Monsters, Magic and Music City: Nashville’s ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Scene

Dungeons & Dragons has never been more popular. An official movie starring Chris Pine, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, is now out in theaters — getting better reviews than the derided 2000 adaptation. Millions of viewers log onto Twitch each week to watch professional voice actors play the game on Critical Role. The stream’s animated adaptation, The Legend of Vox Machina, raised $11 million on Kickstarter and wrapped its second season in Amazon Prime.

Nashville itself has plenty of D&D fans — a Facebook group for Middle Tennessee players sees frequent calls for groups, and hobby shops like The Game Keep are buzzing with tables and dice. And among the crowd are content creators publishing gameplay materials, launching shows and even leading geeky yoga routines.

Local streamer Dominique Howse says D&D is more accessible these days: The current fifth edition simplified the math, and websites like D&D Beyond make it easier to track character features. Virtual tabletops like Roll20 also allow for online D&D play, which was helpful during COVID-19 lockdowns — on those sites, complicated dice rolls just need one click. Howse says accessibility is “what makes this game fun.”

Howse, aka Neosoulgod, runs and streams a game called Hillard University, which takes place at a magical historically Black college, and was inspired by their own experiences as a third-generation Tennessee State University graduate. All the players are Black, and Howse is out to show that all people belong in tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) spaces — which often center white players and Europe-derived settings. Howse has also published free supplements for D&D, their most popular being the playable character race Nightskins, whose lore is partly inspired by West African mythology.

Local comedy club Zanies is also home to the chaotic actual play Catacombs and Comedians. Dan Taylor runs the game and says he approached the club with the show idea after he and his wife moved from Los Angeles to Nashville. He asked the talent booker to find comics who knew how to play the game.

“And it turns out we found comics that don’t know how to play D&D,” says Taylor, who started playing the game in 1979. “But that’s been part of the fun.”

Catacombs & Comedians’ audience has increased over the past year, and the show has been performed in Alabama venues as well. Taylor also runs a spinoff game for noncomedians at The Game Keep in Hermitage on Fridays called Deep Delve Pizza Co., where you deliver pizzas to the most dangerous dungeons.

Lebanon, Tenn., native Erica Lowe, who has played D&D for 10 years, incorporated her own love of Critical Role into a yoga class she’d teach at gaming conventions, reading quotes from the show or renaming poses after characters. She still mixes yoga and D&D on her YouTube channel, even recounting game sessions during a stretching routine. Lowe also published her first adventure for the throwback Dungeon Crawl Classics system, which she playtested at The Game Keep in Hermitage.

Nashville is also where a D&D reality show called Die Inspired was filmed. Created by Michael Rusco and Michael Valentine, the show morphs D&D into a multi-season survival game in which the last players standing win a cash prize. It was filmed at The Game Keep and features a cast of 80 players (most D&D tables cap at six players).

The premise: Four ships, each holding 20 characters, are about to sink, and the lifeboats hold only eight people. Betrayal and half-truths are part of the game, which is more cutthroat than traditional, cooperative D&D sessions. But Rusco and Valentine say players are hesitant to descend into violence too early, and there are even surprising displays of heroism and self-sacrifice. That unpredictability is part of the fun: For all the preparation and worldbuilding the co-creators put into the show, Valentine says the duo “couldn’t have written it better.”

In addition to footage of gameplay and player interviews, the show also features re-creations of dramatic moments brought to life by an army of miniature figures and a massive 3-D-printed model ship. (Those segments are produced at Gamma Blast Studios.)

Rusco and Valentine aren’t the only ones pushing the limits on player counts. Ben Ramos created the TTRPG-meets-bar-game Land of Far, which simplifies gameplay to accommodate up to 26 players for a two- to three-hour session. Ramos says the goal is to have players hop in, quickly grasp the rules, and dive back in next week. Characters take minutes to make, battle is quick and loose, and you can get bonuses by ordering food and drinks from the bar. Sessions are hosted weekly at Acme Feed and Seed and The Pharmacy. Land of Far launched one year ago, and Ramos says players have already created more than 1,000 characters.

Many of these creators say they were concerned when news leaked in January that the company behind D&D, Wizards of the Coast (WOTC), wanted to change the licensing policy that allowed third-party creators to publish D&D material freely, introducing new language about royalties among other tweaks. Fans and content creators were furious, and WOTC and parent company Hasbro scrapped the plans. But for some, that trust is lost.

Howse believes the changes would have shut out creators of color, adding that despite efforts to improve, WOTC frequently flubs representation. Last year the company apologized for its introduction of the Hadozee species — formerly enslaved apelike beings whose depiction recalled stereotypes of Black people.

Lowe, who has long been playing other TTRPG systems, doesn’t expect to continue with the next edition of D&D as a player or content creator.

But while one company can tarnish a brand, frustrating even decades-long fans like Taylor, it can’t sink the whole hobby.

“I’ve played more D&D in Nashville in the last four years than I did in 20 years in L.A.,” says Taylor, who based a Catacombs and Comedians villain on WOTC. “D&D is here to stay.”