I played in my first TTRPG campaign at age seven. My parents really didn’t mess around with “starting them early.” My character was a thief-type named Nara. She had dark hair (like me), violet eyes (not like me), and was uncannily accurate with a bow “because magic.” (Clearly, seven-year-old me put a lot of thought into this.)
Fast-forward to high school, I decided I wanted to write fantasy books. For my first trick, I would tell the story of Nara and her merry band of friends as they explored the highly dangerous magical caverns for the local baron. After years of writing, revising, and thinking I had written a masterpiece that perfectly encapsulated the most creative and fun experience of my childhood, I felt boldly confident when I later submitted ten pages of Nara’s story to my first MFA critique session.
The response? “This doesn’t feel like a novel, and I don’t care about the characters.”
💔
Yes, my dreams felt crushed, and I cried later. Then, I dove headlong into absorbing information and improving my craft.
Which is why now, as both an author and developmental editor, as well as someone who’s played and gamemastered TTRPGs, I can definitively tell you that novels and games are two very different story experiences. Is there overlap? Sure. But if you try to just take your TTRPG campaign as it played out, slap a cover on it, and call it a novel, you won’t get very far.
You’ll get a lot further, though, if you consider a few crucial aspects of storytelling before trying to cram your campaign into book form.
So let’s ask some questions about those crucial aspects and start thinking about how to answer them.
Whose Story Are You Telling?
For the sake of this question, let’s create a fictional adventuring party with four participants. (And for the sake of good gameplay, let’s say there’s a fighter, rogue, cleric, and wizard.) Together, our bold adventurers defeat the army of undead protecting some ancient ruins, where each decides to explore in a different way.
- Rogue: crawls around in some tunnels
- Wizard: runs experiments on floating lights
- Fighter: climbs a crumbling tower
- Cleric: digs through some rubble
Here’s what this might look like during a game session.
The rogue crawled through the tunnels while the wizard cast a spell to detect magic. Meanwhile, the fighter navigated a particularly complex section of the tower. The cleric started digging, but since that took a while, we’ll go back to the rogue, who found some bones, and the wizard, who’s spell failed. Meanwhile, the fighter slipped and was dangling from a ledge, and eventually, the cleric broke through the rubble to nearly fall through a hole in the ceiling of a buried structure. Then, while the two of them tried not to fall, the wizard searched madly for which spell to try next, and the rogue got stuck in a narrow section of tunnel.
As reflected by this passage, equal time is given to each characters’ exploits in a TTRPG session, regardless of how little a character might accomplish (looking at you, wizard). When the purpose of a story experience is to promote group dynamics and engagement, it’s critical to make sure every participant gets equal screen-time, as it were.
However, in an experience where the point is to keep readers turning pages because they “have to know what happens next,” trying to spread focus across four people equally in one scene just keeps the story from covering any ground. As a result, readers feel like nothing’s happening, and they put down the book.
Thus, choosing who’s story to tell is a question of focus. Specifically, which character will drive the story arc and give readers a cohesive experience to follow.
For example, let’s consider what the above scene might look like if it focused only on the fighter. The tension of the climb would keep the story moving, and readers would experience the fighter’s drive to ascend, hope to find something important, fear of falling to a painful death. Focus makes the fighter’s struggle real and not just a checkpoint on a list of actions.
Of course, this means not focusing on the struggles of the rogue, cleric, and wizard, which might feel unfair, but I promise you is not. Letting those three characters fade into the background allows the story to move forward in a way it couldn’t before, and you’ll get a lot further with readers if you finish one story, rather than start four that never end.
Where’s Your Story Going?
Ah, ye old days of rolling up a party, marching off to the dungeon, breaking down the door, beating up the monster, and retrieving piles and piles of loot that are mystically not a struggle to carry back to town and to the nearest imbibing establishment, where drinks are consumed at a rate that would be alarming under other conditions until the wee morn hours, upon which sleep is attained atop bar tables until late afternoon when the party members rise without the restraints of hangovers and sally forth once more to repeat the daring deeds of yesterday for glory.
Why, you ask? Who cares—glory! ⚔
Okay, these may not actually be the “ye old days.” And this is certainly not the only way to run a TTRPG. Campaigns can range from ongoing isolated incidents of dungeon-crawling to well-plotted arcs where each smaller adventure somehow ties into the bigger picture. If you’re working with this second type, you’re game is much closer to being a novel. But even so, there are likely going to be a lot of tangents and random encounters to take a good, hard look at before publication.
TTRPGs are, at heart, a social activity. They aren’t meant to be a complete and cohesive story experience, and odds are good they won’t be, both because of how gameplay shakes out and because it’s tough to get a cohesive anything out of five people at a table doing whatever comes to mind. The gamemaster might toss in a random orc attack. Or the bard might say something allegedly epic while crossing a bridge that stops action for five minutes while everyone quotes Monty Python and the Holy Grail. These tangents are fun in game, but as part of a story, they are little more than places for readers to ask why they care, decide they don’t, and put the book down.
stories need structure—a beginning, middle, and end, if you will. They need to start somewhere, follow a key plot point along ever-increasing dangers or odds, and finally come to a pinnacle of emotional or physical tension before they descend to an at least partially wrapped-up ending. Some writing advice will tell you “if a line doesn’t serve the story, pitch it.” I don’t believe in being quite this harsh. Sometimes, the well-placed tangent works. The trick is to use them sparingly. Want your characters to get attacked in the middle of the night to show the random danger of the world? Go for it.
But if you find yourself including so many tangents that the plot never starts, what you have is not a story. It’s a group of people showing off.
Where Does Your Story Take Place?
If you’re familiar at all with TTRPGs, you likely know companies create licensed game worlds. This should go without saying, but those worlds belong to those companies. Thus, publishing a book set in that world (using its name and other identifying information) is a no-no, both legally and ethically, unless you have permission to do so from whoever owns the license.
Bottom line: If you’re going to make your campaign into a novel and publish it, the best thing to do is set it in a world of your own creation. Naturally, there might be some overlap with other worlds, such as the existence of deserts or orcs, but if the world itself is your creation and doesn’t use officially licensed elements owned by someone else (such as Displacer Beasts or the Forgotten Realms from Wizards of the Coast), you’re good to go.
Beyond the legal issues, there’s another big reason to create your own world, namely that worlds specifically created for TTRPGs aren’t necessarily built to support a deeper dive into how they work. Likewise, if you just tossed together a world so your players would have a relatively original place to crawl their dungeons and fight their monsters, it will probably need some fleshing out. The waterfall that mystically flows upward so characters can reach the moon and fight the great dragon Lunarus might be a cool feature, but once you put it in a book, readers are going to expect at least a modicum of explanation for how such a thing is possible. And “because magic,” as we saw with my MFA critique session experience, will only get you so far.
There is no shortage of fantasy authors who’s works were partly inspired by the worlds they built for their TTRPG group. I haven’t talked to all of them, but I’d wager to guess a number of those worlds needed some expansion before they became fleshed out enough to support a novel. I’m not saying you need a microscopic understanding of how every element of the world works (though, my friend who spent years researching the Victorian Era for a TTRPG campaign so he could be specific down to the phase of the moon because it mattered for two of his characters might disagree with me). I am saying you need to put some thought into how things work. Is there a portal in that waterfall that transports people to Lunarus’s cave on the moon? Or maybe the moon is an illusion, and Lunarus is actually at the top of a mountain. I came up with both those ideas on the fly—no research required. Are they perfect? Probably not. But they offer a lot more explanation and wonder for your audience than “because magic.”
Who’s Telling Your Story?
Yes, this question is very similar to the first one.
No, it is not the same thing.
The first question asked who’s story is being told. Which character is the focal point of the action, tension, and growth? We chose the fighter and showed how telling that character’s story transformed the TTRPG experience into a novel.
Now, this question asks who is telling the fighter’s story. From what point-of-view does the reader experience the fighter’s action, tension, and growth?
If you’re really new to the idea of novel writing, it may seem like the obvious answer is “the fighter, of course.” Often, the protagonist (main character) and storyteller of a book are the same person, but they don’t have to be. And there’s also the question of whether the protagonist is truly narrating or being narrated for.
In a TTRPG, the player characters are both participants in and narrators of the action. As an example, a player might, in their bard’s voice, stand before a room full of people and tell a story of “my brave and daring adventure.” Alternatively, the player might just say the bard “tells the story of her brave and daring adventure.” Both formats are acceptable, and conveniently, they also offer a framework from which to explore point-of-view (or POV) in fiction.
POV is one of those things that is both very easy and also extremely difficult to sum up in a few words. This article from publishing expert Jane Friedman’s blog breaks POV down nicely, but suffice to say, POV is the angle from which your story is told. The article goes into five different POV choices, all of which are valid. For our purposes here, though, I’d like to draw attention to two options that call back to our bard above.
- First-Person: When a character is also the narrator
If your bard tells “of my epic deeds,” the bard is narrating the story with herself at the literal center of events. She is the “first” person of importance in the story, and everything readers get comes straight from her lips. Thus, first-person uses I/me pronouns and allows the reader to be literally plopped into the protagonist’s head.
- Third-Person: When a narrator is telling the story for a character
Third-person is actually a bit more complex than this, but for right now, we’re going to focus on third-person close or limited, in which the focus remains firmly on one character. In this scenario, the narrator is a “third” person who is independent from the story. If your player above decided to just say “the bard tells her story,” the player is the narrator who is telling the story for the bard. The player has access to the bard’s thoughts and knows what happened because they were technically there, but they are not actually the bard herself in the game world. Thus, third-person uses “he/she/they” pronouns because the narrator is separate from the character but still close enough to deliver the story, if from a slightly more distant lens.
As I said, these two POV options are not the only ones available, but they are extremely popular choices because they make for engaging stories. Ultimately, who tells the story is up to you, but don’t be surprised if your characters have something to say about it (and loudly).
Wrapping Up
Protagonist, plot, place, and POV—four P considerations for turning your TTRPG into a book.
If you’re now thinking “ooh, Mary, that’s clever. Why didn’t you use that sooner?” The answer is because I thought of it while I struggled mightily to draft this recap section, and I was not interested in rewriting the entire post to fit it in. 😜
In addition, these Ps are, as I said, considerations. They are designed to get you thinking about how TTRPGs and novels are different story experiences and how you can use your existing creative skills to transition from gameplay to commercial storytelling. There’s lots more to cover (that may or may not start with the letter P).
So for more deep-dives on making your TTRPG an epic novel, subscribe below. And onward to glory! ⚔