After a wildly successful two-week trial run with two separate groups of players, I’ve become a professional Dungeon Master at the Manhattan board game store Hex & Co.! I’ll be running four games per month, all set in my world and using custom content.
The current campaign is set in the city of Senkaku, featured in my story “Hypnotica,” and the main quest-giver is a version of Yute, from the story “Old No-Eyes” (he’s going by the name ‘No-Eyes’ in-game) Here are some photos of the paper material I brought to recent games:
This is a hand-written paper contract that was offered to the players by No-Eyes. If you read the text carefully, you’ll notice some of the clauses are a bit…extreme. Essentially, if the players fail to fulfill the contract or betray No-Eyes, he’ll gain possession of their souls. A friend of mine sent the text of the contract to a lawyer friend of theirs, who pointed out that it wouldn’t stand up in court…
Next up is a sketch of No-Eyes (aka Yute), as he appears in the campaign. The helmet design is based on the sketches created by my friend, Joel Clapp.
This is another drawing of an NPC ghost boss, named Cokolo. Before his death, he was a poet and the author of the book Colder Winters, whose poetry is referenced in my stories. Cokolo is also referenced in “Hypnotica.”
These were scraps of clues discovered by players over the course of a session. One symbol is present on all three pieces of paper–a stylized goblet connected with a goat-headed ghost, Mendes (named for the Goat of Mendes, also known as Baphoment).
This is the candle I keep with me for every session. The tradition started with my original D&D group, which had a little plastic Christmas candle. Our running joke was “We’re not a cult! We have a Christmas candle!” It was sort of a reference to the D&D Satanic Panic in the 1980s, where people though Dungeons & Dragons was turning kids to Satanism.
This is a black origami lotus I folded for a session. Each of my first-time players was given a lotus, which had a secret word written on the inside.
I’ll be posting more about my experiences as a professional DM, but that’s what I’ve got for now!