Facebook Twitter Instagram YouTube Twitch
    Game on Aus
    • News
      ANZPL Split 1 2023 Trophy

      ANZPL Split 1 2023 LAN Finals: Champions Crowned

      May 30, 2023

      This is it. The ANZPL Split 1 2023 LAN Finals. Who would win the Lower Final and make it to the Grand Final to face the Skorpions?

      Company of Heroes 3 Xbox console give-away

      Company of Heroes 3 Xbox console give-away

      May 30, 2023

      TODAY’S release of the Company of Heroes 3 Console Edition released on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, FiveStarGames…

      Assassin’s Creed: Mirage details emerge

      Assassin’s Creed: Mirage details emerge

      May 25, 2023

      AT the PlayStation Showcase this morning there was a few moments of excitement for me, one of them being the…

      PlayStation ’23 Showcase report

      PlayStation ’23 Showcase report

      May 25, 2023

      PlayStation went ahead with its PlayStation Showcase earlier this morning and kicked off the old E3-style season presentation of a…

      AEW: Fight Forever gets a release date

      AEW: Fight Forever gets a release date

      May 23, 2023

      OVERNIGHT, THQ Nordic announced many details and a release date for its upcoming AEW: Fight Forever. A brand new wrestling…

      View All
    • Reviews
      Diablo 4 Review – A Dark and Thrilling Return to Glory

      Diablo 4 Review – A Dark and Thrilling Return to Glory

      May 31, 2023

      Diablo 4 is the long-awaited continuation of the iconic action role-playing game series developed by Blizzard Entertainment. I had the…

      Alienware AW510K Low-Profile RGB Mechanical Gaming Keyboard Review

      Alienware AW510K Low-Profile RGB Mechanical Gaming Keyboard Review

      May 25, 2023

      When I reviewed the Alienware AW720M Tri-Mode Wireless Gaming Mouse at the start of the year, I came away intrigued…

      Fabledom review –  A Charming Blend of Town-Building and Fantasy

      Fabledom review – A Charming Blend of Town-Building and Fantasy

      May 25, 2023

      Embarking on a whimsical journey through a fantasy medieval countryside, Fabledom invites players to immerse themselves in a world reminiscent…

      Planet of Lana Review – A Captivating Journey of Beauty and Emotion

      Planet of Lana Review – A Captivating Journey of Beauty and Emotion

      May 24, 2023

      In a gaming landscape filled with blockbuster action titles and adrenaline-fueled adventures, Planet of Lana emerges as a breath of…

      After Us Review – What Have We Done?

      After Us Review – What Have We Done?

      May 23, 2023

      IT’S the end of the world as we know it. Humanity has continued down its path of ignoring the signs…

      View All
    • Podcasts
      Nuts & Bolts Ep 83 Hero Card

      Nuts & Bolts Ep 83: Let’s Get Down To Business

      May 20, 2023

      There’s lots to cover this week. Join Mercury and Jim as the World Of Thanks ANZPL heads towards their LAN…

      The Weekly Show Ep 279 Hero Card

      The Weekly Show Ep 279: Tech Issues: The Show

      May 19, 2023

      Doomcutie joins Stormie and Jim as they talk through mods, leaks and so much more! Plus our Bloody Good Game Of The Week thanks to Aussie Broadband.

      Nuts & Bolts Ep 82 Hero Card

      Nuts & Bolts Ep 82: We Missed You!

      May 13, 2023

      It’s been a couple of weeks so Jim and Mercury catch up to talk all things Dreamhack Melbourne. Plus Snoop…

      The Weekly Show Ep 278 Hero Card

      The Weekly Show Ep 278: Look Who Just Drops In

      May 12, 2023

      Doomcutie joins Stormie and Jim as they talk through mods, leaks and so much more! Plus our Bloody Good Game Of The Week thanks to Aussie Broadband.

      Nuts & Bolts Ep 81 Hero Card

      Nuts & Bolts Ep 81: The Tech Issues Invade

      April 15, 2023

      Jim has a hard time with tech this week as he and Natty look at round 2 of the World…

      View All
    • Categories
      • BY PLATFORM
        • Playstation
        • Xbox
        • Nintendo
        • PC
        • Mobile
        • VR
        • Retro
      • BY GENRE
        • Action
        • Action-Adventure
        • Battle Royale
        • Fighting
        • FPS
        • Horror Games
        • RPG
        • Simulation
        • Sports
        • MMORPG
        • MOBA
        • Platformer
        • Strategy
        • Survival
        • Indie
      • GOA ESSENTIALS
        • Esports
        • Conventions
        • Tabletop
        • Hardware
        • Funny
        • Streaming
        • Win
        • Podcast
        • Video
    • More
      • About Us
      • Contact Us
    Game on Aus
    Home » Undertaking a RPG adventure writer’s workshop
    Undertaking a RPG adventure writer’s workshop
    GAMING NEWS

    Undertaking a RPG adventure writer’s workshop

    Royce WilsonBy Royce WilsonAugust 16, 2021
    Share
    Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Email

    ROLE-PLAYING games – be they on computer or pen-and-paper/tabletop – are great creative experiences and ones that many writers and storytellers are naturally drawn to as a result.

    But what’s actually involved in creating a tabletop RPG adventure? And how do you go about sharing your creations with the wider community? Read on to find out how I discovered the answers to both those questions.

    When I saw a post in my social media feed from The Storytelling Collective announcing a “Write Your First Adventure” RPG Writer’s Workshop, with the option for Dungeons & Dragons or Call of Cthulhu, my interest was immediately piqued – after all, I like writing, and I like RPGs.

    The self-paced workshop, which ran between July 1-July 31, was aimed at first-time RPG scenario writers and lasts a month; at its conclusion the goal is to have a finished “one-shot” scenario to publish on the Dungeon Master’s Guild site (for Dungeons & Dragons) or the Miskatonic Repository (Call of Cthulhu) section of the DriveThruRPG website.

    Writers are able to set the price of their published adventures in the DMs Guild or Miskatonic Repository, ranging from “Free” to “Pay what you want” to fixed prices. The writer gets a 50% cut of the sales, with the other 50% being divided equally between Chaosium or Wizards Of The Coast (as the IP owner) and DriveThruRPG (the site owners).

    While it is run by the Storytelling Collective, the course has the official blessing of both Wizards Of The Coast and Chaosium (publishers of Dungeons & Dragons and Call of Cthulhu respectively), which further added to my interest in it – an interest that proved well-founded.

    Even though I played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons back in the day (and still really enjoy the milieu), I’m also a big fan of Lovecraftian horror and The Past, so decided to go with the Call of Cthulhu path.

    The course cost USD$35 (AUD$47), which I paid for myself – and definitely feel I got my money’s worth, too.

    Undertaking a RPG adventure writer’s workshop
    If you’ve ever wanted to write your own RPG scenario, the Storytelling Collective workshop on the subject is very good.

    As it turns out, the course was co-written by Paul Fricker, an award-winning RPG writer who was one of the co-authors for Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition and Ashley Warren, a co-author for the Dungeons & Dragons campaignbook Rime Of The Frostmaiden as well as the co-founder of The Storytelling Collective itself.

    The course was clearly designed for busy people with dayjobs and other stuff going on (ie, all of us) and for probably the first two weeks of the month, much of the course was interesting fundamentals of writing and so on which would be very helpful for someone with limited writing experience, but were less useful for someone established as a writer like myself.

    The subjects the course covered were well selected, however, and ranged from organisation and brainstorming through to accessibility, designing narrative choices and challenges, NPC and villain creation, and even designing eye-catching covers. These elements were extremely well done and very useful, and I gained a lot of insights from them – and even where they didn’t prove to be something that would fit with my writing or creative style, they gave me something to think about and I am glad they were presented as part of the workshop.

    For me as a professional writer, the course was a genuinely useful experience with practical advice and guidance on how to write an adventure for Call of Cthulhu; the adventure I put together is entitled Storm From A Teacup and is set in the Prohibition Era, and involves the players investigating a mysterious tea brew which induces horrifying, madness-inducing Cthulhu Mythos-related hallucinations among imbibers.

    I’ve been writing reviews, news stories and feature articles for so long I can do it in my sleep, and have written quite a few (as-yet unpublished) short stories, but hadn’t turned my hand to writing RPG scenarios intended for anything except my own use while GMing an adventure (and a lot of those were basically bullet points with the rest of the details comprising what is scientifically called “making it up as I go”). As it turns out, however, writing a proper RPG scenario is very different to writing a feature story or short story.

    Undertaking a RPG adventure writer’s workshop
    Writing an RPG scenario is very different to writing a feature article, novel or short story.

    When you write a traditional story, it’s generally a linear story where you, as the author, dictate what happens – the characters experience what you decide, and the reader sees things from whatever perspective you decree suits the story.

    With an RPG scenario, you’re creating the blueprint for someone else to tell the story – a story which will come to life through the involvement of even more “someone elses” (the players).

    There are so many variables to take into account – what if, instead of going to see the barkeeper with relevant information like has been strongly suggested, the characters instead decide to go an visit the town library? What if, instead of asking an NPC for information using a charisma-related approach, they punch them in the stomach? All these possibilities need to be taken into account when writing the adventure, so that the Game Master isn’t left scrambling when the players pitch them a spinner.

    One of the big changes to the writing I am used to is the structure – you have to put the twists and major plot points up the front so the Game Master knows how to spin it and reveal it for the players.

    For example, revealing that this person is actually in league with the bad guys, or that this seemingly random NPC is actually a significant plot figure would be revealed at its own pace in a conventional story – but for writing an RPG scenario, you basically have to state right up front that “This plot twist will happen” or “This person is actually X”

    Call of Cthulhu scenarios have a “Dramatis Personae” (from Latin, literally “The Masks Of The Drama”) section where the major NPCs are outlined, and this includes things like motivations, relationships to other players. I found actually having to write down who the characters were and what drove them, their goals and aims, and how they would interact with players really helped sharpen my sense of what the adventure was, where it was going, and what its flavour was.

    There’s also the fact you have to account for failure in your outline too. In a conventional story, you can get the characters out of a jam however you like – the cavalry arrives to save the day, it turns out one of the characters had a Plot Coupon in their backpack the whole time, or maybe the baddies are graduates of the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy and simply miss the characters; whatever works for you as the author.

    In an RPG, however, you have to account for the characters failing dice rolls and therefore tasks – which, in something like Call of Cthulhu, can have deadly consequences indeed. Playing “What if?” with every story juncture is surprisingly time consuming and taxing on creative resources – yet it’s a vital element of scenario writing, especially if you’re trying to avoid railroading the characters through a predetermined path.

    Undertaking a RPG adventure writer’s workshop
    I went with the Call of Cthulhu RPG writing path, since I’m a fan of Lovecraftian horror.

    Many of the workshop exercises such as creating a moodboard – something I’d never previously bothered with, because it hadn’t been part of my creative process – proved surprisingly effective and really helped establish the, well, mood of what I was creating and helped me understand more about the why of things too – not to mention getting me to think about the scenes I was creating in a different way.

    The course has run previously for D&D and this was the first time it was run for Call of Cthulhu; and while there was plenty of Call of Cthulhu specific content and lessons, I could tell the framework was originally designed for D&D.

    For example, the brief was to be able to write and publish an approximately 3500 word scenario in a month. Now, I gather that for Dungeons & Dragons that’s about right, but Call of Cthulhu is much more narratively heavy and Storm From A Teacup ended up being more than 12,000 words long; and comments from other writers in the workshop discord indicated their works were of a similar length and having a look over some of the dozens of works published as part of the course would seem to suggest that was generally the case.

    This also caused some pacing issues for me, because following the lessons (which only unlock once per day) meant that it was essentially the middle of the month before I could really start writing the adventure – and putting together what turned out to be the longest published thing I had ever written in a fortnight was going to be a big ask even if I was doing nothing but working on it, and not trying to fit it in around my other work and family responsibilities.

    The workshop community on Discord were incredibly friendly, welcoming and supportive too – having a space to bounce ideas, get feedback, or discuss progress was extremely helpful and an important aspect of the workshop too.

    It’s been incredibly rewarding to write my first published RPG adventure and to see it come together via the workshop – I won’t lie, it’s been a gruelling experience so it’ll be a while before I attempt it again (ideally not when there’s a bunch of games and hardware releases), but the experience and knowledge I’ve gained has definitely been worthwhile and I look forward to using it to write (and publish) more RPG adventures in the future.

    Undertaking a RPG adventure writer’s workshop
    Pen-And-Paper/Tabletop RPGs are hugely popular and the Storytelling Collective’s Write Your First Adventure workshop has the official blessing of both the Dungeons & Dragons and Call of Cthulhu publishers.

    Chaosium vice-president Michael O’Brien said the Call of Cthulhu publisher had decided to get involved after seeing the success of the Dungeons & Dragons path for the workshop in previous years.

    “We saw how popular the workshop was when it had run the previous year with a D&D path; we thought a dedicated Call of Cthulhu path would be a great addition to the program,” he said.

    He said it was “wonderful” that there was a dedicated Call of Cthulhu path for the workshop this year, and the team had been impressed by the adventures which had come out of it so far.

    “Within a week of the workshop ending there were already over 50 new titles in our Miskatonic Repository self-publishing platform on DriveThruRPG, added by alumni of the program – with more new stuff being added all the time,” he said.

    “The Miskatonic Repository gives everyone a chance to be a Call of Cthulhu creator! It is a platform where we provide creator resources including templates and artwork, and we ensure the finished creations reach a broad audience.

    “Creators can offer their self-published work free of charge, set a price, or offer it as pay-what-you-want.”

    Undertaking a RPG adventure writer’s workshop
    The Miskatonic Repository on the DriveThruRPG website is the official place to publish and sell community-made Call of Cthulhu content

    Mr O’Brien said the Miskatonic Repository was about more than just being somewhere for Call of Cthulhu fans to publish their scenarios, too.

    “From amongst the pool of Miskatonic Repository creators we’ve also identified writers we’d like to work with for official Chaosium titles,” he said.

    “There’s a great community of creators which makes community content a very supportive incubator for anyone interested in writing and creating in the tabletop roleplaying industry. 

    “Our Miskatonic Repository community ambassadors Allan, Bridgett, and Nick are happy to assist anyone interested in becoming a community content creator; they can be reached via Chaosium.com.”

    Undertaking a RPG adventure writer’s workshop
    The Dungeon Master’s Guild site is the official place where community content creators for Dungeons & Dragons can publish their work.

    Hasbro, the owners of Wizards of the Coast, were similarly enthusiastic about the course and the support it offered the Dungeon Master’s Guild too.

    “The DMs Guild is the lifeblood of grassroots storytelling for Dungeons & Dragons and so anything designed to help support it is very welcome,” Hasbro Asia-Pacific brand manager Henry Williamson said.

    “It’s no secret that a great DM can make the experience of D&D far more memorable and enjoyable for all players involved.

    “If this course is encouraging and honing the narrative skillset necessary to be a great DM, it can only be a good thing.”

    If you’ve ever fancied yourself as an RPG adventure writer – either for professional or community involvement reasons – I can highly recommend the Write Your First Adventure workshop from The Storytelling collective.

    The next course starts in November, with registration opening from mid-October; details will be available from the Storytelling Collective newsletter in due course.

    Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email
    Previous ArticleGreak: Memories of Azur Review
    Next Article FINALLY! Dan Gets His XBOX Series X And Bloody Yes, Here’s The Unboxing

    Related Posts

    Diablo 4 Review – A Dark and Thrilling Return to Glory
    ACTION May 31, 2023

    Diablo 4 Review – A Dark and Thrilling Return to Glory

    Diablo 4 is the long-awaited continuation of the iconic action role-playing game series developed by Blizzard Entertainment. I had the…

    ANZPL Split 1 2023 Trophy
    ESPORTS May 30, 2023

    ANZPL Split 1 2023 LAN Finals: Champions Crowned

    This is it. The ANZPL Split 1 2023 LAN Finals. Who would win the Lower Final and make it to the Grand Final to face the Skorpions?

    Subscribe

    Get the latest creative news from FooBar about art, design and business.

    Ads

    Categories
    • ACTION
    • ACTION-ADVENTURE
    • APPLE
    • BATTLE ROYALE
    • CLOUD GAMING
    • CONVENTIONS
    • DLC
    • ESPORTS
    • Events
    • FEATURE
    • FIGHTING
    • FPS
    • FUNNY
    • GAMING HARDWARE
    • GAMING NEWS
    • GAMING REVIEWS
    • GIFT GUIDE
    • GOA
    • GOA PODCAST
    • HORROR GAMES
    • INDIE GAMING
    • Industry
    • MMORPG
    • MOBA
    • MOBILE
    • NINTENDO
    • Open-World
    • OPINION
    • PC
    • PLATFORMER
    • PLAYSTATION
    • Press Release
    • PREVIEW
    • RACING
    • RETRO
    • RPG
    • SIMULATION
    • SPORTS
    • STRATEGY
    • STREAMING
    • SUBSCRIPTION GAMES SERVICE UPDATES
    • SURVIVAL
    • TABLETOP GAMING
    • TECH
    • VIDEO
    • VR
    • XBOX
    Related Article
    Diablo 4 Review – A Dark and Thrilling Return to Glory
    ACTION

    Diablo 4 Review – A Dark and Thrilling Return to Glory

    May 31, 2023ArlentricBy Arlentric

    Diablo 4 is the long-awaited continuation of the iconic action role-playing game series developed by Blizzard Entertainment. I had the opportunity to immerse myself…

    ANZPL Split 1 2023 Trophy
    ESPORTS

    ANZPL Split 1 2023 LAN Finals: Champions Crowned

    May 30, 2023Darren 'Str8JaktJim' MacneallBy Darren 'Str8JaktJim' Macneall

    This is it. The ANZPL Split 1 2023 LAN Finals. Who would win the Lower Final and make it to the Grand Final to face the Skorpions?

    Company of Heroes 3 Xbox console give-away
    GAMING NEWS

    Company of Heroes 3 Xbox console give-away

    May 30, 2023Mikeey BarrowBy Mikeey Barrow

    TODAY’S release of the Company of Heroes 3 Console Edition released on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, FiveStarGames is celebrating with a…

    Game on Australia Logo

    Game On Aus is an Australian games publication working across written, video and podcast, and supported by an ever-growing community of content creators and fans!

    Copyright GameOnAus 2023. Privacy Policy. Website by Digital Hitmen

    CONTENT
    • News
    • Gaming Reviews
    • Podcast
    • Tech
    • Indie
    ABOUT GOA
    • About Us
    • Contact

    Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.