I've loved fiction since I was a kid — too much, probably. The kind of kid who finished a book and then lived in it for a week, recasting the characters and rerouting the plot on the walk to school. That itch never went away; it just kept finding new places to land. At fourteen it talked me into writing a whole novel (a teen fantasy doorstop that, to this day, reads like a fourteen-year-old wrote it — because one did). Eventually it found the place it was always headed: a table, some dice, and friends waiting to see what I'd built. These days the world I can't stop building is a heavily homebrewed Lost Mines of Phandelver campaign I've run for years, and it's the closest I've come to writing fiction that talks back.
I want to be honest about what this is, because it's easy to make it sound grander than it is. I'm not a celebrity DM. I run a game for my friends, on a binder of notes I'm still constantly rewriting. The interesting part was never being good at it — it was discovering that the thing I'd done in my head since I was a kid has an actual craft underneath it, and getting slightly less bad at it one session at a time.
DMing is two jobs wearing one hat
What hooked me is that running a world is two different disciplines, fused, happening at once.
One is systems design, done cold, at my desk, weeks ahead. Factions with goals, NPCs with present-tense wants, rules tuned so a fight is a puzzle and not a slog. This is the same brain that loves the games I love — take a system apart, find where the fun actually lives, build it back better. I genuinely treat my campaign binder like a codebase.
The other is live storytelling, done hot, with six people staring at me waiting to find out what the goblin says next. No undo, no second take, no compiler to catch me — you only get better at it by doing it badly in front of your friends a lot, which I have. The whole craft, for me, is the seam where those two meet: a machine careful enough that when players do something I'd never script, the collision is better than my plan.
The playbook is, embarrassingly, a series of essays
Because I can't leave anything as just vibes, the world comes with a written playbook: a set of notes I call my Golden Rules, plus a suite of design essays titled, with zero imagination, "Better X in D&D" — better factions, NPCs, cities, combat, travel. Writing the method down is just what I do with everything I fall for: find where the common wisdom is wrong, build the better version, write it up so I can do it again on purpose.
The load-bearing belief, the one heresy the rest hangs off:
"Action is boring. Good action is actually good drama and story revolving around the stakes of the action."— my Golden Rules
Which turns into the rule I actually run by — a fight should be rare, and a problem to outthink rather than a number to outlast. I've pulled the full argument apart in what actually makes D&D peak; here I'll just say the playbook is real, and permanently a draft. That's not false modesty — one of my favorite teaching one-shots is abandoned at problem two. I'm better at writing the framework than finishing it, and I'd rather say that than pretend the binder is done.
A world that's already moving when they walk in
The one move that separated "okay sessions" from the ones a whole table forgets their phones for: the world has to be alive before anyone rolls. I don't run a plot on rails — I run a situation with momentum, factions grinding toward their goals whether or not the players ever show up. My note for it:
"Everything should always be going wrong in interesting ways even when it goes right."— my campaign-design note
In practice that means I tear the published module down and rebuild it as a living thing. The villain Glasstaff got an "all-seeing" gimmick so his henchmen are convinced he's omniscient. The dungeon's Nothic became a tragic ex-wizard I named Whisperclaw, with a trust-leveled dialogue tree the players unlock by earning it. Even the disposable monsters get a reason to exist — there's a bullied goblin in my notes named Droop whose entire arc is quietly hoping he'll one day find real friends, "not like them." I'd rather a creature you kill in four seconds have an inner life than be a stat block. That's the fiction-loving kid again; he never could leave a character flat.
And then I let consequences compound past my control, which is the part I can't take credit for. A band of bandits the party recruited as a makeshift town guard quietly grew, session over session, into a thirty-person militia that outgrew their grip on it. That was never on any prep sheet. The world just kept chugging, and the chugging wrote a better subplot than I would have.
- A multi-year homebrew campaign — dated session logs across 2023 and 2024, a working binder going back to 2022, run for rotating line-ups of friends
- A written playbook: the Golden Rules plus a "Better X in D&D" essay suite — frameworks I'm still refining mid-campaign
- The published module torn down and rebuilt: reworked villains, NPCs given trust-leveled dialogue trees, consequences left to compound off-script
Why a kid who loved fiction ended up here
The table is just the latest container for one stubborn impulse. The book at fourteen was me building a world in private and hoping someone would visit. Years of falling hard for games taught me what makes invented worlds feel load-bearing instead of decorative — most of what makes a campaign work, it turns out. And the novel I'm slowly building now is the same impulse pointed back at the page, smarter for everything the table taught me about how a story lands on a person in real time.
But D&D is the one where the feedback is instant and brutal and wonderful. A reader can put a bad book down quietly and you'll never know; six friends around a table cannot hide boredom, and won't pretend a flat scene worked. There's nowhere to hide a weak idea — it just dies in front of you, and you learn.
It also does the one thing I care about most: it gets people I love into a room, phones forgotten, building something none of us could have built alone. The factions and the combat puzzles are scaffolding. What they hold up is that. I'm still mid at all of it — still rewriting the playbook, still finishing nothing on the first try — but it's the most fun I've ever had being a beginner.
Keep going What actually makes D&D peak · How I accidentally wrote a book at 14 · The games I love