Recently, a movie called Seventh Son flopped its way through theatres. As soon as I saw the trailer, I remarked loudly that it looked like somebody turned their Dungeons and Dragons campaign into a screenplay. I said this with scorn, and I did not go to see the film. This seems to have worked in my favor, as one reviewer from the Chicago Reader called it “a loud, joyless mess.”
I read slush for a poetry quarterly called Goblin Fruit, and, being that our submission guidelines request poems of the fantastic, we get occasional submissions that smack slightly of D&D. These pieces often feel like they were written in-game by someone’s half-elf bard character, probably while drunk off his ass at Ye Olde Inn and Taverna.
I obviously can’t share any examples from the slush. However, it is not unethical to make fun of myself, so here is a verse of terrible balladry written by my last half-elf bard character while he was drunk of his ass. I may have also been in my cups: the whole epic is scrawled in the margins of my character sheet.
The Silver Flame belies its name
And makes its bed with evil
Its honey baths are full of shame
Its basement makes men feeble
With a hey nonny nonny woe
I kind of wish I could submit this under a nom de plume and then make fun of it. There are a lot more verses.
But enough about honey baths, it’s time for true confessions.
My first ever published poem—the first piece of writing that I ever sold to anyone—is a poem about the backstory of a character I played in a D20 Modern Cthulhu campaign. It was purchased by Goblin Fruit, yes, the very publication where I’m now an editor, and to date it is the only piece of mine that has been nominated for an award.
So what is the moral of this story, besides the fact that when it comes to this topic, I am clearly a raging hypocrite? What side am I on—do or don’t?
The truth is, we are all on a quest for inspiration, and we must take it where we can find it. If that inspiration dwells in the smarmy back room of Ye Olde Inn and Taverna, I’m in no position to judge.
However, I do have a few suggestions for how to avoid submitting the piece that makes an unsuspecting editor snort-laugh her tea.
- Deploy rhyming couplets with extreme caution. This is just good advice in general.
- Keep it original. RPG settings tend to be derivative, whether your GM is taking her cues from Tolkien, Lovecraft, or Anne Rice. And that is totally fine for a game, but when it comes to your own work, it needs to feel fresh.
- Avoid “you had to be there” humor. Read it to your aunt who has never even seen a D20. Is she smiling?
- Don’t let the worldbuilding overwhelm the emotional core of your piece. The history, religion, and socioeconomics of the world are only interesting if we care about the narrative and characters.
- Keep in mind that your reader hasn’t spent ages hanging out with your character and getting to know her. I’ve played the same character in campaigns that lasted years, and by the end, everything that happened to her felt significant and like part of a lifetime of character arc. Your reader isn’t going to have that kind of time, and just because you care doesn’t mean your reader will. You have to earn the payoff.
Ultimately, the point is that if you’re going to do this thing, you’d best take steps to ensure that the editor can’t tell what you’re doing. In other words: bluff like crazy and hope they critically fail their sense motive check. Then maybe you’ll have a newly published piece to brag about next time you’re trolling for quests at the Taverna.
Caitlyn Paxson is a writer and storyteller. She has pursued studies in writing, folklore, and performance in the United States, Canada, England, Scotland and France. Past jobs include being an artistic director of storytelling performances, a fiber arts consultant, a legal document and poetry transcriber, and a shepherdess. She is an editor at Goblin Fruit, can sometimes be found discussing folklore and pop culture on the Fakelore Podcast and performing with the Banjo Apocalypse Crinoline Troubadours. Her hair defies gravity, and she once tricked a group of tourists into thinking she was a Scottish ghost.
LOL :)
So, when I was in college, my friends and I had two campaigns – a Wheel of Time based campaign (yes, there is an old Wizards of the Coast book for a Wheel of Time RPG and it was pretty fun) and a TSR D&D Planescape campagin. I transcribed all of our sessions and turned them into stories (along with backstory for the characters I was provided, and also spent a bit of time fleshing out my own character, since I was writing from her PoV) and one of my friends (who also wrote her own versions from her character’s PoV) had a web page and we kept a blog of our sessions. But of course nobody would think it was funny but us, and of course it was just a lot of dungeon crawling and loosely connected quests (the WoT one at least had a general story to it, but of course I can’t take credit for that!).
Still, it was lots of fun and as a group we enjoyed reading them :) But don’t worry, I won’t be inflicting it on the rest of you!
The worst and most famous offender of this is probably the first Dragonlance book, Dragons of Autumn Twilight.
Let’s not forget those who have done it right: Steven Erikson & Ian Esslemont. The Malazan series started as a RPG.
I’m not sure exactly how it should count, but Elizabeth Bear’s Dust is rooted in an old play-by-e-mail Amber campaign she ran. She replaced Zelazny’s setting with a nanotechy generation ship, and the plot, so far as I know, doesn’t follow the game at all. But NPC Jacob Dust was a major presence in both, and I think some of the PCs have loose analogues in the book. Both the campaign and the book were great, but in somewhat different ways.
There was also a rumor that Brust’s Dragaera started life as a very idiosyncratic D&D campaign, which would make sense.
I believe many fantasy books started as someone’s D&D campaign. IIRC, Raymond Feist’s Riftware saga sprang from a D&D campaign he had in the late seventies/early eighties, though I’m sure he did quite a bit more than transcribe his sessions. Elizabeth Moon’s great series about a paladin “The Deed of Parksenarrion”, as the rumor goes, sprang from her observing someone playing a D&D paladin (rather poorly) and thinking that a character like that would never behave in that manner. There are probably many other examples.
But, very good advice about producing your own works of art for public consumption. Too many creative works today, particularly movies, seem to be poor renditions of someone’s RPG campaign.
I, too, am guilty of writing something based on a RPG Campaign. In my case, a World of Darkness novella based partly on the (mis)adventures of my gaming group, and partly on a collaboration between me and the Storyteller of that campaign. He liked the result so much, that in the next campaign he introduced a few of the NPCs we had written for the story.
It was a lot of fun to write, and the players (and a few other friends) liked it a lot, but it’s definitely not publishable material. Too many in-jokes and “you had to be there” moments.
Sometimes transcribed campaigns create something so bad, it is amazingly fun.
Exhibit A: Hawke the Slayer
The Dragaera books do show D&D campaign roots in the first couple of volumes, but they went far beyond that.
that’s how my Robotech fanfiction started as putting a 8 month campaign to paper.
I was initially a trifle put out by the glib advice about rhyming couplets, as my primary poetical interests — both as a reader and writer — are in ballads and structured narrative poetry, both forms in which there are long traditions of mythic and magical content.
Then I went off to look at some of Goblin Fruit‘s archives, to avoid the sin of commenting without having properly examined primary sources. And I had to laugh, because the very last thing I expected in the wake of that advice about rhyming couplets was to find this — a clever and mostly well-executed impersonation of Robert Service’s heavily rhymed narrative style. I’m glad to see that poem in Goblin Fruit, and to know that you’re open to publishing work of that kind and character.
Mind, I will grant that it’s dangerously easy to do rhymed verse badly. But I am enough of a traditionalist where poetry is concerned that I dislike seeing advice that appears to dissuade poets from the challenge of doing rhymed verse well, and that’s what I thought I was seeing on my first reading of “deploy rhyming couplets with extreme caution”.
We have definiely had the priviledge of publishing some amazing rhyming couplets in Goblin Fruit – and I am pretty much the biggest fan of the Child Ballads that you are ever likely to meet! As you noted, my advice is merely to be cautious, as it is so very easy for rhyming couplets to veer uninentionally into comedy.
For the record, the movie Seventh Son is based off a rather good book series called Last Apprentice. Its supposed to be a young man’s coming of age story mixed in with well crafted supernatural horror, but apparently they made a shitty movie off of it.
I tried to write a screenplay based on a D&D game once, it did not end well.
China Mieville has said that the world of Bas-Lag is built on a world he created for his RPG campaigns, and the “adventurers” in Perdido Street Station are, in fact, characters out of one of his games.
Wild Cards was, at first, based on the super-hero RPG campaign George R. R. Martin and his fellow writer friends were having.
@14: I’m pretty sure there are even actual adventurer types (presented as mercenaries) who make an appearance in Perdido Street Station. It’s obvious and awesome at the same time. Back when Dragon magazine was still a print magazine, there was even an issue that statted out the monsters and races from that book. The D&D comparisons are perfectly acceptable.
Likewise, I’m not sure why Dragonlance gets so vilified in this way. It was the 80s when they came out, and fantasy fiction was still not as vast as now. Not only does it make sense that the Dragonlance Chronicles should feel at times like the game it was derived from (but not copied from directly), but there’s nothing wrong with that. Yet the story plays out like someone plotting novels, not like dice-rolling. Does it bother people that Raistlin casts a Charm Person spell, and Fireballs are used later? Imagine that, spells from a world that was also an official and viable campaign setting of the Dungeons & Dragons game.
Anyone ever read 1978’s Quag Keep? Now there’s a game-based novel! The characters had polyhedron dice bound around their wrists like bracelets! And why not?
My novel Dragon Precinct and its sequels star two characters based on RPG characters I played — one for D&D in college, one for the prototype of what became the Wildside RPG in my twenties. And Cliff’s End is, I freely admit, based on your standard Tolkienesque fantasy RPG setting.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I think everyone’s forgetting that two of the most popular anime ever are based on DnD campaigns. Record of Lodoss War and Slayers. And both are remarkably well executed.
So while there is no doubt that a lot of so-so to bad stories can come from them, we can also receive some really awesome ones.
As a former staff member of another lit mag, I can vouch for just how much fail comes about because people decided to piggyback on established storyline/characters/worldbuilding. The worst ones used Jesus. If you see a story and Jesus is a character, know someone was probably scraping the bottom of the ol’ inspiration barrel.
The trick is that using an established setting kills an opportunity for something amazing. Even if you make fun of the cliches and tropes you are using, you’re missing out on the awesomeness that can come from some cool new creation. It’s an opportunity cost, so that better be some excellent humor. (This is why my brother loves star wars novels and i’ve never been able to raise much enthusiasm for them. They’re basically fan fiction in a setting that has often been exploited to within an inch of its life)
There are properties successfully use established ideas to great effect. Consider the sorely missed Terry Pratchet. He played on known tropes like a damn fiddle. But my favorite books and properties always go out of their way to explore, working to create a mood and feeling that an established property would get in the way of with all its baggage.
Re-using others work and leaving it in the final draft can be done well, but it is often the mark of rank amaturism. And that’s what the author seems to be warning against. It’s one of those rules that can be broken, but shouldn’t be till you know what the heck you’re doing.
Funnily enough, I once created a whole setting for roleplaying with my friends, which saw little to none actual play… and nowadays, I write comics in that universe, but they’re not adaptations of game sessions.
I have, however, adapted funny situations from games I’ve played in or gamemastered as short comics, but only when I was sure they’d be free of the “you had to be there” factor.
I once wrote up a short adventure out of a longer Hellfrost campaign (if you don’t know it, look it up – it’s a really great setting), as a 3,000 word saga in an awkward 11-foot meter in an effort to evoke the feeling of marching through two-foot deep snowdrifts.
The group liked it, and eventually I got the nerve up to send it to the publishers. They were thrilled that someone had gone to the effort, and asked if they could put it up on their website. It wasn’t my best stuff, but I’m not too embassassed by it.
I was also going to mention the Wild Cards books edited by George RR Martin (@15). These books grew from a regular tabletop gaming session between sci-fi and fantasy writers. I believe the only one of the original writers who wasn’t one of the game’s regulars was Roger Zelazny, who was asked to join in by Martin because he lived nearby and was, you know, Roger freakin Zelazny. Interesting note: years later they were approached by a writer who had an idea for a superhero character whose powers related to dreams. Alas, noone had heard of this young writer so he took his idea, with some modifications, to DC/Vertigo where Neil Gaiman found an outlet for his Sandman stories.
A few corrections regarding Wild Cards. Yes, it grew from an RPG campaign, but the finished book has very little to do with the game. Mostly, it’s just the character’s names and superpowers that come from the game. Everything else was changed. The original game was more of a typical superhero world, instead of the gritty deconstruction of the novels. There wasn’t even a wild card virus in the game.
Also, there were more original writers not related to the game. In addition to Zelazny: Howard Waldrop, Stephen Leigh, Edward L. Bryant, Pat Cadigan, Lewis Shiner, and others. About half of them. So this also meant that about half of the characters had nothing to do with the game