Curse of Strahd: beginner-friendly gothic horror, levels 3-12

Bottom Line Up Front: passionate and knowledgeable long-time dungeon master looking to become your dungeon master. You don't need to finish this bio; read it until you're hooked and then book me or sign up for one of my games! I'm not the best voice actor (yet!) but I am very good at narrative, encounters, characters, and rules. I am very LGBTQ+- and neurodivergent-friendly partly because I am both. I am an anarcho-humanist determined to appreciate people heedless of national, religious, ethnic, geographic, class, and other boundaries (but maximally respectful of personal boundaries). Session 0 is important to set expectations; ongoing communication is absolutely crucial to manage and maintain them. Look no further if you're looking for: an expert on tabletop RPGs and their systems and settings; a nerd that has read most of Wookieepedia (among many other fiction Wikis) and tons of Wikipedia; someone that can spend anywhere from one brief sentence to ten dense pages to describe a given person or place, at your request and preference; someone borderline obsessed with the concepts of player agency and choice leading the story of a game involving character statistics informing semi-random results; or someone that should've gotten their degree in philosophy instead of computer science. I am the DM for you! I've been engaging in cooperative imagination involving increasingly-elaborate characters and stories for 30+ years, running structured role-playing groups in a narrative/game-master capacity for 21+ years, and running crunchy games featuring a lot of challenging situations (including but not only combat) for 9+ years. Some of my reviews are from an extremely high-mortality Warhammer 40k game about Imperial Guardsmen drafted into the Inquisition, while others are from a cuddle-fest Dungeons & Dragons campaign about a half-naked halfling barbarian and shivering kobold chemist liberating the people of Ten Towns from Auril's everlasting rime. I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about tabletop rules, encounters, stories, and worlds. I actively seek to pillage and repurpose ideas and tropes from books, games, shows, and movies. One of my first and most frequent questions for players is what they want for their character's story going forward. Unless I'm running a module for you (and even then to a lesser extent), my goal is to create a believable world to explore, with reasonable obstacles that challenge your characters' attempts to achieve their goals. We'll discuss how challenging those obstacles should be in session 0, and feedback will help me fine-tune to hit the sweet spot. This bio in progress; do you know me? Message me to contribute!