Sov

he/him

5.0

(25)

TOP GM

Timezone

America/los Angeles

Language

English

Identity

Streamer

Podcaster

Artist

Game Designer

About Sov

I'm Sov, full-time GM, system designer, and adventure writer. The first time I sat down at a TTRPG table, I went home and started writing. My own worlds, my own mechanics, my own stories. That creative drive never stopped and eventually became a career. I run exclusively original settings: entirely my own worlds, with their own lore, stories, creatures, and characters. I'm currently developing two original game systems alongside a D&D guildbook. I build worlds with weight: real history, powers with agendas, people with lives beyond what your characters need from them. Your characters live inside that world, and what they do genuinely matters. A story that couldn't have happened without the specific people sitting at that specific table.

At a glance

2 years on StartPlaying

394 games hosted

Highly rated for: Storytelling, Creativity, World Builder

Average response time: 3 hours

Response rate: 100%

Top Game Master

One of StartPlaying's top-rated GMs, a player favorite and highly recommended.

Featured Prompts

I became a GM because

GMing is the purest creative loop I've found. I write constantly: worlds, characters, stories, and see that work lived in and enjoyed weekly. No production cycle. No test groups. Just ideas brought to life, with an audience I know intimately.

The three words my players would use to describe me are...

Immersive : "values setting a beautiful scene and allowing people to sink into it." - Kelvin Storyteller: "a masterful storyteller that will keep you engaged every step of the way." - Hob Welcoming : "I've never seen somebody in this community as welcoming, engaging, and interesting." - Ruby

When I'm not running games I'm...

Writing stories, designing game systems, and playing TTRPGs with friends. Adventuring with my wife and dog, my best K9 co-worker is always by my side and never complains about long sessions. When not creating or adventuring, I'm consuming: games, movies, audiobooks.

How Sov runs games

Every campaign is an original world built from scratch: custom setting, custom politics, custom story. I don't run modules. What I write is the situation: the pressures, the forces already in motion, the stakes already in play before your characters arrive. What happens next is yours to determine. My stories tend toward the gritty and morally complex. The villains I write have goals worth understanding, even when you can't agree with them. The choices I put in front of players rarely have a clean answer. The immediately right thing and the genuinely right thing are often not the same, and I find that tension more interesting than any dungeon. I want players to be the heroes, but I never make being the hero easy. Combat is present and meaningful, but it serves the story rather than driving it. I run theater of the mind with Foundry VTT support for maps and key scenes. I do voices and accents throughout. Every campaign begins with a mandatory Session 0: we establish tone, expectations, safety tools, and the homebrew rules we want to play with before a single die gets rolled. Rules evolve through ongoing conversation as the story demands, but nothing changes at the table without everyone knowing.

Featured Prompts

My games focus on...

The space between the action. The conversation with the innkeeper that turns into something unexpected. The moment a hard choice lands. The NPC you weren't supposed to care about. Story happens in the details, and I make room for all of them.

Rules are...

A foundation we build on together. I start RAW and we shape the rest collaboratively, establishing homebrew in Session 0 and revisiting it as the story demands. Nothing changes at the table without everyone knowing. No surprises. The rules serve the story, never the other way around.

When it comes to voices

I'm no voice actor, but every character gets one anyway. Accents, affectations, personalities, the occasional truly terrible attempt at something ambitious. No NPC just gets my regular voice. Some land better than others. All of them are genuine, and I never stop trying.

Sov's ideal table

Players who thrive here are curious and present. They treat NPCs like living people worth knowing, not quest givers or information dispensers. They sit in a moment rather than rushing to the next one. They explore not just locations, but cultures, relationships, histories, and consequences. They notice things. The kind of player who follows up on something small three sessions later because they were paying attention. The sessions I'm most proud of happen when someone makes a genuinely hard choice and sits with it. When a scene breathes long enough to actually feel something. When a player notices something about the world, an NPC, a detail, a thread, and pulls on it because they're paying attention to the world and story around them. This is a table for players who want to inhabit a world, not just adventure through one. If that's the kind of story you've been looking for, there's a place for you at my table.

Featured Prompts

If you're into ___, you're going to love my table

Deep roleplay, political intrigue, rich narrative, and worlds worth getting lost in.

I love it when a player

Takes their time with the world. Feels the weight of their choices. Gets invested in their party, the NPCs, the world itself, and cares about each other's moments as much as their own. The player who sets up someone else's spotlight instead of chasing their own.

My table is not the place for...

Chaos for chaos’ sake doesn’t fit here. My stories are serious and layered. Wildcards who resist the narrative or derail shared moments tend to work against everything we’re building together. If you’re looking for casual, combat-first, or silly, there are great GMs for that. This just isn’t that ta