Chapter One · The Forge
Bring me yours and I'll ink it so you can see it properly: how it looks, what it might connect to, a stat block if it needs one.
Free to start, no card.
One idea calls for the next: the inn needs an innkeeper, the innkeeper needs a past, and her past belongs to a guild you haven't invented yet. Before long it's a whole world, and I keep every piece of it.
Wiping the same glass for the third time, listening past your table to the one behind it, deciding what the guild hears about it in the morning: your barmaid has a busy evening. I keep her voice, her wants, and the people she answers to.
Circling the camp, waiting out the torches, napping the kid who wandered too far: these are the things a monster lives for. I keep the habit beside the hit dice, and weigh each encounter against your party.
Boots drying by a fire with nobody sitting at it, a card game that stops when strangers walk in, a door nobody has noticed yet: this is what makes a place worth entering. I keep those, and the map underneath.
Quests keep their objectives, triggers and rewards in order, along with the arcs that bind them. Your players will still do them in the wrong order, but don't worry: the order is my department.
Swords, relics, and the ring that whispers. Each carries what it does, where it came from, and who is still looking for it, so the moment your rogue pockets it I know who comes knocking.
Histories and prophecies, filed alongside the versions that contradict them. Your players will believe whichever one was told by the drunkest person in the room, which is when the campaign gets interesting.
A bargain struck that nobody wrote down, a name invented at one in the morning, a debt your players fully intend to forget: I take all of it down as it happens. Come back in 3 months and it's still there, in order, with the date on it.
Nobody expects a Dungeon Master to provide illustrations for everything, but ask me and I shall: portraits, tokens, emblems and maps, all in the art style that best fits your campaign's theme. Beware though. You reveal the villain's face at last, and your players call him "hat guy" for the rest of the campaign.
Good worldbuilding has rules, and my old masters drilled them into me: a villain wants something, a desert kingdom protects its water, and a village of eight hundred souls cannot feed three guard barracks. I write by those rules, and I read by them too. If a fight looks unwinnable, a plot thread has gone quiet since act one, or the count has somehow died twice, you'll find a small note from me in the margin. Dismiss any of them with a word.
Names are threads here: mention a person or a place in any entry and the two tie themselves together. Sessions later you can walk from the letter, to the hand that wrote it, to the order that wants it burned, and never once dig through your own notes.
You'll have noticed I ask for particular things on every page. Any notebook in the world will let you write anything about anything. I've even served a DM who wrote on the back of a receipt. The only trouble with writing anything is that, when a player asks you something, you either wrote three bullet points and don't have the answer or wrote a whole wiki and can't find the answer, let alone remember it.
Somewhere in between sits a handful of things that genuinely earn their ink, and I've spent years collecting that handful off the best DMs I've served. You know the moment: the rogue asks who runs the thieves' guild, you wrote it down somewhere, and "somewhere" is suddenly the loudest word in the room. Each field is armor against exactly that: voice, want, first move, hidden door, one glance apiece. Plot armor, if you will, for the one person at the table who never gets any.
The downside is that you can't rearrange them, and I hope you'll forgive me that one small tyranny. In exchange there's nothing to lay out before you begin, no folders to name, no templates to write, and a page that actually comes to an end, which I'm told is a rare pleasure. Everything inside it is yours, and should you find I've left out the very thing that would have saved you during your last session, come tell my maker on Discord. He listens to me about half the time.
By now it may sound like I write a great deal, so let's be clear about whose hand is on the pen. I could invent things myself, I suppose, but nothing I dream up is ever half as interesting as what a DM hands me. So I flesh out your ideas, and when the page stays blank I recite the old familiar tropes until you interrupt me with something better. Choosing is the creative part, and choosing is yours.
Some of the best DMs I've served never once asked me to draft. Leave my quill in the drawer and the Forge is still yours: write by hand, link by hand, and I'll keep the ledger, the maps and the margin notes exactly the same. Call on my drafting whenever it suits you, or never.
I speak D&D 5e, Pathfinder 2e, and Call of Cthulhu. My accent is excellent.
Twenty faces of fortune, and your world in the balance.
Free to start, no card.
