Welcome to DM-XP!
Helping you to get more from your roleplaying game time.
We can all level up our play. Just as our characters progress so can we as players and games masters This is an exciting time for roleplaying games. Looking back on fifty years of Dungeons & Dragons, our hobby is still in its infancy. There is a creative explosion in table-top roleplaying games and our communities are no longer limited to our own gaming groups.
My name is Nathan Mainwaring and I’ve been playing and GMing roleplaying games for over thirty years. DM-XP is a place to offer thoughts, advice and ideas for you to pick and choose from from me and the people I play with. I’m lucky enough to play with a number of groups, established GMs and DMs and RPG content creators. Here I try to pass on what I’ve learnt and provide adventures and rules supplements available for sale.
For me RPGs have been an obsession but DM-XP has been created since a major career change. After twenty years working as a lawyer working in criminal and child protection law it was time for a change. Through my GMing and with the help and support of friends I left the law and now I work as a voice actor. I do a fair amount of work in the gaming industry with Forteller Games and children’s TV for Nickelodeon.
DM-XP is for everyone. It exists to teach new players and GMs how to get started and what the core skills of the hobby are. in a series of easy to digest guides. I also share advanced skills and tips as food for thought for experienced GM/DMs, hopefully without ever being proscriptive or giving in to ‘one-true-wayism’. DM-XP also has campaign guides for published adventures, narrative work you can use or adapt, voice acting tips for your character or NPCs, discussion of how best to use your prep time, guides on how to support your players or other players when you’re not behind the screen. The content here is provided in written articles, videos and podcasts so you can read, watch or listen as best suits you.
How I run games is very different from other great GM’s I play with and DM-XP is a place to explore how we can each leverage our disparate skill sets to help our players to have a great time on game night. Skills I gained as a lawyer have been helpful to my games just as others I play have leveraged the abilities they have developed as teachers, carers, business people, IT specialists and even hairdressers (seriously, all that client small talk has made him seem ‘born to be bard’).
Ultimately, I want to run the very best games I can and give my players the sort of bonding experiences of adventure and drama that they’ll remember forever! Stories are at the heart of what makes us human. They have been how we have learned since the first people sat around a fire sharing tales and believe are tied to our minds and psychology on a deep level. In the modern world story telling has become increasingly something that we consume passively, in text or on screen but sharing stories we shape together brings us so much more. We need creative outlets and these games give us that as well as bonding us in adventure that remains meaningful despite its fiction. I love these games in an almost childish fashion and frankly I need this site to write onto to give me an outlet for my passion. Thank you for stopping by and giving whatever support you can to help me keep doing this!