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, I believe 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 and local scenes.

My name is Nathan Mainwaring and I’ve been playing and GMing roleplaying games for over thirty years. I’m lucky enough to play with a number of groups, established GMs and DMs and RPG content creators. Here I share my thoughts and provide adventures and rules supplements.

For me, RPGs have been an obsession but DM-XP has been created since a major career change. After twenty years as a lawyer working in criminal and child protection law, it was time for a change.  Through my GMing and with the support of friends I left the law and now work as a voice actor. I do a fair amount in the gaming industry with

Forteller Games and children’s TV for Nickelodeon. You can check out my voice acting stuff here.

DM-XP is for everyone but in honesty, it exists because I need it to. Just like running games, it’s something I just have to do but I certainly couldn’t do it on my own. There are a host of enthusiastic gamers that have leant their support, hours and expertise into building this. Experts in coding, graphic design, illustration, sound engineering and internet media as well as gaming industry publishers and DMs and GMs have given their time to help make DM-XP a reality. I’m incredibly lucky to have such a wealth of goodwill behind this project.

Articles

Advice, guides and opinion on every aspect of the hobby to simplify, support and enrich your games.

The Articles section has material for players and DM/GMs alike, both new and experienced. You’ll find guides to get you started and tips on the core skills of the hobby as well as in-depth analysis and suggestions, without being proscriptive or giving in to ‘one-true-wayism’. Some articles are aimed at new gamers and are more like ‘how to’ guides. Other essays are more involved, to offer food for thought for experienced hobbyists.

The site organises content by sub-menu categories and series of linked articles so you can easily find what interests you. But nothing in this limitless hobby exists in a box and the articles are hyper-linked to let you browse as you need. I don’t say that I know how to do this ‘right’ or better than anyone else. You can pick up advice and opinion on social platforms but this can be inconsistent and confusing. I’ve learnt the most from people I have grown to trust or understand in their approach; and my games are better and my GMing is easier as a result.

Ultimately, table-top RPGs are fun because of the human element and the imaginative collaboration that exists whenever friends come together, share stories and bounce off each others’ ideas and personalities; RPGs just have a bit of added focus. I believe that RPGs are damn good fun because of who we are as people as much as any design in the games themselves. If you co-operate with those around the table you can’t really go wrong or fail to have fun! Nonetheless, when I GM, I want to run the very best games I can. When I play, I want to be helpful to the other players in forging a narrative we can all enjoy. No matter our role at the table, we can all support our players, co-players and GMs in creating the sort of bonding experiences of adventure and drama that we’ll remember forever!

Campaign Guides

Taking the load out of preparing for game night and sharing inspiration, material and ideas.

The Campaign Guides section supports your hard work in running a published adventure. The sum of years and hours of prep and design work by myself and numerous other hardworking DMs is presented for your use, to build on or give you some focus in how you might decide to do things differently. You’ll find ‘high-level’ adventure overview prep documents, bonus adventure material and tightly focused, session guides for key adventure moments and encounters.

As well as the crunch and mechanics of adventure building, there is narrative material supporting the adventure you are running and examples of what other parties did and how the DM responded. World lore, sample back-stories, maps and dungeons are all here but far from a one-stop shop there are also links to other community content from around the net.

Products

Gorgeous adventures and supplements to make running your games easy, slick and smooth.

In the products section you’ll find PDF documents for sale with all original, human created art and expertly designed graphics and layout. Like I said, I’ve been very lucky in the amount of skilled people who have been willing to commit long hours into making this happen. I’m genuinely humbled by the level of design and illustration that has gone into these PDFs.

The rules supplements and adventures have been play tested and iterated with a clear design mission; to be easy to use and to add something new to your game. I shy away from trying to improve on existing systems even if I thought I could. The products sold here are worth their small cost. The rules supplements slot into existing game mechanics cleanly. The adventures are written to be sort of ‘pre-prepped’ without being a light two-page sketch.

You can support the site and all we do here for the cost of a coffee and get yourself a ready to run adventure or rules supplement that will make your GM/DMing or playing easier so you can focus on telling awesome stories and giving immersive game experience.

Passion

No expertise can take the place of enthusiasm, imagination and will!

How I run games is very different from other great GM’s I play with and DM-XP fosters 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, pro-musicians, designers and even hairdressers (all that client small talk has made him seem ‘born to be bard’). We are each the only person who could run the games that we do. Even though DM-XP is an advice conduit, nothing and no-one should ever be able to tell you that you are wrong. The best assets we have are our zeal, verve and drive!

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. Story-telling is tied to our minds and psychology on the deepest level. Stories thrum.

In the modern world story telling has become something that we consume passively, in text or on screen, but sharing stories that we shape together brings us so much more. We all need creative outlets and these games give us that as well as bonding us in adventure that has meaning 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!

Because we can all level up.