As I’ve mentioned many times on this blog, tabletop role playing games have been an important part of my life for as long as I could read. I've been homebrewing and session prepping since high school, but making the jump from hobby writing to published professional writing came with some changes to how I approached things. Just because I had made roleplaying games a core part of my personality did not make me good at writing them. It did not matter how many core books, supplemental splat books, modules, or review videos I had consumed in the TTRPG world – to write something worth the attention of an audience, I needed to grow as a writer. Thankfully, working on Redsky has given me that room, and here are some of the lessons I’ve learned so far:
Know Your Audience
When you write something for yourself, you can simply write anything. It doesn’t have to be on brand, in genre, or even good. There's been plenty of times I have trashed adventure ideas because they were too focused on a joke or media I’m currently fixated on, and it was no big deal. Even though I still like to joke around, and the Solar Studios team is well aware of the amount of fake bylaks I have sitting in the vault, making an official module for an established world, especially in a collaborative environment with other creators, requires you to largely abide by the themes of the world that are already set-up.
For Redsky, we try to keep a grounded sci-fi approach to a mostly fantastical setting. Everything needs to be plausibly real, and you can't get away with waving away problems by saying “a wizard did it.” No deus ex wizard here! That solution can totally work when you’re homebrewing (though I’d never ever do that to my players, if you’re reading this), but there needs to be a more satisfying answer than that in Dema. In Vault of the Panacean Jungle, the mystical elements of the story are easily explained by the meta-knowledge of the Overseers (who are totally not wizards).
Give Up the Reins
Possibly the biggest hurdle I needed to get over was accepting the fact that I would not be the one running the modules I wrote. While it might seem self-evident that someone else will be running your module after you release it, that part does not hit me until I’m about 60% of the way through writing. In my own homebrew or session prepping, I’m used to leaving some details fuzzy. I want to leave wiggle-room for my players to solve a problem creatively or put their own spin on the story I’m trying to make with them, but when you're writing for other DMs you want to give them a little extra cushion and details to make their lives easier. Of course, most DMs omit or add to our modules anyway, which is also great! Once the module is out there, it’s out of my control and up to those who run it to interpret and put their own spin on it.
If you’re anything like me, handing over the reins can be daunting. It can make you want to want to cover every possible way the story could play out, which is a superhuman task that I’ve yet to see any choose-your-own adventure novelist fully accomplish. Even famous roleplaying games have dedicated communities that spend their free time modding new options to stories (here’s looking at you, Skyrim). If pros at Wizards of the Coast, Paizo, and even Bethesda Game Studios limit the choices for the sake of a concise story, it’s safe to do when writing a module.
Show, Don’t Tell World Building
World building is a great hobby. I’ve filled up dozens of notebooks working on imaginary worlds, and only a few of them have ever seen the light of day in a TTRPG campaign. I’ve sunk into rabbit holes about how a country chooses their next leader by taking inspiration from the Polish Lithuanian commonwealth, tried to figure out the internal logistics of a Westeros-like country on the precipice of civil war, and even tried to give speculative biology a shot. However, all those details do not necessarily make for a good story.
Environmental storytelling is a way to strike the happy medium between dumping your worldbuilding wiki on the player and having a bland world. Even settings-agnostic stories need to have something going on in the background to make the story feel more genuine. Whether it be a mural depicting a long-gone leader or a few bodies lying around with strange wounds, these details keep your players engaged in the story that they’re in. And don’t worry about engaging the murder hobos, they’ll be engaged well enough once they roll initiative.
Writing in the TTRPG world has been some of the most difficult writing I’ve ever done. Unlike all the papers I’ve written for college, there is no rubric where I can compare my work to see if I’m doing it the right way. There’s a lot of trial and error with this process. You wouldn’t believe what is on the cutting room floor or sitting in my WIP folder. But with the challenges of the genre, I’ve been greatly rewarded with a better understanding of how tabletop games are made. With hope, these are just my first lessons and I’ll have more to share when we have our next module ready for release!
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