Comments on: Turn your Dungeons and Dragons campaign into a novel

By: Joseph Milillo

Joseph Milillo — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:01:49 +0000

This may not be helpful if you dream of becoming a paid, published writer with your D&D game, but if you’re not…

Having a bard in the party makes this easy, particularly if the player is attentive to the overreaching story (and maybe has DM’d himself), detail-oriented, and truly creative.

I have a blog (www.theadventuresoffloydfiftynames.blogspot.com) that is meant to be a “recording the game” blog, similar to Kameron’s, but like Kameron, reporting the mechanics isn’t that interesting to me.

Through the character of the bard (Floyd), I am able to tell the story as a puppet theatre musical – precisely the sort of thing a bard might do, but no one other than a participant in the game OR a true D&D enthusiast would really find it interesting. Forced to present the story in character gives me a restraint that keeps me from making meta-references or giving specific numbers and stats to the spells, weapons, etc. that are encountered in the game. Plus, since your bard’s 1st person account can be treated as an unreliable narrative, you are free to trim the fat and take artistic license with the story as you see fit, which makes it more interesting to read.

By: Depicting game mechanics in fantasy fiction - Pens and Swords - Talking shop with fantasy fiction author Kameron M. Franklin

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:35:31 +0000

[...] D&D fantasy fiction is influenced by the rules of the game. Fans appreciate when authors ground their stories in the setting by referencing classes, spells and other game features–descriptively, if not literally–along with established world lore. I remember reading Dragons of Autumn Twilight as Raistlin tossed out a handful of sand, uttered his magic words and watched their pursuers drop to the ground, and thinking to myself, he just cast sleep. It’s a fine line for writers to tread; it’s supposed to be a novel, not a campaign log. [...]

By: Serial fantasy fiction at Paths of Adventure - Pens and Swords - Talking shop with fantasy fiction author Kameron M. Franklin

Mon, 04 May 2009 21:04:32 +0000

[...] My new blog Paths of Adventure is another matter. One of the reasons I started this new blog was to record the play sessions of the 4E game I’m currently playing in, but a dry, mechanics-based report didn’t interest me. So, I decided to take a page from my experiment with play-by-post roleplaying and fictionalize the game. [...]

By: Ravyn

Ravyn — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 06:53:12 +0000

I’ve been in a few campaigns (like Ben, mostly Exalted) that could probably be turned into decent stories, and even written a couple things that could qualify as stories that branched off of my games; then again, I was a writer first, so much of what I run I try to make story-quality. And one of the best D&D campaigns I’ve ever been in, aside from the fact that we’re referencing the setting’s gods almost constantly, could probably serve as the beginnings of a novel; admittedly, a lot of that is that most of it so far has been character development and player-side worldbuilding.

For me, it’s mostly what the writer’s doing that steps away from the standard conventions; D&D in general, and 4E in particular, tend to lean most people into the combat end of things, and that results in stuff that is more trying to parse a bunch of dice rolls than trying to tell a story.

You’d need a story that isn’t just “Go to this dungeon and fight these monsters”, and you’d need a group that aren’t PCs first and characters second. It’s doable, it’s just difficult.

Ravyn’s last blog post was Letting Go

By: Ben Overmyer

Ben Overmyer — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:26:56 +0000

A friend of mine actually attempted this with an Exalted campaign, and succeeded to a fair degree in turning the campaign into a viable story. It was rough, but passable – certainly more so than the Dungeons & Dragons movie or other such tripe.

I’ve had the benefit of being interested and educated in creative writing as a discipline for quite some time, and I frequently write very short pieces set in the game worlds I play in. They’re not whole stories, but they explore concepts that are more at home in fiction than gaming – for example, complex character interaction over generations.

A D&D campaign could be turned into an interesting novel only through careful cutting and embellishing. While wading through kobolds to get to the buried treasure can make for a fun adventure, it’s a horribly boring story. It needs a lot of attention and creative exploration to make it interesting. Writing a short story about a conflicted tribe of kobolds and their struggle to survive in a world that seems bent against them, now THAT is readable!

Ben Overmyer’s last blog post was Keep things in perspective