Originally posted by RobtardGet back into it son
The Rise of the Professional Dungeon MasterOn a recent Friday evening, Devon Chulick stood in the kitchen of his San Francisco apartment brewing potions. A dry-erase game board with a grid of black squares to assist in drawing maps was laid neatly across the coffee table in the living room, along with a dozen or so miniature elves, wizards, and drow rogues, which had been released from their Tupperware prisons.
In an hour, a trio of twenty- and thirtysomething Google employees were scheduled to arrive for an entry-level Dungeons & Dragons game. “They’ll love this,” Chulick said, sloshing the brew, a combination of water, vanilla, and cherry bitters; while not exactly essential to the quest, the concoction “adds to the experience.” Tall, bearded, dressed in black up to his glasses, Chulick looked the part of a Silicon Valley product manager—which he is, at bro-tastic swimwear company Chubbies. But in his free time, he said, “everything is fantasy.”
Since October, he’s been moonlighting as a dungeon master-for-hire, catering primarily to those entering the world of D&D for the first time and seeking instruction in the game’s owlbears, Icewind Dale, and other mythological features, plus a few clients who are dusting off the rule books they put away with other childish things in the early 1980s. Until a few years ago, the idea of engaging a professional dungeon master, or DM, would have seemed absurd. In the old days, if a DM accepted payment at all for the work of organizing and creating challenges for a game, it was usually in pizza slices or beer, depending on the age group involved. Most of the time, your DM was a buddy with a talent for making up stories. Demand, paid or unpaid, was relatively anemic.
But D&D has gained more mainstream followers of late, thanks especially to the Netflix show Stranger Things, which premiered its third season on July 4, -snip
This made me happy, a resurgence of D&D. Have to say, it's probably been 25ish years now and I still do miss it.