I've mentioned before that I did NaNoWriMo to get started on a novel-length project, back in November, and I've probably alluded to the fact that I've continued working on this project. NaNo's website is pretty handy to carry over even past the usual month that they do, because you can create a new project and track your progress against it. The best part is, you can set whatever word-count goal you want, so instead of aiming for 50k words each month since then, I've gone for more realistic goals, which I've hit every month (except December, when I set myself the goal of doing 25k words; probably not the smartest thing when you have a week of not working between Christmas and New Year's).
That said, I haven't talked much about where the idea came from. As the title suggests, it came from a weekly-ish game of Dungeons & Dragons that I've been playing with my friends since January 2021. I started playing my character, and as I fleshed in his backstory, it occurred to me that he might make for an interesting novel protagonist. So as I went on playing the game, I also thought about where he came from, why he's an adventurer, what his motivation is, and as those came to me, so did ideas for a story.
Another inspiration was the Classical Chinese account that inspired the novel (and TV series) Journey to the West, which gave rise to the character Monkey. To be clear, I've read neither Journey to the West, nor the Tang Dynasty era Buddhist monk Xuanzang's historical account, Great Tang Records on the Western Regions. But I came across a mention of the factual account in a history of China I was reading in 2020, and was taken by the idea of a scholar traveling across a fantasy world. That thought probably gave rise to the character I rolled for my D&D game.
Now, since I started writing back in my teens, I've seen the repeated advice not to try to turn your D&D campaigns into a novel, so I want to make it clear that I haven't. Rather, I've taken the way I play the character, and the way I see him, and turned him loose into a story centered around him. None of my friends' characters appear, nor do the settings we play in. I've shared some of the backstory I created for my character, including his family dynamics, with my DM, and she's incorporated a couple of these points, but the two are linked only by the same character appearing in both.
At the same time, it's important to mention that role-playing game settings can form the basis of actual stories: Steven Erikson and Ian Esslemont based their Malazan books in an RPG setting they'd created (and it kinda shows in the first book), while Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck based the Expanse series around an RPG setting that Franck ran, or at last devised. I'm sure there are others, even before we get to the decades' worth of Forgotten Realms and DragonLance novels that TSR commissioned in the 1980s as tie-ins to their D&D settings.
I suppose the difference is, creating a setting and exploring the stories that arise from that setting is valid, as opposed to trying to novelize an account of each fight and each perception check your characters run. It's probably why there have been so many bad movie adaptations of video games over the years. At any rate, I find that D&D stories are rarely fun to retell to someone who wasn't in that session, which makes it even harder to turn them in narratives.
As I mentioned, I'm not translating my D&D campaign into a story, so that's not a problem here. What I do find interesting is how it took certain elements I'd been thinking about for a while, remixed them and generated a story that I've now been able to draw out into over 70k words, and which I've been working on for a little over five months. I've found that story ideas frequently come to me like that: I'll pick up some interesting fragment from somewhere, and it'll sit in the back of my mind for a long time until it can latch onto another interesting fragment, until enough of them have fused together to become an idea worth exploring.
It also makes sense that D&D, or RPGs in general, should be the starting point for ideas. I've long played video game RPGs, starting with Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy on the NES, but even the most advanced ones that I've played recently are still fairly rigid. A table-top RPG, on the other hand, forces you to come up with a lot of backstory to explain why your character does the things they do. This backstory then influences the choices your character makes in the course of the campaign, giving you a good sense of their personality. I've always had trouble with characterization, but I think this campaign has helped me with that, at least to an extent.
Anyway, this is how it's panned out for me. There are many ways to get inspiration for stories, but D&D has revealed itself to be a good one. Just as long as you remember not to retell your weekly campaign.
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