How to turn your D&D campaign into a novel

By Brenn and Lindsay, the two writers who built Inkling

Your table spent two years building something: the betrayal at the bridge, the priest who lost her faith, the villain everyone loved to hate. Here is how we would turn that into a book, step by step, without losing what made it good or losing your friends.

We both play, and we both write, and the moment comes at nearly every table eventually. Somebody says “this should be a book,” everybody laughs, and one person goes home and actually opens a blank page. This post is for that person: a workflow from a pile of session notes, to a storyboard of the arc, to a first chapter you can show the table.

First, the honest part. A campaign is not shaped like a novel. It has twelve false starts, three subplots nobody finished, and a dragon that died to a lucky roll. Jim C. Hines wrote a very funny list of the ways a campaign turns into a really bad novel, and most of his warnings come from the same mistake: transcribing the game instead of using it. Treat your campaign as raw material, as Ruckerworks argues, and the book gets much easier to write.

Can you really turn a D&D campaign into a novel?

Yes. People do it, and some of them get published. An EN World thread on exactly this question is full of writers who have. What the successful ones share: they kept the heart of the campaign (the characters, the central conflict, a handful of great moments) and rebuilt everything else so it works for a reader who was never at the table.

Step 1: Gather every session into one place

Before you write a word of fiction, get the raw material into one pile. Session notes, the DM’s recaps, your character journal, screenshots from the group chat, the map. Give each session its own entry, in order, even if some entries are three lines long. Then read the whole thing in one sitting and mark three things:

• Moments people still talk about. The ones that come up at the table months later. These are your set pieces.
• Turns. Any session where something changed for good: an alliance broke, a secret came out, a character made a choice they could not take back.
• Threads that went nowhere. They are the easiest cuts you will ever make.

If you kept your session log in Inkling, each story hands you a short “Previously...” recap of where you left off, built only from your own words, which makes a forty-session reread a lot less of a slog. (Our post on a session recap you can read aloud in 90 seconds covers keeping that log.)

Step 2: Find the story inside the campaign

A campaign has a party. A novel needs a spine. Ask one question: whose story is this? Usually the answer is the character who changed the most.

Here is an example we made up. For a year, a party hunted the Lantern Queen, a smuggler who ran the river past the town of Hollin’s Ford with stolen light. Four PCs: a knight, a priest, a sellsword, and Wren, a river thief. The one who changed was Wren, who started the campaign working for the Lantern Queen and ended it by betraying her. That is the book.

Write the spine as one sentence: who wants what, what stands in the way, and what it costs. For Wren: a thief who owes her life to a smuggler queen has to decide whether to save the town that never wanted her. If a session does not touch that sentence, it probably does not go in the book.

Step 3: Storyboard the arc before you draft

This is where a storyboard earns its keep. Make a scene card for every moment you marked in Step 1. Make a character card for everyone who matters, and a place card for every location the story actually visits. Lay the scene cards out in rough order, then draw threads between the cards that belong together: the scene where Wren first lies to the party, the scene where the lie comes out, and the place where it happens.

Now look for holes. Campaign plots often made sense only at the table, because the players filled the gaps out loud. On a board you can see a thread that starts and never lands, or a turn that comes from nowhere. Fill those holes with new scenes. A shape that works for a lot of campaign novels:

1. Opening: the protagonist in their ordinary life, already wanting something.
2. The hook: the job, the stranger, the letter. Your first few sessions, compressed.
3. First turn: they commit, and cannot go back.
4. Middle: rising cost, allies tested, one big reversal (your best set piece often lives here).
5. Low point: the plan fails, the lie is exposed, someone walks away.
6. Climax: the confrontation with the BBEG, decided by a choice, not a roll.
7. After: what changed, and what it cost.

Step 4: Cut the party down to a point-of-view cast

Five players means five spotlights. A novel usually wants one or two point-of-view characters and a few people around them. Jenn Lyons, writing on the World Anvil blog, recommends simplifying the cast for exactly this reason. Your options:

• One point of view, the rest as companions. The other PCs stay in the story, seen from the outside. Simplest and usually strongest.
• Two points of view that pull against each other. Good when the campaign had a real rivalry inside the party.
• Merge characters. Two PCs who played the same role (two scouts, two bruisers) can become one person.
• Cut with love. The friend who joined for three sessions and moved away does not need a chapter.

Then give your point-of-view characters real interiors. On a character card we fill in the wound, the deepest fear, the lie they believe, what they want and what they actually need. Wren wants to be free of the Lantern Queen. She needs to stop believing she is only worth what she can steal. That gap is the arc, and it is something the dice never gave you. (Our post on character arcs for D&D characters goes deeper.)

What doesn’t translate from the table to the page?

• Dice luck. A natural 20 at the right moment was thrilling because everyone watched it happen. On the page, a lucky break reads as the author cheating. Replace luck with choice: the character wins because of who they are or what they give up.
• Recaps and repetition. Games repeat information because weeks pass between sessions. Your reader just finished the last chapter. Cut the “as you recall” scenes.
• Party size and banter. Six people trading jokes is a great night and a slow chapter. Keep the best line and give it to one person.
• Mechanics. Levels, hit points, rests, spell slots. Nobody in your world knows they exist. Magic still needs rules, though: the reader should feel them, and they should never change to suit the plot.
• Side quests. The cave in session nine was fun. If it does not touch the spine, it is a short story, not a chapter.
• In-jokes. The running bit about the cheese wheel will not land for a stranger. Save one for the dedication.

Step 5: Write chapter one, not session one

Chapter one is almost never the first session. The first session was introductions and a tavern. Start where the spine starts: Wren, on the river at night, doing a job for the Lantern Queen that goes wrong. The rest of the party can arrive in chapter two or three.

Write it fast, in the protagonist’s voice, and set yourself a small daily goal. Keep each chapter as its own story and bind them into one project, so they stay in order while you move things around. If November is close, our November novel challenge has a 30-day plan for getting a first draft down.

Do you need permission from your table?

Yes. Your players built their characters: the name, the look, the history, the voice. A lot of tables feel strongly about this, and rightly. Lyons recommends written permission to use another player’s character, or filing off the identifying details until the character is truly your own. Our checklist:

1. Tell the table what you are writing before you write much of it.
2. Ask each player whose character appears one to one, not in the group chat where saying no is awkward.
3. Offer them a read of the chapters their character is in.
4. Get the yes in writing (a message is fine) if you might ever sell the book.
5. Ask your DM too. The world, the NPCs and the villain are their work.
6. If anyone says no, change the character until they are someone new: new name, new history, new voice.

Can you sell a novel based on your D&D campaign?

This is not legal advice, and if you plan to sell, talk to a lawyer who works in publishing. But the broad lines are well known in the community:

• Homebrew and rename. A story set in a published setting belongs, in part, to whoever owns that setting. As writers in an EN World thread on licensing point out, selling a novel set in a published world needs a license. If your campaign ran in one, move the story into a world of your own, with your own names.
• No Wizards IP in anything you sell. Monsters, gods, places and named characters that belong to the game are not yours to sell. Swap them for your own creations. Your monster will be better for it.
• Mechanics out. No classes, spell names or levels on the page.
• Free fan fiction is a different case. Wizards publishes a Fan Content Policy for free, non-commercial fan work. Read it before you post: it has conditions, and it does not cover selling.

Where the map comes in

Most fantasy readers flip to the map before chapter one. If you drew a world for the campaign, redraw it for the book with your renamed places. In Inkling’s map maker, “Places in your story” reads the places you have named in your draft and can lay them out on the map, so the book and the map agree about where the river bends. Our guide on how to make a fantasy map covers the rest.

How Inkling fits

Inkling is a writing app made by two writers who play. For this job it gives you one place for the whole trip: your session log as stories with “Previously...” recaps (built from your own words, never ours, and you can switch them off entirely), a Storyboard with scene, character and place cards and threads between them, character cards for your point-of-view cast, the map maker, chapters bound into a project, and “Print your story,” which turns the draft into a booklet PDF. Handing the table a printed first draft of their campaign is a very good night.

What Inkling is not: it is not a VTT. There are no dice, no stat blocks and no battle maps. Keep running your game in your VTT of choice or on paper sheets, and use Inkling for the writing that comes out of it. If you are a player rather than the DM, our 30 prompts for a campaign journal are a good way to build the raw material while the campaign is still running.

Inkling is an independent writing app. Dungeons & Dragons and D&D are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast LLC. Inkling is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Wizards of the Coast.