Breathing New Life Into Your RPG Campaign: Adapting Fantasy Novels for TTRPG Adventures

Learn how to transform popular fantasy stories into immersive tabletop role-playing quests.

Game masters: keeping it fresh? Your players have reached powerful levels, and they have woven every spell available and faced all manners of beasts and Demons. “One-shot” quests set in a new world can provide that instant refresh. But how to write that, especially without spending weeks creating a new world? One answer is you don’t—you let someone else provide the setting.

Welcome to leveraging creative fantasy books and their worlds. There are a number of existing book adaptations for the TTRPG world to choose from, or the Game Master can do the work to adapt a book from ground zero. Some can be leveraged quite easily, especially if written in a quest style. So what should a Game Master look for in a book when building a script for a TTRPG?

Epic Fantasies are a good choice, as these tend to have detail-rich fantasy settings of varied landscapes, fortresses, castles and cities, and complex narratives. In this particular genre, books written in a quest style, with clear objectives and a multi-faceted team are the easiest to adapt. One-shot campaigns are a great way to explore new ideas and mechanics in a game. A fresh world can provide unique elements that force players to use existing skills in a new way. What-ifs and placing old characters in new settings is a breeding ground for innovation and new elements – imagine what it could do for a campaign! A well-used example is Lord of the Rings. It has Orcs, Wizards, Hobbits, Men, Elves, and a whole host of evil beings and magic objects, making it easy for a Game Master to sculpt a complex and challenging quest. All the Game Master needs to do is to find a way of entering the world. Will the players be lured in by a magical object, a plea for help, or stumble through a rift in the realms? What would a party do in a world where magic is forbidden? Or fantasy tropes flipped and paradigms broken—Druids with nefarious intentions and Trolls are allies??

Since Epic Fantasies number in the tens of thousands, what should a Game Master look for? First of all, is the fantasy world easy to adapt? A narrative that presents a collaborative, inherent team approach is best suited, as after all, that is exactly how a TTRP game is played. The narrative should also contain familiar elements, including magic, various fantasy Races, and a myriad of world specific characters, rules, and settings. The richer the fantasy world, the easier it is for a Game Master to sculpt his quests.

Next, consider the characters. Personable, unique, and charismatic characters integrate well with the players’ characters. Does the book have characters that easily overlap with existing games? Examples of good characters are protagonists that are flawed, have capabilities they cannot fully control, but endure the hardships and trials—such as Thomas Covenant. Good villains on the other hand, are always two steps ahead, they are cunning and devious, but they always have a purpose that is easy to relate to and identify with. A good selection of characters will always keep players guessing and engaged—as long as they can realize wins along the way to stave off discouragement. This builds good team dynamics and problem-solving.

The storyline is another important consideration. A quest narrative should have a strong storyline with multiple arcs. Multiple arcs allow for side quests and adventures, as well as providing players with a regular feeling of progress as they build toward a grander conclusion. Lord of the Rings is once again a good example: Aragon’s internal struggle, the fate of the Elves, the story of the Hobbits, Boromir and Faramir … and many more! The arcs should provide a closure to the quest, but not to the world. Though the quest objectives must be met, the narrative must leave “threads” that a Game Master can use to unravel a story hiding within. Imagine that Hobbit descendants are faced with a volcanic eruption that hatches a dozen eggs of Smog, or what happens after Aragon dies? Every incomplete thread of a fantasy world is ready to unravel into a new challenge.

The rules of the new fantasy world must also allow the Game Master to selectively trim, enhance, or change players’ abilities and challenges. This can even overlap with carefully designed meta-gaming possibilities, where a player that has delved into the book can add to the story by knowing some of the rules, characters, and context of the quest, without damaging the progression of the storyline. Though meta-gaming can have a bad connotation, it does not always have to be that way. Imagine a short campaign where your players land in a dinosaur populated realm—there is no shortage of books on this theme—knowing dinosaurs and their behaviours would be a great plus! Meta-gaming should help the players accomplish their mission, and it should allow a collaborative approach to creating more complex challenges and puzzles to solve.

This is especially true if the narrative is rich with lore. Lore can easily be adapted into new quests or side arcs for the Game Master to play. This is especially powerful if grounded in a cultural context that reflects the characters, races, and landscape.

Once a suitable book is chosen, the first step is to integrate the characters. The players can bring their current character into the game as is, or they can choose to inhabit the body of a character in the book. Skills and powers can be blended to create a fresh approach. The cast can then be complemented with collaborative characters from the book, controlled by the Game Master to increase the level of difficulty for the players, and up the number of twists and challenges that the Game Master can create. Which are the most suited to tackle tough, but surmountable challenges? For example, how could Gimli complement a team with a female Dwarf?

If the players love the Game Master’s one-shot book adaptation, it can be expanded into a new campaign, or corralled into the Game Masters original campaign … but that will have to wait for another post!”

The possibilities are endless, and thousands of epic fantasies already exist in the literary world. All you need to do is to pick one that suits your style and roll the dice!

Written by Ryan and Michal Snaerravn