As a writer since the age of 15, Tessa Simpson has a love for stories. Now 26, Simpson delights in a collaborative form of storytelling as a Dungeon Master (DM), where both she, and her players, write the tale as they go with their actions.

“I’m very improvisational,” says Simpson, “because of my theatre background I can pick up on player cues and work with it… it’s fun to try and pull the threads.”

Simpson considers her first experience with roleplaying games as the games of make believe from childhood. “You’d play those childhood games where you’d pretend that you’re an Animorph or that you were working on a farm. And that would lend itself very nicely to playing a character in a role playing game.”

Simpson discovered the role playing game Pathfinder shortly before graduating from Red Deer College in 2015 with an applied degree in motion picture arts. After graduating, she made the decision to move from Red Deer to Edmonton, and attempted to play Pathfinder with her friends long distance. However, it didn’t last long.

“It’s really difficult to do any kind of tabletop game if only one of you are on Skype and the rest are at the table,” says Simpson. “You miss that community aspect.” Upon discovering drop-in Dungeons & Dragons at Hexagon Café, Simpson says she was immediately hooked. “You start playing, and then you just want to keep playing. It’s the best drug.”

Unfortunately, back in 2016, Hexagon only ran drop-in D&D once a week, which Simpson says, just wasn’t enough. At the time, she was working as an events coordinator at a company and suggested having a D&D event.

“I just thinking we would hire one of the DMs from Hexagon and my supervisor, was just like, ‘oh that sounds great. A nerdy thing. You’ll run it.’ And I was like, ‘wait, what?’

“So I just improvised a game, then and there, and we only had two people who showed up. But it was great. And I realized that my strength as a Dungeon Master was having a loose plan and then improvising.”

Simpson says that acting as a DM is just another way of playing, albeit a way that grants her more control over the direction of the story.

“On the other hand it’s fun to DM, because here’s the world, now go explore little minions!” says Simpson in a dramatic tone. “You’ve crash-landed on this world and you must collect these crazy gems to power up your ship again!

“Some DMs do a ‘DMs versus the players’ where it is combative, where I’m much more of a collaborative story-teller.”

Improvisation is a useful skill to have as a DM because it allows for them to better react to what the players say and do, rather than just have them follow along a rigid path. “That’s just writing a book,” says Simpson.

Although many of her campaigns are inspired by things that she has read or seen, Simpson’s campaigns are her own special blend of improvised group storytelling, however, giving the players too much creative sway over the story can sometimes backfire.

“So many times, I’ve had a character kill a bad guy before I was expecting them to be killed… ‘well you did it.’ Now I’ve got to come up with another hour and a half so it feels like a good lengthy game.” A decent session length is somewhere between three and four hours in Simpson’s books, unless of course, the bad guy gets killed early.

Tessa Simpson doing her thing

Despite her love of creating most of the story as the game unfolds, Simpson says that preparation and planning are some of the most important skills a DM can have and that having scenarios prepared leads to an easier time with improvising. Simpson says that one of her most memorable experiences as a DM happened as a result of planning a season with the other DMs at Hexagon.

“In my first year as a DM at Hexagon… we as DMs had decided that there was going to be one big bad guy that was a man in a suit, and he had a pyramid head. And I had not introduced him in my game until close to the very end, which was great. There was just this guy with a pyramid head who showed up and was talking to the players, and so the players who knew him from other games were freaking out but their characters had no idea who he was… they were like ‘we know who this is but our characters don’t.’”

Simpson is currently wrapping up the season’s D&D games at Hexagon, but has her eye on running some more one-shots, stories that take a single session to complete. One-shots are easier to plan for and hit all the flavour points, usually ending in some big battle, Simpson says. In the past, she’s done a Jurassic Park one-shot as well as a bank heist, which she thinks she will run again at some point. But for now, Simpson says she just wants more women to give playing D&D a go.

“The Hexagon community has been extremely welcoming but there’s still not a lot of women coming to these things and I think it’s because of the stereotype or fear… but it’s never felt weird here. If you’ve ever been interested, come and check it out. The DMs are open and willing to take new players all the time.”