Adventure Writers' Room
We are a group of GMs who meet in the discord voice chat, and challenge ourselves to improvise a one-shot adventure in 2 hours. Our goal is to brainstorm fun ideas and improvise stories together in a chill, lighthearted, no-pressure environment.
It's really fun, it works, and it really helps with creating adventures! Usually, by the end of the brainstorming session, we have a solid outline of an adventure we can run for our players.
We're looking for some friendly and creative people to join us! If you want to improvise some stories, stretch your creative muscles, get help writing your adventures, or just have some fun brainstorming ideas - come join our discord server!
How does it work?
We use a brainstorming template to guide us through the adventure creation process. We copy it into a new google doc editable by everyone in the group, go through it step by step, and fill it with our ideas.
We use the adventure prompts tool to help us come up with the initial premise for our adventure. We take turns generating random prompts, and doing a short one-minute pitch of a story based on them.
We brainstorm ideas and establish the key elements of our adventure: the goal our players will pursue, setting and locations they'll visit, characters they'll meet, challenges they'll encounter. For every step, we make a list of ideas, briefly discuss them, and pick our favorite ones.
Then we try to combine our ideas into a one-page adventure, put it all together into a list of scenes that flow into each other, add up to an interesting story that makes sense. We use the One-Page Adventure Template to create a short summary of everything we have brainstormed. We start by writing the outline (just a list of scene titles), then every person picks a couple of scenes and writes them.
Finally, we can playtest our adventure between ourselves to notice any issues, come up with more cool ideas, and practice running the adventure before we do it for our players.
Our best adventures are published on this website, available to everybody on the internet for free (as long as everyone who has participated in the brainstorm is okay with that).
Brainstorming Guidelines
To get the most out of our brainstorming sessions, follow these tips and advice:
Brainstorm what’s hard to improvise
Try to make sure we have prepared everything that would be difficult to improvise on the spot, but no more. We don't want to over-prepare, it is safe to omit anything that the GM can improvise during the game. But we do want to make sure that we have prepared all the essential parts, and didn't leave any big unsolved open questions.
If you notice something that's missing or doesn't make sense - bring it up so that we can figure it out together.
Avoid discussing mechanics
We focus on creating system-agnostic, low-combat adventures. Stories that can be adapted to any system, that anyone can drop into their campaign as a quest, or run as a one-shot. Please avoid discussing rules and mechanics until the very end, because getting caught up in mechanics takes a lot of time and distracts people from the most challenging and interesting part - creating a story. Once we have a good story, it will be very easy to figure out the stats, rules, and combat encounters.
Keep up the good pace
Our goal is to complete the adventure in 2-3 hours. If you notice that we're spending too much time on one specific section, encourage everyone to make a decision and move on to the next step of the writing process. It’s better to pick a random idea and roll with it than to get stuck trying to make a decision. If we find it difficult to choose the idea we want to focus on - we vote on it or roll the dice to pick a random one.
Try to keep the discussion focued
Please avoid going on unrelated tangents. If you notice that people are getting distracted, stuck, or too caught up in the details - try to steer the conversation back on track. It will really help us to complete the adventure within a reasonable amount of time.
Share the Spotlight
Try to make sure you're not talking over other people and dominating the conversation. If you notice someone being interrupted - ask them what they were about to say.
Trust the process
We have established a process that works pretty well. If you're just getting started - try follow the lead of the person who's running the session, trust their experience.
Contribute ideas
Try to contribute at least one idea to every step of the writing process. Doesn’t have to be the most brilliant one, even the simple/obvious ideas can be very helpful and lead to something interesting.
Yes, And
Do your best to “Yes And” people’s ideas. Don’t shut down ideas - embrace them, build on top of them, add something new, find a way to make them work, make them better.
See if you can combine multiple ideas suggested by other people into something new and exciting - trying to incorporate other people's ideas into the story often leads to new and even more awesome ideas.
Take inspiration
If you’re struggling to come up with a creative idea - use one from your favorite Movie, Game, or a TV show.
Mix and match tropes. Combine two different ideas. Try to add an unusual unexpected twist. Change a key element of the idea, switch the genre, setting, goal, important character traits, etc. Take an idea that already exists, and try to make it different from what we've seen before.
If you need help coming up with ideas, use our Writing Prompts Tool.
Useful learning resources
Check out our adventure writing course. Watch Brandon Sanderson's lecture where he brainstorms ideas with his students. Watch his full fantasy writing class here. Listen to this excellent screenwriting guide - it is very applicable to writing adventures, and it's the most brilliant summary of storytelling theory I've ever heard.
Invite people
If you know someone who would enjoy brainstorming with us, invite them to our server using this link. The more people we have - the easier it will be to find people to brainstorm with!
Run your own sessions
Once you've participated in a few sessions and feel like you're getting the hang of the process - feel free to announce and run your own sessions. It will enable you to brainstorm whenever it is the most convenient for you, and it will give an opportunity to more people (living in different timezones) to participate in the brainstorms. Learn how to run the sessions here.
If you have some questions, feedback, or need any help - send me a message (lumen#7925 on Discord).