Gearing up for Collaboration
Project Managing for TTRPGs
TL;DR: This post is about the skills and experience you should have done before organizing a group project. Basically, sign up for the Storytelling Collective’s next “Write Your First Encounter” course and get your online presence sorted out.
This is part of a series on Project Managing for TTRPGs. Stay up to date by subscribing:
Step 1: Make One Thing
Being new to this (self-publishing), I find myself getting overwhelmed by all the things I could or should be doing.
With that in mind, if you want to lead a TTRPG collaboration, I don’t think you need a huge portfolio of self-published work. I certainly didn’t.
What I had done was go through the full process of writing a TTRPG product (writing, layout, and publishing) once. Thus when I pitched others on collaborating with me, I had a writing sample and I knew the general steps of TTRPG writing (and how long they take). This was critical for both convincing folks to work with me and running a realistic project. So the first step is to Make One Thing (and publish it!).
Option 1: Write Your First Encounter Course
An extremely easy way to “make at least one thing” is to take the next Write Your First Encounter (WYFE) course run by The Storytelling Collective (www.storytellingcollective.com). The Storytelling Collective runs paid, online courses on D&D and TTRPG writing. The WYFE course, as of this publishing, is $19 and runs every few months (here’s an example from October 2022).
If you have decision paralysis about how to start, just take this course the next time it runs. You get three benefits from the course format:
Simplicity: The director, Ashley Warren, was a co-author of Rime of the Frostmaiden, among a plethora of other accolades. Ashley is well-connected, so the WYFE tutorials are written by prominent professionals in the TTRPG community. You could cobble together Twitter threads and blog posts to get this information, but WYFE lays it all out for you with writing assignments to move you along.
Community: There’s a student Discord server for connecting with your cohort and the wider Storytelling Collective community. The nice thing about your WYFE cohort is that everyone has a real interest in game writing and they’re working on the same project. In the short term, you can use the Discord to find editing and feedback buddies. In the longer term, the connections you make in the WYFE community are potential future collaborators.
Accountability: WYFE runs in one-month cohorts. Students who finish by the end of the month are included in an encounter bundle (here’s the encounter bundle from my cohort). This provides an external incentive to finish in a month.
As a final note: The one skill you don’t get from WYFE is learning how to upload and set up a product on DMsGuild yourself (since they do it for you). You can check out this video for a quick walkthrough though.
Option 2: Doing it yourself
If online courses are not your thing (or if you’d rather not pay the $19), here’s the list of skills I learned before leading a collaborative D&D project:
D&D Writing (or your system of choice): Writing an adventure, or anything that a Dungeon Master uses to run a game, is its own art form. It’s closer to an instruction manual than a short story. There are D&D-specific norms for structure and style; everything from having a “Background” section to how to phrase DCs for saving throws. For the general flow of an adventure, I’ll suggest the blog series, Let’s Design an Adventure by Shawn Merwin, which in turn was recently suggested to me.
Layout: Figuring out how to handle project layout is something you can test run with a small personal project. I used Affinity Publisher for Jukebox and that’s what gave me the confidence to say I could do the layout for Encounters. Affinity has a 30-day free trial and goes on sale a few times a year. I combined it with these incredibly useful D&D templates by Nathanaël Roux. Doing layout in Microsoft Word (with these templates) is another option. If you’re looking for a completely free option, Homebrewery is a markdown-based editor good for short D&D-styled documents.
Publishing platform: There are a few different places to publish TTRPG work - DMsGuild, DriveThruRPG, itch.io etc - each with its own pros and cons. Each also has a website and process you need to interact with. When I published Jukebox on DriveThruRPG, it took around four days for my publisher account to be verified and for things to go live – this was fine as a lone writer, but would have been embarrassing if I’d discovered this while leading a team of people. Know your platform!
Licensing Requirements: This relates to “know your platform,” but there are different licensing requirements depending on where you publish. You also need to make sure you have the rights to the artwork you use. Screwing up any of this could mean your work gets taken down.
Step 2: Setup a Minimal Online Presence
What are the absolute basics you want to show to potential collaborators, fans, or employers? My philosophy was to do the bare minimum, since I was in danger of overthinking it and never publishing anything. I suggest starting small:
Have a simple online portfolio: Don’t do what I did (some hacked-together combination of GitHub pages and Jekyll). I’ve seen a lot of folks use Carrd.co or Linktree, which have free tiers and require no technical background to set up. Figure out a very basic “professional TTRPG” portfolio:
A writing sample
Social media links (stick to platforms pertinent to what you’re doing professionally)
A way to contact you (I made a TTRPG gmail that forwards to my personal gmail)
Make it easy to find you: Put your name on your work, link back to your portfolio, and have a way to contact you.
Know your applicable skills: Since you’ve decided that you’re not a lone wolf, you’ll need to convince others to run in a pack with you. Even if you’ve only written a one-page encounter, you have other applicable skills to bring to the table. Write down these skills and how they transfer to TTRPGs. Be ready to talk about them. As an example, I have a bunch of professional experience writing technical documentation for mobile development. As for how this skill is applicable to TTRPGs, here’s Celeste Conowitch (Senior Game Designer at Kobold Press) explaining that “…writing for publishing is a lot more akin to writing for technical manuals…” (I found this clip after making this argument myself - it was very validating!). Also, your applicable skills don’t need to be skills you were paid for. Case in point: I am not a professional layout artist - that experience comes from working on my high school literary magazine.
Hustle 101 aka Survive the Death Carnival (Extra Credit)
I was recently recommended two Carlos Luna interviews about the TTRPG hustle. They’re funny and a good listen, so I figured I’d share. Carlos has a ton of TTRPG experience under his belt and doesn’t shy away from “real talk” about navigating the unspoken social norms of the professional TTRPG space:
Artwork is 360 Degrees (Adventuring Academy): One of the tidbits he drops during the Brennan interview is that “Artwork is 360 degrees,” meaning that art is not just the piece itself, it’s the context you find it in. Employers aren’t hiring a one-page writing sample, they’re hiring you and how you present your work.
Pass the Vibe Check (Three Black Halflings): Carlos shares frank advice about making yourself a “safe bet” for employers, especially if you’re POC-presenting. It touches on norms that are often left unspoken about who gets hired and why.
That’s it for today. Happy New Year to all! For those following along, next up, I’ll share how I picked my collaborative project.
Over and Out,
- 🫙 👁️ 👁️