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

The Art of Chaos

 A DM’s Confession From the Pantry

Come in close my beautiful creatures. I want to tell you how I ended up behind the screen. Not the wooden one with the fancy dragon prints. The invisible one that hums in your skull when a whole world hangs off your fingertips...

My name is Harrie. Some of you call me Satan. I answer to both with a smile that probably means trouble. I come from the worlds of immersive theatre and fine art. Places where stories drip down your arms and strangers breathe too close. Places where you build a room that feels alive and then invite people in to ruin it in beautiful ways. So of course I became a Dungeon Master.

Story telling has been stitched into me since childhood. My mother and I would invent bedtime tales until the shadows on the wall leaned in to listen. That feeling never left. The thrill of building something out of nothing. The thrill of handing it to someone else and watching them set it on fire.

My first taste of RPG”S came long before I ever held a D20. RuneScape. Skyrim. Those early teen years where you stay up too late and forget which world is the real one. Years later lockdown hit and the universe shoved Dungeons and Dragons through the door. I grabbed it with both hands and refused to let go.

The first character I ever made was a bard named Uncle Bill ( Named after my real uncle Bill - an absolute legend, the kind of fello fused to a stool in the irish pub with time and stories for everyone hed meet)  . The PC  was an ancient dwarf ( Because my uncle was very short and had a long white braided beard ) with creaky knees and a T rex wife living in his pocket. Yes. You read that right. That old gremlin became a folk legend. He ran a tiny hut style tavern on war torn battlefields. A warm little bubble of no mans land where enemies could sit drink and try not to stab each other for five minutes. He was unhinged in all the best ways. He taught me something important. Chaos can be holy. Years passed and so did my uncle. I take a strange comfort in the existence of this PC, like a little fraction of my uncle living on and having aventures in a wild fantasy land with his pocket t rex. Hes become a part of other peoples stories and ttrpg memories.  

My first homebrew as a DM  was A Vegas stag party. A bad decision. A Delorian that definitely failed its MOT. Cracks in time. A nuclear wasteland. You know. The usual high fantasy. I have never been one to cling too tightly to rules. I like them the way I like my monsters. Present. A little wobbly. And easy to ignore when the story wants something wilder.

When I slid from player to DM that chaotic streak came with me. I have only been running games for about five years. I still learn. I still fall on my face. I still make discoveries with my players every time I sit down to breathe life into a new session. That is the part I love most. The shared unravelling.

I build worlds the way I build immersive theatre. Lay the bones first. Shape the air. Let the walls whisper. Then find the characters who belong there. Stitch their stories into the foundations until the world starts kicking like something about to hatch. After that you step back. You open the door. You play. I always prep more than I need. Maps. Notes. Voices. A whole spread of tidy little secrets. Then my players walk in and kick the table legs like gremlins. They make friends with monsters. They seduce shopkeepers. They stab things that should not be stabbed. Every plan I have dies a quick silly death. And I love it. It’s an important thing to remember as a world builder… Prep is the skeleton. Play is the blood.

Running Hellz Kitchen as a podcast is thrilling in the way haunted houses are thrilling. Every corner could bite. Every choice is on display. It is terrifying to let people beyond my beloved table see how I run a game. How messy and tender and loud it gets. How much laughter sits next to fear. How much heart sits under the gore. But I love this collection of nerds too much to hide it. The stories we make together are strange and stupid and beautiful. They deserved an audience. So here we are. Bubbling and hissing and figuring it out as we go. Cooking our first podcasted campaign with shaking hands and wicked grins.

Breathing Life Into the Still Things A Little Puppetry in the Dark

There is another piece of theater craft that slinks into my DM style. Puppetry. The quiet art of convincing the eye that something lifeless has a pulse. I learned early that people will believe anything if you let them. A scrap of cloth becomes a creature. A bit of carved wood becomes a friend or a threat. The trick is simple. You give the still thing a rhythm. A want. A breath that no one can see but everyone feels.

DND is the same spell.

Every monster. Every tavern. Every god hiding in a dusty corner. They are inanimate until we touch them. Until we look at them with that soft hungry belief that children have when they stare at a doll and swear it moved. I adore that feeling. The moment something inanimate becomes real because a table full of beautiful fools agrees to pretend.

Suspension of disbelief is a fragile thing. It hangs by a thread. But once it catches you it holds tight. When I build a world or shape a creature I treat it like a puppet. I give it weight. I give it a heartbeat. I let it twitch in the shadows so my players lean forward and whisper did you see that. That is when the magic lands. That is when the room breathes with us.

Maybe that is why I love DMing so much. It feels like reaching into the dark and pulling on invisible strings until the air starts to move. Until the players forget that this is a game and instead feel the world shifting under their feet. It is a beautiful trick. A wicked trick. And it never gets old.

Building Gormentillia A World Stitched From Nightmares and Daydreams

Gormentillia did not arrive gently. It crawled out of my head like something hungry and confused and immediately started rearranging the furniture. Hellz Kitchen is a homebrew game in a homebrew land and this land is the biggest beast of them all.

Gormentillia was born from stories that fed my soul. Fairytails. Classic horror. Adventure anime. The stories that raised me with cold fingers and warm hearts. Grimm Brothers whispering riddles in the dark. Stephen King grinning in the corner. Lovecraft muttering about the ocean while Edgar Allan Poe drips melancholy everywhere. Add Bram Stoker. Add Mary Shelley. Add the cheesy horror films from the seventies and eighties. Add the nineties and early two thousands nightmares that shaped my childhood in all the best wrong ways.

Then give it the heart of adventure. The kind that anime carries so well. Delicious in Dungeon. Demon Slayer. Tokyo Ghoul. Black Clover. Stories where danger and delight sit at the same table. Stories that make you cry and laugh and gag a little.

That mix created the first spark.

Gormentillia began with a pantheon. I plucked a few gods from DND lore and dropped a juicy conflict between them. That conflict had consequences. Those consequences shaped the land like a scar. From those scars came little fairy tales about the gods. I call them Fayeths Tales. Tiny myths that children whisper. Tiny warnings grown from divine mistakes.

From there the society bloomed. Because childhood stories shape us. They tell us what to fear and what to love. So of course they shaped the people of Gormentillia too.

And then things spiraled. They always do. The world grew. Twisted. Softened. Hardened. Took on a life of its own. I blinked and suddenly there were creatures lurking in the swamps and empires clutching onto hope and forests full of teeth.

After that came my favorite part. My players.

They bring the heroes they want to play to the table and I bend the world around them. I stitch their stories into the soil so the land feels like it knows their names. I want my players to feel at home. When you feel at home you care. When you care the stakes bleed a little deeper.

Hellz Kitchen has a main story waiting for them. A big thread to tug on. But each player carries their own tale too. Secrets. Wounds. Dreams. And my chaos brain cannot help filling the map with side quests. So many side quests. Because if I am honest when I play games like The Witcher that is where I live. Running errands for ghosts. Solving weird little mysteries. Getting distracted and loving it.

Gormentillia will not stay still. It wriggles. It mutates. It drags new stories out of the shadows whether I am ready or not. So if you plan to keep following our journey hold on tight. The path ahead shifts under your boots and the monsters bite back.

So here is to Hellz Kitchen. A campaign built from nightmares. Fed by laughter. Strengthened by chaos and friendship and far too many snacks. The cast keeps shaping it. The audience keeps cheering it on. And I keep throwing fuel on the fire. Stay close. Things are about to get stranger.

Thank you for stepping into the kitchen with us.