Snyder’s Return

Interview - James Introcaso - D&D, Fantastic Lairs & Burn Bryte

June 27, 2020 Adam Powell Season 1 Episode 4
Snyder’s Return
Interview - James Introcaso - D&D, Fantastic Lairs & Burn Bryte
Show Notes Transcript

Join me on this special interview release to celebrate the Fantastic Lairs Kickstarter closing soon, imminent Roll20 RPG Burn Bryte release and all things D&D and Tabletop Roleplaying with my guest Mr James Introcaso.
We discuss how to be a content creator/blogger/podcaster and how to give back to the TTRPG community.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JamesIntrocaso + https://twitter.com/DontSplitThePod
Website:  http://www.jamesintrocaso.com/
Blog: http://worldbuilderblog.com/
Podcast Network: https://dontsplitthepodcastnetwork.com/

Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/slyflourish/fantastic-lairs-boss-battles-and-final-encounters-for-5e-dandd?ref=b2e8v0

Burn Bryte: https://roll20.net/compendium/burnbryte/BookIndex

Jasper's Game Day: https://jaspersgameday.com/

Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) 5e rules referenced are properties of Wizards of the Coast (WotC)

Please leave reviews on ITunes to help us to learn and grow as a Podcast

Yours Sincerely,

Adam 'Cosy' Powell

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CAST

Host: Adam Powell

Guest: James Introcaso

Sound Design: Adam Powell

Music: Epidemic Sound

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Snyder’s Return :

Hello and welcome to Snyder's return a tabletop role playing podcast My name is Adam and today I am joined by award winning content creator dm skilled adept Dungeon Master player podcaster, interviewer, blogger, game designer and d&d Fitness icon, Mr. Jameson castle. Welcome

James Introcaso :

DND fitness icon that is a new one by me. Thank you so much for having me, Adam. I'm excited to be here.

Snyder’s Return :

It's an absolute pleasure just to give some context to everything. I ran. Doctors there. Would you like to give us a little bit of background about yourself and your background was tabletop role playing games, please?

James Introcaso :

Oh, yes. So I have a pretty stereotypical story. I started playing tabletop role playing games, because my brother was also playing tabletop role playing games. He's four years older than I am. And I wanted to do everything that he did, right. And eventually, when his friends needed a cleric they let me play d&d second edition. And I was kind of hooked From then on, right like this whole idea of there's this game and you can do anything and I always loved from the time I was a kid, storytelling and writing my own stories in school like that was always my favourite thing to do is when the teacher said you could write a story I was very down for that. And so there were a lot of different aspects of role playing games that I love because I also loved playing with my friends creating with my friends imagination. Right. And this allowed you to do all of that. And I was also a fan of video games and definitely at the time and even now today, right? Like, you can't do everything you wanted a video game, we come pretty close today, back in 1994 we did not come very close at all to that. And, and so that was really fun for me as well because I was able to, you know, do those things. And so I continued to play you know, throughout elementary school all the way up through college and into adulthood. And and then the fifth edition play test was happening the d&d next play test was happening. And, and believe it or not had them. There were not a lot of podcasts that were covering d&d. At the time. There weren't even a tonne of actual play podcasts at the time. This is probably about six or seven years ago. There were some deaths Honestly, but there was this one podcast called the Tom show that covered DND news still does today. Great show people should check that out too. And it's run by a guy named Jeff Greiner. And I listened to it and I kept saying to my wife, I wish there was the show that would would go more in depth. We're getting all this new d&d stuff coming out, you know, all the time these rules and I want to hear other people talk about it. And my wife said, well, you you know, my day job at the time was a television producer. She said, you know how to do all this stuff. Why don't you make it yourself? And I thought, well, that's an idea. So I wrote to Jeff to get some advice and he said, your idea for a show sounds really cool. Would you like to do it here on the the Tom show feed? And I said, Yes, that would be great. And so that's how I got started. podcasting in in with tabletop role playing games. As I started a weekly news show called the round table. Where it was rotating panel of guests would Come in and we would talk about the latest d&d News. A lot of it started centred around the play test. But it quickly grew out to d&d, movie news. And then new products once fivey launched and third party products and things like that. And then eventually started my own network. And at the same time, I had a design stuff going on. I thought, like, well, if I'm going to launch this podcast with this big audience, what's something that I else that I've always wanted to do? And I thought, I've always wanted to design games, I've always wanted to write about stuff like that. And so I started a blog called World builder blog. And I started to direct people over two world builder blog while I was podcasting, right at the end of every show, I'd say find me over here. And the blog started to grow. And from that, I started to get paid, design opportunities, Game Design opportunities, and now here we are.

Snyder’s Return :

is a lot and you've covered so much ground Looking back a few places you mentioned podcast game design and things like that. And then you've got some some pretty big projects ongoing and coming up very shortly we'll touch on them soon. But how did you go from stories in school through to basically having your fingerprint in pretty much every published adventure as well as becoming a DMS guild adept? How? What was that progress and process like for you?

James Introcaso :

Oh, yeah. So um, so you know, I really really love role playing games. I love dungeons and dragons and I've loved every edition that I've ever played is my favourite right like basically if a game has dungeons and it has dragons, I'm down to play it is kind of a how my thinking on all of this goes. But so I when I was a kid, right, I actually wrote a modern role playing game. So I played a lot of as a kid, there's a game called the fantasy trip that is written by Steve Jackson. And it's sort of a precursor to gurps. And it was much simpler than Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. And so my brother and his friends were playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, and me and my friends would play this game called the fantasy trip that, you know, somebody dad had introduced us to after he found out we were trying to play advanced d&d and failing, right. And, and so, this, this game was really fun. And then me and a friend hacked it apart and made a modern hack of it while we were in middle school, and I loved it. I loved working on it, right? And I always thought like, this will be a really cool job. And then as I got older and started to learn and was in school and stuff, I just never really pursued it. Game Design takes a lot of work, right and it's kind of hard to know We're to start with tabletop game design like, now there are college courses and things like that. But But back in the day, there weren't as many ways to start and it was just kind of like you got to pitch articles to dragon and dungeon magazine. Right? I didn't realise there were all these other avenues of self publishing. And so it took me a while to discover those and I did pitch several times to dragon magazine and got rejected. The adventurers league when they opened submissions, I wrote writing test for them and got rejected. And then I started to write on my own right with the blog. And that's really where I got a lot of writing experience because I took the blog, and I would go to Twitter, and I would go on Facebook, to various d&d groups and forums and things like that and say, Hey, I made a creature. What do you think, right? I made a spell. What do you think I made a new feat to magic item, whatever it was, and the internet really helped me. Right? So So two things. One is that I kept a regular schedule. One piece of advice that I read about blogging was always like, always, always, always keep a regular schedule. When you're blogging. That's how you find your audience. Same thing with podcasting, or anything else. If you can keep content coming out regularly. That's a good thing. So I always had a, like a self imposed deadline that I had to put out, which meant I was putting out content on a regular basis over and over again. And then the internet is always willing to tell you when they think something isn't right. And, and so I got a lot of feedback about like, hey, this would be better if you did this, or what if you tried making this next or Hey, I really like this part of your design. But I don't like this part so much. And that really helped me as well. And so when the DMS guild launched right and said, Now there's this place where you can sell your market where you can sell your own stuff. Wizards of the Coast is going to be looking for freelancers here for the adventurers League, and for hardcovers and things like that. And I said, The key here is going to be to get in early, right? Because there's going to be a lot of people who don't have stuff ready to go. And I do. I've been blogging for two years at this point. I have creatures and magic items and all kinds of stuff ready to go. So all I need to do is get it into a PDF and put it up there. And that's what I did. Right? I focused on getting things up there as quickly as possible. And I ended up with some bestsellers because of that things that if I put them on the guild today, nobody would take a second look at because the layout is terrible. They could be better to fill up, they could be better edited, right. But in the in the first days of the Guild, it was a little bit of a wild west. There wasn't that much content up there. And so and I have since again continued to grow my craft, learning how to lay things out and A more professional manner. I'm better at design than I was when the guild started back in 2016. So, you know, over four years ago that was right. And, and because of that, because of the things that I had going on there and because of the things that I had on my blog, I was invited to start writing for the d&d adventurers league. And eventually, Chris Perkins, hit me up in my my Twitter, DMS and said, Hey, James, you know, I see you you post about d&d, you post about writing. Do you have anything on the DM skilled I could look at as a sample of your work. And so I sent him at this point, I've gotten a little bit better at laying things out and that kind of thing. So I sent him something that I was really proud of, and that's how I ended up working on dragon heist, which was the first official hardcover that I've worked on. And I've worked on a lot of hard covers since I am have seven total under my belts now. And and basically that's just because I keep saying yes. And and getting the work done whenever they asked me to. So yeah, so that's how all of that has has come about

Snyder’s Return :

once that doesn't inspire potential creators out there I don't know what will but touching on the podcast kind of stuff. You've got your own podcast you went about regular schedules, where can people listen to you and your content?

James Introcaso :

So yeah, so I was on the Tom show for three years, and then wanted to start my own podcast network with my friend Rudy basso. And so, so we left the term show, we're still on very good terms with Jeff and everybody there. We just had sort of a little bit of a different vision for what we wanted to do. So we started a podcast network called don't split the podcast network. And I host a podcast they're called tabletop babble, which is very similar to the sort of show where On now, except that instead of atom it's a much less intelligent host it's me at talking to people and and and interviewing people and stuff and and then there's also an actual play that I host called the demon plague, which is based on a level one through 20 adventure that I wrote it's me running it for a bunch of friends. And then there's all sorts of other great shows that are run by the the creators who own them venture maidens names and dragons, the DMS deep dive, the behold her podcast, there's all kinds of good stuff we just wrapped up the fairest of the seasons, dark fortunes as a humble would actual play the redemption podcast, so there's a lot of really good stuff. Oh, DND brief. That's the only one I think that's active that I have not mentioned your total party thrill as well. So anyway, there's a lot there's a lot there to to check out at. Don't split the pie. Cast network comm where we we interview a lot of people on tabletop Apple I've had a lot of different interviews at NAB podcast is almost four years old now.

Snyder’s Return :

So you mentioned the you mentioned the demon plague. You've got some fantastic players on there that you dm. But you've been working on a Kickstarter recently that has well, as of earlier when I when I checked it up again, which I have backed, I'm gonna Yeah. Oh, thank you. give myself a pat on the back for that one. It is

James Introcaso :

yes, I will also give you a virtual pat on the back for that. Thank you so much.

Snyder’s Return :

It is currently 317% funded, and it has six days left at time of recording. So would you like to take us through that the work that you and the team have done on on like, what it is and what to what people get if they chose to back it?

James Introcaso :

Yeah, sure. So Fantastic layers is a book of 20 drop in boss battles and short dungeons for your fifth edition d&d games. So I worked on it with Mike Shea aka sly flourish online. Who is for me has been somebody that I really look up to. And I've gotten to play at his table and stuff. But he's been blogging longer than I have and, and making amazing stuff. And Scott grey, who is just a d&d veteran. He's been editing and designing stuff for d&d since the third edition days. And is, is great. And so we teamed up because we all like each other stuff, but we've never really worked all three of us together as like a partnership and we really wanted to, and so we came up with this idea, because we really like we really think that boss battles are a thing that are Difficult to and to design and they should feel special, right? I think whenever you read a book or a comic book or play a video game or watch a movie, right, anytime that final showdown with the big boss comes or even a showdown with like a, you know, a mini boss comes, we want it to feel special, right? We want it to feel like something more than and and ideally for me and I think for many other people, you want the heroes at the end to feel like totally drained of all their their spell slots and like they were challenged, but that they did a good job and they they won the day, right? That's kind of the quote unquote, balance you're looking for. At the end for many people, some people want a couple characters to die heroically. And I think that's great, too. You know, there's all kinds of different things and so, this book is all about that like the the final leading up to the boss and these mini dungeons and we have all these hooks that are in there that you can either, you know, spend your session building up through these hooks to get to these final boss layers. Or you can drop a boss layer immediately on your players as a one shot. When they go somewhere that you didn't expect, right, you can pull out a boss layer and be ready to go. They take minutes to prepare. Basically, you just need to read over like three to five pages of stuff and you're ready to go. And you probably could run most of them right off the page. And so there's that and thanks to the fact that we are over 300% funded, we've hit some stretch goals and we've been able to bring some awesome people on to the book so so there's 20 boss layers covering all levels of play and DND levels one through 20 and each one has advice for scaling the the layer and the boss up or down as needed. There's the story hooks and then we also are going to do about Bunch of what are called what we're calling sort of adventure outlines or campaign outlines really where we've brought in a bunch of different writers, TK Johnson, Lisa Penrose, Latina Jackie's Casey Machado rich Lesko flair. Collect Quach, Jessica Ross. Jen Vaughn, Willie Abdo and Leone I'm sorry, Leon Leon that I am I'm all tongue twisted today, Leon barrel aro are all going to write some amazing stretch goals for us these these layer outlines that define like, hey, here are some big story beats some encounters, things like that, that you can have on the way to the layer that will lead the characters up to this to this big villain. So and actually I'm sorry I misspoke it's gonna be 21 layers now, because Well it might be if we If we get our latest stretch goal, it'll be 21. And that layer is going to be chosen by the backers. So very exciting. Huh?

Snyder’s Return :

That is very exciting. So with the exception of the potential 21st out of the 20 that have been sort of formulated without giving too much away, which one is your current favourite?

James Introcaso :

Yes. So this is a this is a hard pick, because we brainstormed probably about 50 layers, you know, and had to cut it down to less than half and so when we cut it down, we really picked like our favourites of the favourite right now there's so so I'm going to cheat and I'm going to pick two. There's a free sample which gives you two complete layers on the site and one of them is a mechanical dragon that I am I'm really excited about it's in the Lair itself is this mobile mechanised dragon that well the villain inside is a surprise so I'll leave it at that but it is it's a lot of fun. And then the other one is a layer that that chapter is titled Sticky Toffee. And it is a candy shop with a nefarious owner. So, a magical creature who is in disguise, who is offering people cursed candy. And that one is a lot of fun for me. We've been play testing a bunch of these layers recently and I had a blast doing that one.

Snyder’s Return :

Sounds great. And I like both song. good fun to play them from the teasers that you've given us. So there was a lot of game design and you being a game designer, you've moved on and designed your own. If you'd like to tell us more about that and, and the galaxy, Alexis?

James Introcaso :

Yes, yeah, so burn bright and that's br y t. burn bright is a science fantasy world. playing game that was designed for roll 20 from the ground up so it's a virtual tabletop and roll 20 is the publisher of the game they commissioned me and the design team which is Jim klore and Kat cool and Darcy Ross to to make it for them. And so the Alexis galaxy is the last galaxy in existence. And you play people who are from the Alexis galaxy characters that are from the Alexis galaxy. As this phenomenon called the burn closes in its encircled the galaxy and it's slowly closing in, and as it closes in, it's devouring planets and spaceships and moons and people anything it touches that it absorbs is never heard from again. And and so the the role playing game is about like in the face of oblivion. Your characters are good people who dare to help people, right? Who dare to save lives. When that is a thing that is difficult to do because hey, the end of the world this year, right? So we've we've sort of taken the apocalypse scenario, and we flipped it on its head. I mean, there's still roving bands of pirates in greedy corporations and monsters and all that kind of thing. Right? Those are those are part of the effects of everybody being thrown into a panic and this world, really, we should say universe ending phenomenon happening. But the characters themselves that that you play are on the whole good people who are trying to still do the right thing. Even though existence is coming to an end.

Snyder’s Return :

There's still space for some wholesomeness towards the end.

James Introcaso :

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And there will be you know, tough moral choices. and things like that, and it's uh, you know, I'm really excited about it, we have a, it's a totally unique engine, I'm sure people have done what we've done before because nothing is new under the sun. But you know, it's it's, we didn't use fate or fivey or anything like that it's a totally different engine that that we created for this. And, and your character advances through a mechanism called story paths. And so you have these short sort of five event acts. And as you complete an event in an act, your character gets a little advance write a new ability or a boost to their skills or that kind of thing. And that is how you advance through the game is by engaging with the story. And so every character has a story path and when you finish one, you start another one. You can take on an old one, and there are branching paths within the story paths that are pretty fun. So like story paths are have a pretty broad term associated with them like revenge is one story path, and maybe you're on the warpath for revenge right now. Well, when it comes down to it, you can choose to take revenge or not. And you get different abilities based on what you choose. And so you might play out a revenge story choosing not to take revenge or failing to take revenge, you could immediately take the revenge story path again because maybe you regret that right? Or maybe you want to catch take revenge and so that is how that works. So the onus is very much on the player in the players choices to sort of stone these story paths adventure through as a group. Hmm, I mean,

Snyder’s Return :

when, when is this expected to be available on roll 20 one's the sort of release date for this for people to sort of get involved with it.

James Introcaso :

So July 7, is the release date for burn bright it can be pre ordered. Now if you go to burn bright.com you can check out more info about it and And you can preorder it if you want to preorder it, or you can, you know, wait for July 7 and see what everyone has to say.

Snyder’s Return :

All right, well, I'm sure people will be jumping on that sooner all across Twitter, there seems to be a lot of take up and backing of it. So I'm sure that will do fantastic. Thanks. That's all right. Switching focus back to you and dungeons and dragons and all the work you've done. Is there anything in your back catalogue that maybe you would you want to highlight or bring to the fore or possibly rework for for the new audience and people coming into the hobby now?

James Introcaso :

Yeah, so you know, there's a there's a lot of things that I have done on the DM scale then and with Wizards of the Coast that I think is really fun. And so you know, I for me One of the things that I'm most kind of proud of is I worked on the explorers guide to wild mounts. And that has a lot of Matt Mercer really was the lead writer on that book, he really let us go wild in his world. And it was kind of cool to, to work in a world that that, you know, didn't have the decades of history that like the Forgotten Realms has associated with it, or even something like LeBron has associated with it now. Right. And what's cool about that is we were working with the Creator, so he was able to greenlight crazy ideas and say, yes, that is part of my world. Now. The regret about that is that there's so much stuff, we packed that book full of material. And there's so much stuff that wound up on the cutting room floor. Because, you know, you can only make a book so big, it can only have so many pages in it, right? So some stuff needs to go by the wayside. And so that was The that was one of the things that I would love, love, love to have some more stuff. I think that that could go in there. And as far as things that that could be reworked. One of the first things that I worked on was the demon plague, which is a level one through 20 Adventure path that I wrote with john for them, I'm proud of, but, you know, there's some stuff in there that that I I were planning on tackling when we do our next reprinting and stuff like that. And that is because there's some stuff there that like, I'm sure, Adam, you're probably aware of the recent diversity statement that Wizards of the Coast put out about orcs and drought and their humanoid races kind of being monolithic and that being not the best choice and and that causing harm to people of colour and marginalised people. And so there are some choices we made like that in the demon plague that you know again that was written God almost six years ago now I think I started that and there are things that I have learned that I would love to change and and tackle and so we are going to do that with that book.

Snyder’s Return :

Okay well that's I'm the the podcast which I highly recommend people go and listen, listen to when when you get the chance is fantastic and the way you do it and allow the players some flexibility I I love rock and I love as well. Fantastic characters. So it's a joy to listen to every time I get the time to sort of put an episode on.

James Introcaso :

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, they I was blessed with amazing players for that. Yeah.

Snyder’s Return :

And you collaborate as a writer again, you mentioned the stuff on the DM skill with your namesake James and you guys have worked on Two things city encounters and you've worked on the tactical Atlas stuff. And there's so much is there. Is there more coming from from that collaboration? Or is there someone else that you're looking to collaborate with? what's what's in your sort of future?

James Introcaso :

That's a great question. So yeah, James James hake, who's the lead writer for d&d beyond and just an amazing human. He actually gave me my first job. So the first job I had in role playing games was I wrote an article about chases for a magazine called insider that's put out by Ian world. And James was the editor at the time and and I wrote a pitch and he was the first person to ever greenlight me and and then I found out he was 10 years younger than me and I was like, Oh, my gosh, I got a lot of catching up to do. And, but he's a genius and I love working with him and he's a great collaborator. We don't have anything. I don't think we have anything coming down the pike, but he's one of the diems guild to add apps. So we do end up working together on a lot of DMS guild releases. We work together on the wild mountain book, we work together on dragon heist, we work together on descent into a furnace. So we've worked on some hard covers together too. So, so I think it's safe to say as long as he's not sick of me, I would love to work with him again. Right now, a collaboration that I'm really excited about is I am working with Daniel de Fox, who is the creator of this vi hender RPG and and he and I are working on a an adventure first by hander I can't say too much about it yet because we just signed the contract and we've just gotten rolling on it, but it's gonna be like a full length, you know? waterdeep Dragon heist cursive straw style adventure that that and I when I say style I just mean like that hardback sort of cover adventure that's going to happen so yeah,

Snyder’s Return :

well so good sorry.

James Introcaso :

Oh sorry and then there's a there's a whole list of people that I would like to collaborate with many of them are people we just hired to be stretch goal writers for the the fantastic layers book Gabe Hicks is is somebody who I am eager to, to work with. So there's there's a lot of people that I would I would really like to to work with or keep working with in the future. All right.

Snyder’s Return :

You mentioned that the spy hand RPG and potentially a few ways in the room possibly pricked up and are unfamiliar with the RPG you're able to sort of touch on that.

James Introcaso :

Yeah, so it's my hander is a mediaeval fantasy A role playing game. It's different than d&d and that it's a it's like a more grim dark and, quote unquote difficult game. And I don't think it's actually it's not any more complex than d&d is. But combat is more deadly. When I say difficult. That's really what I mean, right. And so you're encouraged ins by hand or to use a lot of everything at your disposal, not just combat to solve a lot of your problems. And it's a game where it's a game about what you will do to survive kind of right. I would say there isn't a lot of like being a hero, you're mostly saving yourself and your friends as you try to make a living adventuring. And you do definitely save towns and villages and things like that as well. But it is more about that. You're the reasons for doing it are because this is what you do this is your job right and when you when you hear people say yeah just doing my job that's kind of part of the vai hander mentality is this this world where it is tough to survive and and so you're doing that and there's you know, magic in this game is is not as prevalent as it is in d&d because magic is dangerous, right casting magic comes with risks. And people often see magic as associated with evil and chaos and the bad forces of the world. And so if you're a magic user, maybe you hide that when you're going into town and you're constantly fighting the corruption every time you you know, cast a powerful spell and stuff like that. So it is a it's really fun. It's got a lot of options for character building. Basically, you You pick a starting profession, which is kind of like a class, and then you have more chances to pick other professions and there's not a tonne of prerequisites or anything like that. So you can do a lot of mixing and matching of all these different combinations. And, and you know, when you like, when you die, you're dead, you're probably not coming back. When your hand gets cut off, it's probably staying cut off that kind of thing. So it's definitely a game of consequences as well.

Snyder’s Return :

Oh, well, that's it sounds good. It's pigs might just have to say, Oh, my bees checking that out once we've finished this interview,

James Introcaso :

and I will throw out there that the does by hand or player's handbook. If people are interested in checking it out. It's available for free on roll 20. So, which is a tonne of content that slanders player's handbook is like, I think almost 400 pages of stuff. So, so yeah, so you can you can get that totally for free on roll, Tony.

Snyder’s Return :

So when you're over in row 20, check it out burn bright. You can also pick up those right hand plays.

James Introcaso :

That's right. That's right. Get ready to play all the things I make.

Snyder’s Return :

Do Absolutely. Saying that. Well, where can we find you next as a DM and where can you find your next as a player?

James Introcaso :

Oh, it's a great question. So, let me think next as a player. I know next is a DM I can tell you that at the end of August. The dates and times are not totally set yet. But I will be running probably a game of burn bright for a one shot of burn bright for Jasper's game day, which is an amazing charity run by Fenway Jones. And it's all about you know, suicide prevention that that charity so, so be on the lookout for that. Jasper's game day. I think They're Jasper's game.com and if you Google it, they will come up. And as a player See I do I do a lot of playing, but I don't do a lot of it on stream or on podcast. But let me think I think the next time I will be playing in a stream. Well, I can tell you that I just played a game again on the Stratus Academy. And I also played with chromatic Kimura on their wild mount game as a guest. So I would say keep watching those streams. I if they want to have me back, I will be back soon to help play games for charity. That is my favourite thing to do.

Snyder’s Return :

Is is wonderful. Something two things I haven't touched on one your blog and the stuff you do with your dad. Entertainment allowed if you'd like to expand that probably sounds weird out of context, but if you'd like To expand.

James Introcaso :

Yeah, I'll just leave it there. No. Um, so yeah, so world builder blog started as a blog where I was building my homebrew world, and the creatures and class options and all that kind of stuff in it, and now has just become a blog about game design and the industry and things that I want to make and that sort of thing. Um, recently, I've been posting a lot of previews of my dad's monster manual on that, and my dad's monster manual is a product that I'm going to release on the DMS guild that I've been working on with my dad, and also with some of the other Gilda depths who are going to you know, edit and and help me lay it out and all that kind of stuff. So Hannah rose and Richard Lesko flair, who are just wonderful humans are also working on that. But essentially what I do is I show my dad a picture from the monster manual, just the picture of a creature and then I have him describe to me what he thinks the creature does what he thinks the creatures name is what he thinks the creatures lore is and I asked him follow up questions and things like that and then I write all of that down and I create a stat block and you know monster manual style entry for the creature based on my dad's description and and so the creatures are going through play testing right now we had, you know, some sensitivity readers go over the the material and and Hannah's editing things which is laying stuff out and you can actually get a preview in addition to on my blog on the DMS guild right now there is a bundle that has a bunch of different previews of upcoming products and and things like that and it is, let me see if I can can find what this is called. It is called the guild notes and benefits Red Nose Day. So you Hey look at that your support and charity if you go check it out and get into view a lot of creators work anyway you can see a preview of what it will look like laid out. And, and my dad's interpretation of the flump and beholders is is in there so and it is just really fun. My dad has watched me play d&d for, you know, almost 25 years now and has participated and I've even run a game for him and but he doesn't know a tonne about it, but he does have a wild imagination so so getting to do this project with him. It started as like I bet we're just gonna hear a bunch of dad jokes right and it's actually turned into a really heartfelt thing that I'm very proud of to have created with my father.

Snyder’s Return :

Good. Sounds like a lot of work but work from the heart and it sounds like you've got your father's imagine So we're going from work to work out. Lauren urban your rock from the demon plague and I'm sure friend and colleague tweeted about having a DND fitness stream on Twitch and I said I'd ask if you would be interested in that

James Introcaso :

DND fitness stream on Twitch so like people would see my sweaty faces I work out. I got to say that is scary. But the whole point of d&d Fitness is like, not being afraid and jumping in right? I think many of us in the d&d community grew up probably as as what as what we may call a nerd Adam, a geek, not necessarily someone who is great at at sports, as it were. And, and that definitely fits me to a tee So, yeah, I would do it, I would do it. It's in the spirit of d&d fitness and I think it's great. And I, I'm a big Lauren urban fan and would basically do anything Lauren asked me to do. If it was a project to getting to work with her. So yes, 100% I'm in, you will regret asking me because it's gonna be very sweaty.

Snyder’s Return :

But Fair enough, you know, you can always set it off for charity that that would benefit more people and as well as drawing people into the hobby and fitness and it's a good combination. Should the project move ahead? And thank you for your time. Would you like to remind everybody where we can find you and your content? Just so in case people have forgotten from the start, they can refer to it?

James Introcaso :

Sure. Yeah. twitter.com slash James intercom So James, intercom, calm and world builder blog.com. Oh, and don't split the podcast network. com. Well, there's a lot of websites So yes, but if you if you hit me up on Twitter, I've got everything linked in my, my bio.

Snyder’s Return :

All right, if final question for you before we close this out, if you could offer another piece of advice or some advice to new creators or podcasters or even DMS and players, just a general piece of advice for those looking to start on one of those avenues, if not more than one, what would you say to them?

James Introcaso :

I think one of the biggest things you can do is get involved in the community. You know, the the online community is a great place to go especially right now with COVID. Right? We're not heading out to conventions or things like that. Those are also great things to do to be a community member but I would encourage you to go to Facebook go to Twitter, go to discord and and talk with people all Lot of people are willing to give help. A lot of people have created articles and posts and things like that meant to help new creators. And so so you're not in this alone, right? And so the community has helped me out a bunch and and really taught me how to be a designer in many, many ways. And so I would say get involved and give to the community as much. if not more than you plan to take from the community, right be be willing to give your own advice, be generous with your time too. And, and hang out and and all of that is with the Asterix of sometimes Twitter and Facebook and discord can be terrible places and they can suck your time and they can make you feel bad about yourself. So step away from the community when you need to as well.

Snyder’s Return :

Never has to have a break for yourself.

James Introcaso :

Exactly. Exactly.

Snyder’s Return :

Well, thanks for your time today, James. I really appreciate talking to you and covering so many topics and having some Really great advice given over to, to those looking to take out the hobby. So yeah, absolutely appreciate you coming on the show.

James Introcaso :

Thank you, Adam. I really appreciate you having me. This has been great. And and the work you're doing is super important and supports a lot of creators. So thank you.

Snyder’s Return :

Thank you. I hope we can talk again in the future. I would love that. Thank you very much, James.

James Introcaso :

Thank you.

Snyder’s Return :

Thanks for listening, if you want to hear more of us or to get in contact with us, you can find us on Twitter at Return Snyder. You can find us on Instagram, Facebook, and also if you wish to support the channel on patreon@patreon.com slash nice return. music and sound effects provided for this episode are from epidemic sounds.com Transcribed by https://otter.ai