Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games - Jennifer Grouling Cover [81]
There definitely seems to be some important differences between writing for a fantasy role-playing campaign and writing a fantasy novel. A few years after the Sorpraedor campaign, Mark decided to shift his career from a job in the technology industry to become a fantasy author. I talked with him about this shift and about the differences between running a character like Cuthalion in a D&D campaign and writing his own novel. As a long-time D&D player, Mark said that when he first started building a world for his fantasy novel, he thought back to his gaming days. He started from the rule books and materials he had used to play D&D, which he said was a great way to get started in building his own fantasy world. However, he found that certain things about the gaming structure were limiting when writing a novel. The main difference Mark brought up was that in a TRPG it is important for characters to gain levels and experience; for the genre to function as a game, that progression is necessary. While a character in a novel may grow and change, they don’t necessarily get new skills and abilities by facing the challenges in the story. For example, Mark mentioned that while he wanted magic in his fantasy world, he saw it as something more innate to his characters rather than something learned through experience. He gave the example of a goblin that could turn invisible. Unlike in D&D where that character would then win a battle, get experience, and go up a level, Mark liked the idea that he would always have just that one magical trait rather than gaining new ones. To deny a player in a TRPG the ability to add more spells as they went up in level, though, would take away one of the fundamental game mechanics that keeps players interested.
Just as Mark used the initial D&D rules as a springboard for creating his own fantasy world, he used events that he experienced as a player as inspiration for events in his own writing. Mark recalled a particular incident in the Sorpraedor campaign that stuck out in his mind. The party had been walking through a swamp, when they came upon a hag. For some reason the hag focused her attention immediately on Cuthalion, hitting him with both hands and grabbing a hold of him. Although I did not initially recall this moment from our campaign, it stuck out in Mark’s mind because Cuthalion almost died in the attack, and he realized that his character was not very capable when it came to hand-to-hand fighting. Mark explained that in the fantasy series he is writing, he has a female villain who has some special powers, and that when he was thinking about how this character might behave, he recalled the scene with the hag from the Sorpraedor campaign. He determined that he will write a scene where she turns into a hag and attacks the bowman because he really liked the vivid image that the incident from Sorpraedor left in his mind.
There is a key difference between the writers who write up the story of a particular gaming session (like my Blaze Arrow story in the appendix) and Mark writing his own fantasy novel. Just as Mark’s use of Tolkien as an inspiration for Cuthalion’s character in the Sorpraedor world goes beyond typical fan fiction, his use of the Sorpraedor campaign in his later fantasy writing is inspiration, not adaptation. As I will explain in more detail in chapter 8, fan fiction writers work more clearly from an existing text and rather than using a text purely as inspiration, they work to inhabit the worlds and write about the characters in the original text. Although Salvatore’s books may continue to exist within the D&D universe, Mark’s fantasy novel does not.
Furthermore, when looking at the influence of gaming on literature, levels of authorship are complicated. If a novel is based off of a role-playing game, such as is the case with Temple, should we consider the game designers’ primary authors and the novel writers