11 September 2024

How Playing and Running D&D Helped Me to Become a Fantasy Author

Commentary / Writing

I’m currently in the process of self-publishing my first novel. A tale of epic fantasy, it takes place in the kingdom of Grandaga, where humans live alongside elves, dwarves, orcs and many other races and species, with the main characters also consisting of a centaur and a halfling. There’s battle scenes and spellcasting – and there may or may not be a dragon in there as well for good measure.

And I’m unashamed to say that the whole novel exists purely because I play Dungeons & Dragons.

And – much to the chagrin of budding and fellow authors, I’m sure – I’ll admit that I never intended to become an author of fiction. It wasn’t a life-long dream or goal of mine, or anything like that. It just happened… thanks to D&D.

Getting into D&D

Excluding a brief, one-off session all the way back when I was a teenager, I didn’t start playing D&D properly until 2018. The coworking space that I used to be a member of (for my day job, which is basically freelance online marketing stuff) had someone join who was a big D&D geek, and he got a bunch of people there into it. Those people then formed their own groups splintering off from his, and one of those groups invited me to play with them. Having seen glimpses of people playing D&D in TV shows such as Stranger Things and Community, I was excited to give it a proper go.

Despite playing in a few different D&D groups/games and with another TTRPG (Tabletop Role-Playing Game), the idea of being a GM/DM (Games Master / Dungeon Master) – the person running the show – had never really appealed to me. It looked like a lot of hard, stressful work. But then, in the month of April in the dreaded year of 2020, after having finished being a player in another TTRPG, our GM – who also happened to be the person who devised the TTRPG – asked me if I could playtest his second campaign of the game. I said yes. I’d had a change of heart on my thoughts on DMing, because one day I thought it’d be cool to run a D&D game for my kids, once they’re a bit older. Sadly, after one session, things didn’t work out with that particular TTRPG (for reasons I won’t go into here) – but I found myself left with a group of half a dozen people who’d just committed to playing a long-term TTRPG game with me online over Zoom and Roll20, so I bought the D&D Starter Set and we pivoted to D&D instead.

That’s great… but what’s any of this got to do with becoming a fantasy author?

I’m glad you asked, subheading! Thanks for putting me back on track.

In the first group I played D&D in, there was a tense moment in one session where my PC (Player Character) was close to death. Was he alive or not? The DM wouldn’t tell me – at least not straight away. We left it as a cliffhanger between sessions, and the DM asked me to come up with a backup character, just in case my current one bit the dust. I came up with a centaur samurai bounty hunter, complete with an elaborate backstory about how he was hunting certain bounties that were connected to his past (which I won’t elaborate on further because… y’know… spoilers for my upcoming novel).

However, the more awesome (read: complex) his backstory became, the more I realised that no DM would willingly want to work with me to bring the whole thing to life. I’d also considered making him an NPC (Non-Playable Character) in the D&D game that I was running, but then I became concerned that he’d get ‘main star’ treatment, which – let’s face it – should be awarded to the actual players’ characters, not some randoms characters who are all under my control.

So, what was I going to do with this centaur samurai bounty hunter with an unworkable backstory? It was then I realised: he could appear in his own story.

Then I thought about other characters for this story. When I started DMing D&D, my group’s characters didn’t have a dedicated healer in the party, so I created a DMPC (a DM-controlled Player Character – sort of like an NPC but they’d ‘level up’ with the characters) to fill the role. He became a hit with my players, and so I later realised that he could also appear in the novel, alongside my centaur samurai. Another character I came up with for D&D – who I planned to play in a ‘one-shot’ (a short/one-off adventure) – also made the cut, who plays on the ‘gentle giant’ trope (in terms of D&D, he was going to be a goliath barbarian).

From there, I was able to build up more of the story from the foundation that I’d laid for myself. More characters were dreamt up – although these were intended purely for the novel, rather than as former or potential D&D character ideas.

And then, before I knew it, I had a full roster – and a world and a story to put them in.

Utilising D&D to become a fantasy writer


Everything I’ve said above though? Obviously, it’s not quite as simple as that.

Playing and running D&D didn’t just give me those ideas – they gave me the confidence to do something about them as well.

After all, what is D&D other than storytelling, albeit storytelling where the players can interact with and therefore help to dictate and direct what happens in the story? And seeing how much my players enjoyed the story I was running with them made me think: “hey – y’know, if they like this, then perhaps people will also like a novel that I write.”

I ended up taking quite a gradual process with my DMing evolution: by starting with something already written, to eventually moving onto scenarios that I’d be pretty much making up myself or that only had a small starting point to go on.

The D&D Starter Set (which I mentioned earlier) contained an adventure called Lost Mine of Phandelver. I ran it almost exactly as it’s written, making just a small handful of minor adjustments.

After my players had completed that adventure, we moved onto the popular gothic horror adventure Curse of Strahd – where the characters end up in a land ruled over by a vampire lord (D&D‘s version of Dracula, basically). It’s a popular campaign to modify, with quite a few good ‘mod’ guides out there, so this time I tinkered with the story, going ‘off-book’ a fair few times – sometimes using other people’s modifications, sometimes using my own.

They defeated the titular villain a couple of years ago, and now we’re onto ‘phase 3’: where they’re hopping across other lands similar to the vampire’s land, liberating each of them one by one (in D&D, this setting is collectively known as Ravenloft). Now, there is a D&D-published guidebook for this (Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft), but it basically only gives you the templates of the different lands – e.g. this one suffers from a recurring zombie siege, this one has ghost pirates, this one has a scientist like Victor Frankenstein as its villain, and so on – and a few ideas of scenarios that the characters may find themselves in in each one. This gave me a starting point where I could expand on it and fill it out myself, with my own characters, locations, quests, and story. My players are currently stuck in a deadly jungle land that hosts a Hunger Games-style competition – and I’ve gotta say: it is so, so much fun…!

Who knows… Maybe ‘phase 4’ of my D&D-run adventures will be 100% ‘homebrew’, which is the term used for when people basically make it all up as they go along.

Obviously, there are people out there who leap straight into homebrewing from the get-go, which I find hugely admirable. But if that seems intimidating to you, then there’s no harm or shame starting with someone else’s pre-written adventure and finding your feet that way – and then gradually working towards part- or full homebrew, much like my path throughout. It sure worked for me.

The DM-turned-novelist ‘stigma’

I’ve been a British Fantasy Society member since 2021, and I had the pleasure of attending the three most recent FantasyCon events (2021, 2022 & 2023).

At 2021’s event, I told some newly-made contacts/friends my story of how I’d become a budding novelist thanks to D&D. I was reassured to learn that many other authors have taken this route. I certainly wasn’t an anomaly, or the first ever person to stumble down this path.

However, interestingly… At 2022’s event, there was a fantastic panel session titled “Running a Role Playing game and writing: the transferable and non-transferable skills”. Naturally, this hit all my buttons… so I sat in the audience and ended up enjoying every second of it. During the Q&A at the end, someone raised an interesting question (which I can’t remember verbatim unfortunately, and I don’t think its audio was recorded, so I’ll have to resort to paraphrasing): “what do you say to people who complain about authors who are simply turning their D&D campaigns into the stories in their novels?”

Uh-oh. That’s… literally me!

Apparently, there’s a whole stigma surrounding this! Who knew? I certainly didn’t.

Now, I’m going to sound biased (because of course I am), but my genuine thinking is: who cares?! If the story is good enough to stand up on its own, then does it really matter if it originally came out of someone’s D&D game, or if it just magically/randomly manifested within the author’s head without the need for D&D to kickstart it?

I guess what I’m trying to say is: just because it started life off the back of a D&D (or other TTRPG) game, it doesn’t automatically make it inferior.

And hey: if it’s good enough for Jon Favreau – who arguably helped to bring the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) to life – then it’s good enough for me.

Want to become an author? Then run D&D (seriously)

Even though I’ve finished and I’m about to self-publish my first novel, and the fact that I have a ton of ideas for sequel and prequel stories off the back of it (although, sadly, not enough time to write them all immediately), I still like to run D&D on the side. Why? One might argue that I needn’t bother anymore – I’ve got all that I needed out of it, after all. And yet I persevere – for a few reasons…

Firstly, it keeps the creative juices flowing. By working on something that’s similar and running parallel to my novel-writing, I’m constantly thinking about and coming up with stories, plotlines, quest ideas, character motivations, and the like. I also have to be thinking ahead, to what might happen in later parts of the story. It’s a bit like chess in that regard: always feeling like you need to think a few moves (or sessions) ahead. And you can always count on characters to potentially ‘break’ the story, which could be a good thing – after all, maybe the plot-hole in your D&D game is also a plot-hole in your novel…

Secondly, and perhaps unexpectedly, it’s helping me to try out other genres. I’m actually not a big fan of the horror genre, but the Curse of Strahd and (current) Ravenloft campaigns are very much horror-focused, which we’ve (sort of)* fallen into by accident.

* Admittedly, as the DM, I could steer the story away from this setting – but we’re here now, and I’m choosing to lie in the bed (or should that be coffin?) that I’ve made for myself.

To elaborate on this and to give an example: I’m not a big fan of zombie stories. I don’t think I could ever watch The Walking Dead (despite everyone telling me how amazing it is). Weirdly though, I really enjoyed DMing a zombie apocalypse scenario. And as a result of that, I wonder if I could write a story – whether short or novel-sized – involving zombies. I never would’ve landed on that if it weren’t for D&D.

Wrapping up the story article

Honestly though… D&D is great. If you’re currently wanting to write fiction but your mind is currently out of ideas, then get going with D&D – it’ll help you to sharpen your focus, and as you come up with ideas for your D&D game, you’ll inevitably come up with ideas for stories on the side. The D&D Starter Set is super reasonably priced, has everything you need to get going, and acts as a good tutorial to both playing and running D&D (as, admittedly, all the various rules can feel a little overwhelming at first). And there’s always a supply-and-demand of DMs versus players – so if you offer to run D&D for people, I doubt you’ll have any trouble finding people who’ll want to play in your game.

And heck – it doesn’t have to be D&D! It doesn’t even have to be ‘classic’ Tolkien-style fantasy, either. You can use D&D‘s game system but adapt the story to be science fiction instead. A Cowboy Bebop-style space Western, you say? Yes please! And if D&D doesn’t roll your dice (so to speak), well I’m happy to tell you that there’s countless other TTRPG systems out there. Have a browse and take your pick.

All I thought I’d be getting out of playing/running D&D was a night a week of fun with some of my friends – and yet here I am with an almost ready-to-publish novel that I’ve gotten out of it, too. For which I am very thankful.

To my fellow D&D-inspired novelists, present and future: may all your work be a (critical) hit.

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DEMONS I

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