Back in 2015 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 & 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.
This article was originally published in March 2015.
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.
This is good advice I’ll keep it in mind. What is a fiber arts consultant ?
It would feel wrong not to point out that the Seventh Son movie was very loosely based on the excellent YA horror/fantasy book series The Wardstone Chronicles (aka The Last Apprentice) by Joseph Delaney. How different are they? Like if the first Harry Potter film aged Harry by ten years, had him and Hermione hook up, and saw him training in the Sword of Gryffindor with weapons master Dumbledore against pimped out Voldemort plus a whole bunch of invented villains that turn into dragons for some reason. Oh, and if all the Hogwarts ghosts were rewritten as generic CGI monsters.
On the plus side, the movie added some racial diversity and Olivia Williams.
From a writing teacher perspective, I’d say to never use RPGs as an inspiration for fiction, either. Fiction and RPGs are different types of storytelling with different requirements, and it’s very easy to spot RPG-inspired stories which are thin, boring, and lackluster because the author hasn’t thought through things like character and plot.
And, I feel your pain about the slushpile. I did it for years in college, and I’m still suffering from it many years later. The horror! The horror!
I’ve been tapped to keep the journal for the 5E D&D campaign I am in. I’ve decided to go in the opposite direction of this article; instead of trying to turn it into a novel, I’m using various books to inspire how I relate the events. Specifically, the journal is from the point of view of a sage as modest as Paarfi of Roundwood and as humble as Adrian Mole. And as even tempered as Francis “Franco” Begbie, which is why the character is on the road.
Interesting. Reminds me of how, if you read Gardens of the Moon looking for it, you’ll be able to see who’s a pc and who isn’t, when they split, up, when they regroup, successful dice rolls, failed dice rolls, and so on.
@3: “From a writing teacher perspective, I’d say to never use RPGs as an inspiration for fiction, either. “
As RPGs and tabletop gaming isn’t my thing, I can’t right comment on their ability to properly inspire fiction. But this comment sounds a lot like the same complaints I see leveled against fanfiction authors online, with the same issues cropping up: derivative, thin characters, lack of proper/logical plotting, etc. And the thing is: I agree, to an extent, that a lot of it is bad. Some of it is in fact Very Bad, with the extreme examples making ou bemoan the fact that nayone thought it was a good idea to ever make a fanwork.
But … the good stuff is Really Good. I have found so much meaning in fanfiction written by others and have found that writing this type of story challenge me to be better, deeper, and stronger. I had to really think through character motivations and force myself to return to the text over and over again to get a better understanding of why things should happen, and thus learned far more about the original work than I might have “passively” reading.
So while I’ll buy the argument that a lot f the fiction inspired by gaming of any kind can be drek, I’m not convinced it is necessarily a bad idea. Even bad stories can teach writers how to be better. We don’t tell would-be writers: don’t even think about writing bad drafts, it could lead to bad stories! Instead, we encourage writers with “original” stories to revise, revise, revise. I think anything can inspire stories: as with any artform, it’s all in the execution.
I feel sheepishly compelled to admit I rather like the Evil Silver Basement Honey Bath poetry. I’m enjoying the ironically-drunken-bard vibe. Picturing a sort of Tenacious D affair.
Then there’s also MMORPGlit. It’s a strange little subgenre I’ve recently stumbled on, and kinda cool, if you like MMOs but hate actually taking the time to play a video game and would rather read a book.
I didn’t need the idea of a hipster bard in my head and yet now it’s there….
Here’s one more tip: don’t submit your poetry to Goblin Fruit. The magazine hasn’t responded to anyone’s submissions in two years. How hard would it have been for the editors to put a note on their guidelines page to say that they’d closed it down?
I remember a publisher’s slush-pile reader on a convention panel talking about how he came to quickly detect which ones were based on RPG campaigns. He’d pass them on with a notation, “I can hear the dice rattling in this one.”
I disagree in part with the premise of the article. If someone wants to be a professional author, yes, maybe don’t write a novel based on your gaming campaign without making major overhauls. But, if the point of the exercise is not to be published, but to practice writing skills, gaming campaigns are a great starting point for people getting used to the work of writing and telling a story. It’s how I got started writing decades ago, and now I write professionally (non-fiction) in large part because I found a way outside of school to grow my writing skills. It’s what my tween-age nephew and several of his friends are doing (writing cooperatively about their gaming campaign) and their teacher is delighted that they are writing voluntarily. There is no much in the process of formal education that crushes creativity. I’ll happily ready a bunch of kids’ D&D campaign written up as a “novel” so that they can grow up enjoying language, writing and reading.