I restarted the Write Your First Adventure course

Back in August of 2024, I signed up for the Write Your First Adventure course from the Storytelling Collective. It’s intended to be a one-month course that you follow to write and publish your first one-shot module. I . . . did not finish that in one month. I do, however, want to get back to it and complete that course, and so I’ve restarted it.

What stopped me

The problem was the exact one I’d expected: I did not dedicate the time for it to complete it in one month. I have a demanding job, and some days I come home quite low-energy. Usually, my energy peaks in the late morning to early afternoon in any case, and in the evenings I’m already low energy. With evenings already being low-energy moments, work sometimes taking a lot out of me, and evenings being my only free time during the week, it’s hard to be productive.

Skip a day, and that’s fine. Soon you’ll find yourself skipping two, three, and a week. Before you know it, it’s been quite a while. I wanted to follow along with the design of WYFA, and do it within the one-month timeframe. You know what, though? That’s just not realistic for me. So the next logical thing is to just do it my own way.

Adjusting to OSR

What is tricky, though, is that the course does seem to be geared towards storytelling (unsurprising, since it’s from the Storytelling Collective!). While the course is absolutely built to have you write your own thing, there’s some underlying assumptions still. For example, the section on mindmapping and outlining suggests that there is a sequence to the adventure that you’ll write. However, all of the OSR products that I’ve been experiencing so far are designed more like a playground. There’s no predefined story for players to work their way through, but rather there’s a playground full of toys for them to interact with.

Nevertheless, I just take what I can use and leave behind what I don’t need. For example, to resolve the mindmapping/outlining section, I did not create something mapped to storybeats but rather the interconnection of locations. For the antagonist, I did not bother to create a single Big Bad Evil Guy but rather used the advice from the course to create a few factions with relationships to each other.

Overall, I would still suggest WYFA as a good framework to start with, even with adjustments being needed for an OSR playstyle. There’s plenty of advice on blogs out there to help create OSR experiences, so a little bit of mixing and matching of advice works wonders. When I’m further down the line, I’ll post some more thoughts on it.