Those who know me well know that I have always been a fan of tabletop RPGs. I spent countless hours in my childhood playing games like D&D, Star Frontiers, Villains & Vigilantes, and Champions. Later, in college, I started playing again and that was my first flirtation with writing for games. I sold an NPC to Steve Jackson’s Pyramid magazine and though I never won, I did well in several open-calls. I thought for a while that writing for games was going to be my future, long before I was committed to writing fiction. Eventually, I fell out of gaming and got my first 9 to 5 job. For a while I was putting out an online gaming magazine called The Fireblade with a friend of mine, but eventually that fell to the wayside as I started taking fiction writing more seriously. It wasn’t until recent years that I rediscovered my love of gaming and realized the wealth of material available both from established companies and indie game developers. And this year, after creating some concepts for small gaming groups, I decided to try to put those ideas together as adventures and supplements.

For those familiar with D&D, they now have an online store called the DM’s Guild. Wizards of the Coast, who currently produces D&D, sells PDFs of older supplements there, but it’s also a marketplace for creators to put up their own creations and sell them. Figuring this would be the easiest route, I put together my first adventure and put it up for sale. Cavern of the Violator is a 5e D&D one-session adventure for low level characters centering around fungus and a strange disappearance, and was heavily influenced by the X-Files. It’s meant to be dropped into any campaign and I tried to give some tips to make it work for anyone. It’s currently for sale on DMsGuild.

That was only the beginning, though. After delving into the Warlock class, I wrote up Rykard’s Book of Patrons, an 87-page supplement with sample patrons for each of the official warlock subclasses, including optional rules and plot hooks. The goal was to create interesting patrons with their own backstories and personalities that players and DMs could either use as written or else make them a springboard for an original concept. The book also includes a new patron type, The Elemental, as well as a new patron category — Locations. Rykard’s Book of Patrons is currently on sale at DMsGuild for 7.95 with over 40,000 words of material (and lots of pretty pictures).

To celebrate the release of Rykard’s Book of Patrons, I dropped the price of Cavern of the Violator to $1.00. If you do check it out (or the patron book), I would appreciate it if you would leave a review and/or tell someone else about it if you like it.

Since I’m having so much fun, I’m sure there will be more game-related releases once I’ve worked them out. I can’t wait.