RPG Writer Workshop’s Write Your First Encounter Course Review

(Yes, I seem to have put off until late 2024 writing about something I did in early 2023. In my defense, I did create a blank post last year with the intention of filling in the rest of it “sometime later this week”!)

A couple of years ago I started seeing people talking about an online course from a group called The Storytelling Collective called “Write Your First Adventure”. The idea was to walk aspiring adventure creators through the process of designing an adventure and preparing it for publication. This interested me and the reviews of the course were mostly positive, so I headed over to their site, found the RPG Writer Workshop page, and registered for the course noticed the course I wanted wasn’t currently available.

So I waited. Then waited some more. Then a while longer. Eventually I went to their Discord to ask if the course was coming back, and was told that there was some redesign going on and that something should be available soon(tm).

So I waited. Then waited some more. Then waited- hey, what’s this? “Write Your First Encounter”? Well, it’s not the exact thing I was looking for, but I’ll take it! So I paid my $25 to get access to a dedicated section of their Discord server and to a dedicated page where I could work my way through the course and track my progress.

The course itself is dedicated to the creation of a single one-page encounter that can easily be dropped into a single game session, as opposed to a full-blown adventure. As I would discover while creating my encounter, there’s real value in this exercise even if your ultimate goal is to write longer material; the single-page limitation really forces you to think about what is truly necessary to include and what can be eliminated.

The course starts with an intro section that provides some general descriptions of the process along with a few downloadable templates for various publishing tools and links to tools and publishing resources. After that are four units that are meant to be completed about a week at a time.

Week 1 is centered around defining just what an encounter is, what elements it needs, and the types of … encounters that one might… er… encounter. It includes activities based around brainstorming a number of three-line descriptions of projects (trying to go a whole sentence without the word “encounter”, here!) based on those components and types.

Week 2 starts with a brainstorming session – after reading some resources and watching a video or two about how the creative process works, some up with even more of those three-line descriptions. After this, it’s time to pick an idea – you’re encouraged to work on the one that most interests you, not the most marketable or the one you think will interest other people. While putting together a basic structural outline, you’re given advice here on using, mixing, or reinventing existing tropes. At the end of this, you’ll have your encounter basically written and will probably notice even before working on the final layout that it’s going to be much longer than will fit on a single page, and you’ll have to start trimming. If you’re like me. “trimming” here is defined as “adjusting the size of your draft using high explosives”.

Week 3 is playtesting week. With an acknowledgement that this isn’t always easy to arrange – especially where a one-week time frame is involved! – it provides some recommendations for getting feedback and learning from it. For most of the folks involved in the course at the time I enrolled, playtesting mostly involved posting your work on the course Discord server for the other participants to review and comment on.

Week 4 dives into the publishing side of things. Layout (where you’ll find yourself trying to figure out how to trim even more!) is the first step. Next is a basic guide to publishing on DMs Guild, followed by some marketing advice.

Overall I felt that the first three weeks were well structured and represented most of the value in this course. Was there anything here that can’t be found elsewhere without a paid course pointing it out for you? Probably not. But it’s organized into a step-by-step process here that walks through the creation process in a way that drives you from idea generation and into the writing process.

Week four, I have to admit, felt a little rushed and incomplete. I’m not sure I can fault the course’s creators for this, though. They’re trying to cover a number of potentially very complex processes which could easily be separate courses all on their own and condense them into bite-size steps, and as a result most of it just felt… vague. At best it presents some starting points.

Was it worth it? Yeah, I think so. Not financially based on my [checks my DriveThruRPG account] zero sales over the course of a year, but as an exercise in getting me to actually work through a publishing project to completion. My goal was a realistic “I’m definitely not going to make money on this, I just want to get something out there into the world”, and the course was a valuable experince.

For what it’s worth, my encounter is called A Captive Audience, and it’s out on DriveThru for 89 cents. I’ll write more about it in a separate post.

As a side note, the Adventure Writing courses did eventually return, and I signed up for one… and have still not started on it yet.