# Hero's journey beat sheet

From "The hero's journey: the 12 stages, with a worked example" by the Feldar team:
https://feldar.com/guides/heros-journey

Free to use, copy and change. The twelve stages follow Christopher Vogler's
The Writer's Journey (1992), based on Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a
Thousand Faces (1949). The questions are ours. Skip any stage your story does
not need; a stage that exists only because the chart asks for it does more
harm than good.


## The hero

Name and one line about them:
What they want (visible from outside):
What they need (what they must learn, accept or give up):
What they bring home at the end (the elixir):


## Act one: the ordinary world (stages 1 to 5)

### 1. Ordinary world
Chapter or rough position:
What is missing from this life, and do they know it?
Opening image:

### 2. Call to adventure
Chapter or rough position:
What event makes staying the same impossible?

### 3. Refusal of the call
Chapter or rough position:
What does the hero risk by saying yes?

### 4. Meeting the mentor
Chapter or rough position:
Who or what is the mentor?
What does the hero receive that they could not get alone?

### 5. Crossing the first threshold
Chapter or rough position (often near 25%):
What is the point of no return?


## Act two: the special world (stages 6 to 9)

### 6. Tests, allies and enemies
Chapters:
Allies:
Enemies:
Tests, and what each one teaches:

### 7. Approach to the inmost cave
Chapter or rough position:
What is the plan, and what will it cost if it fails?

### 8. The ordeal
Chapter or rough position:
What does the hero face here that they have avoided all book?
What gives way in them?

### 9. Reward
Chapter or rough position:
What does the hero hold now that they did not before?


## Act three: the return (stages 10 to 12)

### 10. The road back
Chapter or rough position:
What pulls the hero home, and what comes after them?

### 11. Resurrection
Chapter or rough position (often near 90%):
How does this final test prove the change?

### 12. Return with the elixir
Chapter or rough position:
What does home receive?
Final image, and how it mirrors the opening image:


## Check

Is the want clear by the end of the first chapters?
Does each stage change something, or only fill a slot?
Does the hero's inner change show in a choice, not only in events?