The Story Behind StoryForgers: Insights from Our Founder

If you've landed here wondering who you will actually be dealing with when you book a Dungeon Master, or whether we're a proper company or just a bunch of weird dudes with a suspicious dice addiction, this post is for you! I'm Wouter, one third of the founding trio behind StoryForgers (Sebastiaan and Sever are the other two thirds). Below I'll be sharing a bit of the deep lore of StoryForgers while also answering some of the questions we most frequently get. So let's get to it.

How did StoryForgers start?

I was hooked on Dungeons & Dragons from the very first session I played. I was 15 back then. We had no idea what we were doing, and the session got completely unhinged. For the longest time after that, I wanted to play more D&D, but I wasn't a GM yet, so I was always at the mercy of another GM to play sessions. Running a campaign sounded quite daunting, so in order to get my first campaign going, my plan was to run it together with Sebastiaan. My reasoning was that if there were two of us, we'd actually get more sessions played. I would at least have one person as excited about the campaign as me, who could help me get the players (our very busy friends) organized.

Sebastiaan and I weren't actually close friends back then. So running a campaign together as co-GMs was completely new territory for us.

It was fantastic. That campaign is still one of the most memorable I've ever run. It was fully homebrew, and Sebastiaan and I would have these long sit-downs where we just talked through the deep lore of our world. By the end of the campaign, we had written more than 150 pages, scattered across a pile of Google Docs. It was the first thing the two of us did together that really worked.

However, I still just wanted to play more, and our group would only get together at most once a month. A couple of years later, I was on holiday in the mountains when the thought hit me: would anyone be crazy enough to pay me to be their Dungeon Master?

So I started looking around online. After some googling, I saw that no one in the Netherlands was doing this seriously. I messaged Sebastiaan, and he was in right away. Sever was a player in our group, and we were hanging out after a session when I pitched the idea. He said, "This sounds super cool. Can I join?" And we said, "Yeah, why not?"

I still remember the three of us shaking hands on it.

Why the name StoryForgers?

At first we wanted to call it "Verhalenmakers", which is Dutch for "story makers", just because we thought it sounded really nice. But we waited a bit too long, and by the time we got around to it, the domain name was already gone.

Even though we started in the Netherlands, we already had this idea in the back of our heads that we wanted to grow it big and see if one day we could take it international, so we needed a name that would also work outside the Netherlands. In the end, Sever came up with StoryForgers. It felt nerdy in the right way. During the best D&D sessions, you forge flaming stories together, and that's what we do!

What was your very first paid session like?

Our first paid session came through another friend from that original group. He was a member of a student fraternity, and he had pitched to them that we should come and run D&D at one of their events. It was on the other side of the country, so the four of us (me, Sebastiaan, Sever and that friend) made the trip, and we each ran a table.

We figured we somehow had to make D&D work for a student fraternity without it being too nerdy, so we made up a story about a beer dragon, and there was a beer tornado as well. It was such a stupid session, very whimsical, but it was a lot of fun. Afterwards we had to take the train back home at night, and we got home at almost three in the morning.

What were the early days like?

To a certain extent a lot of those first sessions felt like that. There was something very magical about going to some random place in the Netherlands or Belgium, showing up, and then playing this game we really love at some random stranger's house.

In the beginning it was very small. We set aside one day a week and did all of the sessions ourselves. At some point I did five sessions in 72 hours. Half of the sessions had not been written or prepared yet. For anyone who thinks there is no such thing as too much D&D, I can tell you: there is! I couldn't touch D&D for a couple of weeks after that 😂

Then slowly people started to email us: "Hey, can we join?" And that is how we grew into what StoryForgers is today, with a whole team of paid GMs running sessions alongside us.

Who does what?

Honestly, it has always been pretty open, and a bit chaotic. All three of us have had other commitments along the way and gone through different phases, and we're still a small core team, so we do almost everything ourselves.

Sebastiaan is a designer, so all of the designs you see on this site are his. In the beginning we also wrote all of our sessions ourselves, and we really did that together: brainstorming ideas for the kind of adventures we liked, and then slowly iterating on them with feedback from our GMs toward the one-shots and campaigns we run today.

Sever is our coding wizard, and he has definitely done the most coding of the three of us. The website has been a constant effort from day one. We started out on a Webflow project we got for free because we were still students, then we moved to a WordPress site we built ourselves, and now we're rebuilding it properly, to a more modern standard. We were learning while we were doing all of this. When we started, we had no idea how to build a website.

As for me, lately I've mostly been working on reprogramming the whole website to our new stack. I've also written a lot of our sessions, run a lot of them, and made some of the workshops we give. And then there's just a lot of daily stuff, like staying in contact with people and emailing customers.

Isn't D&D something you just play with friends? Why pay a Dungeon Master?

You don't have to pay. D&D will always be something for you and your friends, and StoryForgers has never had the intention to move away from that or to replace it, and it never should. We still play with our own friends too, just for fun.

But there is a real demand from people who are in a different situation. Some groups simply don't have the time to organize a whole session, some people want to get started but don't know how and would like a bit of help with that, and there are corporate events where a company just wants ten Dungeon Masters at the same time. That is what we focus on, and we have zero interest in commercializing the rest of D&D.

What turned out harder than you expected?

If I could do it over again: don't build your website on WordPress. Use something good from the start, and I mean that for real. To be fair, we had no idea we were going to grow into something this big, so the first things we built were all super simple, and even that already took a lot of work. But switching away from it later took so much more work than that.

And get an accountant early on. Oh my god.

What makes someone a StoryForgers GM?

Most GMs who apply are already really good, and I think that is because it's kind of self-selecting. To become a GM at all, you already need to be the most D&D-obsessed person in your group, because otherwise you wouldn't have ended up behind the screen in the first place. And then on top of that you need the guts to think: I'm good enough to get paid for this.

So for us it mostly comes down to two things. Obviously we look at whether you have a certain quality for storytelling and whether you can entertain people at a table, because in the end this is entertainment, and that is a bit different from GMing for your friends. But it should also be the case that you're just genuinely a nice person to work with, and someone people are happy to have in their home. If those two things come together, 90% of the GMs who have them are good to go.

What's next?

Mostly it's about turning StoryForgers into a sustainable business that we as founders can actually live from. Besides that, we're still developing tools that make it easier to run games. We've been promising a character sheet generator for a very long time now (sorry to all GMs reading this), but we've been planning to rebuild the website properly first, and everything always takes more time...

We still play almost all of our sessions offline, face to face (the way the gods ordained D&D to be played). Because of that, we have the very ambitious goal of having a GM within an hour's travel of every customer in all the countries we operate in. Which is the reason why we are always looking for more awesome storytellers to join!

Got a question we didn't answer?

If there's something else you'd like to know, just send us a message and ask us anything. The best questions might end up in this post.