Jamison Stone's Blog, page 2

Apotheosis Studios' Exclusive Interview With Arcane Mini's Benny McLennan

We here at Apotheosis Studios have some very great friends. In the wider world of ambitious creators bringing their ideas to Kickstarter, we are among some truly exciting projects. Despite appearances, we're not super competitive. We support each other constantly, as each of these projects really excite all of us.

One such project is that of Aldarra, a tactical board game by Arcane Minis. We've had a long look at the game in our rules breakdown in another post here on our blog, but there's still so much to know about Aldarra. I talked to Benny McLennan, Founder and CEO of Arcane Minis, and here's what he had to say.

Benny McLennan’s banner on the aldarra kickstarter - image by arcane minis

Exclusive Interview with Arcane Minis

Arcane Minis is an exciting up and comer in the world of 3d printed minis. But no company starts as such. How did Arcane Minis get started?

Well, I’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons for over 2 decades. Just over 3 years ago, I had gotten back in to playing with my friends while living here in South Korea. I took 5 brand new players and coached them through their first campaign. A few months after that, I took up 3D printing as a hobby because I saw the potential as a DM to use 3D printing to customize my sessions. A few months after that and I was inspired to have airships in my campaign, but no one had created any decent ones. So I set out to develop my own, which turned into a Kickstarter called Skies of Sordane. Here we are 2 years later and we are releasing our first board game!

The minis made for Aldarra, Skies of Sordane, and Airship Campaigns are detailed and wonderful pieces for any collection. Can you discuss the details behind the printing process, and how the quality of the minis always hold up from your initial concepts to the finished product?

The arrodan syndicate’s minis - image by arcane minis

Well, first and foremost, we never make anything that we wouldn’t use or approve of ourselves. We have delayed a few STL releases in the past purely due to me not believe the product to be of good enough quality to share with our backers and customers. Quality and communication are key for us. It helps to have a superb team of creatives working on art and sculpting like our lead artist Wallok and lead sculptor Osaka. Two of the many people that work on Arcane Minis projects that I simply couldn’t operate without them.

To finish a product, we go through a long process of validating files, making proper cuts and guides for customers to know what goes where and ensuring that the aesthetic of the product fits into not only our setting of Sordane, but other settings of similar theme.

The creative team has no shortage of grand ideas. A lot of them seem to draw your attention up into the sky. Between Aldarra, Skies, and Airship Campaigns, there's a strong theme in all of your releases, that take us skyward. What draws the projects of Arcane Minis skyward?

Personally, I love airships. We all do, I think. There’s such a rich world and story to tell when you can fly anywhere in a giant ship and defeat massive airborne monsters or fly off to an adventure in a hard-to-reach location. Airship campaigns really are quite unique in their function to traditional 5e or other RPG campaigns. They really put a lot of creativity in the hands of the players and a lot of improv on the DM. Which, as almost a fully improvisational DM myself, I love. Airships are just awesome!

Airship Campaigns is a project very close to our hearts here at Apotheosis Studios. 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons is where we live, and even when we aren't producing our content, we're rolling dice for adventures to have fun with. Could you share a little about the ideas behind Airship Campaigns? Where the ideas behind it began? What players can expect?

Airship Campaigns was an offshoot from Skies of Sordane. Skies was originally meant to be just an STL campaign. But, as we went on, it seemed there was a demand for how to use the ships in a campaign. So we added an addon. Airship Campaigns. Originally it was intended to be a 40 page rulebook on using airships, but it quickly grew to 100 pages with extra lore and goodies in there. After finishing that, we decided we really wanted to take it to the next level and add monsters and more world buildings, ships and items. So we made a mountain of new creature STLs and added another 100 pages and we are now at 220 pages, going to manufacturing within the next week or two and created nearly 100 creature STLs to fly along side airships trying to eat their juicy crew inside!

Now onto the main event, Aldarra itself. Your upcoming game is a very exciting and ambitious project. Where did the idea of bringing your skyship universe into an intense tabletop strategy game come from?

Ever since we did Skies, my dream has been to make a board game with airships in it. So shortly after Skies, we started development. It has been a long 2 years, especially with covid and trying to playtest and develop in that environment but we did it and we love the end product. It’s an in-depth, but fast paced combat strategy game and it’s just a fun time where you don’t have to spend 6 hours playing 1 game (once you learn to play of course!)

Not only that, but a board game with airships meant we got to design more and more of them. As they are smaller, they’re much easier to develop than the super massive ones. Still a challenge to make perfect, but it really allowed us to get our creative juices flowing with the aesthetics and world building of it all!

The odarian empire’s minis - image by Arcane Minis

The replay factor for Aldarra is quite high, which is a big selling point for me and a lot of tabletop gamers. Between the different map tiles being laid out in a different way each time, the randomness of how power crystals can be generated and the encounters that players can have over the skies usually leads to unique and thrilling gameplay right out of the box. Was replay value a priority during the design and development of Aldarra? How was that implemented in the creation of Aldarra?

100%. We didn’t want a game you would spend hard earned money on being something you would only play one time and then having no replayability. Those games exist, and a lot of them are great. That’s not Aldarra. With Aldarra we wanted to give you a social experience that you didn’t have to think incredibly hard on, but it wouldn’t be a cakewalk without careful planning and cunning tactics. The mechanics we have in the game to make it replayable because each time you play, you’re going to play a different faction, get different Discoveries or Explore cards or even playing with 1 new person in the group can add a hugely different outcome to the game because if there’s one thing I’ve learned with Aldarra game testing, it’s that even though our game is heavily focused on combat, there is a large difference in play styles that different people have. Every game I play is very different and still a blast.

The strategy and detail of the rules is immense in this game. When players can perform certain actions. The limits of ships and where placement of your airship units can be. Was the intensity of strategy and detail of the rules a priority when designing and developing Aldarra? What was the play test process for a game of this level of complexity like? What was the feedback like to get the games system to where it is today?

The original complexity was far greater. My original ask from my partner developers, Forever Stoked Creative, was to make a very complicated, in-depth RTS type game that would last many hours. But, as we got into the development process, I realized that what was really important was the social aspect. We all lost a lot of that at the start of the pandemic (basically when we started developing this) and since then, it definitely was more of a focus to not only have in-depth strategy and big brain moves, but we wanted it to feel like you were socializing as part of the game. So as time went on, we definitely kept a bunch of the strategy and mechanics, but we removed a lot of the time-sinking micro managing mechanics of the game. I would love to do a deep dive on the development process some day as well when we have time. It was an eye-opening experience as a first time game designer working with Matt and FSC. It has been wild!

Us here at Apotheosis Studios are eager to see Aldarra in action. Our partnership means our very own Jamison Stone and Satine Phoenix will be playing the game in person! How did this exciting testing opportunity come to be?

Yes, we feel exceedingly lucky to be partnered with many amazing people and we were super thrilled when the prolific map makers Cze and Peku introduced us to Jamison and Satine. Jamison was our main point of contact to set up the partnership and he couldn’t have been a nicer person. Really value the new relationships we have been able to build and cultivate because of this game. There are some really amazing communities and people out there that love seeing others thrive and succeed and I’m glad we could surround ourselves with so many people like that. It’s a fun time!

Arcane Minis are becoming heavy hitters in the world of table top gaming and this current release on Kickstarter is what's bringing their name up even higher. For more information about how to play Aldarra for yourself, check out our in depth article about the game itself!

Tune in to Apotheosis Studios' own Jamison Stone and ttrpg legend Satine Phoenix trialling this game for themselves right here, and put your pledges in to support Aldarra right now on Kickstarter.

Now we want to hear from you. Have you put your pledges in to back Aldarra for yourself? Are the other projects by Arcane Minis drawing your attention? Let us know in our discord server or in the comments below.

Adam Ray contributes much for adventurers here on Apotheosis Studios. As co-founder of fantasticuniverses.com , they write all kinds of gaming press, while they write news about the League of Legends Card Game on RuneterraCCG . On Youtube, they can be found game mastering for No Ordinary Heroes , or editing the antics on The Hostile Atmosphere . Find where they dwell by climbing their Linktree .

The Mighty Fall Down to Size in the Temple of the Tortoise

Adventures are perilous and uncertain activity for any to be involved in. It's easy to be swept up in the activity of searching long forgotten places and rummaging for treasures beyond the wildest dreams of avarice. That said, the dangers of monsters and madness can take their heavy toll on these heroes.

Over the long life of an adventurer, they can gain a great deal of power and expertise in their travels. This is represented in game play terms by experience and levels. Those who have been around a long time have mastery over their powers and abilities. The more experienced and veteran adventurers may be pretty heavily reliant on their own skills and experience, so when they face a time when they're away from their full suite of powers and equipment may harm them as much the monsters and hazards of adventure.

We here at Apotheosis Studios love to build rich and long adventures for an entire campaign, but not all adventures take a character across the world and span a lifetime. Sometimes an adventure can be a day in a single place. Working out what the One Shot is trying to do and how it works is key for making this feel as fun and developed as possible.

Building a One Shot

The One Shot is a very popular format for adventure. Most players of any table top role playing game are familiar with it. The idea of an entire adventure is boiled down and run as efficiently as possible in one single session. It's an ambitious thing, and not as easy as it sounds.

What could possibly go wrong in the running and management of a One Shot? I'd recommend it for a Game Master who is incredibly familiar with the players they're working with. If you're bringing in newer players or unfamiliar friends, there can be an even greater level of unforeseen randomness that can drag the story out.

A party always has much to discuss as a DM has much to plan - you meet in a tavern by zoltan boros

Next, the One Shot needs a remarkable amount of additional planning. With ongoing sessions, at least in my own experience, you're able to run a fairly cohesive narrative with a few lines of play of what the player characters may want to do. Those who are particularly adept at improvising may work with even less, but those who need more structure can plan a great deal in preparation for their sessions.

One Shots need a very concise level of planning to ensure that the beats of the story you want to get told don't take up more time than you have allotted. This may involve a little rail road style of direction on the part of the Game Master, but this is one of the few times keeping your players on a subscribed story path is acceptable.

There are many ways to keep your party of adventurers on course with the micro adventure you want to tell. The one I implement the most, and one I use to keep things on track in an ongoing campaign as well as my One Shots, is being vague. Most players will pick up on the cues you weave as a Game Master. Even ones you don't intend to drop. If you give a lot of detail, a player may think that you're implying that something is interesting and want to unpack it; to investigate it further. If you deliberately describe only things that don't relate to the concise quest you want to tell in your single session adventure.

Now we know how to keep a single session adventure on course, we should probably ask ourselves how to even plan or run a One Shot. It's never as tricky as building sessions and arcs for entire campaigns, or multi part adventures. With One Shots, it usually comes from a single idea. One clear idea running through the whole adventure is usually enough to build from a concept to an entire mini adventure.

I myself usually run long and ongoing campaigns, but I've had the fortune of playing in some wonderful games in my time. Memorable encounters include a literal pay to play adventure with a bait-and-switch ending and the visit to a wizard's house, only to find that we had gone somewhere we think is incredibly far away. I won't go into too much detail about what those adventures were like, as they weren't my own. Not exactly fair of me to share another Game Master's excellent ideas.

Once we have an idea, and we know how to guide them along, we can bring it to our players. Usually they bring in a whole new character for a story like this. Sometimes they want to tell a contained story too, and sometimes they want to test a certain combination of classes and powers. The One Shot is a very free form way for everyone at the table to just play.

Temple of the Tortoise

Though I won't talk about my friends' ideas, I will gladly share my own. An idea for a One Shot intended for incredibly powerful characters would be a very fun experiment for players who are already invested with who they play and how they play them.

This is a one shot intended which could easily be run as an off beat episode or session for an ongoing game, or for players who want to recapture their lost love for characters gone by.

The treasure in the dungeon is all the more rewarding when it’s already your own - inner sanctum by kudos productions

The party arrive at an immense gateway carved into the side of a cliff face or mountain side. The doors glow a faint blue, and open easily despite looming well over them and being made of solid stone. As they enter, a single staircase continues upward, suspended by nothing. The area under this cavern extends in all directions endlessly. As they approach a central platform, a white gnarled tree dominates the space. As soon as a character goes to interact with it, there's a great flash of light. As the players recover, you the Game Master take in all of their character sheets, and hand them back versions that are devoid of all their abilities and gear. A great voice will fill the chamber.

“Trespassers cunning enough to enter this place must earn the skills which brought them here. All moves slowly in the temple of the tortoise.”

The party have all been reduced back down to level one.

Then, you the Game Master may populate this dungeon with as many or as few chambers as you wish. After each one, the players gain a little more of their levels, prepared spells, gear, and ability score improvements to bring them back to the levels they were previously.

In each chamber, I encourage you savvy Game Masters to use a mixture of puzzles and combat encounters that would have been very easy for them if they were at max power. If a spellcaster relies on a particular damage spell, using a monster that has vulnerability to it, but resists all other things will be a way to make them reminisce on how useful it was, and wish for it back. A Rogue who didn't take their Thieves' Tools expertise at level one may truly struggle with a lock that would have been simple before, as they fumble with the files and picks. The Paladin used to a certain aura ability may struggle in the face of enemies that would easily fumble in their holy presence.

When laying out this dungeon, there may be a sense of satisfaction where they compete against the difficulty wall in a long, corridor style structure, regaining items and levels by overcoming the struggles in each chamber until they find which ever final presence that stole their grandeur. It may make the entire dungeon a grand puzzle if its laid out in a grand maze, where they need to go back on themselves to find certain abilities they've lost that would otherwise be impossible to pass once they regain certain skills. It also opens up to the interesting possibility that they may leave some of their old powers behind once they leave...

This is a challenge that a lot of players may truly struggle with. After such a long time of playing, they may be fully invested, and so familiar with their characters and their many powers, that this hard reset would be a true fish out of water moment. I enjoy testing my players in every way I can.

I have my own ideas for how and why their powers and items may be taken, but I'm again choosing to leave these vague so that if your players enter the Temple of the Tortoise, they may face whatever enemies your twisted imagination can generate.

Now we want to hear from you. Where would the temple of the tortoise be found on your world? Which heroes would test themselves, being sent back to square one? Let us know in our discord server or in the comments below.

Adam Ray contributes much for adventurers here on Apotheosis Studios. As co-founder of fantasticuniverses.com , they write all kinds of gaming press, while they write news about the League of Legends Card Game on RuneterraCCG . On Youtube, they can be found game mastering for No Ordinary Heroes , or editing the antics on The Hostile Atmosphere . Find where they dwell by climbing their Linktree .

Healing Can Bring an Enemy's Doom With the Sea Queen's Crown

Dungeons and Dragons has been the driving game for me as a writer, creator, and a human, for well over eight years. As part of the course of being a Game Master for 5th edition, I crave inspiration for new material as the goat craves the mineral.

Bringing new story lines to my players, so that they may explore my world as fully and deeply as they want to is usually my priority. I have a long history with writing fiction set in my world, and my players bring those stories to life.

“But this is Dungeons and Dragons” I don't hear you ask because I'm writing this down and I can't hear you. In the world of adventurers, there have to be things for them to fight against and sweet, tasty experience points for them to be rewarded with. Well, I don't run my games with XP because in essence, it makes zero sense, and that's something I'll explain another time, but rewarding players for adventure is essential!

Coming up with new items for your heroes to be bequeathed can be a struggle. Many pragmatic protagonists can look at their patrons and simply say “money is always nice”. But that's never enough, not when a unique item is up for grabs.

Why Build Something New?

In your own world of Dungeons and Dragons, the gods that bestow powers to the Clerics and Paladins can be as different and diverse as you can imagine. The Domains that the Clerics are built around in 5th edition give us some inspiration to see what kinds of gods there could be, especially if you've added your own from other game materials and extra world material.

Sometimes cobbling things together is very effective - Scrounged Scythe by Jason Felix.jpg

But once the holy casters know exactly who they pray to, how these penitent few channel their magic is wildly different, and the thoughtful player paired with the crafty Game Master can come up with something truly unique. One great example of this would definitely be in the live streamed game of Force Gray: Giant Hunters. Ashley Johnson's Cleric was a god of invention, and to channel her magic, smaller mechanical beasts and insects flew out and generated what the spell did.

The ability to customise and manage your own magic is an exciting way to make your character look and feel unique. Adding new items makes things even stronger still, but a large part depends on where a new magic item comes from.

To be a Game Master, you tell stories for all of your players, but stories can come from any part of your game. When creating something for your game, thinking about where something came from can clarify things for your players and keep them curious about the world you're bringing to them.

While the books written by Wizards, the fine creators on DM's Guild, and of course us here at Apotheosis Studios will always bring you new unique pieces to your games of Dungeons and Dragons, coming up with your own stuff makes it personal for everyone at the table, and brings everyone's investment right into the centre with something that the table has that's just their own. I encourage every Game Master playing any system to brew new things for their players. This is something I've added to my games.

Crown of Sea Queen

As said earlier, Clerics and Paladins draw their power from their devotion to a god. When they have this devotion clear in their hearts, and the favour of the gods is a conduit of immense power, the power that they need to bring the gods' will to the world for good or ill.

The life of adventure means that the successful ones come back with treasure to their name. Something truly ancient, and blessed by one god may yet benefit another priest of a different faith.

The story of an item blessed by a god can inspire the hearts of many. Thus was the story of the Crown of the Sea Queen. Circlets made of the drops of the ocean, with the strange effect of bringing both weal and woe to those around its wearer.

There was once a pale priestess who had earned the favour of a goddess of the ocean. The great fins of the mother of all merfolk carry the deity through the oceans of the higher planes, and dictates the tides of the oceans across the worlds. One of this goddess' penitent dry-folk had held her attention for many many years. By spreading the word of respecting and being careful in the face of the ocean, the movements and care of the creatures within.

The goddess watched the cleric from across the world and the ocean. She moved with grace and precision, rolling like a distant wave. The goddess watched with fascination as her words of respect to the sea were sung and recited as though effortless and like a breath. The priestess wore green scales and wielded a tall trident made of coral and pearls. This dedication drew the goddess' fascination.

Heroic feats were made across the coast all in the name of this oceanic goddess. She watched closer as these majestic acts of heroism done in her name began to lift her spirit and energy as a goddess. Catastrophes that would have ravaged coastal settlements were easily avoided through the prayers and magic of the penitent. The sick and injured were healed by the graceful hands and green light of the deep ocean. Wonders made in the name of the ocean mother became a common occurrence on the coast and sea shores of the world. This good will left traces of power behind in the world, ingots of the goddess' power, damp on the ground like sea water.

The sea queen crown is as beautiful as it is deadly - Rainbow Sugar Mermaid Crown by Frida Flower Crowns

One such day, the tides of fate changed. The cleric worked in the service of the ocean mother for her entire life, but all mortal lives end. When on an adventure, the cleric ensured the escape of her party, then flooded the subterranean dungeon with ocean water. The loss of her most penitent follower left the goddess distraught and broken. The drips of water across the world coalesced and froze with grief. The frozen sadness coalesced up into crowns made of deep blue coral. These indestructible circlets sought their way to the followers of the gods to share the stories of the separated, mortal and divine lovers.

Whilst Wearing the Crowns

The Sea Queen Crown is a strange magical item spread by the continued use of holy warriors over the ages. Even ones who do not worship the goddess of the ocean.

There is a shared power among Clerics and Paladins that allow them to draw on similar magic, bestowed by the powers of the gods that radiate out this energy. Those that use this crown feel the comforting warmth and endless rolling motion of the ocean. In recent years, those who have a connection to the ancient and primal world, such as the Druid and the Ranger may be able to commune with this ancient and holy power.

Crown of the Sea Queen Stats generated with homebrewery

While using this crown, the wearer is able to tap into the same changeable powers of the tides. The weal and woe woven into the world and its waters. This primal power is tempered by the unrequited love of the goddess to her remarkable mortal. The desire to protect her people is mirrored by the goddess in her anger at losing the woman she loves. As such, the power to heal and protect, and the powers to attack those who rebuke them.

As a user attuned to this circlet uses healing magic they control, a globule of pure ocean water starts to coalesce over the user. Simply by using the magic item, the power with which you heal your allies increases. The strength of the healing energy swirls in the bubble as the user heals themselves and their allies. After a short time, the bubble detonates in a way that is harmless to the user and those who have been healed by them. Those who do not takes a sum of damage equal to an amount of the healing dealt out to their allies.

The blessings of the sea queen's crown are manifold and every where. There are enough out there to have been shared in Druidic circles and Paladin enclaves. It's powers to heal allies and blow back enemies have been valued and sought after by many.

Now we want to hear from you. What unlikely magic items do you imagine coming to your games? What mechanics that appear distant but could be brought together in something you run? Let us know in our discord server or in the comments below.

Adam Ray contributes much for adventurers here on Apotheosis Studios. As co-founder of fantasticuniverses.com , they write all kinds of gaming press, while they write news about the League of Legends Card Game on RuneterraCCG . On Youtube, they can be found game mastering for No Ordinary Heroes , or editing the antics on The Hostile Atmosphere . Find where they dwell by climbing their Linktree .

Exclusive Interview - Dead Aussie Gamer Talks Professional Game Mastering

Apotheosis Studios is but one of many creative voices out there in the world of TTRPGs. You would think that we are all clamouring for views and supporters when we broadcast our games, but not so!

We’re gamers who play an infinite game, all we really want are more people to play with. Being excellent to each other allows us to find new friends and truly build up our community.

Dead Aussie Gamer, as well as having a very metal name, is one of the professional Game Masters who has built a truly inclusive and welcoming community around his games. It’s with great excitement that we announce that we’ll be playing alongside him and some dear friends for this year’s Jasper’s Game Day.

I had a talk with Dead Aussie, and this is what we talked about.

Dead Aussie Gamer’s banner on all his social media - image by dead aussie gamer

Exclusive Interview with Dead Aussie Gamer

I believe that big things have small beginnings. What's your (hopefully not too tragic) backstory? Where did your journey in writing and in TTRPGs begin?

Well funny you should mention backstories because I feel like my beginnings in TTRPGs began quite dramatically. March 22nd 2010, the day started like any other warm autumn day in my sunny hometown of Perth, Western Australia. But that took a turn as thunderstorms rolled in and the skies turned an eerie green, for the first time ever hail the size of golf balls rained down on us! The streets were overflowing from the storm and the power was cut. It was on this very ominous day that I ran my first game of D&D. My partner and I had just returned from rescuing our cats from the weather outside and we had spoken of playing Tabletop RPGs before, with her coming from a family of TTRPG players/gms. Given there was literally nothing else to do and no where else to go, we played by candle light and ran my first and by far my most memorable game. As far as signs from above that RPGs were going to be my calling, this was a pretty good one.

Stormy Skies over Australia - image by Dead aussie Gamer

People in our communities are what I call, capital G, Gamers. Of course, tabletop RPG takes up the majority of your time, and that's great, but it can't be the only kind of gaming you do, right? What kinds of games do you enjoy; PC, console, tabletop, or anything in between? Where do you go to relax? Do you have an all time favourite?

Gaming with a capital "G" always has been a major source of relaxation and peace for me. Honestly I don't think there's been a type of game that, at some point in my life, I haven't spent a reckless amount of time indulging in. Early on as a kid I loved video games, MMORPGS, FPS, RTS, and all other three letter acronyms were where I found my joy. Today with my more time sensitive schedule I find myself indulging in tabletop board games which I have kickstarted, as well as the wargame Malifaux, of which I am very enamored with it's TTRPG counterpart Through the Breach.

You've cornered a pretty strong spot in the world of TTRPGs. Your YouTube channel has a pretty strong following, with a lot of gameplay you've ran as well as your own GM advice. Did playing and running TTRPGs prompt you toward video making, or did making videos lead you to be a Game Master?

Honestly I was a game master long before I stated making videos, my humble following has been very supportive of my endeavors as a content creator. But the real origins of my presence on Youtube goes back to 2012 where I was invited by my mentor and close friend Guy Sclanders to perform in his series "Adventures of the Windswift" on his channel HowtobeaGreatGM. He gave me the confidence I needed to start my own channel and taught me much about being a supportive member of the creative community. Since then I have continued to grow and feature with and alongside some incredible performers.

Being a Professional Dungeon Master is a strong ambition for many people in our community, myself included. How did you get started professionally DMing and how would you advise others to get into that line of work?

Being a professional DM? well depends who you ask really? what makes a dm professional? money? talent? social media presence? for me being professional is about standards, and valuing your journey as a DM. Once you value yourself and hold these standards, others will also, and in time you'll find the people willing to invest in your journey, whether as players, fellow storytellers, sponsors, or audience members.

You've made important ambassadorial efforts in your work as a professional TTRPG player. Particularly with emphasis on bringing love and careful attention to mental health. What efforts and concessions did you make to bring such positivity in themes into your games? How can you encourage others to do the same, and making their games welcoming and inclusive spaces for all?

Wow that's some pretty high praise! Thank you! I don't think inclusively has ever really been something I've focused on. Deep down I want everyone to feel and experience the same joy I have when I sit down with my group, when I heard the sounds of dice hitting the table and when I experience those moments that can only be captured by the shared imagination of those around me. It just never mattered to me who got to share in that joy, if you were willing to sit with me around a table, then I was always willing to go on that journey with you.

I have experienced much in the field of mental health, and one of the greatest struggles is that of expression. What is roleplaying if not a chance to express yourself in a new way? There are so many who struggle with mental health issues, and it comes in so many different forms. With care, understanding, and most of all, patience, I think TTRPGs have the potential for powerful healing to those who need it.

If you really want to make a game inclusive, then want people in your game. Be passionate about your story, about your players and their tales, and be willing to bring others on your quest. Some groups may have issues with communication, others may have issues with schedules, there are always going to be challenges that will test even the best DMs in the world. Stay strong, stay proud of your game and most of all, always be willing.

You've put a lot of effort into making your games accessible for a younger player base. I personally deeply struggle with this, which is why when other creators do it so well I am inspired. What was your process for tailoring games for all ages? How did your process of bringing younger players in inform your future game and story design?

When I figure out how, I'll be sure to let you know! Running games and tailoring them to young players has not been a struggle from the perspective of writing or even running the adventure. Kids have a very different social dynamic and structure, and as an "older" DM the struggle comes from being able to breach that structure and learn to bend and shift with the mood of the table. A mood which changes quickly and sometimes unexpectedly. It's kinda like trying to walk in sand, if you try to force yourself forward, you tire easily and the sand fights against you, but if you build a rhythm and momentum then it's no struggle at all. Don't treat kids like "kids", give them to opportunity to explore their imagination and if something doesn't make sense ask yourself "why not?". Kids want to be entertained and will often entertain themselves, as a DM its our role to let them, and guide their fun across the threshold of adventure.

Dead Aussie Gamer's Christmas Special brought out good friends - image by dead aussie gamer

You proudly hold an unofficial world record for the longest TTRPG session. That's impressive, and something I'd like to match or beat one day. What was the process for getting this long session together? How did you prepare for such a long sitting of play, between factors like story and content to go through, and the mental endurance to go on for so many hours?

Well if you would like to beat my unofficial record then you have at least a fun filled 86 hours ahead of you. From the start I knew what I wanted to go for, when I made the attempt. It wasn't a "lets see how long we can go" challenge, it was an honest attempt at a Guinness World Record. My players and I spent 8 months training and even dieted to cater our bodies for the energy consumption needed to be able to complete our marathon. I spoke with a number of medical professionals and sleep specialists to come up with a very strict schedule in order to complete the challenge safely. We also had an incredible staff of volunteers, friends and family who had supported us during the challenge with food, water and regular health checks.

I was the GM for that session and we were playing Pathfinder's Rise of the Runelords, a game which I had run 13 times prior to our attempt. Jokingly we said, I knew that adventure so well, I could run it in my sleep, I definitely proved that. If it wasn't for the footage I could not tell you what was going through my head once I past 60+hours, fatigue was intense. Every 6 hours we got a 30 minute break, with 10mins for a restroom stop and a 20 minute power nap before continuing. My biggest hurdle was losing my voice around 3am on the third day, I remember writing an SOS to the staff on duty who messaged our families. They rushed out for some lozenges and a ton of ginger and lemon tea, which helped me pull across that hurdle but I can't so much as smell ginger without gagging anymore.

All in all it was a wonderful and successful attempt, however we hit a few unfortunate snags in the paperwork which is why the record remains unofficial. That and trying to get 160+GB to Guinness was a daunting task.

We all have similar interests as TTRPG creators. Movies, games, anime, and fiction call backs that set the genre like Lord of the Rings or Wheel of Time. These influence the games we write for our players, but what is one of your biggest influences that most people have never heard of?

Oh wow, well influences are easy as I am a huge comic book and anime fan, but an influence that not many people would know huh? Food is probably my biggest and most unknown influence on my games and my world. Heston Blumenthal's Fantastic Feasts introduced me to the marriage of magic and food, and I have done my best to include something wonderous and delicious to every game I've run. From my twilight mead darkvision potions smoothies, to spicy nachos that give fire resistance, consumable food/drink items are an absolute pleasure for me to feature in my campaigns. Some of which I've managed to replicate in my kitchen at home.

Dead Aussie Gamer Talking on Subverting Expectations

Tabletop roleplaying games are at an all time high. The sense of community and the wealth of creators have put streamed games and content similar to yours across the web. What are your takes on D&D and the wider TTRPG community as a whole right now?

We live in an amazing time we are now connected in a way that allows us to roleplay with people from across the world at ease. To me, has both great and terrible implications. Back in yester-year TTRPGs were a social underground, folks who engaged were considered to be social pariahs and enjoyed their hobby in the company of those who were exclusively a part of the underground community. Today RPGs have become much more mainstream and has entered the forefront of so much pop-culture, with performances and live streams at an all time high.

While this is great for the industry, it is also very challenging for those wanting to engage for the first time or succeed as TTRPG content creators. It becomes difficult to stand out in the crowd, and harder still to build those meaningful connections when so many are doing so, and while others still approach the hobby as if it were a "secret club".

As someone who entered quite late in the race, I often see many struggle to join the space and other struggle to succeed, which motivates me to dig deep and support others and raise them up. As I mentioned earlier TTRPGs are for everyone and I think now is the time for the community to open up and include a new generation of fans and creators.

The work you've done both for charity, and within the wider TTRPG community has been a wonderful. You said you were very excited to discuss your upcoming projects. What's the next big thing on your horizon? What are you working on at present, that you can tell us about?

Well in addition to the professional GM gig on my twitch channel, I also consider myself a professional roleplayer and love nothing more than putting my acting degree to good use on a variety of different shows. At present I'm working with the incredibly talented Robert Hartley GM and Dreaded GM in a number of future collaborations. I'm hoping to continue my role as an ambassador to the creative element of the community and build bridges between content creators.

Between fans asking about the minor details in the shows, and the co-workers asking for the meaning behind your writing, you probably field a lot of questions. What's a question you've never been asked but always wish you had, and how would you answer it?

Hmm a question I've never? how cryptic well a question. A questions I've never been able to answer was "Is there a game you've ever regretted" the answer is no. I've played or run, to date 10,000+ games and I have have more terrible games than some people will play in their entire RPG lives. But even my absolute worst campaign was something I did not regret participating in. Every game is an experience, a chance to learn, improve and become better as a performer, gm and roleplayer.

Trust me when I say, there have been some real freaking gems and would absolutely make for some Crit Crab story level cringe.

A very nice man indeed, doing important work in the grand world of tabletop roleplay. We look forward to our antics with him on Jasper’s Game Day.

Now we want to hear from you. Will you be swinging by Dead Aussie Gamer’s next stream? Which influencer from the TTRPG community would you like to hear from? Let us know in our discord server or in the comments below.

Adam Ray contributes much for adventurers here on Apotheosis Studios. As co-founder of fantasticuniverses.com , they write all kinds of gaming press, while they write news about the League of Legends Card Game on RuneterraCCG . On Youtube, they can be found game mastering for No Ordinary Heroes , or editing the antics on The Hostile Atmosphere . Find where they dwell by climbing their Linktree .

Sponsor Spotlight - Level Up Dice are Just How We Roll

Apotheosis Studios does work in prose fiction, graphic novels, and video games. Our main work is in Tabletop RPG. We write many adventures for 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons to level up your tabletop roleplaying experience.

To play games like D&D, you need dice. Some games may use different dice, and some may not even need dice at all. But Dungeons and Dragons has been using the same set of polyhedral dice for almost as long as the game has existed. Dice mean everything to us. I have many friends who are proud Dice Goblins, collecting the prettiest and shiniest dice around. The math rocks go click clack.

Level Up Dice bring some of the prettiest and shiniest dice out there, made of exotic materials around. I talked to Alex Abrate, one of Level Up Dice’s Founders, and here’s what he had to say.

Exclusive Interview With Level Up Dice

Level Up are known world over for some of the finest dice in the world of gaming. Your dice are made of some truly exotic material, and your storage and accessories are equally stunning. The world of dice is well populated by gaming titans, but Level Up have levelled up to become a real market leader. But no company starts as such. How did Level Up Dice roll up on the scene?

That's a great question! So, it was August 2015, and I had just come out of running a contact center, and I was on sabbatical. I had about four weeks off before I was going to look for another role and I thought I'd design a board game and write a book, as you do on a sabbatical.

About two weeks in, I turned to my wife Nadia and I said, "you know what? I deserve a fancy set of dice." and she was like, "yes, you do", and so I jumped online and I went searching for the fanciest of dice out there - there wasn't much, but I found one place at the time. I felt like it was not only extremely expensive for what I was going to get, but they had a turn around time of about nine months and I'm a 'now generation' person; I want things now... I didn't want to wait nine months and so I stood up in a bit of a huff and jokingly turned to Nadia and said I could do better than that.

She replied back saying "Yeah, you could" and then went silent. She was, as far as I could tell, deadpan, serious.

And then I was like "No, no, no, no, no, I'm joking" and she just sort of waved me away and jumps on her laptop and starts typing away furiously.

And I'm like "Honey, what are you doing?"

She's like "No, no, one second".

At the time her mum was an importer and exporter of semi precious stones between Russia and China and was currently in China at the time. Nadia finished typing what she's doing and she goes "Cool, You're going to go to the Chinese consulate tomorrow and pick up a visa. My mum's over in China at the moment and I want you to go meet some friends, family and colleagues over there in manufacturing."

"And you can figure out how to make dice."

and I was kind of like what, yeah?

"You leave on Wednesday." This is like Friday, so literally about a week after I had sort of joked about making Dice I was on a plane to meet the manufacturing side of our friends and family and figure out how the heck you make dice, and that was 2015 August or so. By October I had started making our first dice.

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Ionized Chip Orange Cat's Eye - image by Level up dice

The dice themselves are beautiful. The range is so diverse that any gamer can truly find their perfect set. What makes the dice truly unique is the fact they're all made with very heavy metals, precious stones, and even bone, while most producers still use resins. How has sourcing these kinds of materials for dice been challenging?

Materials come from all over the world and up until 2020, I was personally doing a lot of travelling and sourcing materials myself. It's amazing what you can get from all over the world.

We've sourced Damascus from Pakistan, Mokuti from Japan, we've gone into northern Siberia to get Charoite as a stone. Sourcing is a challenge because there's only so much you can do without actually being there and seeing the material itself.

Let's talk about stone for a second. Metal is a bit easier because you can get it melted down and consistent, but stone, you don't really know what's inside. It's like a Kinder Surprise; sometimes you could crack open a stone while you're working on it, and there's nothing in there, or there's a completely different stone, so you know, get quartz living inside Amethyst. When we when we go hunting for materials we have an ultrasonic scanner that helps us also look into the larger pieces and see if there's any density changes.

In the last couple of years, material sourcing has been very challenging. Trying to do it all via a Skype connection or a zoom call and figuring out if it's a good material or not is extremely hard, coupled with the current state of shipping and getting things around the world, its become a big challenge now. We've been quite fortunate in that I am a bit of a hoarder, so I've been collecting lots of materials and lots of stone that I figure we'll use eventually, meaning a lot of that stone horde has gotten us through the last couple of years.

I'm really keen to get back into the hunt in 2022. You never going to know what you might stumble on, what new material you could play with, so that's really exciting for me, and you know, it's a challenge, but it's it's fun. Like a treasure hunt!

Another important detail about the dice, that many players often forget, is the typeface of the numbers on the dice. It's easy to settle on one font and use that as the house style, but the care and attention to make a specific set of dice unique is another thing that makes Level Up Dice unique. A common theme I see is using angular, digital looking numbers on your metallic dice to give them a sci-fi feel, perfect for the right kind of sci-fi RPG. How does finding the right style of numbers influence designing your dice?

We do all the design inhouse and we aim to release 3 fonts every year. We have a sci-fi inspired font, a fantasy inspired font and then we have what we call a round font, which is a font that is based on standard-style, easy to read fonts. Our first Sci-fi font was called Sci-fi, (yeah, super original). We called one Frontier, another Blatron. We've got a fantasy one called HP - they're all done in house and I spent a bit of time finding an amazing typographer who did a masters in in font design at Uni, so that we could actually have these designs created and the importance of that is that when you're dealing with dice, especially your standard 16mm Set, that's a small surface area and you're also dealing with very specific tools that can engrave or etch or print these different numbers into materials. By having someone in-house, who understands the limitations of the tools we use, it means that when we create a font, we're creating a font specifically designed for dice as opposed to it being "oh look, we found this font online, I wonder if this is going to work with our dice?" and then we have to modify. So as far as that's concerned, it's finding the right style of numbers, but it's more about finding the right individual to create the right style of numbers for dice specifically.

Copper Caged Dice - image by level up dice

You offer a diverse range of dice and gaming accessories that appeal to many of our fans, and to us right here in the Apotheosis Studios team. Your partnership with Curious Empire has even allowed you to branch out into apparel? How was that new line of business been serving for you? Is there an item you create that the team is particularly proud of?

That's a bunch of good questions in there. Partnerships, I think, are an important aspect of Level Up Dice and we've partnered from day one, when we were a small fledgling company of one back in 2015, 2016. One of the first things we did was find local artists in Australia and go "hey you make an amazing pouch or you make a really cool dice tower, let's work together" and that's really the symbiosis of our community, of our industry. It's working together and achieving greatness together, so as far as that's concerned, I think it's really important to do partnerships of all kinds of levels, and it helps not only you grow, but also it helps you learn and understand. There's been a lot of times where I've learned from a partner I've worked with, that they may have figured something out that works better or not. As far as how that line of business serves us, I feel like it's ingrained, it's symbolic. I think I've said the word twice now, but it's symbiotic with Level Up Dice.

We flourish because we have amazing partners as well. We work with the best, we find the best and that way when you come to us, you know you are getting the best, which of course is really important to us as well.

As far as anything we've created recently that we're very proud of, last year we decided to have a look at the section of dice accessories that deals with storing dice; your vaults, your chests, your hex chests, dice vaults, etc. We we took our R&D team and sat down back in January 2021 and had a nice brain jam and we said "well, this is what's currently on the market, it's been on the market for about five years, nothing has really changed. Is this the best possible rendition of dice storage?" and after working through that, the answer we came up with was no. We found two fundamental flaws that we felt could be improved on; the first one was that all these different cases had two pieces, so when something fell, or if it was in a bag and it got shifted around, these two pieces had a higher probability of coming apart, then your precious dice fall out everywhere. The second thing was that nearly all these receptacles of dice opened up vertically with magnets. So what happened was you'd have this lift that happens, and then this reverse inertia when it actually comes apart from the magnets that could cause your dice to fly, and you've got an expensive set of crystal dice in there you don't want them to go flying and fall and break on the ground. So we put our minds to it and we came up with four ideas but we've only released two (as a bit of a special information for you right now) so far; horizontally opening, single piece-designed vaults.

We have our Duel Case as we call it, which opens up in 2 directions, left and right horizontally, so you've got no no worry about the dice flying, and it's still produced into a single functional piece, so that if it falls, it's not going to fall apart. We also released our Switch vault, which, as the name implies, looks very much like a sort of switch knife. It swings open horizontally again and reduces those two problems that we believe the exist in the market, and that's something I'm really proud of personally, because our team didn't just go "let's make something for the hell of it", we sat down and we looked at a current product and thought, what can we do to improve it? And then we followed through. It was about six months of R&D and then we were able to deliver to the world our new horizontal opening cases.

The Level Up Dice community is well represented, and the conversations had with fans is rewarding to see. Your company website talks of a lot of great interactions with the community The one with the fan in Green Arrow cosplay is a particular favourite. We here at Apotheosis Studios know how beneficial a blog is to building a community. How has fostering a community by building a blog and other social media presences helped build the name of Level Up Dice?

So blogs, social media, personal presence - are vital to any brand these days, so much so that not only have we (in 2022) set up a community team, with two amazing individuals who are going to be bringing the Level Up Dice community to its next level, but I also gave them a task to create a person, if Level Up Dice were a person. What would be their behaviours? What would they like, what would their mannerisms be? Because your brand, your face, is a being.

The way you blog, the way you communicate online, the way you interact, all of that, is a character really. It's a person and it's important to make sure that that person is likeable, approachable and people want to be friends with them; with Level Up Dice. They want to interact. They want to know more.

Is not only vital, but I think the only way to really look at community and our place in it. You know my two amazing new community managers, one of their big goals is to not only understand our friends, followers, fans (the F’s. I guess we will call them), but also to make implementation changes in the business for them if there is a pain point that.

Community has or there's something they don't like or they want changed. If there's something that could be done differently or better or they really enjoy than having some empowered managers in the business that can go "This is what our community wants, these are our people, we will make these changes" is very important. It is vital for any company to really listen to its its customer base, its fans.

So I guess to to answer that question it is super vital, super important. If You haven't got a community you haven't got a business these days.

Bronzite Lapisin Dice - Image by Level Up Dice

It's important in business to admit when something isn't right, and no idea is a winner every time. We gamers can be particular with how our dice feel and whether they meet the tone of the character they're for and the game we're playing. Was there ever an idea or product that you can recall that didn't work or wasn't a good idea? What happened to it? How did the company learn from the minor setback?

So many ideas don't work. And yeah, there's an idiom that says that for every hundred ideas, one of them is a winner. And that's really true, you know? I personally am a creative, and I surround myself and my team with amazing creatives, and we come up with ideas all the time. In fact, every single person in our business, be it someone who's in charge of customer service to someone who's doing the warehousing is more than welcome to come up with an idea and see if we can make it work, and I've designed an R&D team specifically to test those sort of projects, so we've had lots of projects that haven't worked. This is probably the one I enjoy talking about the most, because it's really a two-parter and it just shows that things can go wrong and they can go wrong for the reasons you least expect, but sometimes you can turn it around. So as I'm sure everyone knows, we do these amazing dice where we Ionize the numbers on stone or the patterns and they get this really nice rainbow effect through all the numbering. So we were developing this process back in late 2016 and we spent about 11 months on it, off the top my head - it was around 11 or 12 months - working out how we're going to plate our stone dice with this really cool electroplating ionization, where we stick titanium molecules onto them and we had taken a clear quartz die, and we coded the whole thing in this ionization and bam, we had this amazing rainbow dice made out of quartz crystal that unfortunately looked like it had an oil spill over the whole entire thing. You couldn't actually see it was clear quartz. About two weeks before we finalize and figured out the exact process and made it something that would be functionally successful to make in larger quantities, a couple of other companies in the industry who have nothing to do with stone released a zinc alloy metal die that had the exact same look. It wasn't the same design or the same method because they were using a zinc alloy and they were plating it, but If you put their die next to a clear quartz die that was Ionized completely, it looked exactly the same - but ours cost twice as much because it was using quartz, crystal or amethyst, whatever you put as the material, as opposed to a zinc mold. So the 11 or so months we worked on that project, and I think it was about $20-30,000 in R&D costs were completely gone. We couldn't release that product because it just wouldn't sell, there may be a few individuals that go "Oh cool, this is a clear quartz die underneath this", but fundamentally it was the exact same die as far as look and feel. So we had to shelve that project and oh well, that's that's the way being an innovator in the business is, not all of them are going to hit, and sometimes you're going to lose money and time.

About a year and a bit later I was working on another project and which led to our raised Obsidian, which was one of the biggest splashes we've ever made in the industry, and there was a crossover with the process we were doing with the raised obsidian where I went back to the ionization project we had and I was like "Could we fuse some of the process of that one into our raised Obsidian process?" and I played around with it. What you see now being sold for Level Up Dice and so many other companies, who have now taken it on board as well, is the fruition of a failed R&D project from 2016/2017 that didn't go anywhere because of a competitor releasing an amazingly good product at half the price. It now allows us to deliver what we see as one of the most beautiful types of semi precious stone sets we do, which have the amazing ionized glyphics and numbers. So even though there are going to be failed projects, you never know when that failed project may come back as a potential success story as well.

You've been partnered with Apotheosis for quite some time. The continued support has allowed us to take on some of our most ambitious projects yet, and for that we are grateful. As an independent developer of Dungeons and Dragons, we were a perfect fit, and as a team, we wouldn't think of sitting down to test our modules without our many sets of Level Up Dice. How did that sponsorship come into being? What drew you to us?

So I'll answer the second question first, 'cause I think we got drawn to each other, and that's something that happens in this industry; when you do awesome stuff, you find people who also do awesome stuff and then you say "hey let's do awesome stuff together" and I feel like that sort of is the road map of awesome stuff that has happened in the tabletop industry. But if I had to place the blame on anyone, it would definitely be Satine, who when we first met, which was the first PAX Unplugged, 2017 over in Philly, we ran into each other and there was an immediate like "Oh my God, you're like me and I'm like you, even our hair and nails look similar - we have to be best friends!" and then when we started talking and getting to know each other, we realized how similar in a lot of ways, we think, and we look at life and we act, so we became instant friends and she definitely guided us towards Apotheosis in regards to a a longer term relationship. I feel like I, I'm nearly 100% sure she did the same thing to Apotheosis back, so if there was anyone to really thank or blame for this relationship coming into being. It would be Satine 100 times over and I'm I'm super glad that she did, because as I said she and I have very similar taste. If she likes something that I'm pretty sure I'm going to like it as well, and I, you know, we've loved every single project we've done with Apoheosis as well, and I can't wait to show the rest of the world what we're doing with them this year.

Wyrmwood Vault with LEvel Up Dice - image by Level Up Dice

Every business is looking at this new year with a lot of hope and excitement. There's plenty to expand into with our hope that 2022 won't roll the natural 1's of the two years prior. What can we expect from Level Up Dice this year? How much can you tell us about your upcoming releases and projects?

Well, we plan to give everyone a D20 that only rolls 20s, so that we won't have any more natural ones. Uh, because boy, were they a couple of challenging years. This year is really exciting and anyone who works for me will tell you Alex doesn't get excited, but there's so much to be excited about. We have a lot of projects that have been funneling through our R&D team that are going to be released this year that I'd love to talk about, but I don't think I can get our complete reader base to sign NDA’s. That said, I will sneak peek a couple of things and then get in trouble from my PR manager later.

The first is that we released a product called the Glyphic Blind Bag, and last year we released season two and season two was amazing. People absolutely loved it. We had 30 or so designs in there and it really inspired people to collect dice as a collectible object, not just as a rollable object and we have been working extremely hard with four artists to design the season 3 Glyphic Blind Bags. Every single die in season three has been designed exclusively for the glyphic blind bags, so you wouldn't find any of these designs on any existing sets or anywhere else, and they are absolutely stunning. Every single one is an art work and I can't wait for the world to start exploring and seeing what GBB3 is about to offer.

And you bloody well know I'm going to go out there and collect the whole set as well.

I'll finish off, because I believe this is our last question, with a bit of a a cheeky sneak peek; we are launching something big at PAX East in April!

HHH

Now we want to hear from you. HHH...? HHH...? Let us know in our discord server or in the comments below.

Adam Ray contributes much for adventurers here on Apotheosis Studios. As co-founder of fantasticuniverses.com , they write all kinds of gaming press, while they write news about the League of Legends Card Game on RuneterraCCG . On Youtube, they can be found game mastering for No Ordinary Heroes , or editing the antics on The Hostile Atmosphere . Find where they dwell by climbing their Linktree .

Sponsor Spotlight - GUNNAR Defends Your Eyes and Keeps You Stylish Doing It!

Apotheosis Studios is endlessly grateful to the many fans and supporters we’ve had over the years. Through our many Kickstarter projects, we’ve been able to turn the creative visions of our team from dreams into reality.

Some of our most ambitious projects to date have required even more assistance. Both of the Satine’s Quest events at Wentworth Mansions and the Seven Day Cruise are only possible thanks to the help of corporate sponsors.

GUNNAR Optiks are market leaders in eyewear scientifically proven to filter blue light. I had a talk with Ryan Jaress to learn all there is to know about GUNNAR.

Exclusive Interview with GUNNAR Optiks

You are known world over for keeping eyes safe from the dangers of too much screen time. And doing so in a stylish way! It’s interesting to hear where things began, especially for a product as helpful and diverse as GUNNARs. How did GUNNARs get started?

In 2003, our founder Matt Michelsen was inflicted with headaches caused by long days staring at his computer screens. Matt sought help and visited an optometrist and was diagnosed with Digital Eye Strain.

With tech use rising rapidly, Matt and his wife, Jennifer, saw that Digital Eye Strain would affect more and more people. With that insight, they teamed up with Joe Croft and began developing products to address the issue. And with that, GUNNAR was born.

oUR CEO Jamison stone with gunnar optiks

Initially, the glasses were developed for those working with computers, but gamers became the early adopters of the product given their constant screen time. Since then, we have become #1 in the gaming eyewear category and we are here to stay!

Blue Light has interesting effect on the human brain and psychology. Because blue matches the sky, it has the effect of helping people feel awake. This is why social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have those colour schemes to encourage users to stay on longer. But that’s my surface knowledge, could you explain the science behind blue light and why filtering is so important, especially with screens?

Very interesting perspective with the social media outlets! Blue light is everywhere when using digital devices. Digital devices emit the harmful artificial blue light that disrupts melatonin production and circadian rhythm, the body’s natural sleep cycle.

GUNNAR’s lens technology is built to block that harmful blue light which helps reduce the effects of digital eye strain. Our lenses also have a curvature to the lenses that limit air currents and maintain humidity which sharpens detail and reduces strain. These aspects of our glasses address all short and long term side effects of digital eye strain, including: headaches, dry eyes, blurry vision, glare, and fatigue.

The result – improved clarity, focus and performance.

Now for the glasses themselves! What’s the science behind how the lenses filter out blue light and screen glare? How effective is it?

Our lenses have specific tints that are built to block blue light on the 450nm scale. With this benchmark we have four different lens tints:

Clear: Blocks 35% of blue light

Amber: Blocks 65% of blue light

Sun: Blocks 90% of blue light

Amber Max: Blocks 98% of blue light

Each lens option serves a different purpose. Clear offers effective blue light blocking capabilities without that amber tint. This gives a more color clear experience while still protecting your eyes.

Gunnar Filtering Breakdown - Image by gunnar Optiks

Amber is the lens we recommend for most digital device users. This lens tech offers the optimal protection and performance out of our lens options. Sun lenses are made for digital device usage outdoors. Our sun lenses are perpously non-polarized so you can see your devices clearly without any distortion. They also offer a 100% UV protection from the sun.

Our Amber Max lens offers the most protection from blue light. Having a 98% blue light blocking scale, these lenses are made for those who are looking for improved sleep or those who tend to use digital devices during night time.

Even though the blue light filtering has important medical applications, so you’d expect stuffy and boring looking goggles or spectacles. Not so. GUNNAR’s glasses are incredibly stylish with multiple styles and frames. How does managing the function of the filtering and finding a stylish look make for a good product? Was finding the balance between function and aesthetics difficult, or something you always strived for?

We want everyone to keep their eyes protected and look good while doing so! We’ve always strived for a variety of styles for our glasses to fit everyone’s personal preference. We have leaned heavily into the functionality category for the hardcore gamers (i.e. Lightning Bolt 360 and Torpedo-X Razer Edition ) and we’ve created trending styles to allow everyone to look good and feel good while wearing them (i.e. Emery and Apex ).

Whether you’re looking for maximum comfort while gaming or using digital devices, or you want to have a pair that fits your lifestyle, we have an option for you!

You offer a diverse range of eyewear products that protect to varying strength levels. This spread of product appeals to many, especially our fans, and us right here in the Apotheosis Studios team. But is there an item, idea, or service that you are particularly proud of?

Even though we are beyond proud of our lens technology, we have recently developed some technology to help gamers play longer with even more comfort. This is the Lightning Bolt 360 glasses. This frame is essentially 6 different pairs into one. Featuring interchangeable amber and sun lenses, customizable nose bridges, and 3 different temple options, you can find the perfect setup for your gaming lifestyle!

What we are most proud of in the Lightning Bolt 360 is the strap. Through customer feedback, we have defined that wearing glasses with headsets applies uncomfortable pressure. With the strap, that issue is completely eliminated and you can game even longer with unparalleled comfort.

It’s important in business to admit when something isn’t right, and no idea is a winner every time. Was there ever an idea or product that you can recall that didn’t work or wasn’t a good idea? What happened to it? How did the company learn from the minor setback?

For as long as I have worked at GUNNAR, there haven’t been any major setbacks with glasses in production. But throughout GUNNAR’s history, we have worked to follow trends in the digital landscape. Sometimes, those trends aren’t as widely adopted as we anticipate. With that being said, we have developed a line of lenses in the past that are compatible with 3D monitors. Because 3D technology wasn’t widely accepted, we decided to step away from that technology.

With that being said, we are constantly keeping our eyes out (no pun intended) for opportunities to help protect the eyes of those exploring new technologies. For instance, we have listened to our audience and developed a heaver tint to help promote sleep and night-time digital use (Amber Max).

Jamison Stone Gives GUNNAR THE APOTHEOSIS SEAL OF APPROVAL

You’ve been partnered with Apotheosis for quite some time. We’ve used your product to help turn in those heavy deadlines and late hours for many of our releases, and for that we are very thankful. The continued support has allowed us to take on some of our most ambitious projects yet. It’s clear then that gaming and tech professionals have a lot of overlap, as we love our screen time, so our partnership made a lot of sense. How did that sponsorship come into being? What drew you to us? Are other gaming companies big supporters of blue light filtering?

Hearing how much GUNNAR has helped Apotheosis makes my heart sing! The opportunity to partner with Apotheosis presented itself when Jamison Stone and Satine Phoenix approached me during PAX West 2021 and the rest is history! We actually identified that the Digital D&D market is a untapped market that we want to be a part of! With the rise of online table top games, that means more people staring at screens playing their favorite games with their friends. We want to make sure that their eyes are protected along with the rest of the gamers and digital device users! With that, partnering with Apotheosis was an easy decision!

There are other companies that support blue light filtering glasses. We have strategic partners such as Razer, Ubisoft, ESL, and St. Jude. Each company identified the need for blue light protection and we’re happy to be their official blue light glasses partners!

Every business is looking at this new year with a lot of hope and excitement. There’s plenty to expand into with tech in filtering blue light becoming all the more refined. So what can we expect from GUNNAR in 2022? How much can you tell us about what to expect?

As much as I want to reveal what’s on the pipeline, I cannot at this time. All I can say is that this is a BIG year for GUNNAR on what’s to come.

Sponsor Spotlight - The Last Gameboard is the Future of Tabletop Gaming

At Apotheosis Studios, we are endlessly grateful to our sponsors. Fans like you have backed our many kickstarter projects, and lead our efforts out of our dreams and into reality.

For bigger, more ambitious endeavours, like the currently ongoing Satine’s Quest, we need a little more help. That’s why approaching companies we love like Last Gameboard has been so great for us, and we’ve even had our own exclusive beta look at the Last Gameboard ourselves right here.

I was fortunate enough to have a conversation with Shail Mehta, CEO & Co-Founder and Roland Cinco, the Head of Growth over at Last Gameboard. A big thank you to Phil Macnevin, Head of Community for bringing this all together.

A Look at Last Gameboard

Last Gameboard is known the world over for the most ambitious tabletop gaming platform to date. But no company starts as such. It'd be such an interesting story to hear how the hybrid of digital and tabletop gaming came to be. How did Gameboard get started?

Phil: Shail grew up playing tabletop. In fact, when she migrated to the US, playing board games helped inject herself into the local community. Her dream is to build one big gaming community world and connect the different worlds of tabletop players. Gameboard is her answer! When she, with cofounders Tim and Rob, launched it on Kickstarter in 2019, it was an instant hit! The rest is history... we're now about to ship our Beta units to our early customers and influencers. We've never been more excited!

The perfect union of a player's unique gaming minis, the meticulously crafted monster minis, and the detailed maps that the Gameboard can make all adds up to a masterwork of immersion. We here at Apotheosis Studios deeply love that for bringing our adventures like The Red Opera to life. But may fans would love to know just how it works. Can you talk us through the process of bringing the TTRPG environment to life through the Gameboard?

Phil: The cool thing about how Gameboard works is that immersion between your environments in TTRPGs and your physical minis and characters. Similar to how most VTTs work, any DM can use their supported VTT to craft amazing looking maps using their own creations or maps from other artists. Gameboard then connects to that VTT server, giving players a surface to view and interact with the map. The difference between Gameboard and other options out there is that Gameboard can detect both the presence and orientation of physical miniatures, allowing players to continue to use their beautifully painted minis while simultaneously and dynamically interacting with the virtual world displayed on the Gameboard. As you move your mini around, you can see exactly what your character is seeing in real-time since the dynamic lighting automatically updates as you move your mini around on the board, and your field of view rotates with your character as you rotate your mini around.

Virtual Tabletop is all the rage right now, and Gameboard is one of the best ways I've seen it implemented. There's a lot of talk about future gaming tech to use Augmented Reality and VR to bring their tabletop roleplaying games to life. Is this something Gameboard will look into using? Will there be ways to update and bring even more content to the Gameboard once it's out there for us gamers?

Shail: Absolutely, Gameboard is cross device. We can easily deploy and Augmented Reality game onto our platform. It’s truely up to a developer how and what they would like to use in our SDK. Think of Gameboard as an open sandbox, where a developer can choose how they want to use our technology and modify/create their own games. Our goal is to help push the limits of our technology.

The imagination and potential of Gameboard is endless. As well as being at battle map simulator for TTRPG, you have a selection of gaming classics available to play on the platform. What was the process like for bringing classics like Chess and Poker, as well as hard hitting gaming classics like Gloom and Terraforming Mars?

Phil: We have an in-house team of developers who are working hard to bring some of the classic games like Chess and Poker to Gameboard while bringing in some of the new ways to interact with those games to life on Gameboard. In terms of other popular tabletop games like Gloom, Terraforming Mars, Mystic Vale, etc, we’ve been working hard to develop relationships with these amazing game publishers to bring their creations to life on Gameboard while guiding them on how to integrate some of the new technology available on Gameboard into their games. We’ve built an SDK that game developers can use to maximize the player’s experiences on Gameboard,and allowing the players to connect and play with a great community of players on the Gameboard platform (and beyond).

It seems like the Gameboard can do it all. You offer a diverse range of games, in addition to the battle map optimisation that that appeal to many of our fans, and to us right here in the Apotheosis Studios team. But is there an item, idea, or service that you are particularly proud of?

Phil: We here at Gameboard love the flexibility that digital board games gives us in both portability as well as playing with loved ones and new friends remotely, but we often miss the physicality that goes along with traditional board games. We also love the tactile feedback that physical board games give us, but sometimes it can be a challenge to play games when you want because of the availability of players to play with when you have the desire and time to play.

We love that Gameboard can bring together both worlds! We love that Gameboard gives us a lot of portability - you can bring your whole board game collection with you anywhere. We love that with Gameboard, you don’t have to sacrifice the tactile piece of Gameboard, whether that’s playing with physical miniatures in TTRPGs or even being able to use something like the blade of your hand to show your cards in poker, that gives board games a more natural and physical feel. Most importantly, we love that you can do all of this without sacrificing community! Whether it is through our online Guild system, or in-person with a group of friends, or a combination of both, it’s very easy to find people to play with when and where you’d like to play.

It's important in business to admit when something isn't right, and no idea is a winner every time. With a project as high tech and ambitious as the Gameboard, some technical hitch has to happen here and there. Was there ever an idea or product that you can recall that didn't work or wasn't a good idea? What happened to it? How did the company learn from the minor setback?

Roland: As a startup in the gaming space, building both software and hardware, which is very difficult, it's safe to say we've had our fair share of challenges. We're a fail fast company, and Gameboard has come a long way since the first version. Speaking of initial versions, Gameboard didn't start square. After several design iterations and feedback from tabletop players, we came up with a square design, the perfect shape for most tabletop games.

The reviews for the Gameboard are glowing. The endorsement from Steve Jackson, and the support from titans like Riot Games and Asmodee digital show you have the respect of the industry's best. Does that inspire the creative team to push the bar even further?

Phil: Yes! We are very grateful for our relationships with such amazing collaborators like Steve Jackson, Asmodee, Nomad Games, Apotheosis, etc and working with such amazing partners definitely inspires us to push the boundaries even further! We want Gameboard to be a place where gamers can really come and connect with an amazing community of gamers and play games together in very immersive ways. We have a lot of great ideas for the future, and we’re also excited to see what our community of game developers bring to the table in terms of innovation as well!

You've been partnered with Apotheosis for quite some time. The continued support has allowed us to take on some of our most ambitious projects yet, and for that we are grateful. How did that sponsorship come into being? What drew you to us?

Shail: Energy. Call us suckers if you must but there is something magical about meeting a company/people that you are instantly drawn to. We share a vision with Apotheosis Studios on the bold future of immersive gaming. That vision became synchronized when the teams met and instantly saw how our respective businesses could align. Together we are shaping the way for immersive play, that does not exist today. There are beautiful things ahead of our partnership!

Every business is looking at this new year with a lot of hope and excitement. There's plenty to expand into with the unique and ambitious plan of marrying digital and tabletop gaming. So what can we expect from Gameboard in 2022? How much can you tell us about what to expect, and those mysterious game studios coming soon?

Phil: The first set of Beta Gameboards is set to ship in batches in Q1 of this year. Hundreds of thrilled Beta users and influencers will be getting their hands on their boards and will play live! We have hundreds of games and studios in the pipeline for this year, which are top secrets for now. But you know what, join our email list or Discord server, so you don't miss your chance to get fresh news from us.

Truly exciting stuff. Last Gameboard is most definitely the most exciting and ambitious new venture in the world of tabletop gaming. To look into Last Gameboard, and reserve your own, look no further than their own website lastgameboard.com.

Now we want to hear from you. Have you reserved your Last Gameboard? Which exciting tabletop endeavour has you excited? Let us know in our discord server or in the comments below.

Adam Ray contributes much for adventurers here on Apotheosis Studios. As co-founder of fantasticuniverses.com , they write all kinds of gaming press, while they write news about the League of Legends Card Game on RuneterraCCG . On Youtube, they can be found game mastering for No Ordinary Heroes , or editing the antics on The Hostile Atmosphere . Find where they dwell by climbing their Linktree .

Exclusive Interview - Keith Baker Talks to Apotheosis Studios

We here at Apotheosis Studios have made some of the coolest friends, and some of the most seasoned gaming professionals working today. It’s only thanks to continued support of you, our fans and backers, that we’re able to have as big a sway in the community as we do.

It’s incredibly exciting to see such icons of the tabletop gaming world stand right alongside us for our upcoming events! One such name is Keith Baker, the mind behind the Eberron setting and award winning game designer for Gloom. We had a delightful conversation talking about his work in gaming and what we can look forward to in the future.

Exclusive Interview with Keith Baker

Keith Baker is a huge name in the world of Dungeons and Dragons. You've been designing games professionally for well over twenty years and many will know you as the original creator of the grand setting: Eberron. A true visionary in gaming, but few start at the top of the game. What's your (hopefully not too tragic) backstory? Where did your journey in game design and TTRPG building begin?

My mother gave me the white box when I was still too young to play it. I thought the original Monster Manual was the best coloring book in the world. I started running games for my friends in elementary school. By high school I realized that someone wrote these games—that this was a job I could do. At that time there wasn’t any concept of a game design major at college, but I studied history and creative writing and kept creating games. Part of my thesis was a sixty person, three day live roleplaying game! After college I ended up getting into the computer game industry, and worked as a designer for eight years while continuing to create freelance TTRPG content for various publishers. I finally quit my day job when it became clear that a game I’d been working on for three years was going to be cancelled, and I decided to try freelancing full time. That year I created Gloom and Wizards of the Coast announced the Fantasy Setting Search… and the rest is history.

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Keith Baker, with the alternate cover of Eberron Rising from the last war

As a seasoned Game Master of multiple settings, coming up with the stories and lines of play your adventurers can follow is always a fun process. It's important to take sources of inspiration from many kinds of places that fit the world and what your characters are like. What are your main sources of inspiration when you're crafting an adventure for the table? What's a big thing that inspired you, that most people wouldn't know?

When I’m working on games at home, the main thing that inspires me are my players. What I love about TTRPGs is that it’s a collaborative process. Even when I’m working alone creating the story for the next session, I’m always thinking about the actions the players have taken in the past and the evolving stories of their characters.

On game night, I usually like to sit with my friends and make a day of it. We'd start with a few small box games, laugh at antics, have some snacks, and then dive into six or more hours of D&D. One of the smaller games that I always have close by in that instance is Gloom, which is one of your award winning pieces! What was the process like for developing one of the best games of the 2000's? How was managing the complexity of the infinite stories that can be told in that game, despite how simple it is to play? How much involvement did you have on the spin offs and expansions?

Gloom began when I saw a deck of transparent playing cards and thought if it’s possible to make transparent cards, there’s got to be something fun you can do with it! I made the first prototype in my basement using overhead projector film (do those even exist anymore?). Collaborative storytelling has always been my favorite thing, and as a fan of Edward Gorey, Charles Addams, Lemony Snickett and more, I loved the idea of a game where you wanted to tell the most miserable story—where your goal was to crush YOUR OWN family instead of your opponents. I’ve created all of the spinoffs and expansions except for the recent Gloom of Thrones—and I’ve actually just released two new products, The Gloom Chronicles and Gloomier: A Night At Hemlock Hall.

Gloom game cover - time to make your family miserable!

You've had your hand in designing content for many high fantasy tabletop RPGs. Pathfinder, 13th Age, Fantasy Age which created Titansgrave: the Ashes of Valkana. How has working on each of these different worlds and systems informed your game design and storytelling? Do you know these systems as well as D&D to give us a game there too?

It’s true, I’ve worked with a lot of different systems. My first paid, published TTRPG work was for the game Over The Edge, which I love—and I’ve also created content for Feng Shui, Ars Magica, and my own RPG Phoenix: Dawn Command. I’ve also written live-action roleplaying games and served as lead designer for two MMORPGs (neither of which made it to market, sadly). And then there’s Gloom and The Adventure Zone: Bureau of Balance. Aside from being a big list of things I’ve done, for me all of these things connect together in different ways—just as fencing and karate are very different, but there’s basic reflexes and instincts you develop that apply to both. Working with so many different systems and styles of storytelling games has helped me identify the aspects of collaborative storytelling I most enjoy. Beyond that, I’ll often pull in a mechanic from another system for a particular scene even when I’m running D&D, whether that’s Over The Edge or Phoenix.

Eberron, for myself and many others in the community, is a strong favourite in terms of the big and official settings. It's the perfect union of steampunk, science fantasy, western fiction, high fantasy, political drama, and war narratives. That depth of worldbuilding is something many Game Masters aspire to create. We all know it was a success when it was chosen by Wizards, but where did it begin? What inspired you to join the Fantasy Setting Search? Despite how beloved it is, is there anything you'd change or amend?

Why wouldn’t I join the Fantasy Setting Search? When Wizards of the Coast said that ANYONE could pitch an idea for a new D&D setting, it was an amazing opportunity… and as I mentioned earlier, I’d just quit my day job to freelance full time! I sent in seven submissions to the Fantasy Setting Search, and Eberron was actually the last one I came up with. The MMORPG I’d been designing beforehand was called Lost Continents, and it was inspired by pulp adventure. While it’s not directly related to Eberron, it meant that I’d been immersed in the pulps for three years. Eberron blended three central ideas: over the top pulp adventure; the shades-of-grey depth of film noir; and the basic question of since arcane magic behaves like a form of science, why isn’t it part of civilization in the same way as science? If I could change one thing, it would be the scale of the timeline. One of the things I like is that Eberron generally feels like it could be real—that it’s internally logical and consistent. However, the history of the last 7,000 years is just too long for the amount of things that happen in it; I’d compress the timeline and really highlight the key discoveries and developments.

A stratified map of Sharn, the City of towers - the biggest and wildest city of Eberron

Eberron has come a long way in the twenty years since it won then Fantasy Setting Search. It was one of the saving graces of Fourth Edition, and Eberron: Rising from the Last War felt like the arrival for the promised land. In 2020, you released Exploring Eberron, to delve into themes you had yet to explore in past Eberron releases. How was compiling the list of new details you wanted to look at in Exploring Eberron? Was there any themes you want to explore still?

Most of the topics covered in Exploring Eberron are things I’ve wanted to cover since the setting came out. The planes, Dhakaani civilization, Droaam, aquatic civilizations. Eberron was introduced with a unique cosmology, but we never explored the planes of Eberron the way the Great Wheel has been developed; as someone who loves planar adventures, that’s one point I always wanted to expand upon. But there’s no shortage of other topics I’d like to explore!

With all this history in the world of gaming, you're bringing all that experience to Satine's Quest! The one week cruise is already something that sounds incredibly luxurious, but to wrap up the all-inclusive experience, you will be among legendary game masters telling the guests grand gaming stories. What was your preparation going into this event? What can players expect from your place in Satine's Quest?

As I say at the start, one of the things that I enjoy most about TTRPGs is the collaborative aspect of storytelling. I’ll certainly work to get to know all of the players I have at my table and to draw them into the story, challenging players to help establish details within the adventure and to go beyond the dice and numbers. I can’t wait to see how it turns out!

As well as the cruise, it appears that there's much to look forward to this year. What are your upcoming projects in 2022? What can you tell us about Frontiers of Eberron?

Oh, I’ve got no shortage of projects in 2022. As I mentioned before, I’ve just released Gloomier: A Night At Hemlock Hall with Atlas Games. I’ve got an expansion coming out for The Adventure Zone: Bureau of Balance through my own company, Twogether Studios (https://www.twogetherstudios.com/). I’m continuing to run an online ongoing campaign for my Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/keithbaker) supporters. And I have two Eberron releases planned for 2022! Frontiers of Eberron: Threshold embraces the idea of the Western in Eberron, delving deep into the contested lands between Breland and Droaam and exploring rules for wandslinging, monstrous PCs, and much more. That will hopefully come out by the end of summer. In the meantime, I’m also working on a project codenamed Chronicle, which collects some of my best online content from the last decade and revises and expands upon it.

Fascinating stuff indeed. It’s great to hear a storied career direct from a veteran of tabletop gaming design. The things Keith has been a part of will be celebrated by gamers like us for a very long time indeed.

We have a lot to look forward to from Keith over the coming year, including the one week cruise as part of Satine’s Quest. Book your spot right now, and look out for more of Keith’s work, and even more spotlights on members of the TTRPG community right here on the Apotheosis Studios blog!

Now we want to hear from you. How did you first hear about the gaming works of Keith Baker? Which creator or collaborator in the world of TTRPG would you like to hear more about? Let us know in our discord server or in the comments below.

Adam Ray contributes much for adventurers here on Apotheosis Studios. As co-founder of fantasticuniverses.com , they write all kinds of gaming press, while they write news about the League of Legends Card Game on RuneterraCCG . On Youtube, they can be found game mastering for No Ordinary Heroes , or editing the antics on The Hostile Atmosphere . Find where they dwell by climbing their Linktree .

Apotheosis Studios' Exclusive Interview With Robert Hartley

Happy New Year, gamers!

We here at Apotheosis Studios have a great many friends out there in the world of table top role playing gaming. I know that Dungeons and Dragons have brought me some of my very best friends, but they’ve also introduced me to some of the finest creators and most colourful characters in our broad and big community.

I had the pleasure of having a discussion with Robert Hartley. Professional Dungeon Master and thespian in the hilariously well produced D&D Logic series over on Viva La Dirt League. It was great to get an insight into his in on this wide world of content creation.

Exclusive Interview with Robert Hartley

I believe that big things have small beginnings. What's your (hopefully not too tragic) backstory? Where did your journey in writing and in TTRPGs begin?

Well, there are obviously contributing factors that I wouldn’t be aware of, like the types of shows I watched on TV and the movies I watched at the cinema, the books I read as a kid and the fact I always gravitated towards playing make-believe as a child, rather than sports, but for the stuff I can actually concretely point at as directly contributing to me getting where I am, it went exactly like this:

Firstly, studied acting and pursued it actively as my full-time job for many years. Next, visited a friend in Oxford, UK, where we enjoyed a board game shop called the Thirsty Meeples. I fell in love with it and thought it was a wonderful business idea to avoid the cost and storage issues of buying your own games and, instead, rent them for a couple hours on site. I came back to NZ with the plan that I would open one in Auckland if there wasn’t one. Turns out, there was! A wonderful café called Cakes N’ Ladders. I started going regularly and further developing a love of boardgames while supplementing it by watching Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop series. In particular, I watched him play Dragon Age and thought ‘hmm, is this what D&D is like?’ So, I contacted a friend I knew was a DM and asked them to set me up my first game.

Then I blacked out and haven’t woken up yet, going on 6 years later!

Robert Hartley as Aaron, a sword for hire - image by Viva la dirt league

People in our communities are what I call, capital G, Gamers. I know my tastes are very diverse, but we want to hear from you. What kinds of games do you enjoy; PC, console, tabletop, or anything in between? Where do you go to relax? Do you have an all-time favourite?

I was just thinking about this very question the other day. I caught myself not thinking of myself as a gamer, and then paused and thought, ‘wait a second… I play board games, dice games, card games, bluffing games, social games, roleplaying games, pen and paper games, manual dexterity games, miniatures games, betting games, games of chance, and, lately, a whole bunch of PC games too; just because I don’t own a console doesn’t mean I’m not a gamer!’

As for favourites, I love deck builders, engine builders, resource management, turn-based strategy, platformers, miniature games, some social deduction games and, of course, TTRPGs. My least favourite, not that there’s anything wrong with them, just haven’t found them to my taste, are worker-placement games and first-person shooters.

Viva La Dirt League has been making gaming comedy content for many years. Fans have seen it grow and encapsulate gaming comedy from titles also including Dark Souls. It's also brought hilarious skits and sketches. How did you get involved with them?

A good friend of mine, Mike Glasswell, (whom I met through Cakes N’ Ladders!) is an animator, had worked with them on animating an episode of NPC Man before and he was also a friend of Adam King’s. He put us in touch after watching a three-part series from Shut Up and Sit Down reviewing some TTRPG, as he thought it would be a good fit for their channel to do something similar.

We trialled a OneShot where I had homebrewed them a simple character each and absolutely jammed it full of easter eggs from the series. They enjoyed it and it was well received on their Patreon, but not at a high enough production quality to add to their main channel. So, we treated it as a test and started looking for sponsorship to do it properly. As luck would have it, WotC reached out around that same time asking if we’d be interested in doing a short, sponsored series promoting Baldur’s Gate: Descent Into Avernus. Match made in Heaven! … or in this case, the first layer of the Nine Hells.

Link to the Avernus playlist on their main YouTube channel.

VLDL's D&D specific page has been going for around a year, and has the same level of rich production value and hilarious content. I imagine that you've been involved in that very heavily, but how did that come to be?

After our series on Descent Into Avernus released, it got mixed reviews. The people who were used to the VLDL format of 3-5 min comedy skits about PUBG had no love for this weird new diversion to a 30 min episodic D&D campaign, even if it did feature the same characters from the NPC series as the primary cast. However, the people who loved it REALLY loved it and vociferously demanded more.

So, we had a chat about how to continue, and it was decided that they would make a secondary channel and that I would help them to run it, growing in responsibility for the channel over time.

Here’s the link to the ongoing campaign.

Then the day we were booked in to film our first greenscreen for the first table session, we went into a lockdown in NZ, and so we had all this hype for a new channel and no content for it! Hence was born the ‘Isolation Games’; a short series run over Roll20 and Discord from lockdown.

Here’s the link to the Isolation Games playlist on our D&D channel.

Robert Hartley’s Aaron as the Judge dealing with the rules lawyer

The gaming community is vocal and opinionated. You see lots of members in the worlds of TTRPG, while VLDL have a lot of fun dabbling with AAA video games. How does interacting with so many different kinds of fans and gamers inspire your many kinds of creative work?

Not sure that my answer to this is that surprising or interesting, to be honest; Viva make content for video gamers and I make content for TTRPG folk as it’s what we each know! And thankfully, (though not coincidentally) its what we respectively find exciting and where our passions lie, so the creativity seems to flow, inspired by the wonderful support of the communities.

Being a Professional Dungeon Master is a strong ambition for many people in our community, myself included. How did you get started professionally DMing and how would you advise others to get into that line of work?

Yes, I still haven’t worked out a way to explain what I do for a living to my more traditional family… especially not without saying “I’m a Dungeon Master; I’m an entertainer and help groups of people act out fantasy stories.” and leaving them with a VERY different idea of what I do for a living!

My path to doing this full time started the way my career as an actor started, or my job as a tour guide at the zoo, or my job as a kids entertainer at birthday parties, or my getting a degree in applied mathematics and working in mathematics education research; namely, I followed what I enjoyed doing, put conscious dedicated practice into getting better at it and giving it my all, studying it in my spare time, performing it with gusto when given the chance, and getting good enough at a thing that someone wants to start paying me to do it.

Once I discovered D&D, I needed it in my veins. I bought dice, all the books, I read them cover to cover, I played whenever I could, watched Critical Role, pausing to look up spells and (now regrettably,) being a rules w***er in the comments when Marisha got a spell wrong (I was learning, I’m sorry!). Not long later, I was asked to take over a timeslot, running a game for a friend who needed a break from DMing. I prepped and started a home game that it still running 5 years later.

A friend of a friend, Lara, (also through Cakes N’ Ladders,) contacted me to say ‘Hey, I loved how into character you got when we were playing Dread the other day, would you run a D&D game for my kid’s birthday party?’. So that was my first time DMing professionally. She was impressed enough to invite me back to do the same the next year AND to take me on at the ground level of a new business she had, Game Changer’s League, helping children with special needs through the medium of D&D. I ran that with her for over a year before my schedule got too busy to continue it.

In the meantime, my work with VLDL was getting recognised and I was starting to realise I had a little fandom beginning. I heard that people were raving about my work on Ben Van Lier’s Twitch stream so I made an account to log in and say hi. Within a couple weeks I had started streaming, hit affiliate, and realised that, if I really put the effort in, I could turn it into a full-time job.

I made the decision to forgo my burgeoning career in mathematics education research and take a risk by focussing on the one I was more passionate about. And here we are about 20 months later and it’s going really well! I get tremendous support from wonderful friends, fans and fine folk and stream D&D-related content several times a week. I also post D&D-related content to YouTube.

It’s definitely worth me pointing out, however, that I am privileged to have had the opportunity to pursue my passion until I’m good enough at it to be paid doing it; not everyone will be in a position where that’s a viable option right away. See what small changes you can make and keep moving towards that goal, one step at a time. Never stop striving to be a better person than you were yesterday.

Link to my Twitch, and to my YouTube.

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Robert Hartley’s Aaron Alongside the beaten and bloody Party - image by viva la dirt league

We all have similar interests as TTRPG creators. Movies, games, anime, and fiction call backs that set the genre like Lord of the Rings or Wheel of Time. These influence the games we write for our players, but what is one of your biggest influences that most people have never heard of?

Hmm, fantastic question. I rarely ever consciously grab inspiration from anywhere so it’s hard to know what is subliminally affecting my stories. I have been told an many occasion that something that has happened in game is very similar to something that I have never watched, so maybe it’s just a case of there only being a finite number of notes to make music from, so some are bound to sound similar!

One story I did consciously draw on heavily for my home game, is an anime called Tenga Toppa Gurren Laggan. I had never seen any anime, (at the time; I have since hosted a weekly anime podcast, no less!), but one of the players in that game told me his character concept was based on Kamina from that show, so, as homework, I told myself ‘if he's just given you the gift of flat out telling you what sort of story he’s keen on this being, you better get in there and watch it!’. So, I grabbed some character and plot concepts, transposed them into D&D, forced them into fitting my setting and tied them to his backstory which, incidentally, is the story they’re still following 5 years later!

I did the same when one of the other players told me he was playing a sort of amnesiac Oliver Twist and was keen on the Harpers (a sort if Robin Hood-esque gang of scrupulous pickpockets); I made a benevolent thieves’ guild run by a fella called Figan and tied it to his whole story.

Tabletop roleplaying games are at an all-time high. The sense of community and the wealth of creators have put streamed games and content similar to yours across the web. What are your takes on D&D and the wider TTRPG community as a whole right now?

I love that more people are getting into the hobby. I just yesterday met a guy who said, ‘I thought boardgames were kind of done.’ And when I asked him to clarify, ‘I thought there was just Monopoly and Scrabble and there couldn’t really be any new ones.’ And he isn’t alone in thinking so; I thought this way as well until about 7 years ago. So, if it wasn’t for these things being on an upward trend, I possibly wouldn’t have gotten into it myself, either.

Now, I love Monopoly as much as the next boardgamer, (that is to say, I loathe it), but the sooner we can get rid of this notion that that’s all this hobby has to offer, the better. I love that TTRPGs and Tabletop gaming in general are becoming more mainstream and finding new audiences.

The work you've done with us here at Apotheosis Studios has been a wonderful help. Your presence is felt greatly on Sirens: Battle of the Bards. How did you come to be involved with Sirens and Apotheosis Studios?

Thank you for saying so, you’re awfully kind. When Satine and Jamison put on the Kickstarter for it, one of the pledge rewards was that if you pledged enough money, you got to get your own sidequest in the module. Now, I was by no means well-off enough to afford that myself, (even though, with this as my career now I can write things like this as work expenses, which is an awesome perk of this weird job!), but I knew that I do have an insanely generous and supportive minifandom. So, while ever I was streaming duration their Kickstarter’s run, I had a donation goal in the bottom corner of the screen. Before the Kickstarter was over, I had raised enough to pledge the highest tier, essentially crowdfunding my donation to a crowdfunder!

As a thank you to my donators, I have worked in my community Discord server with everyone who contributed to the pledge and we have collectively created the NPC and sidequest!

Link to my Discord.

Robert Hartley’s Aaron Alongside the Party witnessing a party member’s cruel fate - image by viva la dirt league

What's the next big project on your horizon? What are you working on at present, that you can tell us about?

For projects with others, I hope to continue working with Apotheosis Studios on upcoming projects and, of course, with Viva La Dirt League on our ongoing campaign and supplemental ‘Behind the Screen’ episodes.

One huge project for me in 2021 was being writer and showrunner for my own web-series with Viva La Dirt League, called ‘D&D Logic’. It was a 10-episode, standalone series in the short, comedy, sketch style of VLDL’s main channel, with a leaning on the logical inconsistencies of TTRPGs. I had an absolute blast writing it and helping to create it and I am very grateful to the folk at Viva for giving me such an awesome (in the literal sense) platform to utilise for such high production quality D&D skits. So watch this space for Season 2…

Link for D&D Logic playlist on VLDL YouTube.

As for personal projects, I will be focussing on growing my YouTube channel and meeting new inspiring people from the community. On Twitch I routinely run a series I call ‘Short Rest’ where I get a guest on to just have chill chat-style interview and a general meet and greet. I’ve had on Satine and Jamison, the gang at Deerstalker Pictures, Felix from the Dingo Doodles Fool’s Gold Campaign, and other wonderful people. I have some exciting guests lined up for early this year as well.

I also plan to do more collaborative TTRPG streaming this year with fantastic streamers like DreadedGM and DeadAussieGamer among many others.

Finally, another project I have ongoing is an interactive D&D game on Twitch where the chat hivemind controls the actions of the main character. That story will be continuing throughout this year as well, no doubt, so jump in if you want me to DM for you!

Between fans asking about the minor details in the shows, and the co-workers asking for the meaning behind your writing, you probably field a lot of questions. What's a question you've never been asked but always wish you had, and how would you answer it?

Matt Mercer hasn’t yet asked me if he can play in one of my games… I’d probably answer it with a ‘umm, I’m kind of at capacity already dude, let me see if I can move some stuff around’.

Truly deep and interesting stuff from Rob Hartley. It’s great to hear the dedication to being a Game Master by immersing yourself in a genre all new to you. It’s also inspiring to hear his determination to act finally paid off after so long away from things.

Now we want to hear from you. How has hearing the experience and antics of a creator like Rob Hartley inspired you and your way ahead in our TTRPG world? Who would you like to hear from next? Let us know in our discord server or in the comments below.

Adam Ray contributes much for adventurers here on Apotheosis Studios. As co-founder of fantasticuniverses.com , they write all kinds of gaming press, while they write news about the League of Legends Card Game on RuneterraCCG . On Youtube, they can be found game mastering for No Ordinary Heroes , or editing the antics on The Hostile Atmosphere . Find where they dwell by climbing their Linktree .

Paladins to Dark Forces Utter the Prayer of Disintegration

Magic is everywhere in the worlds of Dungeons and Dragons. It fuels and powers the homes and economies of these fantastic settings as electricity and science does in our world.

When a Game Master is building their world for the next game of Dungeons and Dragons, they have to ask themselves some very frank questions about the fundamentals of magic. It's easy to just say that magic exists and it perfectly matches the last chapters of the Player's Handbook. It's more fun and rewarding to unpack that mechanic, and to see what counts as truly magical in the earliest forms of your setting, to see where all that magic truly comes from.

Once you do that, you can have so much fun with the details of it to make your own world unique. It's a common trope in current fantasy fiction to see that magic is on its way out of the world. The Elves are sailing west, the last of the dragons are extinct. The phrase 'magic is dying' is a common one in current fantasy fiction. If you had a reason to explain why the magic is leaving your setting, thus influencing the low magic nature of your world, then you could make for some truly interesting stories. If your world is teeming with strange beasts and geysers shooting multi coloured magical plasma to the outer planes, then explaining where that magical energy came from is fascinating and can lead to different but equally interesting stories.

As I was drafting this post, it was simply going to be an in depth look at the spell I had created, Prayer of Disintegration. As I was writing it, the thoughts of the origins of magic in Dungeons and Dragons settings made for an interesting debate in my mind. It all came from the rough origin of this spell in my mind, and the question: where do spells actually come from?

The Craft of a Spell

The phrase 'Spell Craft' is ubiquitous in our world, in the witch and wicca communities, as well as in fantasy fiction. The phrase itself really made me think. The act of crafting a magical ritual that can be repeated by other mages is such an interesting idea that I sort of sat thinking.

Much as a great philosopher once asked: are we human or are we dancer; or am I a person or am I a brand; I had to ask myself are spells invented or discovered?

My efforts to find an answer about discovered and invented magic - Frantic Research by Mitchell Malloy

Of course we are wondering about the metaphysics about a fantastical world that we collectively create when sitting around in a circle with friends, but it's a question that one should ask themselves more just to make the worlds and stories all the more real.

So in the case of Prayer of Disintegration, as you'll read in a little moment, the knowledge of this spell was given to a sect of clerics. This however doesn't really clear up the question. Was the spell discovered or invented? If it was handed down to these priests by the dark god, they discovered it. Or perhaps the dark god invented it. It's all very ambiguous, but in storytelling that's something I deeply like as it allows the reader to make the choice to apply what they like to the story.

It makes us wonder, are spells discovered or invented? Is the combination of magic words, gestures, and the reactions inside a focus or with material components an effect that will always happen when channelled by the will of a spell caster, or is it something that said spell caster has iterated and worked on constantly to be able to create through practice and care.

In our world, the balance of what's discovered and what's invented by science is a usual balance that gets deeper and more strange the further advanced things get in science. Obviously at the service level, every device and tool used to do science (and in our case, magic implement to do spell craft) was invented. Every natural force like gravity and electromagnetism (and the raw mana that flows through ley lines and in the blood of dragons was discovered). But in physics, the deeper down the rabbit hole of quantum physics, the elementary particles were created to fit the standard model of theoretical physics. Their findings have since been proven to be accurate and correct. Those particles were both invented and discovered. Some elements of magic may yet be the same?

In any case, the origin of specific spells, how a mage can twist the fabric of nature to pull rabbits from hats or set entire castles on fire has to come from somewhere. Did they discover this magic, or did they bring it into existence with their own will power? The choice is yours.

Prayer of Disintegration

Time for the main event!

Anyone who knows me knows I have a long history of playing Magic the Gathering. The iconic board clearing spell Merciless Eviction, during play testing, was called Prayer of Disintegration. That name has always stuck with me simply because I think it's both cool, and a better name than Merciless Eviction. This name did not get its justice in Magic the Gathering so it's only right it gets its time in the sun with me.

As we talked in the earlier stage of the article, there's an interesting debate about whether spells are discovered or invented. In the case of Prayer of Disintegration, it's hard to tell.

In ancient times, when the gods strode about the world, a sect of clerics worshipped a god of deep darkness, one known for spreading ill will and curses to many mortals that lead to painful death. This very same entity was defeated by a glade of druids which lead to the creation of the Sword of Feast and Famine.

The first efforts to create the prayer of disintegration - Cabal Ritual by Kieran Yanner

These penitent believers all look to this dark god for their guidance and ideals. The worship of painful, merciless death is a paradoxical one, and it leads to these priests being spreaders of the deep curse that the god pervades, while seeking new and gruesome ways to punish life and spread death.

In a grand circle, the priests began to join in chanting, seeking to spread pain and misfortune to those as far as they could sense. The prisoners they kept looked on from their chains in horror as the thrumming noises their chants made their blood boil and their skin bubble. Their forms turned to a thick ashy powder, as their forms slowly drifted away.

The decades after lead these clerics into deep practice. Their words harmonised and were chanted over and over, until finally the right string of invocations were found. Each word was an solemn prayer. On command, the priests knew of a spell that could turn someone of a weak disposition to turn to dust.

The casting of this spell was refined down over time by these priests until finally one person can pray to this god of cursed afflictions and gain the unblessing of affliction. It's a potent spell that saps the life from nearly anything as long as the prayer continues uninterrupted.

Prayer of Disintegration Stats Generated with Homebrewery

This spell has been taught by the orders of clerics to their champions. Paladins of undeath, dread knights who seek to employ chaos and discord in the memory of this cursed god are taught this prayer from a very early time, with the intention of this spell being their main form of bringing judgment down onto the enemies of their faith.

As time flows on and the god of accursed life was defeated and forgotten to myth and legend, its loyal followers persisted on across the material world, spreading the venomous dogma that built the religion. As other faiths absorbed the original one as gods that were there at the formation of the world since died and gave way to newer deities, those rituals were absorbed and co-opted, including the Prayer of Disintegration. The use of the prayer is heavily frowned upon in use among holy communes, while arcane casting societies, like wizard schools, look on at this spell with a great deal of curiosity and uncertainty as to how prayers can undo the structure of a living being.

The Prayer of Disintegration is an ancient and deadly spell that has an ancient heritage and spreads great death and misery to those who hear it.

Now we want to hear from you. Which nefarious holy orders would bring down a prayer of disintegration to their enemies? What thought and logic did you give to the magic in your setting? Let us know in our discord server or in the comments below.

Adam Ray contributes much for adventurers here on Apotheosis Studios. As co-founder of fantasticuniverses.com , they write all kinds of gaming press, while they write news about the League of Legends Card Game on RuneterraCCG . On Youtube, they can be found game mastering for No Ordinary Heroes , or editing the antics on The Hostile Atmosphere . Find where they dwell by climbing their Linktree .