So, I'm taking a break from reading the works of Pierce Brown for a couple of weeks and will be sprinkling in a review for the movie Dune this week and a review for the game Metroid: Dread, next week. I’ll be back with a review for Iron Gold on December 1st, so keep an eye out for that! This review for Dune is one I’ve wanted to do for a while because I’d like to add my voice to the cacophony. That’s what everyone wants, right? Someone else shouting their opinion? Right? That’s what the people need?

We’re finally here! The session I’ve really been looking forward to… writing copy for your players. Today, we’re going to create something we can give to our players that they can use to build the backstory for their characters. I’m going to talk about the different things I include in this initial handout and I’ll even be giving you access to the handout that I’m creating for you to review. I’m eager to get started, so let’s just dive in!

Today, I want to talk about my writing history. I’ve been writing for several years and I never had a good example of what a writer’s path should look like. It was hard to tell if I was doing everything the right way, though there isn’t really a correct way to go about becoming a writer. This isn’t going to be a post giving advice on becoming a writer or suggestions for how to develop your skills--I’ll release something like that in the future. Instead, I’m just going to talk about the things I did historically as I learned to write and found my voice.

Because we now know what all we want to happen in our arc—or what might happen—we have a lot of work to do to get the setting for our arc fleshed out and expanded. This course is going to be where we take care of that. By the time you've finished with this part of my homebrew campaign creation series, you'll have a solid grasp on the setting of your arc. We've done a lot of world-building so far and we're about halfway done with that, now. Soon, we'll be focusing largely on the stories of our campaign. Bear with me, we're nearly there!

Today, I thought it would be good to talk about some of the people and stories that inspired me to tell stories of my own. These are going to be books, authors, even games that originally gave me the drive to sit down and put pen to paper… or fingers to keyboard, as the case was later on. I’ve been writing since I was extremely young, honestly. I don’t remember exactly when I started writing stories, primarily about my classmates. However, I do remember that even from a young age I was checking out books about writing, publishing, editing… all things related to becoming an author. A few key players were definitely responsible for inspiring this.

In this session, we’re going to take what we developed in the previous session and really flesh it out. I’m going to break down how I write my arcs and talk about what I do to ensure successful, cohesive improvisation during a session. At the bottom of this post, you’ll find links to download the template that I use for writing an arc. If you have your own that you’d like to use, feel free to use that! My template is also fairly focused on Dungeons and Dragons, but it can easily be modified to any other system.