Mythic Design was my first foray into publishing tabletop role-playing game content. It was a company I started in 2004 after moving into a new house after breakup with girlfriend who I had shared a live-in relationship with. The period was a bit of a “crash and reset” moment in my early 20s, and mostly my creative efforts of that period were focused on keeping my mind unfocused.
I had played Dungeons & Dragons for over a decade at this time, and I tended to be the DM for most of those experiences experience. I understood how to build an adventure, but I had no idea where to even start to publish one. I had no connections in the gaming industry, no real leads, but the Open Gaming License (OGL) seemed like a potential vehicle for my ambition.
The company would linger mostly as an idea and concept research for the next year and a half. It was a weird time, I ended up quitting my job at the time due to a breach of contract, then was awarded full unemployment benefits after providing the state arbiter with those details. So I didn’t have a lot of extra cash to invest into starting a new venture. I just sort of rode out the entire length of those benefits while working on a few other personal projects.
Then in 2006, on the actual last day of benefits I had been allowed, I got a random phone call from an IT firm that I had worked adjacently to in my previous job. They wanted to offer me a job as a developer. The new position was recently created, and the staff remembered me from a few years earlier and tracked me down. I gladly accepted.
With the sudden significant bump in income, I could afford artists, editors, and cartographers to help bring my ideas to life. Along with a few new connections I had made in the gaming industry, I officially established Mythic Design as a company and the adventure began.
It was squarely in the era of TTRPG splat books being published by indie game companies. These compact topic-focused softcover books inundated the market, where typically inexpensive, and weirdly collectable.
I would find a middle ground with Mythic Design content. The company embraced the spirit of splat books, but focused it on two main channels: adventures and artwork for adventures.
Via the company website, Mythic Design introduced a free campaign setting titled The World Beneath. The setting was a generic fantasy world (lending to its easy comparability to other OGL content), but set amidst a devastating pandemic. A disease spread among the halfling population that changed them into vicious, sadomasochistic bloodthirsty beings that ravaged the world. To try to avoid the vicious wrath of the Kindergorn (infected halflings) most civilizations were relocated to underground cities and depended on subterranean corridors for travel and trade.
It was an unabashedly derivative theme loosely inspired by ‘reavers’ from the recently released movie, Serenity. Also, I enjoyed the idea of flipping the narrative where the species of humanoids most often considered the smallest and weakest became a feral, bloodlust-fueled threat to everyone.
There would never be any printed books for The World Beneath, it was offered in bite-sized chunks via the website, including adventure hooks, setting highlights, and optional ‘house rules’ to assist GMs running the setting. There were a few branded accessories sold directly off the website to support those house rules, like the set of combat dice pictured to the right.
The thought process behind offering the campaign setting for free was dual purpose. It provided a steady stream of new content to publish to the website, but also provide a constructive reason for customers to frequently return to the website where they would also see the latest new print products for sale. For that reason, I made the decision at the time that the print products wouldn’t focus on the campaign setting.
Tribes of Danu was the theme all of Mythic Design’s published adventure modules. The Tuatha Dé Danann in Irish mythology were the “people of the goddess Danu” (or, the tribes of Danu), a mythical race of supernatural beings and powerful sorcerers who were said to rule over Ireland during the eras of prehistory. The books from the series were set in this prehistoric world and drew inspiration from Irish mythology. The stories took place in the age before the warring invasions of humans or their retreat underground to Sidhe where they would evolve into the Aos Si (the fae-folk of Irish folklore).
Adventurers were never from this realm, but rather entered it. Either by stumbling upon it by or by various magical means; some even passing secret knowledge of how to find the way through familial generations. It was even said that old Suibhne Geilt, better known as Myrddin or Merlin, learned his magic directly from the tribes of Danu, coming to know them well through one such hidden way.
The second series of books published by Mythic Design was the Adventure Art series. This series was rooted in a partnership with the AvatarArt.com custom character portrait service for which I had also recently become IT manager and web developer for.
In the early-to-mid aughts, finding quality fantasy artwork that allowed for legal reproduction was relatively hard to come by. The idea of “RPG stock art” wasn’t widespread, and this series filled that niche by providing print books each with 24 full-page illustrations of fantasy characters and themes.
An excess of these books was printed. In fact I still have dozens of every issue in storage to this day. We would hand out copies of issues for free at gaming conventions, and to those who attended the company’s Mythic Party yearly event at Gen Con.
It also provided opportunity to pitch to gamers the idea of getting their very own custom character portrait drawn by a professional artist. An offer with a money-back guarantee backed by an established game company. The profits from the book series and commissions contracted through the series were split evenly between the two companies.
The company would persist until 2010, when I established my web development firm, Webdot Studio. The workload required to run and maintain a business, an office building, meet with clients, and actually build their websites and web apps consumed so much of my time that I couldn’t maintain the level of focus or energy I felt like Mythic Design deserved. I had to choose between making a living or making a moderate income creating games.
I would return to the gaming industry in two years with the founding of Paths to Adventure in 2012, which allowed me to work at my own pace creating projects for game publishers while I maintained operations of my firm. In 2016 I made the decision that it was profitable enough for me to ‘retire’ to pursue the gaming industry full time.