Game Master to Story Teller

Since I've known her, my soon to be wife has participated in this annual event cryptically titled NaNoWriMo, which stands for National Novel Writes Month. This event is a self competition for amateur authors to write a complete 50,000 word story in 30 days, beginning November 1st and ending on the 30th. Those 50K words translate into a trade paperback of more than 200 pages. While she has completed a variety of stories for this competition, I have yet to compete. Until this year.

I have always enjoyed storytelling. It's one of the main reasons I like to run RPGs. Being a Game Master for an RPG gives me an excellent avenue to practice storytelling without actually putting words down on paper. You have a direct audience and get near immediate feedback. But telling a story this way leaves out some of the detail that could easily be conveyed on paper. Because of this, I've finally decided to partake in the NaNoWriMo challenge.

During the month of November I will be posting progress and snippets of the story here on my blog. But leading up to that, I have decided to post some awesome tips that I will be learning to help improve your story telling as a GM. There are a ton of resources out in the world now that can help you improve your games through encounters and system mechanics. Where these articles will come in will be to help flesh out the bits between the dice rolling. A game without an engaging story is just test who's results mean nothing. With a little luck, hopefully these will help make your games more appealing and engaging to your players.