Darkrin

I played my first D&D around 88-89. I'm a little fuzzy on that as I probably played some computer D&D before that, like the gold box games.  I love playing older games, and I go back about once a year to play one of the Dragonlance gold box games.  I am and was always firmly in the Dragonlance camp.  I didn't get into the Forgotten Realms as much, I guess, because, by the time I learned more about it, I was already into building my worlds and didn't have time to read the books that had come out. 

When the third edition came out, I got the 3 main books, and since no one else was willing to run games, I became a DM.  By this point, I was already making my own, but I was not heavily invested in it as 3.5 came out, and my interest waned. When the 4th edition came out, I got back into it a little more profoundly this time, tried to like the system, and even ran a few games online around 2011-2012ish.  All the tools at the time were in their infancy.  Fantasy Grounds was probably the only good one then, and I couldn't afford it.  I went with D20pro for a couple of years; however, the games I ran online soured my taste for DM'ing for a while.  I swore that I would never run another game after how I was treated. 

However, my Nephew got me the books for the 5th edition when they came out. I jumped back into it and seriously got hooked again this time. I went back to creating my world again. Sometime shortly after that, I found Scabard. While it was still young, I saw the potential there, so I got slightly invested in putting my world online.  However, the friends I was running with never bought into Scabard.  After that campaign fell apart, I again pulled away from D&D to regain my bearings and fervor.  I decided I wanted to try to play online again, and at this time, I invested in Fantasy Grounds as it was one of the best tools at the time, as I was not fond of Roll20.  A year or so later, I played some online games that went from level 1-to 20 in 20 sessions. I got a local group together and ran them through Lost Mines of Phandelver and then into Curse of Strahd. 

Then COVID hit.  While it derailed the local group, we got back to it for a little while, only for it to fall off the rails about a year later. I started seeing the need for DMs and looking for a way to make money. I mainly saw this as a way to get consistently invested players.  I'm not doing it for the money, as most of it goes back into the hobby as fast as I get it.  I looked for the best tools during this time. I came across FoundryVTT when I bought it. I didn't want to put the work and effort into putting all of the books into Foundry, though I love its visuals. I prefer the automation of FG. Beneos Battlemaps came up when I was preparing for a run of Curse of Strahd online for Startplaying.games, his assets, and maps are top-notch, and while they were built for FoundryVTT, I figured out how to use many of them in FG and Discord chat.

Then I tried a few of Scabard's competitors, and while they were nice, they did not seem to have some of the things built into Scabard.  I returned to look into Sabard again to see it was much improved from when I first tried it. It has a lot of tools to help make your work easier, so I bought back into it and started building my world again. Realizing this would be a great place to organize my book campaigns, I started loading Curse of Strahd into it, bringing us to the current time.  I have run two groups through it now and another part of the way.  It has become my favorite module to run. However, I still like my world and am building on it from the past and modern-day settings. I have recently picked up Everyday Heroes by Evil Genius Games. I am going to start building that on Scabard as well when time permits

Additionally, I play guitar, video, and board games. I love classic cars and 80s TV. 80's hair bands & country. Along with a lot of current stuff. I currently do IT support for City of Brenham. I am a professional DM. I no longer charge for my games as it made it feel too much like work, so I am now building a website where you can donate and buy items in-game with real money. It is not required to play my game, and I will not let it be pay to win.