The Art of Chaos: A DM’s Confession From the Pantry

The Art of Chaos

 A DM’s Confession From the Pantry

The Art of Chaos: A DM's Confession From the Pantry

Every Dungeon Master owns two screens. There's the wooden one, laminate dragon print, bought as a job lot with the dice, mostly there to hide the fact you improvised the last three encounters. And then there's the other one. The one that hums somewhere behind your sternum the moment a table full of people hand you their imaginations and say, go on then, do something with these.

I'm Harrie. Most of you know me as Satan. I've stopped correcting people, mostly because they're not wrong.

Where I Came From

Before I ever picked up a d20, I came from immersive theatre and fine art, disciplines built entirely around one deranged premise: that you can construct a room so convincing strangers will let their guard down inside it, and then invite those strangers in to wreck it beautifully. It turns out that's also the entire job description of a Dungeon Master. I just didn't have a name for it yet.

Storytelling was stitched into me earlier than that, though. My mother told me bedtime stories until the shadows on the wall leaned in to listen properly. That's the feeling I've spent my adult life chasing, building something from nothing, then handing it to someone else and watching them cheerfully set it on fire.

My actual TTRPG apprenticeship happened long before I'd heard the word "TTRPG." RuneScape. Skyrim. Those teenage years where you stay up far too late and genuinely lose track of which world is the real one. Then lockdown arrived, shoved a copy of D&D through my letterbox, and I have not let go of it since, which, in retrospect, is either the healthiest or the most concerning thing to come out of 2020, and I've made peace with not knowing which.

My first character was a dwarven bard called Uncle Bill, named for my actual Uncle Bill, the sort of man who was permanently welded to a stool in an Irish pub, endlessly stocked with stories for anyone who sat near him. The PC was ancient, short, creaky-kneed, and carried a T. rex wife in his pocket. Yes, you read that correctly. He ran a tiny tavern in the middle of a war-torn battlefield, a warm little bubble of no-man's-land where enemies could sit down, share a drink, and agree not to stab each other for five minutes. He taught me something I still believe: chaos, run properly, is a kind of holiness. My uncle passed a few years ago, and I take a strange, specific comfort in the fact that a fragment of him is still out there having adventures in a fantasy world he'd have found utterly ridiculous, with a pocket dinosaur he'd have loved. He's become part of other people's campaigns now. Other people's memories. That's not nothing.

My first homebrew as a DM, once I crossed to the other side of the screen, was a Vegas stag do gone wrong, a DeLorean that had very much failed its MOT, cracks in time, a nuclear wasteland. Standard high fantasy fare. I have never been precious about rules. I like them the way I like my monsters: present, a little unstable, and easy to ignore the moment the story wants to do something more interesting.

That chaotic streak came with me behind the screen and never left. I've only been running games for about five years, I'm still learning, still falling flat on my face, still discovering the game alongside my players every session. That's the part I love most. The shared unravelling.

On Puppets, and Other Lies We Agree to Believe

There's another piece of theatre craft that's crept into how I run games: puppetry. The quiet, slightly disreputable art of convincing an audience that something lifeless has a pulse. What you learn fast in puppetry is that people will believe almost anything, provided you give it three things, a rhythm, a want, and a breath nobody can see but everyone somehow feels.

D&D is the exact same trick, run with dice instead of felt.

Every monster, every tavern, every minor god sulking in a forgotten corner of the setting is inert until someone reaches in and gives it a pulse. That's the whole con, and it's a good one, it relies on the same soft, hungry belief a child has staring at a doll, half-convinced it just moved. Suspension of disbelief is fragile right up until the moment it isn't. Then it holds like iron. Which is, incidentally, why a beloved NPC's death tends to land harder at the table than a PC's ever does, the players had no hand in it. No control, no agency, nothing to soften the blow. That's not a coincidence. That's the whole mechanism of horror, working exactly as designed.

I treat every creature and every corner of a setting like a puppet. I give it weight. I give it a want. I let it twitch somewhere at the edge of the players' vision until someone leans forward and whispers did you see that. That's the moment the table stops playing a game and starts breathing along with the room. It's a cheap trick, honestly. It never stops working.

How Gormentillia Learned to Bite

Gormentillia didn't arrive gently. It clawed its way out of my skull already hungry and immediately started rearranging the furniture, which, in fairness, has remained its general personality ever since.

The realm was built from the stories that raised me with cold fingers and a warm heart in roughly equal measure: Grimm's darker fairy tales, Stephen King grinning from the corner, Lovecraft muttering about the ocean while Poe drips melancholy over everything nearby, Stoker and Shelley in the foundations, a healthy dose of cheesy seventies and eighties horror cinema, and the nineties nightmares that shaped my childhood in all the correct wrong ways. Then, because dread alone isn't a campaign, I folded in the appetite for adventure that the best anime carries so well, Delicious in Dungeon, Demon Slayer, Tokyo Ghoul, Black Clover. Stories where danger and delight sit at the same table and share a plate.

That's roughly where the first spark came from.

Gormentillia began with a pantheon and a deliberately juicy falling-out between its gods, the kind of divine feud that leaves scars on the land itself, the way a bad breakup leaves scars on a shared flat. Out of those scars came Fayeths' Tales, small, cautionary myths children whisper to each other, seeded directly from the gods' own worst decisions. From there, the society bloomed outward, because that's how culture actually works: the stories a people are told as children decide what they grow up fearing, and what they grow up worshipping instead. So of course those myths shaped the people of Gormentillia too. Then, as these things do, it all spiralled, creatures crawled into the swamps, empires clung to hope with both hands, and entire forests grew teeth.

And then came the part I love best: my players.

They bring the characters they want to play, and I bend the world around them until it fits, stitching their backstories into the soil so the land already seems to know their names before they've said a word. When a place feels like home, you start caring what happens to it. When you care, the stakes bite that much deeper. It's the cheapest, most reliable trick in the DM's arsenal, and I use it constantly.

Hellz Kitchen has a main thread waiting to be pulled, but every player carries their own, secrets, wounds, half-formed wants, and my chaos brain cannot resist filling the map with side quests regardless. If I'm honest, this is exactly how I play The Witcher too: running errands for ghosts, solving small strange mysteries, getting hopelessly, happily distracted along the way.

Gormentillia will not sit still. It mutates. It drags new horrors out of the dark whether I'm prepared for them or not. If you're planning to keep following along, hold on properly, the ground shifts under your boots in this campaign, and the things underneath it bite back.

So: here's to Hellz Kitchen. A campaign built from nightmares, fed on laughter, and held together by chaos, friendship, and a genuinely alarming number of snacks. My cast keeps shaping it. You lot keep egging it on. And I keep throwing fuel on the fire, because that's the job & my utter pleasure.

Gormentillia is hungry, and dinner's nearly ready. Pull up a chair... if your dare .