Writing stories is hard. Everyone who has ever taken the running leap off the cliff of imagination to try and fly quickly learns that. When the thermals are good, you’ve got smooth sailing; the words come like water from a faucet, and everything seems to flow. You can coast for pages on a good burst of inspiration, struggling here and there, but overall making good time. When that lifting force fades though, as it eventually does, it’s just you and your arms, flapping harder and harder to try and stay up.
One of the biggest causes of that lack of lift is plot. When your plot starts to drift or show its holes, then everything starts to fall apart. You can stall for days, weeks, months, until that burst of insight and motivation hits you. Having a solid plot is like having a map of air currents to ensure that you can always avoid the biggest pockets of dead air.
And that’s the greatest advantage writing a story based off a completed tabletop game provides. The plot has already been established, by the hard work of the GM and the capricious whims of the players. There’s an established beginning, a satisfying (or depressing) end, and all the major events that lead from one to the other is sitting there waiting like checkpoints in a side-scroller.
The second great advantage provided by writing a story based off a game is the characters. Their relationships are fleshed out, their motivation and personalities more or less made clear. All the tagonists are lined up, pro and an, waiting for you to breathe life into them.
So if those are the main advantages of writing a story based on a game, what are the unique challenges? Here are a few of the main things to look out for and check off your list of bases to cover while worldcrafting: Read more
