Professional development you can actually experience.
You can understand psychological flexibility intellectually and still find it difficult to practice when life becomes uncertain. What if learning ACT gave you a chance to experience that uncertainty in a supportive, engaging environment—where you could practice the moves of psychological flexibility rather than simply understand them?
Heroes Quest Academy offers small-group, experiential professional development for mental-health clinicians. Through shared tabletop adventures and guided reflection, participants encounter uncertainty, make meaningful choices, and practice the processes of psychological flexibility in real time.
No tabletop role-playing game experience required.
The ACT Experience
Six live 90-minute sessions. A shared adventure. Real opportunities to practice psychological flexibility.
Learn it. Experience it. Bring it back to your work.
Learn ACT differently
Move beyond definitions, worksheets, and lectures. Explore ACT processes through a shared narrative adventure, guided reflection, and thoughtful discussion with your peers.
Experience it through play
Make choices in an unfolding story. Step into uncertainty and experiment with choices you might hesitate to make in real life. Notice what shows up when the dice, the group, or the adventure take an unexpected turn.
Apply what you learn
Connect what you notice in the adventure to your life and clinical practice. For those interested, explore how carefully designed role-play can support experiential work with clients.
You don't have to become a therapeutic game master
The ACT Experience is for clinicians interested in psychological flexibility—not only clinicians who want to run therapy games. You might want a more memorable way to deepen your understanding of ACT, explore experiential professional development, or take part in something different from another lecture.
If you do want to bring therapeutic role-play into your work, the same experience offers a firsthand introduction to the design principles behind the Heroes Quest Protocol.
Professional development can give something back to you, too.
Clinical work asks us to spend a great deal of time attending to other people's experiences. The ACT Experience gives clinicians room to explore curiosity, play, uncertainty, and connection in their own learning. You may leave with new clinical ideas—and with the memory of doing something genuinely different from the usual lecture or webinar. It's okay for professional development to be engaging, too.
How can playing a game be professional development?
The game isn't a reward tacked onto a lecture. It creates a context in which participants encounter uncertainty, perspective-taking, difficult thoughts, values conflicts, and meaningful action. Guided reflection helps participants notice what happened, consider its relationship to ACT, and think about where those insights might matter beyond the game.
Your ACT Experience Kit
Each participant receives a physical kit with a printed guide and reflection workbook, a set of Dungeon Crawl Classics dice, a dice map, character sheets, an Academy pencil, and other materials used during the sessions.
The kit isn't a souvenir: character creation, dice rolls, and personal reflection are part of the learning experience.
Coming soon
Facilitator guides, implementation materials, participant kits, and workbook refills are in development for clinicians who want to bring the approach into their practices.
Founding clinician cohort: scheduling and enrollment details are coming soon.
Interested in participating or hearing when resources become available?
Curious about the approach?
Start with Roll for Flexibility, a free eight-page guide to experiential ACT and therapeutic tabletop role-playing. It explores the emerging research, practical possibilities, and the thinking behind the Heroes Quest approach.
