In January, I’m teaching a workshop at a residency about using rpgs and brainstorming cards to write stories—short stories, novellas, novels, all of it. So I figured I’d also go into my own current experience of the process.
TL;DR: I am having a FUCKING BLAST.
In a previous post, I mentioned how difficult writing Fell Runner felt. Questions of structure and narrative, experimentation with the form that is a ‘novella.’ Well, the experiments continue, but this one is having a very different result.
Codename: Monster Slayer, my August 2026 novella, is coming out so much more easily than Fell Runner. This is probably because of a combination of reasons.
One, it’s outlined. Fell Runner had a bit of an outline, but it was the kind of story that had to be told by feel. There were things I had to discover about the character and her world on the run, so to speak.
This isn’t the first outlined story I’ve ever written, but it is the first that I’ve completely outlined with a solo rpg. Some of you have seen me posting about my Ironsworn playthrough, and that’s what I used to structure the bones of the adventure.
As any of you who have played a ttrpg will know, your characters eventually go beyond the game, and you get to inhabit a full life as different chance turns force you to think on your feet. The mechanics of Ironsworn—failed rolls and oracles for example—forced me to explore options that would never have occurred to me if I were just sitting at the desk trying to come up with something to happen next. (I liked this mechanic so much that I actually used it when I was stuck at different points in Warmongers, too, and it led to some surprising character moments that really worked for the story.)