Author: izzytaylorc04374ca8a

By Kyle Grindstaff

 Creating stories for tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs), such as Dungeons & Dragons, was one of the primary factors that led me to take up writing as a hobby. And selfishly, one of the first things on my mind when I decided to pursue creative writing in college was, “I sure hope my education will make me a better dungeon master!” While I can attest that my wishes have come true, the opposite also happened. Running TTRPGs for my friends has made me a more flexible and confident writer.

         I have come to a realization while running my D&D games that the less time I spend laboriously (but lovingly) planning my sessions, the better. The unpredictability of my players’ decisions throughout the game often forces me to toss whole scenes and characters away and improvise new ones on the spot. This unpredictability could manifest in many forms: perhaps they decided that they would rather murder the noble who, unbeknownst to them, was holding crucial information to their success, or they take a liking to a stray goblin they interrogated and forget about the quest to make friends with him and skip town, or something else entirely. It’s hard to know what my players are going to do, and I find the same when writing my own personal stories. It’s hard to predict where my mind will go next.

         I’ve learned to embrace this flexibility that I have developed when running TTRPGs and use it for my writing. I always start with a loose outline, but I’m never afraid to ditch those plans and follow either my own instinct or the characters I write when they evolve to be something more than an idea I created in my head and ink on my page. By doing so, I allow and trust my characters to guide the story along rather than myself as an omnipotent figure beholden to a list of notes. As writers, our characters will always develop and deepen past their initial concept, and I believe we are doing ourselves a disservice if we are to believe that the story’s core outline is set before we even begin writing the first words of the draft. 

         For writers who are meticulous planners to a fault, I encourage you to let down the pen for a moment and pick up a set of dice. When running a D&D game, you could have the most expansive world set with clashing political factions, ancient lore, and a captivating storyline to match. As your players engage with your world and foil your plans and expectations, you’ll likely find the most memorable moments are made when you let go and see where they take you. I guarantee that if you take that feeling and transfer it to your personal writing, embrace the chaotic unknown, and allow your characters to tell the story they want to share, you’ll discover confidence and flexibility in yourself that pages of cushy notes could never provide, and maybe a new hobby too!

Exercise: 

In the spirit of embracing the unpredictability of a TTRPG, a fun writing exercise I try when I feel particularly stuck in my writing is to let the dice decide my character’s actions.

Assign Your Character’s Stats 

A character has six statistics: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. 

–       Assign these stats to whatever you think your character would have. -1. +0, +0, +1, +2, +3, 

–       A 0 is the skill of an average person for a frame of reference

Example:

Let’s say my character is Anette, a witty scoundrel from the backwater slums of the city. Her stats would look like so: 

• STR (+1) 
• DEX (+3) 
• CON (+0) 
• INT (-1) 
• WIS (+0) 
• CHA (+2)

Difficulty Classes (DCs)

DC’s (or difficulty classes) is the number on a 20-sided die your character needs to roll or higher to succeed.

• They range from 5 (easy), 10 (medium), 15(hard), 20(very hard)
• If you determine that your character’s task is a medium difficulty (DC:10), the result must be a ten after determining your roll and modifiers from your stats to succeed.
• Note: if you don’t own a 20-sided die, there are many virtual dice that you can find online!

Putting It Into Practice

Here’s how it would look in practice: 

• Anette has to infiltrate the baron’s mansion in search of a magical crystal. She begins to pick the lock, and I determine that’s a medium difficulty (DC:10) and needs a certain amount of finesse (dexterity). I roll a 6. A +3 isn’t enough; the lockpick breaks. She’ll have to improvise. 
• Anette instead hides in a bush and lures the nearby guard. When he approaches, she tries to tackle him. It’s late at night, the guard is tired, and she is attacking from behind. I determine that’s a hard difficulty, but I’ll take it down to a DC: 13 instead of 15 to show she has the advantage. She is using brute force to attack (strength). I rolled an 18! Anette tackles the guard and knocks him out, stealing his keys. 
• After infiltrating the mansion, she finds the magic crystal. It hums with raw archaic energy. She tries to figure out what it is, I determine that’s a DC:20 using her knowledge of magic (intelligence). I roll a 12. To make matters worse, she was never properly educated, and that falls to an 11 due to the -1 intelligence I gave her. She supposes she’ll just have to trust her contract and turn in the bounty blindly without knowing its potential.

Feel free to play around with the DCs depending on the situation as I did. Although my example isn’t in prose, you can see how the randomness of the dice adds to creating dynamic highs and lows throughout the writing process and helps you as the writer improvise just as much as your characters might!

By Isabel Taylor

Until this fall, I last attended the Tuxedo Renaissance Faire six years ago. My memory of that day is hazy: a sea of lace-up corsets, handheld fans, and contortionists. This October, my friend invited me to go on closing weekend with our local children’s librarian and the librarian’s friend. This day refreshed my view of fiction. I am currently working on my senior project, which revolves around a similar fantasy environment to the Renaissance Faire. My friend wore a brown and white milkmaid dress, the librarian wore a Robin Hood costume, and the librarian’s friend wore a moss-skirted fairy costume. I had dressed up too, in a blue velvet dress and a DIY French hood. 

When we arrived, the Queen (inspired by Elizabeth I) and her posse walked by, smiling and waving at us. The Queen’s hoop skirt made it look like she was floating. My friend told me that when she wore her own Robin Hood costume a couple years ago, the Queen saw her and said, “Keep an eye on him”! Similarly, after my friend and I watched a maypole “peasant pageant”, the winner walked up to us and said, “I won, didn’t I?” These spontaneous interactions made it seem like we were interacting with characters instead of regular people.

Another immersive element was the park itself. There were designated areas for each activity, similar to a map in a fantasy novel. The knights jousted on the Roselawn Tournament Field, the fairies hid in the Enchanted Forest, and the peasants danced at the aforementioned maypole. There was also Lady Abigail’s Dungeon Museum, which had an array of medieval torture devices, including the iron maiden, the rat torture, and the tongue tearer. This museum was atmospherically different from the rest of the faire; I was removed from danger, so this lessened the immersion compared to places like the Enchanted Forest, where there was no danger to speak of. 

With these different places, the conventions of the modern world were gone. The thoughtfulness of this fair could be translated into the process of writing a book. The fair was like a finished draft with its new iconography: small ponds to boat across, vendors selling weaponry and handmade clothing, and performances to watch. This taught me to have every element in place when writing a new world, including the worldbuilding intricacies, the societal codes, the available entertainment, and the story’s extent of danger.

The last place I went to was the Sunset Ball in an outdoor space called the “Chess Board”. As we danced, the Queen and her noble family sang about the final weekend of the Renaissance Faire. The rest of the actors sang too, including the fairies, who spoke in sign language. This small detail helped me reimagine how people distinguish themselves in a fantasy-historical setting. When I left the park at closing time, the actors were lined up at the side of the path with banners saying things like “Ahhh!” and “Hark!” This reminded me of Lady Abigail’s Dungeon Museum in that I was removed from any urgency that the banners conveyed. The actors being stationed at the exit was like the end of a novel; even after the reader leaves, the characters still exist.

By Remi Bryan

A stereotypical depiction of a writer or avid reader usually consists of someone introverted, a loner, a wallflower, who finds comfort and escape in writing and/or reading. While that is true for a lot of writers and readers, it was not that way for me. When I was a child, I hated reading. It frustrated me, it made my head hurt, I would have much rather been playing with my friends or watching TV with my brother—until my grandfather and I started an unofficial tradition of reading together in the morning.

We were both the only morning people in the family; he woke up at 4 A.M., I woke up at 5 A.M. So instead of having to deal with a tiny six-year-old blindly following him around, my grandfather invented a routine. He would hold me up so I could fill the birdfeeders, we would make sugar water for the hummingbirds, pick up the mail, and finally grab the newspaper. Then we’d cuddle up on the couch closest to the windows and read the Sunday comics under the morning sun.

He taught me about grammar, structure, pronunciation, and phonics through Peanuts and Zits. Quickly, reading became less of a chore and more of a way for me to feel close to my grandfather. Once I got older and began writing he always wanted to read my pieces, even if it was just an essay about how I read Lord of The Flies. My grandfather would show the pieces to my aunts and uncles, and writing became yet another way for me to connect to the older generation of family members, my own little community.

We never stopped reading the newspaper together. He would send me clippings of articles he thought I would like, I would send him letters back about my thoughts on them. I still have the clippings saved in a yellow envelope in my room. My grandfather was the first writing/reading friend I had in life. The final gift I gave my grandfather before he passed was a poem thanking him for how he influenced me and my love for writing.

He gave me the tools to create my own community in the world, one of likeminded people who love reading and writing just as much as I do. When I was in high school, I made my own writing community through fanfiction, writing/sharing melodramatic poems, and figuring out how to edit essays. Nevertheless, being from a small southern town, I still felt isolated.

However, once I arrived at college, I realized I didn’t have to carve out my own community. A community already existed amongst the writers: the community behind the literary magazine Italics Mine. I saw creatives of varying mediums melding to create one beautiful amalgamation of pure art. It was when I picked up my first copy that I realized writing and reading have never been solitary activities. The stereotypical writer polishing their manuscript alone in their room was never the full story, there’s a community, an ecosystem.

Literary magazines are an amazing example of the ecosystem behind a writing community. Writers need editors, editors need readers, readers need writers, so on and so forth. Within that cycle comradery, empathy, and creativity blossom. Even if it seems so small, making an effort to relate with others about reading and writing can be so important. I would never have joined Italics Mine if I didn’t love editing. I would never have found my love for editing if I wasn’t a writer. I would never have found my love for writing if I didn’t love reading. Finally, I would never love reading if I didn’t have my grandfather teach me how to enjoy reading under the early morning sun, showing me reading does not have to be a chore and most importantly does not have to be done alone.