I've been making up fun stuff to do with friends for as long as I can remember, but I didn't start with TTRPGs until I squeezed into my friend's D&D 3.5 campaign in 2014 (That group of friends made up a huge part of what became Level Zero, a Destiny clan that continues to grow). Once I got a taste, I had to start running the game as quickly as I could. Before I understood what a cantrip was, or a single concept about party composition, or what "edition" even meant in the context of D&D, I started running the game.

I ran the game with a chess board for a battle map and dice or guitar picks as miniatures. I "did my own research" and put together a campaign that took place in a cleric's college called Pantheon, completely—blissfully—ignorant of the monstrosity of rules and lore cobbled together from disparate aspects of various editions of D&D, Pathfinder, or anything else that looked like it might work.

We had a blast. To create a game experience from scratch? It was liberating on every level.

Eventually, I started figuring out how the game was "supposed" to work. I bought the core books and read them cover to cover. Yes, I actually did that, it was a hyper-fixation like no other. I wanted to master every tool a dungeon master could. After multiple campaigns—and with Matt Mercer as my guiding star—I felt like I could do anything.

In 2016 I was confident enough to take what homebrew I cooked up for my campaigns and put it out into the world. I put my design for Automaton NPCs on DMsGuild.com (where it's still the #1 search result for automatons) and when it did well, it fed my desire to make games just as much as running them for my friends in person.

There were quality-of-life needs and gaps in the core rules that WoTC had left for players to figure out, so that's what I did. Since then, I've released 8 products on DM's Guild, 6 of which have best-seller awards. To this day, Level Zero has sold well over 5,000 copies of various D&D supplements with zero marketing effort.

Over those few years, I became the D&D guy in all my social circles. I was running three games a week, I printed out massive battlemaps at the sign shop where I worked, I even became a DM for hire on Craigslist and made a lifelong friend doing it! I guess this is all to say I'm grateful to Dungeons and Dragons and the hobby of tabletop gaming for giving me my art medium of choice.

During the WoTC OGL debacle, there was talk from almost everyone in the community about abandoning D&D in favor of some other game made by a different company. It seemed like there was a new "D&D-killer" being announced every few weeks. Each game proposed sounded just like D&D with one thing changed. Some of them still ran on the 5e SRD! I found those ideas pretty pointless. 5e has all but perfected its own art and most groups can't be bothered to re-learn an incredibly complex game for pretty close to the same result in gameplay.

While watching another D&D-like Kickstarter trailer, I thought to myself: "There's no point in making a D&D-like if everyone already has a D&D-like". But I hadn't really delved deeper into the realm of tabletop RPGs. I had explored every inch of D&D, but there were thousands of other games that I never even tried reading. I learned that Indie TTRPGs run a gamut of experiences as wide as the visible spectrum of light! Anything is possible, so there's no reason to make a game like D&D!

I asked myself "What would I do if I wanted to make a game?"

My brother, Jon, dreamed up a VR RPG where the player could cast any kind of spell. I still kind of think that would be impossible to build in a video game. But the theatre of the mind has no limits.

The idea stuck with me, so I—once again—barreled headlong into something I vastly underestimated!