Last night marked an auspicious event—I finally FINALLY DM’d my first game in my home-brew campaign.

I’ll pause for your applause.

But on that score, let’s take a pause and talk about the hibernation.

A lot has changed for me in the past year, I started a more labor intensive role, I started knitting, I was working my way through finishing ER, getting back into long form writing again, and I was most importantly working on fleshing out the world of my campaign. Each one of these projects (except for ER) took a ton of focus, concentration, goal setting and smashing, and in between that I also had vacations and real world obligations.

I think in today’s day and age, there’s such a strong pressure of feedback culture—sort of a gut-reaction maybe to the adage that if a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear it, are you really working? I don’t know what it is, but these periods of hibernation, where there’s no obligation to respond on your progress and to just focus on the work can be really beneficial. There’s been plenty of studies which you can Google or DuckDuckGo that support the idea of having uninterrupted creative time, time in which you switch off from the dreaded Social Media, time for just existing with your chosen media and avoiding self-editing and in experience, it rings true. Some of my best days at work are days where I have a couple of hours in the morning to just hack away at an idea and come up with something brilliant. For each of these projects, I gave myself the time and space to investigate and learn and I think it improved it for the better in each. Again, except for ER.

But let’s get back to the question I’m sure you’re asking: what is this campaign you’re mentioned and why did it take you a year to talk about?

I’ve been listening to D&D and consuming D&D content since I found The Adventure Zone back in early 2015. I had just started getting back into listening to podcasts regularly after pretty much just listening to the RoosterTeeth Podcast from start to finish for the 3rd or 4th time, starting with My Brother My Brother and Me when I realized that they had started playing D&D on their side show. This was also roughly around the time I started seeing posts and blogs about this Critical Role thing on Tumblr and started following some subreddits on RPG Horror Stories, because i’m that kind of person.

Sidebar—my dad has always loved this heavy metal music video where a band beat the sh!t out of some LARPers which I have included here. It’s pretty much a cross-section of all my favorite interests (drinking, garage bands, heavy metal and D&D). Sometimes, he will just turn to me and pretend to cast fireball and now his daughter is a DM so enjoy the irony of that one.

It took two years of watching videos on and off, writing a whole novel for NaNoWriMo after not having written since high school and sobbing in the dark to the end of the Adventure Zone Balance arc finale that I finally had the thought: Maybe I should write a campaign.

At this point, I sort of wanted to play D&D but I didn’t have any friends who were really interested in it, aside from a few people I talked to about the podcast. But I really loved the idea of crafting a collaborative story with friends, as I’d been doing it in some way shape or form since middle school. And, unknowingly, one of the only high fantasy series I read from elementary school to middle school was in fact a D&D novelization. I figured, if nothing else, I could turn my world into the plot of a really expansive series that would get picked up by HBO for a show and sweet sweet cash money and residuals. Yes, this was well before the Game of Thrones finale.

So about a year and a half ago, I started working on the map you see above, of a world called Ein Sof (Ein-zof), a world plagued with thousands of years of warring before a flood wiped out most of the land and left this archipelago. Filled with a rich forgotten history, lost cities and temples, happy and sad stories, this was the world to be fleshed out by my players and my NPCs. And yesterday, that world finally became real.

But this has already gone on quite a bit, so I’m going to be separating this out into a series of posts about world building and hosting your first home-brew campaign from your always novice DM, particularly how I came up with this wild idea, what I created and why I created it, and how you turn that into a game. My experience may be limited in D&D but my experience in world building is pretty extensive, so stay tuned for more.

<3

Steph