Tales From Behind The DM Screen: The Beginning

Hi, I’m Euan and I’m new to dungeon mastering. I thought I might try and talk about my experiences so far; firstly, how I decided I wanted to try running a game. I am a self-confessed big old wimp. I get scared of scary movies, TV shows, and video games but I find it all fascinating, not wanting to see it but want to know about it. That’s where D&D comes in.

I tried to run a session of the starter set as DM a couple of times for family but could never get the hang of it and didn’t like it. I felt I was messing up. This was before I even played a game myself as a player. I decided I would be a player for a while before trying DMing again

After a few years I tried to run the starter set again and still didn’t like it. I just couldn’t get the hang of it and left it a couple more months before deciding to write an adventure myself, just a one-shot to see how I’d get on. I’d never have to run it; just try and write one.

Next challenge; what type of adventure? I thought, what would I like to see as a player? That’s when I settled on horror. After that it all fell in to place. I took inspiration from “The Thing”. Body horror in particular freaks me out, so I made that the main theme.

I’m not going to give a blow by blow account of writing the one shot and running it (I’ll leave that for another post), but I asked the group I usually play with if they wanted to be my test players for the one shot with me as a DM. I then opened the invitation up to others to see if they wanted to play a game run by myself, and also to see if I liked it myself. If I didn’t that would be as far as it needed to go, after all. We settled on a date and gave it a go.

After it was done I wished I had been doing this so much earlier. I loved it. I enjoy being a player but I enjoyed being a dungeon master so much more. I know this might sound sappy, but purely for the enjoyment and good times my players got out of the one-shot. That’s when I decided I wanted to write and run an entire campaign.

I hope you liked reading this short post and would want to hear more in the future.