Let’s play a game

There is a sort-of meme that surfaces from time to time that I’ve been thinking about for a little while. It’s structured as a comment, and then a reply to the comment by the same author.

It goes something like this:

I would like to run a Dungeons & Dragons campaign but just play it by myself and DM it myself.

I have been informed that is is called writing a book.

This strikes me as something I should try. World-building I can do. DMing a game I can do. DMing a module I wrote myself, including ad-libbing things along the way, I can and have most certainly done. Moreover, there are novels from both the Dragonlance and the Forgotten Realms collections that really did start life as an adventure module, so people have clearly done this before! One highly memorable character in the original Dragonlance trilogy occurred because a player rolled a critical hit on a spell, causing the NPC to become utterly devoted to the player character in question. Not what was intended, but it worked so well in the story.

It also strikes me as an approach that I have not seen any article about “how to write” actually talk about. Maybe there’s an opportunity to be had…

Now, of course, to create an adventure story in such a fashion.