Going from RPG to Novel, my experience.

Wow, four blogs in a row, I must be on a roll. No, not really, but while I am writing my next novel, Savage Rebellion, for NaNoWriMo (I am currently on day 13 at 32000 words). I explain why you should never adopt a Dungeon and Dragon/Pathfinder game into a book. To head off the first question, yes, Journal of Adventurer and the World, Favinonia was based on a role-playing game. I built this world over ten years ago with the help of my friends, but the books are played out in this world; the characters of the Rejects and the city of Lake Merrin were completely separate from all the games I created.

There have been three authors I know of that based their books on a game they created; they are Raymond E Feist, Margret Weis and Tracy Hickman. They did a brilliant job; I don’t know how much it carried over. Still, one quote from Margret Weis about the character Raistlin Majere, whos character was a good friend of Tracy Hickman, Terry Phillps’ betrayal of the character Raistlin in the game, gave not only the character a personality but breath life into the complexity of Dragonlance and Krynn itself. Mr Hickman says that Raistlin was Mrs Weis’ character, and the books The Soulforge and Brothers in Arms show the complexity created by the Phillps’ roleplaying.

If you read Dragonlance Chronicles, Legends and the above books, you can see that with help, you can translate roleplaying games into a novel. This is when the ‘but’ comes in. Not all games will adapt, and not all characters will adapt to the page.

My example was that I would do a short serial on the party of Shadow’s Bane (here is a link to the story). I started to introduce each character with my interpretation of each; it was not perfect, but I tried to capture the essence of the character. This seemed to be going well until the last one I introduced. 

I will not name my now ex-friend, but I will describe her character as best as I can remember. The character’s name was Raven, and she was a summoner (this is from the Pathfinder RPG). Her eidolon was called Night Fury. You can see that one name of her summons was named after the movie How to Train a Dragon. This is fine for a private game with many friends, but publishing a description of the summon as Toothless the Night Fury from the movie would be dangerous for me and my blog.  Raven was independent with a powerful but not fully understood ability. I think she could be a bit domineering, but that is my interpretation.

So, I changed the dragon’s look, shape and name and softened Raven’s personality. To keep it somewhat the same, I found a name that meant Night and or Fury. I then wrote the characters’ arc. In the game, my ‘friend’ roleplayed between Raven and NF, and I think it was one of the best sessions I have ever run. I tried to emulate that feeling, but somewhere, it got lost in translation, and I lost two friends because of my interpretation of said character and her summons.

This hurt me dearly, and I stopped writing for four years. Only now, since the death of my mother, have I come back to the keyboard to start to write again. Could I have done something different? Yes, but that would be hindsight. I can warn other fledgling writers about adapting a game to a book, as it is more challenging than you think. Do not lose friends over some simple words. Still, use the world, but make new characters that are yours and yours alone.

Shadows Bane short serial story [Link]