A beautiful in-game notebook ?

Hi, I have a peculiar request and I feel I need to give it some context... But TL, DR : I'd very much like for my players to make a beautiful in-game/in-fiction logbook of their adventures in Roll20 , and I'm looking for any way to either embellish a shared handout, or create an in-platform document they could edit while playing. Now for the context : I'm running a long multi-party campaign in which PCs belong to a mercenary company tasked with exploring a mega-dungeon. Each "squad" (party) entering the labyrinth must keep a logbook , handled by the players and a very significant in-fiction object. At the campfire, they write down their many discoveries, slowly map out the underground realm and try to decypher the strange language of the long-lost civilization which built that horrible place.  Most importantly, players record in their book the various Clues , Leads and Directions they found, each type giving some bonus toward finding an objective, a place-of-interest or overcoming a specific obstacle. The logbook is therefore their main "orientation, investigation and survival" equipment : gameplay-wise, against an ever-rising adversity while their ressources and forces deplete, players' best hope is to pile up as many bonuses they can find in this precious journal. If the book is damaged or lost, it's often a tragedy for the squad : some party have quite simply died from losing their journal and therefore their way back out of the unforgiving labyrinth. Some PCs went to great length to protect their book, enchanting it with spells in special inks or hunting some dangerous (and very thick-skinned) beasts to bind the precious journal in their protective hide. Sometimes, PCs will find another squad's remains and look for their book to find out who they were, what happened to them and –maybe– how to avoid such fate. And when they die themselves, their book is their legacy . Squads lucky enough to get out alive will have their logbook copied into the company's library while the mercenaries rest and heal, opening new paths for other squads. Chroniclers from various squad tend to exchange their discoveries and clues to try and figure out the over-arching mistery of the gigantic labyrinth. But there is also a political component to the book since each squad report to one of the officers competing for the company's command, and the more successful a squad is, the more its' logbook fills with secrets and leads toward ancient treasures, the more their faction gain powers within the company. Now, considering how important the logbook is for each party and the overall campaign, some "analog" players invested a lot in their physical document, customising it in many ways and trying to give it the best "in fiction" look they can... But, obviously, the one Roll20 squad only has a digital one and, at the moment, it's nothing more than a simple, tasteless shared handout. The Roll20 squad plays the most regularly, explored way further than it's analog counterparts, the "virtual" players got rather jealous of the "analog" ones' logbooks (especially since they exchange notes), and they would really love to embellish their own in any way they can. Nonetheless, the game demands for the book to stay be edited by the players and shown to each other while playing . How could I do that ?

There are significant limitations on what you can do with handouts in terms of beautifying them.  Your best bet here might be to look into an external tool, like Obsidian Portal, or even Google Docs.  But even then, the skills needed to make a pretty digital document are vastly different from those needed to make a physical book pretty, and your players might find it more of a struggle and a chore to do it.

Graphic skills aren't exactly our problem, Roll20's tech is : illustration is my day job, I can make pictures for the player's to use and I already experimented with shared "in-fiction" Google docs... But the game really requires we keep the logbook within the VTT . For instance, something like a parchment backdrop under a editable shared doc', using the best possible font, could be a step toward apeasing my jealous mercenaries. But I have yet to figure out how to do even that ... T_T I'm currently fiddling with the book as a secondary page , backdrop as "map layer", a space for the players to draw in (though Roll20's drawing tools are kind of awfull) and prepared text-blocs, but the problem is players seem unable to switch from one page to another themselves, and I can't really block every one else while the Chronicler-Player is writing down clues every five minutes.

There's no way to let players move pages on their own, unless you have a Pro subscription. You can drag a single player to another map, but then only they can see it, and they cant see the main map till you drag them back, so that's not practical. They'd have to ask you to move them every time they wanted to make a change then ask you to move them back. You cant do background images in a handout. Roll20 handouts provide only very rudimentary formatting: y ou can include inline images, which text wraps around.  What you want simply isnt possible within the limitations of roll20. If you were a Pro user, you could edit the character sheet you're using, to add a tab, and have a parchment background on that tab, with editable text boxes that players could add. But you'd be stuck with a very inflexible format, and there'd be no way to add drawings.  Frankly, there's no way to do what you want within roll20, so I recommend you either compromise on your goal and accept less, or find a way to do do it outside roll20 that satisfies you. A shared whiteboard website for instance might suffice, and players can switch between the roll20 page and the whiteboard page easily enough.

I do have a "pro" account (it's just not this "historic" one). :)

Since you have a pro account, you could use a custom character sheet and make a tab that's four journal entries. That way, you could set a background image for the tab, etc.  You'd need to get the code for your current character sheet (assuming you're using one of the standard ones on Roll20, the code will be on GitHub). Then you create a character (or characters) called Journal/Log/whatever and give the players access to that character.  They'd just need be on the journal tab for that character to enter journal information.

I think this would be neat as an entire second game. Make them all GM's and then have each page in the game be a page in their journal. That way it'd be collaborative and they could all add text and images to the pages. It does have the sucky downside of being a separate game, but if they are in to it, then that shouldn't be a big deal. You can have two games open at the same time.

I did mention the pro account method, but i don't really recommend it. It's a lot to pay each month for a feature which frankly is not up to the OP's stated desires.  Some Limitations: You can only add text, not images, and definitely no drawing. You have no freedom about where the text would appear. You can write wherever you want, only in preset text inputs or textareas. You can use repeating fieldsets to make the number of such boxes you can make unlimited, but again, very inflexible placement, and no text formatting controls. Your stuck with the font and size that the sheet is programmed with.

Love the idea! Hope I get to see your group's campaign journals (that's what I call it, a CJ). Handouts have some limitations that affect this concept. I found the Game Forum to be slightly better and more flexible (Players can't overwrite or erase each other; easier to embed multiple images; NOTE: Text wrap around images and floating images is currently unreliable). However I think that in any case, another external site or app (Google Docs, Dropbox), will provide you more of the requested features that aren't currently available in Roll20. Might be a good Suggestion for the Suggestions & Ideas thread. There are already some existing Suggestions to improve the abilities of Handouts, and to upgrade the Game Forum for PbP (Play By Post).

Alright ! Thanks to you all. I'm going to experiment with the "special character-sheet as shared logbook" method, though player's are already trying out the more simpler and far less interesting "customizing the logbook between sessions" : while playing, the "chronicler" only makes sure to record and affoer the right informations in a plain-text handout, and the most crafty players will re-shape the basic-text afterward. A lot of immersion is lost in the process, but it proves easier to handle than my previous try-out (logbook as backdrop on an another page : very unwieldy). Sadly, right now, no squad actually got through with its aesthetic ambitions : the material book from the analog group isn't assembled yet (I feel they ran out of steam after they created most of the required pieces, but we'll see...) and I'm not sure the Roll20 squad is actually going to re-shape its text-log because we're having scheduling troubles. But on a more positive note, the publisher is –of course– very interested in the merchandising prospect of selling branded logbooks... I'm a bit worried it may end up being a rather cheap product but I guess demand will drive the offer.