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Adventure Writing Academy

Your Tools & Resources

This course comes with a set of tools that will make the process of brainstorming and developing your adventure much easier and more fun. Before we begin creating an adventure, I want you to get familiar with them and make sure you are ready to use them.

Story Source

Story Source is a deck of cards containing hundreds of prompts for the key ingredients of any adventure - locations, characters, actions, and targets.

You will mix and match the prompts to help you come up with an unlimited number of unique creative ideas for your adventure.

The digital version of the deck comes with this course for free - you will find the link to it on your downloads page. Open it, sign up for a free account, and then click "Play" - that will take you to the digital version of the card deck. You can drag the cards onto the board to draw the prompts, press F to flip the cards, press R to rotate them so you can mix and match the prompts. Make sure to press the "star" button so that the prompts you draw remain saved and accessible through this website.

To generate ideas, draw two cards and stack them so that a bright edge (an adjective) meets a dark edge (a noun), then rotate the cards to combine the prompts in different ways. The same two cards can give you a "Dangerous Town", a "Flooded Fortress", or a "Forgotten Harbor" - every rotation is a new idea.

If you want to get a physical version of the deck, you can find it here.

Adventure Blueprint

The Adventure Blueprint is a template that will guide you step by step through brainstorming and developing your adventure. It contains sections for each of the core elements of a well-crafted adventure - setting, objective, opposition, locations, characters, and plot. Under each section you'll find questions that will guide you through the process of developing your ideas.

You will use the Adventure Blueprint as a living document, filling it in with your ideas as you go through the course. The awesome thing about this tool is that it breaks down the creative process into very simple steps, and once you go through all of them, you will know everything you need to know to run a great adventure.

Once your adventure document is complete, turning it into a complete adventure will be extremely easy - you will already know all the ideas you need to convey, and all that's left is to describe what you already know clearly and concisely.

Open the template, then click File > Make a Copy to create your own copy of the template that you can edit.

Adventure Editor

The Adventure Editor is a tool for turning your ideas into a beautiful, ready-to-publish adventure. It's the same tool that I used to create all the adventures you see on our website.

You can use the editor to create adventures of any length, but I highly recommend that you intentionally stick to a single page. A single page, when it is organized the way you see in our examples, is a clean, focused document that contains everything a game master needs to know to prepare and run a great game. Adding more words will make the adventure more difficult to refer to during the game, and will not necessarily make it better.

Use the limited space as a creative constraint, which will help you distill everything important about your adventure in a few words, making it easy to read, to prep, and to run at the table. Trust my experience, this is one of the most helpful and productive exercises you can do to get better at making great adventures.

Another benefit of sticking to one page is that it makes the work ahead of you feel very manageable, easy, and fun. Don't take on a large writing project until you have mastered the art of creating the concise and accessible adventures first.

Discord Community

Last but not least, our Discord community is where you'll share your work, get feedback from other adventure writers, and find people to playtest your adventures with.

As you go through the course, the action steps will often ask you to make posts in our community. You will share your ideas, and leave feedback on the ideas and adventures made by other people. Both giving and receiving feedback are extremely valuable ways to learn from others, improve your own ideas, and get better at creating excellent adventures. I hope that you see this as one of the most valuable parts of this course, and take advantage of the opportunity to learn from our community.

Once your adventure is finished, you will announce and run a playtest of your adventure, which will help you to practice running your story, improve your ideas, and see how well it works during the actual game.

You will also be able to participate in our collaborative brainstorming sessions, where we get together in a voice chat, brainstorm ideas, and create an entire adventure in a couple of hours. It is very fun, and makes the process of creating adventures even easier and more fun.

Resources

All the links in one place:

Action Steps

  • Open Story Source, create a free account, click "Play" to open the digital card deck. Draw a few cards and try combining prompts - just play around with it.
  • Open the Adventure Blueprint, click File > Make a Copy to save your own version. Skim through the sections to see what you'll be filling in.
  • Create an account in the Adventure Editor. Browse the example adventures to see what your finished adventure will look like.
  • Join our Discord community. Say hi in #introductions (if you haven't already).
Welcome & The Process
The Story Idea Recipe