We had a teacher request (thanks, Tegan!) for story structure templates recently so we've put together a collection of preset prompts based on three-act, five-act, hero's journey and other useful story structure patterns.
Some templates cover the entire structure within a single game (so either write quickly or extend those timers!):
Other templates spread the structure over multiple games, with more detailed instructions on how to approach that phase of the story:
There are no lesson notes to support these prompts at the moment
We will write some teacher notes, but we figured you'd be familiar with act-based and hero's journey structures.
- Dan Harmon's story circle is a hero's journey variant.
- Vonnegut's story shapes describe the general patterns stories take in terms of the rise and fall of emotion and fortune.
- Platform-tilt-adapt is the Keith Johnstone/Theatresports/Impro-based approach we explore in Teaching Narrative Writing with Frankenstories.
We might add some more unusual structures
Ursula K. Le Guin made a critique of heroic monomyth-type structures as tending to be "take, take, take" conquest-based stories that only present a narrow slice of the world, so we're looking around for other structures and are open to suggestions if you have any.
We fixed an image upload bug & shortened the random player names
In other news:
- We fixed a bug that prevented images with all-caps file extensions (like .JPEG) from being uploaded.
- We had some feedback about random player names being cut off on small screen sizes, so we've added a rule that means random player names should always be short enough to be visible.
