I think it's something that most people kind of think
about as a shock.
They don't realize that someone could make money by being
a professional dungeon master.
I'm always met with what do you do that for
a living?
I did not think at all that this was a
career choice.
I certainly saw it as something that I loved to
do on the side with my friends.
But it eventually did turn into that,
which is kind of cool.
My name is Maddie Murdoch.
I'm 36 years old. I make
$37,000 a year and I live in Salt Lake City,
UT.
The tabletop gaming is kind of like the branch or
umbrella under which card games,
board games, and role-playing games fall under.
It's essentially any type of game that you can play
at a table with friends gathered around it.
So when I say tabletop role-playing games,
I'm specifically talking about a type of game that involves
role-playing and imagination.
My husband Scott and I share finances.
He makes significantly more than me working as a state
employee.
I guess our personal philosophy or approach to money was
that we were really interested in finding careers that we
were super passionate about.
Being in a career often means working for decades upon
decades on something,
and we wanted to make sure that we could feel
personally fulfilled as we were doing that.
Because Dungeon Mastering is gig work,
I do also need to make sure that I have
a regular paycheck.
I do teach on campus at Westminster University.
Generally, I teach about one class per semester.
Some of it did certainly come from when we were
in lockdowns and weren't actually able to go out and
work and and do the regular things that we had
been able to do. A lot of it was also
from grad school as well.
So we've been kind of slowly paying that back over
the years,
but now that we're dedicating 10%
of our income to that,
it's going much quicker.
Generally, we like to pay about 10%
of our income, but during this time we kind of
realized that it would probably be a lot more effective
to spend that 10%
to get out of credit card debt,
especially since I was doing so much service on behalf
of the church already.
My husband gets wonderful benefits.
His state benefits do include a retirement plan and a
pension.
And so currently that's the only thing that we're kind
of using as our retirement.
I do anticipate that once we are completely out of
just regular debts,
besides it's the mortgage that we will probably put more
into that retirement account as well.
When we splurge, we usually like to do things like
go out to eat or go to concerts or shows.
We also often spend quite a bit of pocket money
on gaming supplies.
We'll buy Magic cards or game books and things like
that.
In college that we were all kind of nerdy.
We really liked books and movies and fantasy.
But one of my friends had an older brother who
was coming to visit and he was a Dungeon Master.
He started running games for us and we really got
into it.
We kept playing games and I actually tried my hand
at GM as an English major.
I was really good at storytelling and I I had
a very imaginative kind of thought process and so I
was kind of able to pick up the rings there.
So if you ever actually have seen a tabletop role-playing
game,
it usually comes with a book and you have to
kind of learn all of the rules,
the lore of the world,
the setting details, stories about the characters that actually live
there.
Basically I got roped into writing anything that they needed
me to.
So whether that was game design,
so mechanics or whether that was stories specifically fiction,
kind of pre generated characters,
back stories and flavour text,
I started doing it all.
I love reading through game books and writing stories and
so I thought because I'm going to be doing it
anyway,
I might as well be doing it for money.
Actually getting publishing credits from a well known publisher in
the gaming industry was very attractive to people.
So when I went to things like gaming conventions and
met with creators and producers of other games,
I could say, hey, I worked on L5R and they
thought that was incredible.
Currently I have 5 ongoing campaigns.
We usually offer three models of sessions.
They're private games, public games,
and corporate games. The private games are essentially what you
would imagine a birthday party or bachelor party or a
long time reunion would be,
where people who want to play
D&D would hire us to run their event.
We also have public games where we as dungeon masters
get to choose maybe what module or what adventure to
run.
We post those online, Whoever wants to come can join
them.
So it's public because you're not necessarily playing with your
friends or your family.
You're playing with strangers, but you are able to still,
you know, enjoy the tabletop gaming experience.
The corporate games are more specifically for people who are
interested in team building exercises,
running through a game to learn essentially how to work
together and socialize in a corporate setting.
I'm currently acting as the Relief Society president in my
area.
Depending on the week, I'm heavily engaged in working with
the women to do service projects,
meet the needs of the members in our area,
such as giving rides or kind of facilitating welfare needs
and things like that.
In the 80s there was actually a strange wave called
the Satanic Panic,
a very specifically surrounding tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons and
Dragons.
Because you are play acting as adventurers or heroes fighting
against the powers of evil,
People have this kind of stereotype that maybe kids in
their basements who are playing this game were actually summoning
these demons and things like that.
And obviously that was kind of sensationalism,
and it was silly. In the 2000s,
when D&D started to become very popular,
I think people were revisiting the game and realizing that
it was just a fantasy game.
We're kind of hoping to maybe eventually get to a
position where we could foster children or adopt children,
because that's kind of something on the horizon that we've
always been interested in.
I would also absolutely love to write novels or my
own fiction,
because currently I am working on a lot of stories
for other people,
so I would love to branch out and create my
own.
I PS I think it's a really important thing to
remember that creative work
is work. A lot of people don't see things like
hobbies or artistic endeavours as something that could generally make
them money.
And I think that that certainly can be true.
But I think as we're kind of pivoting toward,
I would say, like a hustle culture that involves a
lot of making money on the Internet and finding ways
to kind of make your personal hobbies or your personal
talents lucrative. If you have a talent that's very specific,
if you have the means to make money off of
it,
then it absolutely is a viable option.