Risen

Jacob is an excellent GM. I was completely new to Call of Cthulhu, and he eased me into the new system and through the character creation with a level of patience and humour that was greatly appreciated. Overall, it's been a wonderful experience - while there is an adventure to be had, we are being encouraged to explore it at our own place, and it does not feel as though we are on "rails" being guided to do certain things in a certain order. It's more like an investigative sandbox where we have many choices, and control over how things happen. Jacob is a great collaborative GM, embracing (and/or rolling with) our mad ideas or little moments of RP, and he brings each individual NPC to life really well. The use of both Foundry and Theater of the Mind allows us to have the fancy tools when we need them for detailed room-by-room explorations, but also have more free-flowing options if we want to go to a random location, which again makes us feel more freedom than being subtly limited to locations that the GM has a map for already. The best way of summing up my experience is that I signed up for a one shot and then when it rolled over to a campaign, I could not sign up fast enough. I highly recommend Jacob, especially if you're dipping your toe into CoC for the first time.

Having played a whole campaign with Cam, I cannot recommend him highly enough. I tried a LOT of games and lasted a couple of sessions before settling on two to continue with. I stuck with Cam because he builds the most wonderful worlds, uses great world-building, knows his fancy awesome software, and encourages a really fun vibe within the group. He's an excellent DM for players who are new to the game, and walks you through things really well. Learning how to play DnD, and how to be a good player and team mate, how to navigate the group dynamics and everything is a long learning curve, and having Cam there to guide me was really helpful and important. He's made me a much better player, and that in turn has really helped me enjoy DnD more. The high tech VTT is awesome - but world-building is about so much more than that, and Cam does it artfully. His NPCs have unique personalities and voices, and there are always opportunities to explore and feel less "bounded" by the limitations of the story. Cam adds to and fleshes out the source books. The first campaign I was in was in a very small section of a world, and the second we've just started is far more expansive, and both felt somehow balanced and like we have the opportunities to make choices about the order in which we do something, and how we do it, not just follow the path laid out by the book. Overall, Cam is an excellent DM, and you will not regret joining one of his campaigns.

TLDR: If you're debating which campaign to join, and one is DMd by Dev, choose that one and thank me later. Longer version: Dev is the "Goldilocks" DM - they balance things amazingly well, and create a really wonderful atmosphere. High level play is very fun for players, but there aren't that many high level campaigns for the same reason BG3 ends at level 12 - coping with the amount of power and options player characters have at high levels must be extremely difficult. Dev somehow manages this effortlessly. We had an absurd amount of choice to build very powerful characters... and personally mine nearly perma-died a few times.... but somehow the fights were never too easy or too hard. Dev's balancing is truly impressive, as is their unnerving ability to predict exactly how long a fight will take (again, remember we have a LOT of options in Tier III so this is very impressive). Dev doesn't rely on the most advanced tabletop system - it's all on Roll20. This gave me pause at first, because I'm a nerd and I like high tech stuff and fireballs having flames on my screen. But honestly, having played both ways for a whole campaign, I see exactly why Dev uses Roll20 - everything is so much faster, and more able to cope with the ridiculous stuff we can do. On a practical level, it also means that we never spent any time waiting for the Virtual Tabletop to fix itself, didn't have to reload, didn't have to sacrifice doing something because the module for it was broken. The only time we had any tech issues at all was when the whole of the BeyondDnD/Beyond20 system went down. It's also worth nothing that all of this only works because Dev KNOWS DnD, backwards and forward. Their encyclopedic knowledge shines through, and they are also a really great teacher! What WAS high tech, as it were, was the way Dev invited us to use our creativity and imaginations. I've never been so challenged by difficult choices, so delighted by the journeys of NPCs, or so free to choose my character's arc. Everyone was given a chance to shine, to develop their character, to build a whole life for them, not just as someone who trudges from battle to battle, but has nothing to fight for. We were given moments where we were challenged to explore how our character thinks - what their greatest fear is, who they don't want to be, and how they worry power might corrupt them. We were given opportunities to have relationships with NPCs that were each unique to us. Dev is deeply intuitive as to what each player needs from a session, and makes sure we each get to shine. As a queer woman, it was also really lovely to have a DM who picked up on that, and gave me a queer romance. My character's journey included a beautiful romantic comedy subplot, buying a bar (The Tipsy Owlbear) with their best friend, and being offered a truly Faustian bargain in the form of a cursed weapon looted from a serial killer that did a lot of damage but had... some drawbacks. Now, you might assume that if you get a great overpowered weapon it'd be an easy path. It was not. We knew before I attuned that the weapon could turn me evil by changing my alignment. Unfortunately, we failed to set up an "early warning system" and did not know that we'd have no idea in-game when my alignment changes. So each long rest, Dev would manually roll the dice, and I would discover if my alignment had changed. This was such a fun RP challenge - to react to the environment and what happened differently, depending on where I was on the "turning evil" spectrum. Eventually, I one-shot killed my fiancée with the weapon in my sleep... but she was surprisingly chill about it and the rest of the party helped to set up a really cool "evil early warning system". All of this made for a lot of fun, and some great challenges, but it also made it feel like a real choice to keep using the weapon, and a really earned reward to be able to use it without worrying about killing anyone in my sleep... just the bad guys. Every player character had a journey tailored to them and their backstory, their fears and hopes, their styles and their sense of humour. It was really fun to watch everyone's character get fleshed out and have their own journeys, their own quests and their own resolution by the end of the story. Again, all of this happened because of Dev's skill and deep understanding of the characters and their players, as well as of the setting and the rules. It really felt like an epic and unique adventure, and the atmosphere was very fun and friendly. I was very new to DnD when I started, and there was a lot of grace for me as I learned the ropes, which was also very much appreciated, especially while playing at such a high level. Overall, I could not recommend Dev as a DM highly enough. They build amazing universes for people to play in, they make sure everyone shines and has fun tailored to them, and they have a unique ability to take things just seriously enough to keep the world together, but not so seriously that there isn't space for really mad murder-hobo shenanigans if that's what the party decides to do. Their characterization of different NPCs is also really impressive, and honestly I've never had a DM who manages to world-build so skillfully through everything from the maps to the NPCs to the unique "feel" of each of the places we visited. Perhaps the biggest compliment I can pay is that I wish the campaign had kept going, and was genuinely sad to lose the world, the party and the characters at the end of it. Needless to say, I will be back for more!

As a new player, I wanted to try some one-shots so I could test out character builds and remind myself why I'm grinding from level one in other games. I wasn't sure what to expect, but Sebastian's game was awesome - everyone got a chance to shine, there was a cohesive storyline, and we had great fun! As a new player I didn't feel swamped, but I did feel challenged in the best ways! If you're wondering if you should try a game with Sebastian, or trying to choose between games, I'd recommend you go for it!