World Adventure Writing Month ‘08

Adventures are starting to roll in!  (See the previous post for info on how to submit your adventure.)  If you’re not done, don’t worry WoAdWriMo lasts as long as you need.  The point of this operation is to get people writing and sharing cool adventures; sticking to an arbitrary timetable is NOT a priority.  Keep at it and send me your adventure when it’s done, whether that’s tomorrow or months from now.

Our download section with completed adventures should go live this weekend, so stay tuned!

I mentioned this in our forum, but I thought I’d repost how to submit a completed adventure.

Email it to me (jrients at gmail dot com). Title the email WoAdWriMo or Completed Adventure or something useful like that. Preferred format is PDF. If you send something else we’ll probably try to convert it to PDF.

In the body of the email list the title of the adventure, a one or two sentence summary, the system it is written for, and how you want to be credited on the website.

I just got the first completed WoAdWriMo ‘08 adventure from James Hutchings. Congratulations, James!  His Tunnels & Trolls adventure, “The Necklace of Arrah-Samat”, will be available for download ASAP!

The end of the month is in sight.  I hope writing your adventure goes well.   For the first WoAdWriMo outing we got some great advice from two very cool guys in the RPG industry, Mike Mearls and S. John Ross.  Here are the links to their words of wisdom:

http://woadwrimo.blogspot.com/2007/06/tips-from-pros-part-1.html

http://woadwrimo.blogspot.com/2007/06/tips-from-pros-part-2.html

Like me, you maybe had some specific ideas regarding how much should be finished by this point in World Adventure Writing Month.  Also like me, you may be way behind on that mental goal.  The important thing here is that you don’t despair and don’t stop your efforts.  Here are a few tips for keeping a positive attitude and pressing on.

Write now, right now! As far as I can tell, no one has invented a substitute for hard work.  If you’re reading this that mean you’re probably already in front of your keyboard.  Open another window and get cracking!

Cut something. Consider whether or not you can prune something from your adventure and still retain the essence of your project.  For example, my own adventure outline calls for seven sample PCs.  That’s not really necessary for the kind of adventure I’m writing, so if I get down to the wire and I really want to make the deadline then the sample characters are expendable.

This month is as long as you want it to be. In the final analysis, July is WoAdWriMo only because some dork on the internet said so.  What do you care?  If you finish your adventure in August or next July, you still finished your adventure.  No matter when you finish your adventure, you’re still fulfilling the primary goal of WoAdWriMo: to get more people writing and sharing RPG adventures.  No one will judge you for taking some extra time.

Finally, remember that help is one click away. If you’ve got some writer’s block or have hit some sort of snag, just head on over to our forum and ask for some help.  Everybody there is in the same boat as you.

Thinking about your adventure is great, but you won’t begin making any progress towards completing your Worldwide Adventure Writing Month project until you get writing.  Start small.   WoAdWriMo participant Darklance has started a thread in our forum where users are invited to offer a one-sentence synopsis of their adventure.  That’s certainly as good a place to start as any.  Or maybe you want to make a list of monsters to use or people to meet or locations for scenes.  Keep in mind that nothing you write at this stage is set in stone.  The important part is to get past the interminable planning stages and get to actual writing.

Worldwide Adventure Writing Month is a grassroots effort to motivate RPG fans to spend one month (July) writing a new adventure to share with the rest of RPG fandom.  ‘07 was our first year and we got some great adventures to share with you, thanks to the efforts of Jay Hafner, Peter Seckler, Phil Winters, Gabor Lux, and Bobby Derie.

Whether you’ve never written an adventure before or have a hundred modules under your belt, why not join our effort to expand the pool of free stuff that GMs can use?  WoAdWriMo doesn’t require you to sign up and there are no crazy rules you have to follow.  This website exists to cheer you on, to host your completed adventure if you want us to, and to help out in any way we can.  Hit a snag in your adventure design?  Got some writer’s block?  Want to share a cool bit you’ve come up with?  Then swing by our forum and join the conversation!

But keep in mind WoAdWriMo isn’t this blog or this site or the forum.  And as your WoAdWriMo coordinator this month isn’t about me.  The website exists as a service to the real heart and soul of Worldwide Adventuring Month, and that’s you.  WoAdWriMo is about regular gamers having fun working on a challenging but not impossible task and then sharing their results.  Please join us.  Take the challenge to write and complete adventure in the month of July.

Welcome to woadwrimo.org, then new home of Worldwide Adventuring Month!  WoAdWriMo ‘08 starts tomorrow.  Join us in the challenge to write a role-playing adventure in the next month!  You can totally do it!  If you need any advice or help or just want to say ‘hi’, please visit our forum.

WoAdWriMo ‘08 is less than a week away. Maybe you’ve already decided to take the WoAdWriMo Challenge and write your own RPG adventure to share with the world. But what system should your game be written for? Of course you are absolutely free to pick whatever game system you want to write for. The soon-to-be-relaunched WoAdWriMo website exists to host games for darn near any system.

But if you’re having trouble picking a system, here are some different directions you could go in making your choice.

Write Your Passion

This is the easy one. If there’s one system that really speaks to you as the end-all and be-all of RPGs, then you should write for that. You’ll be doing yourself a favor.

Flavor-of-the-Month

There’s nothing wrong with turning the enthusiasm of a fad into the energy to write an adventure module. Mutant Future is on my own personal shortlist mainly because it’s new and shiny. Well, that and the spidergoats.

Last Year’s Model

Maybe you took the challenge last year but didn’t quite finish your module. Dust that baby off and finish it off this July! Of course, if a new edition of the RPG you wrote for has hit the stand you might want to make some changes.

Go with What You Know

If there’s one system you know like the back of your hand, don’t hesitate to leverage that knowledge to make your WoAdWriMo project easier to complete.

Get Back to Your Roots

When was the last time you wrote an adventure using one of your favorite systems from the good ol’ days? Maybe after you’re done you can contact some gamer buddies from bygone days and play it through.

Push Yourself

Maybe there’s a game system that’s been your own personal white whale. You have trouble understanding it or making it work. Here’s an opportunity to sit down and really tackle that beast one more time.

Systemless is an Option

If you’ve got a cool adventure idea but can’t figure out a system to fit it, please work on it anyway! Some people get weirded out by systemless adventures, but there IS an audience for such work.

If you’re reading this, thanks for keeping WoAdWriMo in your feed! This year we’re going to do Worldwide Adventure Writing Month in July instead of June. That should give you some time to digest that new set of rules you just bought and get your ideas together.

One major change to the program this year: no page count goal. Let me repeat: no page count goal. Last year’s goal seemed to discourage people even though it was an admittedly arbirtrary bar. This year make the best adventure you can and don’t worry about how big or small it is. Page count is kind of a dumb way to measure the size of an adventure anyway.

Stay tuned in the month of June for more WoAdWriMo info!