after a few years of not touching anything related to role playing games, I picked up Dungeons n' Dragons in August of 2022, playing over Discord calls. Then, a few weeks ago, at the start of December, I started hosting my own online DnD game for a group of six. I'm deeply appreciative of the time I've spent creatively expressing through this game, especially as a "Dungeon Master".
World and encounter building is one of the great joys I have in writing, so I wasn't quite keen on using a pre-written adventure. Instead, I worked with a very rough, very vague idea of a world that might feel vaguely familiar to the friends I was hosting for. As the calendar moved closer to the date of session one, a group of close friends (who weren't players) and I built a vague world map and a basic idea of the aesthetic, culture, and politics of each region of the world. We used a website called Shmeppy to build this, which I'm very fond of as a minimalist pixel editor with some gaming-focused tooling. The moment I revealed the world map to the players, they started approaching the world with more directed questions and ideas. I think their perception of the world we were creating changed as it got more intricate, though many details are still unknown.
The main use of Shmeppy was building the actual in-game maps for the players to move their tokens within each session. Players are able to open the link and move their own tokens without any real need for login/setup, which made the process of visualizing where you were and moving your character quite intuitive. I think the sense of scale and the mystery from the paintable fog-of-war really let players approach my world in a way that felt... explorable? A basic pixel editor makes it also very useful for just designing accurate but not-too-detailed environments. I'm not trying to make this a sales pitch about Shmeppy, but I did really enjoy my time using it for this campaign so far!
I don't consider myself "very good at art", whatever that means. I think it's mostly because I don't think I've clocked many hours on the practice of drawing itself, and I certainly haven't quite made a habit of it yet. I thought drawing every (notable) NPC and displaying them in a fun fact card whenever the players met them would be a cute and fun idea, so I made some!
I wanted a more skillfully drawn piece for the end of the "episode", so I commissioned an artist (27kb, artstation here) to draw the final zone in episode one as a scene opener.
During the session, I got spammed with various memes on Discord that my players were literally making during the session, and I think they communicated that they seemed to like Rye the Jelly Necromancer, the episode one villain. They got quite bummed out about killing this character, so I felt really bad and decided to make them a Christmas card featuring Rye, which is the cover image of this post. Somewhere in a different universe, Rye is enjoying their gift box of taffy candies.
All the content above that I built for the sessions was created in the span of roughly 2 weeks, though I think they'll spend one more session in this location to wrap up some loose ends. Once that happens, I'll need to have more content ready for Episode 2! My players seem to really be enjoying the experience, and I love the various drawing/writing exercises and the structured "deadlines" that I give myself with this endeavor. I'm hoping I can keep up the workload and continue enjoying the process.
As it goes with most working people, Christmas is more of a time of stress for me, and I've been struggling between finding a new home before my lease expires and various work troubles. It's very rare for me to find something that I can earnestly spend most of my free time enjoying like this. I'm very thankful for the friends I have that let me play and run role play experiences with them, and I wish them all a happy end of 2022.
I wish you too, a happy end of 2022!
