THE GM Team

What’s your GMing style?

I love running roleplay heavy games, where even combat and exploration are used in tandem for richer stories. Epic bosses, grand adventures, and mysterious lore-heavy settings are my biggest MOs. I’ll always try to challenge you, and encourage teamwork at the table.

How long have you been a GM?

I started playing D&D in 2004, and became a DM soon after. Though I started with 3rd edition, I seek out a lot of niche and indie TTRPGs. My current mainstays are 5e, Pathfinder 2e, and Red Giant.

What’s your favorite thing about Dungeons and Dragons?

My favorite parts of the game are when I successfully engage and immerse my players with cool mechanics, fun characters, and a responsive world. My reward comes from seeing my players’ expressions after big reveals and cool moments.

What’s your GMing style?

I like games with heavy investment, where the stakes are high, the environment and circumstances are immersive, the role play draws you in, and the game feels like a choose your own adventure book with the production value of a blockbuster movie.

How long have you been a GM?

I started playing D&D in the mid 90s, and have been a DM since the early 2000s.  I originally played 2nd ed, but have since expanded out to all of the editions.  5e is my latest obsession.

What’s your favorite thing about Dungeons and Dragons?

The immersion.  Getting to step outside yourself is the best part of roleplaying, and nothing excuses you from your real life like high fantasy. 

What’s your GMing style?

I like to let my players dictate the pace and direction of the campaign, and once they’ve “found the game” so to speak, I focus on that. In general I also tend to reshape the world and story around their characters’ backstories. I am very likely to side with the rule of cool.

How long have you been a GM?

I have been playing DnD since around 2015 and DMing 5e and Pathfinder since around 2017, so closing in on 6 years now.

What’s your favorite thing about Dungeons and Dragons?

My favorite thing is when the act of pretending to be somebody else causes a player to learn something about themselves or adjust their own frame of reference. I’ve seen multiple people have their beliefs and attitudes changed right alongside their character. I’m not the first person to get her egg cracked from playing DnD and I certainly will not be the last.

Other stuff about me

I love snakes with all my heart as long as they maintain social distance with me. I’m always open to dump paragraphs of hyperfixation on movies and television, especially spooky films. I’m a trans woman and I go by she/they so people know my gender is a lil haunted. 

What’s your GMing style?

I like to run a game with a variety of ways to challenge the players.  Promoting creative solutions and interesting roleplay.  Never one to shy away from combat I make sure they are never as they seem

How long have you been a GM?

I have been a DM sparingly since 3.5 and consistently since early 2017.

What’s your favorite thing about Dungeons and Dragons?

When a party works together to find a solution I never see coming.  When they share in triumph over the obstacles placed in their path.  In other words, seeing the party succeed and rise as heroes in their own right.

What’s your GMing style?

As a DM, I prefer to emphasize game mechanics as a foundation for roleplay.  I love to hear descriptions of what it looks like to perform character actions.  I also try my hardest to pass around time in the spotlight.

How long have you been a GM?

I have been DMing for about seven years, including D&D 3.5, 5e, Warhammer 40k RPG, and Star Wars RPG.  My longest campaign was about 14 months.

What’s your favorite thing about Dungeons and Dragons?

My favorite thing about Dungeons and Dragons is watching a party of strangers evolve into a party of dear friends, full of stories that they made together.

Although they have GMed in Radiant Realm before (and may do so again in the future), Gage primarily works behind the scenes ceaselessly invoking the eldritch rituals to support the other team members and the program as a whole.

They have been playing D&D and World of Darkness (especially Werewolf: The Apocalypse) for entirely too long.  They got their start with online text role-playing back in the day, and have played all-day tabletop in a multi-year campaign, but live action role-playing is ultimately their preferred gaming format — and maybe some day they'll be able to convince Radiant Realm to partake in a fully LARP campaign.

Other important things to know: Gwaedhêlin is her name in Sindarin.

What’s your GMing style?

Coming from a cultural background that heavily encourages communal storytelling, I come to the table first and foremost with the thought of creating an inclusive experience that is fun and entertaining, creates and firms social bonds, and teaches us something about the world and ourselves we didn’t know before.

How long have you been a GM?

While I have been a Dungeon Master™ for less than a year, I have been running Tabletop Roleplaying Games for more than two decades.  I started Middle-Earth Roleplaying in the mid-nineties and eventually heavily involved myself in the World of Darkness (particularly Mage: the Ascension and Werewolf: the Apocalypse).  I have also written for a host of games, including the previous two, and am one of the creators and authors of Transformers: the Roleplaying Game.

What’s your favorite thing about Dungeons and Dragons?

My favourite thing about roleplaying games generally is the pathos we earn through communal storytelling and immersive roleplay, but my favourite thing about Dungeons & Dragons in particular is the healthy mix between roleplaying and war gaming (the tabletop combat mechanics).  I find a lot of joy in visual representation of imaginary worlds, and love art, miniatures, props, and maps.  I think D&D is well-suited to a lot of those, where they aren’t as important in some other styles of TTRPGs.

My Paradigm

A lot of Dungeons & Dragons is built around expectations of a Western colonial mindset, with a significant amount of the lore inspired by European mythos.   That is not how I approach my games.  I utilize a significant amount of Indigenous storytelling methodologies and employ non-western paradigms and perspectives.  This can be challenging for those of us who have grown up ensconced in Western colonial storytelling and paradigm, but I don’t want this to feel intimidating.  I want to help you step into a world where how you are part of that world is completely different from how you are part of this one.

What’s your GMing style?

My DM style is all about fun first. The Rules are a way for us to have fun together in a fair way and play to our hearts content. I’m all about grand descriptions and stylized combat. A flair for the dramatic is always welcomed at my table and encouraged throughout play. I like to keep my players engaged emotionally in the story. I try to bring my characters to life, and the more a player is willing to invest, the more interesting the story can be.

How long have you been a GM?

I have been running games in dungeons and dragons since I was about 13 or 14 years old when I met my very best friend in the world William “Jack” Baker.

What’s your favorite thing about Dungeons and Dragons?

My favorite thing about dungeons and dragons is the acting and the roleplaying between people. Play is vastly under appreciated and under utilized in our adult lives, and I believe that bringing people together through play, can help bring together a community and even help to heal trauma. We don’t always feel our best, and sometimes there’s no better feeling than working toward a common goal with friends. Plus there’s loot!

What’s your GMing style?

I'm pretty laid back and lenient.  I like to give the players creative freedom and let them build their characters how they wish.

How long have you been a GM?

This is my first full size campaign, but I've been doing one-shots.

What’s your favorite thing about Dungeons and Dragons?

The roleplaying and storytelling!

What’s your GMing style?

I focus on roleplay heavy campaigns and integrating player backstories into the plot.  I like to mix light whimsical aesthetics with darker themes.

How long have you been a GM?

I’ve been DMing for several years.

What’s your favorite thing about Dungeons and Dragons?

I love how it encourages creative problem solving and cooperation.

What’s your GMing style?

I like to use heavy descriptions for situations and arenas in order to give the player as many creative environmental options as possible, and encourage use of creative solutions. I also like to play in campaigns where you really feel like you're being drawn into a world just as large and complex and crazy as ours.

How long have you been a GM?

I’ve been playing DnD 5e since about 2019-2020 playing my first games with Radiant Realm and have been a DM for home games since late 2020.

What’s your favorite thing about Dungeons and Dragons?

The modularity of 5th Edition is like using a heavily modifiable game engine, I can potentially reflavor and modify any number of mechanics to fit a theme or setting of a game or work from the base items and mechanics of the game and expand upon them to make interesting NPC’s, enemies, rules, really anything.

What’s your GMing style?

My DMing style includes lots of epic dialogue and epic roleplaying with heavy combat in between! My stories evolve around the player characters and focus on their actions. My job as DM is to react to your characters in a way that builds the world around the story. I try to regularly use visuals and musical media to enhance the experience.

How long have you been a GM?

I have been a DM for about 3 years now, with a lot of that time being both a consistent player and DM which allows for experience on both sides of the screen!

What’s your favorite thing about Dungeons and Dragons?

My favorite thing about Dungeons and Dragons is the ability to tell stories with your friends and more specifically make your friends laugh with the stories you tell! I fully believe that magic is real and it happens when you make your friends laugh!

What’s your GMing style?

I definitely have a plan.  I'm also 100% prepared to have to eat that plan and come up with a new one because my players decided to do something else.  I try to make it seem like the plan presented was the plan the whole time.

If the group leans into espionage?  Let's go stealth hunting a noble's secrets in a castle.  If the group wants to full-frontal assault?  I'll marshal the guards.  Y'all decide you wanna broker a truce?  We'll see if you can talk your way into it.  My favorite is the "truce talk while two people are split off hunting damning secrets, and the barbarian and the fighter non-lethally hold off invading revolutionaries ahead of the guards in the midst of it…"  That was a real example.

"My" story will either find the players sometime along their path, or the consequences of ignoring the threat may become too big to ignore.  Or the group moves to another city and they never hear from that particular clowned prince of crime again.  Like my belief that "character choices determines alignment" (not the other way around), character choices will inform our story on where it's going to go.  We make this story happen together. 

How long have you been a GM?

It started with being introduced to Critical Role for my birthday in 2016.  6 months into that addiction, my brother-in-law pitched me on playing 5th Edition on Roll20.  December 2017, I started running my first two home brewed games on Roll20 (because I start everything on hard mode).

Radiant Realm took me in to play the first World Event in July 2018, and I traded my international home game to start one some games.  For a year of the next year and a half, I averaged 3 ½ games per week DMing (home game is biweekly).  That's a bit more true than just saying "3 years."  I've seen a lot of D&D in just 3 years (16 players vs me for the middle of the "Freedom of Aynor" fight, for instance).

What’s your favorite thing about Dungeons and Dragons?

Getting people out of their ordinary lives to tell a story and grow together.  And figuring out how to challenge so many people without being stale, repetitive, or leaving people out.