Miro and Drinax

If you are wondering who this Miro character is: no, they are not a GeDeCo agent nor a skilled, PRQ assassin. Miro is a visual tool that we use a lot in tech companies for prototyping, for diagrams, for capturing feedback in retros and more.

With the scale of the Pirates of Drinax campaign, I have begun to find tracking things like standings, location of assets and people and the like increasingly difficult in Excel. Excel (other spreadsheets are available) is definitely invaluable for a lot of data-rich tracking (crews, ship costs, faction standings etc), but it has two disadvantages:

• only the truly insanely reckless work on shared Excel sheets, so it is pretty much useful only to the GM
• it’s great for people who, you know, like using spreadsheets, but many – even most – people find spreadsheets daunting

Miro offers a way to share a visual portrayal of the same data. So the map view I use tracks the location of the party’s ships, soldiers, bases and employees in a simple and obvious manner:

Similarly, the accounts of the party’s discoveries on Arunisiir in the Treasure Ship adventure: involvinding a huge cast of NPCs, are dauntingly long, comprising thousands of words after only two sessions.

So instead of relying on narrative, I used Miro to make the traditional tool of the conspiracy theorist: a pinboard, with links between characters, blocks to group subsets of the cast, stickies to add notes and so on.

The players do not, to be honest, seem terribly engaged with this. Perhaps partly due to the fact that they don’t work with Miro every day like I do. But I have found it invaluable in ordering my own thoughts and keeping track of their discoveries.