How I Co-Authored an Official Dungeons & Dragons Book
Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, the newest Dungeons & Dragons hardcover adventure, was just released. I am incredibly fortunate to be one of the co-authors of this book and it was a wonderful experience. I get a lot of questions about it and thought it would be helpful for aspiring D&D writers to get some insight into my personal process. I will note that every writer’s process is different, and this is just what I did and what works for me, but hopefully it will give you some inspiration for your own creative endeavors. If you don’t have your own creative process yet, emulating someone else’s is a great place to start, and then you can adapt it and make it your own!
One of the main questions I am asked is… how did I get this opportunity? That’s tricky to answer because people are invited to work on these books in many different ways. I have been active in the D&D community since 2017, and have written dozens of adventures that I’ve published on Dungeon Masters Guild. Additionally, large-scale community projects such as the Uncaged Anthology and the RPG Writer Workshop have also allowed me to expand my community. I believe my involvement in Frostmaiden is likely due to a combination of factors. The lead designer on this book, Chris Perkins, had started a Twitter thread asking people about their favorite community D&D writers to add to his roster, so folks mentioning my name helped immensely (and I am eternally grateful to everyone who has supported me and my work for the past few years!).
Ultimately, getting opportunities in this industry is largely about taking the initiative to start your own projects. Writing and producing your own projects — and actually completing and releasing those projects for people to enjoy! — will help you build an audience and will help you develop your unique “voice” as a creator. I certainly don’t intend to use this post to upsell you on the RPG Writer Workshop, but that is a good place to start if you are brand new to adventure design or anything pertaining to tabletop RPG creation. :)
Now, let’s talk about creative process! Typically, my writing process looks like this:
Ideating and brainstorming
Immersing myself in atmosphere
Research
Drafting
Revisiting my inspiration/atmosphere
Completing drafts
Reviewing drafts
Submitting and waiting for editor feedback
Making revisions (sometimes the revision stage has several back-and-forths)
Turning in final drafts
Drinking a glass or two of well-deserved wine
For me, the first three steps are vital to my process. If I jump straight into drafting, I most certainly flounder soon after starting. I want to focus on those three steps in this post.
Ideating and Brainstorming
When writers signed on to this project, we were given a document that outlined the major narrative arc of this adventure book, along with information about the setting and overall themes. We were then assigned specific chapters and sections, with some summarizing information, so we didn’t just come up with everything from scratch. Our job as narrative designers was taking those (often bare-bone) notes and fleshing them out into interesting encounters and story elements. So, my brainstorming for this project was less about big picture ideas and more about how I could offer clever, engaging, and memorable encounters while also honing in on this book’s themes of isolation, survival, and horror.
Whenever I start an adventure project, I make a list of the types of encounters and narrative beats I personally enjoy just to get the brain juices flowing. (Ew.) An example of this: I love meeting large, intimidating monsters/creatures in a D&D adventure and interacting with them in ways other than combat, perhaps through negotiation, bribery, befriending them, etc. I personally find these encounters fun and memorable, even when they turn bad and combat happens anyway (which it is likely to do in Icewind Dale, when many creatures are hungry and short-tempered). This gives me something to fall back on if I feel stuck or uninspired. I usually take this time to also read through other adventure books; in this case, I read through Curse of Strahd, Storm King’s Thunder, and Tomb of Annihilation — books with some similar themes or adventure pacing as Frostmaiden — and took notes on the chapters I found most interesting, and why. (I can’t stress enough how much reading makes us better writers.) With my simple “potential narrative beats and encounters” list, I moved on to Step 2, which is my personal favorite part in my creative process.
Immersing Myself In Atmosphere
This image inspired me throughout the project. Photo by Zoltan Tasi, Unsplash.com.
Folks familiar with my creative work and my writing courses know that I am incredibly passionate about mood and atmosphere. I want to be completely immersed in my favorite stories and settings, and I hope my readers and players feel that way, too. Although the written word is my chosen creative medium, I employ all of the senses in both my work and my writing process. This means that I immerse myself in a setting or project by listening to thematically appropriate music, making moodboards, and even changing the lighting and scents (candles ftw) of my writing environment to really delve into the story. I do this early on to get into the right headspace for a project, and revisit this homemade atmosphere later on in the project when I’m far into a draft, just to keep my inspiration and excitement for the project alive.
Atmosphere is a huge theme in Frostmaiden, and Icewind Dale is an expansive, arctic setting. I made playlists of Scandinavian folk music and dark instrumental tracks (one of which is my Borealis playlist, which has songs with lyrics that reminded me of the story). I also made several moodboards, which are one of my go-to writing strategies. Moodboards are essentially just compilations of images that evoke a certain feel or “mood,” and they help to keep me inspired and excited about what I’m writing. For this project, many of my moodboards featured cold biomes and a distinct color palette that mirrored the Aurora Borealis as well as the book’s narrative threads: deep blue for the dark, horror themes; green for the nature themes; and bits of white for the moments of brevity throughout.
Research
Reading inspirational source material helped me get into the right mindset.
Icewind Dale is an established and beloved setting in the Forgotten Realms, and it was important to all of us who worked on this project to encapsulate what people love about this locale. Writing a D&D project requires a mix of reverence for the existing lore and confidence in building upon that lore with new details. Before writing, I read The Crystal Shard by R.A. Salvatore, which of course is the classic Icewind Dale novel featuring Drizzt Do’Urden. (I had never read this book before and enjoyed it!) I also read At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft, which Chris Perkins had included in our initial notes on the project as one of the sources of inspiration. Although Lovecraft is a problematic author, I did appreciate the horror tone of this book and it helped me get into the mindframe of a horror author to infuse my contributions with that tone.
Additionally, I purchased numerous Icewind Dale supplements from past editions on DMsGuild.com. I worried far less about any sort of continuity, since I knew the lore experts and editors would be looking out for those already, and more about keeping the tone of Icewind Dale consistent and deriving inspiration and ideas from past publications.
Signing copies at The Glass Die, my FLGS.
After these steps, it was a matter of drafting. Typically, I don’t like to write more than 500 words a day, so I try to schedule out my projects so that I don’t have to write more than that per day to meet a deadline. I work full-time outside of writing D&D content and after a long workday, I’m already tired and of course want to do my best on any contract project I accept, and this for me is my “mental limit.” For the most part, I stuck to a pretty good schedule for this project, although nearing deadline I had to have some late-night writing sessions to get caught up!
As with every writing project, there were times when I felt stuck. I was lucky to work on this book alongside an amazing creative team and when I felt stuck, I asked them for input on my ideas and this always helped me overcome the hurdle. (Thank you, Valkyries!) Usually, though, putting effort into prep before ever writing words on a page helps me prevent these obstacles.
I’m very proud of my contributions to this book and am honored to have been a part of such a terrific team. I hope you will enjoy this book and make many lasting memories with your friends!
If you have more questions about this process that I didn’t already cover, post below!