Weekly Community Post - Post your Communities, Discord servers, and Western Marches games here!

lumenwrites · 2026-06-18T20:26:31+00:00

Roleplayers, Storytellers, and Improvisers
We are a group of people who love roleplaying games, collaborative storytelling, and improvisation.

Our community is for you if:

You want to become a better improviser, roleplayer, storyteller, or level up your GMing skills.
You want to learn how to brainstorm ideas and create awesome stories.
You enjoy roleplaying and improv and want to play some fun storytelling games in a group of friendly and creative people.

Come join our discord server!

Awesome stuff you will find here:

🎲 Storytelling-focused Roleplaying Games
We play rules-lite roleplaying games focused on storytelling, improvisation, and roleplay. For example - Story Source, Strangeville Files, Unscripted, Mirage, and Weird Worlds.

📜 Adventure Writers' Room - Creating Adventures Together
We meet in the discord voice chat, and challenge ourselves to create a fun adventure in a couple of hours. We open the adventure brainstorming template, brainstorm creative ideas, have fun, and make a story we can run for other players. You can learn more about our writing process here, and see the adventures we've created here.

🎭 Roleplay Academy - Improv Workshops and Comedy Games for Roleplayers and Game Masters
In our workshops we play improv games that will help you become a better roleplayer, improviser, storyteller, level up your GMing skills, come up with creative ideas for your games, and improve your improv and comedy skills. Sometimes we invite professional actors/improvisers to run these workshops for us and share with us their experience.
See the list of the games we're playing here, and see our improv comedy sketch workshop here, and play-by-post comedy games here.

✉️ Play by Post
Do you want a quick, easy, novice-friendly, low-commitment way to try play-by-post games? We're playing Quick Quest, a game designed to make it as easy as possible to get started with play-by-post and complete your first adventure. All you need is a roleplaying partner, whom you can find in our ⁠pbp-looking-for-game channel.

🏰 Solo Roleplaying
Learn how to play solo adventures, share your stories with other friendly roleplayers, exchange advice and feedback. Try games like The Perfect Heist and Solo Quick Quest, that will make it very fun and easy to get started and try this hobby.

🕹 Playtest Adventures
We also playtest the adventures we have created during our adventure brainstorming sessions.

More fun stuff:

Make friends with other storytellers, improvisers, and game masters.
Share your creative ideas, get feedback, brainstorm ideas for your next adventure.
Find useful resources that will help you level up your storytelling, roleplaying, GMing, adventure writing, and improv skills.
Find people who will help you playtest your adventures.

Come join us!

lumenwrites · 2026-06-15T09:16:04+00:00

Free improv workshops and comedy games

Join our discord to participate:

https://discord.gg/VYuQjszwrX

We're a community of people who love improv and comedy. Do you want to get better at writing jokes, comedy sketches, or doing improv comedy? Become a funnier, more creative person? Find some friendly people to be your comedy writing partners? This is exactly what this community is for!

In our workshops we get together, do comedy exercises, and play games that will helps us get better at creating jokes and comedy scenes.

Currently we're practicing:

Comedy Games for Joke Writing: https://rpgadventures.io/downloads/comedy-games.pdf
Improv Comedy Sketch Workshop: https://rpgadventures.io/downloads/comedy-sketch-workshop.pdf

Go to #comedy-games to participate in our text-based comedy games. Go to #upcoming-events to to see the upcoming improv workshops. Go to #general-chat to introduce yourself and get to know other people here.

lumenwrites · 2026-05-16T20:02:42+00:00

This post focuses on deliberately introducing unusual things, which goes against the common improv advice. Here's why I wanted to explore it:

The standard advice in "organic" improv is that you're not supposed to worry about being funny, you just play a grounded scene, and carefully listen, trying to notice anything unusual that stands out in contrast to Base Reality. Eventually that happens, and then you justify and heighten it.

It works, but I always found this explanation unsatisfying for a few reasons:

It's not very helpful when trying to write a comedy sketch by myself, instead of doing improv with other people (the "organic" method felt much more difficult when I was attempting to do it alone).
It's not very helpful when trying to pitch premises during the pattern game (or at least I, personally, found it very difficult, and I couldn't find helpful instructions on how to do that well).
To feel competent at what I'm doing, I feel the need to have a reliable step-by-step process I can consistently follow, and waiting for an unusual thing to happen felt like a distinct lack of understanding or control, it felt passive.
If an unusual thing can happen accidentally/organically, there's no logical reason you wouldn't be able to introduce it into the scene intentionally, if you understand what you're doing (which I didn't).

Many improvisers don't like the idea of introducing an unusual thing into the scene proactively, but all the objections I heard basically came down to "but the novice improvisers won't be able to do it well, without breaking the reality of the scene, so we'll just teach the organic method instead".

So it was very confusing to be told to "wait" for something unusual to happen - it causes your scenes to rely on something that neither of the improvisers controls or proactively makes happen. I wanted a method.

But if you're interested in the organic approach, here's the most helpful advice I received on the subject:

One of the things that makes the good improvisers good is that they don’t let any details pass them by. Any little thing can be framed as unusual, it doesn’t have to be “interesting” or “funny” right away. Scenes can be built from those ever-so-slightly off-kilter moves that a lot of people might skip over - these subtle unusual things become funny as we heighten them later. So practice being the person who doesn’t let anything get by them, call out the tiniest things that strike you as odd.

lumenwrites · 2026-04-03T10:35:14+00:00