RPG Writer Workshop – Week 1 Impressions

As of July 1, I have been attending the Write Your First Adventure course provided by RPG Writer Workshop with the intent of releasing a published one-shot adventure for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition on the Dungeon Masters Guild. I’ve been meaning to get off my ass and put pen to paper (or, more realistically, typed keys to word processor) for a long time now, but it’s always easier to find an excuse (e.g., “But I have work in the morning, there’s no way I can write an adventure!”) than it is to put in the time for a passion project. By attending the Workshop, I’m pushing aside the excuses and getting help from renowned TTRPG publishers at the same time.

The course lasts all July, meaning I have one full month to research, draft, organize, playtest, and publish my one-shot. Needless to say, getting this adventure off the ground, running my home games of D&D and Call of Cthulhu, and taking care of my other personal/professional obligations will be my top priorities for the next four weeks. To ensure I’m keeping up with the blog, however, the next series of posts will be detailing my experiences (without providing content specifics) going through the Write Your First Adventure workshop.

If these posts persuade you to give it a shot as well, it’s worth noting a few key details:

• The course has three different tiers: Free Path, Paid Path, and DMs Guild Path.
  
  A breakdown of what each Path offers.

• The Paid Path and DMs Guild Path each cost $30.
• The next class will take place in November.

With that out of the way, let’s get right into the general impressions portion of this post!

Planning Makes Perfect

With the course starting mid-week, we’ve only completed three of the seven activities (one for each day) in the Planning and Organizing phase of the workshop. In these three days, however, we’ve already received a fantastic design template (a huge plus from me as a Technical Writer) for the adventure, a list of project management tools to ensure we’re staying on track (perfect for the “chunk it out” style of task completion), and a considerate breakdown of how to design and write the adventure with accessibility in mind. A succinct, yet powerful, thought came out of the accessibility lesson that I won’t soon forget, “When you don’t intentionally include, you unintentionally exclude” (Yubi & Tyler, 2020).

I appreciate the slow-burn approach RPG Writer Workshop takes in regards to the creation and publication of an adventure. When I first signed up for this course, I was so nervous because I was walking into this without any real idea what kind of adventure I was even looking to write. Should I play into my love of horror, or perhaps branch out and try capturing a well-received adventuring arc from campaigns long past? Turns out, I didn’t need my best-selling idea right from the jump. The workshop is giving us time to breathe, start our planning, and tease out the adventure idea day by day. While I now feel comfortable with a concept I want to explore (which for obvious reasons I won’t spoil here), I could decide tomorrow to follow an entirely different path and that’s alright. The course is built by authors who have clearly gone through the same creative growing pains.

For brand new authors taking their first big steps and for individuals who may not have experience with project management, I can only imagine how relieving it was to have the first lesson dedicated to management resources, like Trello, creating a dedicated workspace, and setting realistic goals for the time provided. RPG Writer Workshop isn’t expecting us to publish an entire 1-20th level campaign in the course of a month, even if that’s what we thought it was going to be. The biggest takeaway from the first lesson, in my opinion, is let your friends and family know what you’re doing. Not only does this keep them informed, and therefore know what to reasonably expect from you during the workshop, but it helps you actualize the fact you’re really doing this. If you’re someone like me who needs a little motivational push every now and then, get your loved ones involved in the process early to ensure you keep going.

Conclusion

To avoid spoiling too much of these first few lessons, my first impressions of this workshop are resoundingly positive. While geared towards writing your first ever adventure, I feel like the lessons being applied thus far are fantastic for new and veteran authors alike. For the latter, I believe access to the course discord server and plethora of resources is enough to justify purchasing the Paid Path or DMs Guild Path.

If you’re interested in becoming a published contributor to the TTRPG of your choice but don’t know where or how to get started, keep following along with these posts and see if this workshop is right for you. I’m eager to see how this unfolds over the remaining 28 days.

Until next time,

Matthew Wulf

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