I must have been in sixth grade when my brother got a copy of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set as a Christmas present¹. That would have been 1983. He, his friends Mark and Mike, and I spent almost every day of the next summer crawling through the Caves of Chaos in B2 Keep on the Borderlands². I have yet to see Stranger Things, but from what I understand this was a scene straight out of that, minus the government conspiracies and otherworld monsters. It was somewhere during that time that D&D emerged as a defining part of my life.

After that one summer, we didn’t play again, although that didn’t stop me from continuing my interest. I spent much time as a teenager thinking about D&D: building campaign worlds, monsters, characters, and adventures. Almost everything but playing them. I didn’t know anyone who would play them with me³. My parents didn’t understand, I’m sure they thought I was weird, but they weren’t going to hold me back.

I’d browse for hours in the role-playing game sections at Waldenbooks, B. Dalton’s, Children’s Palace, and St. Paul Book & Stationery in Burnsville, MN. In those days role-playing game only meant Dungeons & Dragons, if there was anything else on the shelf I didn’t even notice it. I spent my own money on rulebooks, Dragon magazines, and adventure modules, including T1-4 Temple of Elemental Evil, S3 Expedition to Barrier Peaks, EX1 Dungeonland, DL1 Dragons of Despair plus a few sequels, and my favorite, I3 Pharaoh, which I would later find the two sequels for⁴. I would read them from cover to cover, but never use them for their true purpose.

It wasn’t until college that I finally found people who would play D&D with me. By this time, I had it in the corner of my head that I would someday turn my interest into an occupation. I was majoring in cartography, and one of the things that went along with official D&D content were the fascinating, yet ugly, maps. I thought I could use that major to get a job at TSR, the publishers of D&D, designing fascinating but not-ugly maps for their products. But for many complicated reasons, many of them my own fault, others circumstantial, that didn’t happen.

A couple of years after college, I stopped playing. I’d convinced myself that it was a hobby that wasn’t worth pursuing. I was engaged to a wonderful woman, Amy. I had a full-time job in IT, which had nothing to do with my degree in cartography. I didn’t have a lot of free time to myself, and I had to decide which of my creative hobbies I felt important enough to keep working on. I chose writing, not gaming. Writing was cheaper, but I also felt it didn’t require me to find people to do it with⁵.

In my mid-to-late 30s, I became a stay-at-home Dad. I was also running a small computer consulting business with one employee, me. But taking care of young children took more out of my time than what I needed to keep that business going. Getting a different job didn’t make sense, as Amy was making plenty for us to live on and I was providing free childcare. So, I spent some of the spare time I did have on writing, and a lot of it on failing to write. Even as the kids grew and took less of my time, it took me ten years to put together a novel that I tried to get published and failed. Another five years for the next novel, this one a lot better, and I was on the verge of querying agents again.

Then came COVID-19. You’d think that would be the time that I could finish writing, get a lot of stuff done. But it wasn’t, because my children and my nephew discovered Dungeons & Dragons, and I fell back in like a thousand platinum pieces thrown into a portable hole.

They were home from school. They had extra time on their hands, and they’d heard my niece talk about playing D&D in college. I felt like I would be betraying my childhood if I didn’t join them, and they needed someone who knew what it was about to help them out anyway. So, I asked to be the Dungeon Master. I ran them and Amy through the Lost Mine of Phandelver, with some modifications⁶.

I thought it would be over when we finished that, but it wasn’t. They wanted to keep playing.

But I had no idea where to go from there, so I started looking for modules. I found Dungeon Master’s Guild, a site where people could publish their own content for D&D, and not be burdened by licensing issues. I scanned through it for adventures, but I couldn’t find the one that I wanted to run.

I went to Facebook for advice on what to play. An old college friend of mine, Chris, gave me some. He didn’t tell me to do what I did, in fact his advice leaned towards making something up as we played. But I couldn’t do that, I at least needed an outline. And I found myself fleshing that outline out. And before I knew it, I’d created a complete adventure⁷.

My players seemed to enjoy what I created. So did I, especially when they solved it in a way that I hadn’t thought of, with less bloodshed than I’d expected⁸. But I felt so good about it that I thought others might enjoy it as well. I remembered the adventures I’d seen on DMs Guild, and realized that I could do what those people had done. In fact, I should, because this was the adventure I had wanted to run. And if it had been there already, I wouldn’t have had to create it.

I had questions and worries, of course, and looked up the answers. I realized it wouldn’t be as difficult as I thought. I didn’t need fancy desktop publishing tools, although I expect if this becomes a sustainable hobby those will help me a lot. I could improve my maps. I had to do something with my degree in cartography. I would need to charge money for it, even if it wasn’t much. I did want to make something out of the time I’d spent. But, I didn’t want to isolate those people who didn’t want to spend money on some unknown author. So I decided to also release an abridged version for free.

In spring 2021, I started working on it. It took two months to complete, three months including the time planning the original adventure, and I learned things in the process that could make it faster the next time. Before I realized it, I was sitting and staring at a PDF with a green cover that sent my mind back to St. Paul Book & Stationery, staring at racks of shrinkwrapped D&D adventures, wishing I had someone to play them with. And I realized that I was now one step away from following that dream from the corner of my mind in college. It wasn’t exactly working for TSR, but I was going to publish something for Dungeons & Dragons, even if I had to do it myself.

Okay, it turned out I wasn’t one step away, I still had a few things to do. The book wasn’t going to market itself, and when my friend Kim offered to playtest it with her troupe, I couldn’t resist. And the playtesting was helpful, it found a lot of stuff that I needed to fix. So, it took another couple of months before it was ready to release⁹.

Anyway, you want to see it? It’s so cool. Head over to Dungeon Masters Guild and take a peek at The Smugglers of Grogmock Mound. It doesn’t cost much, and it’s now pay-what-you-want, so you could get it for free. But if you want guilt-free, you can also download The Smugglers’ Hideout, an abridged version of the same adventure, for free.