Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 239 - Write What You Know

Episode Date: October 6, 2024

Do you ever struggle to create compelling adventures for your RPG group?  I know I have in the past until I embraced the simple tip:  “write what you know”.  But what does that even mean?  Tune in and find out.   #pf2e #Pathfinder #gmtips #dmtips #dnd #writingtips #writewhatyouknow

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. It's extremely satisfying to produce something that others enjoy. As I said though, writing is tough. How do you maximize your chances for success when you're writing your adventure? Thank you so much for listening to the Taking20 Podcast, Episode 239, a Back to Basics episode with a key tip for adventure creators out there. I want to thank this week's sponsor, Bricks. I just heard that a truckload of bricks overturned on a local highway.

Local authorities just don't know what to make of it. We have a website where you can listen to all of our episodes all the way back to the beginning of this podcast with my crappy equipment I had back then. www.taking20podcast.com. Come on by and leave a comment on an episode. This episode, fair warning, may not be for everyone. Some DMs never write their own adventures. They use pre-published adventure modules and campaigns and never create any custom or unique

dungeons, monsters, or even NPCs. And that's, you know what, okay. There's nothing wrong with being that type of GM that runs their players through adventures that others have created. However, this episode is for those DMs who like to game with their own creations, and for those who don't, hopefully you'll gain a point of to an inspiration from this episode as well. This week's advice to write what you know applies to authors no matter what they work on and make no mistake about it.

If you're creating an adventure for your friends or absolute strangers to go through, even if you will never publish it in the traditional sense, you're still an author. Authors at their very hearts are content creators. The content could be books, poems, plays, websites, podcasts, and yes, even RPG adventures. They are creating the theme of the adventure, writing descriptions for areas and creatures and NPCs. They are tying it all together in a series of encounters that can tell a cohesive story for the player characters to experience and hopefully enjoy themselves

in the process. Writing is tough, trust me. I've now written or spoken about 6-7 pages of single-spaced content about 239 times now. Granted, some are interviews like next week, stay tuned for that, but when you put it together, it's more than a thousand and actually almost 1500 pages of material. When I'm researching for a podcast topic or something for an adventure, it does take some time. The temptation to do other things is strong.

Right now, the icon for the game Satisfactory is calling me, telling me I need to go expand my steel production section of my factory and to complete the next tier of research. I can quit anytime I want to. I just don't want to. Anybody else's teeth itching right now? But writing is also rewarding. It's fulfilling to see others enjoy your creation.

Remember the last dungeon you created or encounter that you customized where one of your players immediately exclaimed how much fun it was? That little tingle you felt in the back of your brain was a shot of dopamine right to your pleasure center. Or the tingle is brain cancer and you might want to get that checked out. Seriously, I don't think I ever talked about this

on the podcast, but that's how my brain cancer started was a tingling in my fingertips and loss of strength in one hand. Everyone, please, if anything doesn't feel right in your body, go to the doctor and get checked out. For years, I just tough stuff out, but going to the doctor about this probably saved my life. Sorry. Anyway, it's extremely satisfying to produce something that others enjoy. As I said though, writing is tough. How do you maximize your chances for success when you're writing your adventure? There are a lot of points I could focus on. Don't write like a script, craft a good plot hook, focus on challenges, not outcomes, playtest

it with multiple groups, etc. But there's an old writing tip I want to focus on this week. Write what you know. You may have heard this advice before, but I think there's an old writing tip I want to focus on this week. Write what you know. You may have heard this advice before, but I think there's some misunderstanding about what it means and what it doesn't mean. So let's start with what it does not mean. Write what you know does not mean that you have to only write about your personal experiences. If I did that, I'd be writing every single adventure as a middle-aged white

cisgender heterosexual teacher cyber security leader husband and father Could I write adventures around this sure but I would imagine it would eventually get boring as hell All of that to say is that it doesn't mean that I can only write intelligently about being a dad or Hackers or trying to get kids to follow a game plan I've written a ton of adventures for my groups and I really enjoy doing it. I've researched and written adventures about defending caravans. Personally, I've never done that. Clearing out caves revealed by earthquakes.

Again, never done that. Finding a serial killer in a small town, flushing out doppelgangers at a city celebration, and you see where this is going. I don't have any of those personal experiences. But by researching what I don't know and learning from others, I'm able to put together a fairly cohesive RPG adventure. That being said, you can apply what you know and the experiences that you have that are similar to or echoes of or variants on the RPG adventure you want to write. For example, I've been in IT or cybersecurity in some

form for more than 25 years at this point. In that job we do a lot of investigations. Someone decides they want to try to gain access to a system or server or a user's account and they try to compromise things to send spam emails or whatever the incident do. Well, it's not a du jour. We usually have a couple per day. So let's go incident de ur is. So I've conducted digital investigations.

There's a methodology to it, finding the indications that something went wrong, gathering relevant clues and data, analyzing to reconstruct timelines, identifying potential subjects of interest, et cetera, et. etc. etc. So I once put together a quick adventure that went through some of those same steps to identify the serial killer in the normally sleepy little town of Willowbrook.

Granted, there was a little more excitement and a lot more stabbing in the RPG adventure than in my normal day-to-day investigations, but it had the same general structure of an investigation that I may do on a random Tuesday. Another example, I've taught college classes for about 12 years. I'm familiar with the ins and outs of college classrooms, what they look like, and when they're, for lack of a better word, normal, boring, everyday, humdrum, nothing exciting. So when I was writing a one-shot for Halloween a few years ago, I kind of turned that idea on its head. What would a haunted classroom look like, and how would the apparitions behave?

All of the people at the school had died, but their ghosts still roamed the hallways and classrooms. What weird twist could I put on the students' and teachers' behavior that would make it spooky, frightening, feel abnormal? I used my knowledge of the classroom and asked what would make this different or a difficult experience and wrote the adventure to include that.

So if write what you know doesn't mean you have to only write about your personal experiences, what does it mean? Write what you know has two parts to it, knowledge and feelings. I've alluded to it earlier, but having knowledge about what you're writing about will tend to make you write even better. For example, ask any computer security geek, and I say that with love because I am a geek myself,

ask them how accurately movies and TV shows portray computer topics and you'll likely either get a good 10 minute rant about how inaccurately it's always shown, or maybe just a simple, god it it sucks, or God, they're so stupid. Which as an aside, I will grant you that the movie The Matrix Reloaded isn't as good as the original. But in the movie, when Trinity gains access to a power plant computer system, if you pause the screen, the methods shown on the screen was a real SSH-CRC32

attack method that was a known UNIX vulnerability in 2001. I have to admit when I noticed that I was pretty excited and told my wife who just humored me when I geeked out like she always has to. She is an absolute saint for putting up with me. Anyway, if you have to include a topic in your game, consider doing a little bit of research in preparation for the adventure. When I wrote an adventure where there was a cult group that was abducting families to convert them to their religion or sacrifice them if they wouldn't,

I did some research on meals that peasants would eat in the middle ages and found a few sources that said meat was fairly rare among the poorest of peasants. So I took that fact, along with an idea that I stole from the movie From Hell, that meat would be readily accepted by the poorest and most unfortunate of people and they would just gobble it up without thinking. Like the killer in the movie giving drug laced grapes to those he wanted to kill, the cult would donate drug and magic laced meat to make the family fall asleep and make them easier to capture. Have I ever drugged a family and converted them to a cult? No! I have other hobbies and my weekends are already pretty full. But by researching

what I needed to know and using my tried and true advice of borrow borrow borrow, steal steal steal, good ideas from sources, I was able to make something coherent enough for a good adventure. Your experiences, no matter how thinly connected they are to the reality of your game world, can be used to give your game life. Take a situation you were recently in, like a traffic jam or a problem at work or problem with family or whatever. Now reimagine that situation by asking yourself what would have happened if the worst version of you had made all the decisions? How badly would things have gotten? Would you have gotten out of the car, started yelling at people, maybe threatened someone? Now run that same experience through the filter of your game world. Instead of a traffic jam on Interstate 90, it's a jam at the local spaceport, or busy town square,

or crowded firewall while you're net running. Just like that, you have a pretty good scenario that isn't exactly what you experienced, but it echoes of it and has similarities to it. Many times these similarities are based on emotional experiences of the moment. Loss, tension, frustration, anger, temptation. All feelings that we've all felt countless times in our lives. And that's the second part of Write What You Know. Write based on what you've experienced emotionally in your life. Love and possibly loss of that love, grief, trauma, joy, pain, sadness, they're universal. Nearly every human being on the planet has experienced those feelings at some point in their life. Using empathy or understanding of others' feelings, we can place ourselves

in the NPC's mind and use our own personal experiences to give them a realistic reaction and to make the game better. I tend to use examples because this is a teacher in me coming out, I apologize for that and hopefully they're not too distracting, but imagine you're a teenage child of a local weaver. You're learning the trade from an adult, maybe parent, older sibling, step-parent, grandparent, adoptive family, whatever. I don't know about you, but my teenage years were awkward as fuck. I was growing fast, clumsy, voice cracking, little bits of stubble here and there on my face that looked like little trees at

the edge of a desert. Anyway, you're a teenager who's learning a trade and just starting to make your way in the world. Maybe you have a small apartment or rent out an area above the weaver's shop but when you return one evening, you find the sleeping area broken into, rummaged through and maybe even something very valuable stolen. If you've ever had anything stolen from you, you know the desperate feeling of wanting to get what you lost back. Now, put yourself in this young adult's shoes and voila, you can write their interaction with PCs as strangers who solve problems and, someone stole the ring that I'd saved for months and I bought it for my sweet Sam, I was going to give it to him this weekend.

You may have never had an engagement ring stolen, but maybe something has stolen out of your car or locker at school or gym. You can emotionally relate to having something valuable taken. How would you feel? What would you do? Design your encounter and how the NPC interacts with the PCs with that mindset,

remembering something that was stolen from you. Now flipping the script a little bit. Imagine a good motivation taken too far. Love becoming obsession, justice becoming vengeance, patience becoming laziness, charity becoming greed, or what have you. That's one of my favorite starting points for coming up with villains, baddies, antagonists. They're rooted in my own experience. There's someone with motives that makes sense to them and maybe even started with a noble intention, but it's gone too far.

They're blind to the damage they're causing to others around them, those they love and maybe even themselves. I would imagine most of us, because I know I have, tipped a little bit too close to a line. Now imagine if you'd crossed it, made the wrong choices. What would that have looked like? So not only how would you feel and what would you do, what happens when you go too far? That's a great starting point for a villain. You may not have ever done horrible things in the name of something that you think would be good or something that you want, but you can find that mindset and now you know what it you need to have a believable motivation for your big bad.

You are writing what you know, what you understand emotionally. Never mind that your big bad is a hobgoblin queen, which you obviously aren't, or a nomadic chieftain in Westcrown, which you're not, or a conniving merchant on the planet Slysek, when all you are is just a junior software engineer from Perth. It doesn't matter. What matters is that you understand emotionally what it would feel like and you can give the character or NPC some realism because of it. To sum up the episode, what you're doing to put a fine point on it is you're placing yourself in that character's shoes or that situation to help you breathe life into that character based on your own experiences.

The situation, the interactions, etc. By using those personal experiences and reframing them in gaming adventure terms and by researching aspects and perspectives that you don't already have or know, you are writing what you know. And in so doing, I'd be willing to bet that you and your players would have fun doing it. Shorter episode this week, I'd love to hear some feedback from you about the podcast. Hey, what's going right? What's going wrong? What needs improvement? What suggestions do you have? Send them to me via direct message on Facebook or Instagram, or

send them to me via email, feedbackattaking20podcast.com. Tune in in two weeks when I'm going to interview one of my DMs, Tom Robinson, a Pathfinder Infinite master who has years of experience in adventure writing and recently put out a Halloween one-shot called Harvest of Shadows. It's available on DriveThruRPG and Pathfinder Infinite right now. Plus, he puts up with my character's bullshit, so you know he has to be patient and good. But before I go, I wanna thank this week's sponsor, Bricks.

You know, Bricks kinda leave it a pretty good life. They're guaranteed to get laid at least once. This has been episode 239, a Back to Basics episode advising you to write what you know when designing adventures. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking20 podcast is a Publishing Cube Media Production. Copyright 2024.

References to game system content or copyright their respective publishers.