A Grand Adventure: Taking your Tabletop RPG Story to the Written Page

In this workshop, we will help you build a toolbox to get started with writing fiction. Drawing on the presenters’ decades of experience in story-based gaming, you will come away with prompts and processes drawn from tabletop role-playing games to help you escape the tyranny of the blank page, avoid perfectionism, and get past roadblocks that prevent you from writing.

John Owen has been telling collaborative stories through the medium of tabletop role-playing games for more than thirty years, currently specializing in pastoral horror themes and running games for young people. A former record-industry hack and academic historian, he has also been a music writer, frustrated musician, and amateur yeast rancher. People nearby often catch him monologuing about flavor chemistry, role-playing games, music theory, and speculative fiction. You can hear him telling stories as a cast member in the Dungeons and Dragons live-play anthology series “The Ravenfolly Institute Presents” at https://www.ravenfollyinstitute.com/.

Matthew Phillion is the Salem-based author of the Indestructibles series of YA superhero novels, the spinoff series Echo and the Sea, and the fantasy NA series the Dungeon Crawlers. Book 1 in the Indestructibles series was released in 2023 as a full-cast audiobook produced by Spoken Realms (including himself as Doc Silence). A former journalist, actor, and filmmaker, Matt also writes about cybersecurity and healthcare. He is creative director of the Ravenfolly Institute Presents podcast and can generally be found bouncing plot ideas off his dog Watson.