I interviewed writer, artist and musician Wilderwhim, who is crowdfunding a Zine Month project right now called Doors of Dimensia, an OSR inspired TTRPG adventure generator in a demiplane connecting all places through the multiverse. You can find it right here. He is also collaborating with me on my Zine Month project, Dead Internet Theory, as a stretch goal writer and stretch goal heavy metal album musician.
David Jackson: Thanks for being here for an interview I'm excited to see Doors of Dimensia and I'm excited to work on Dead Internet Theory with you of course. So I have a few questions prepared. The first one is: What was your first experience with TTRPGs? What was the path that led you to here?
Wilderwhim: Thanks yeah glad to be here, stoked to be working with you as well. The first experience I guess would be a few friends were playing I think a session of 3.5 in an LGS that I was playing in a I think probably a magic tournament or a magic the gathering draft, and if I remember correctly they asked me to fill in for an NPC which if I remember right I was like a magic shop merchant, and you know just being a goofy idiot and like selling the party like dubious potion bombs and that kinda stuff. It didn't really grab me then because I think the guys then didn't take what they were doing very seriously. I was very very loose. When tabletop role playing games grabbed me it was because my now wife was GMing and was trying to put together a group for 5E. I started playing with her and when that group fell apart, I was like well that was pretty cool, I feel like I should try my hand at GMing, and when I started doing that it was kinda like when you discover any other medium for the first time. It was like oh wow, this is like something that's been missing from my life the whole time. It was like this book shaped hole in my heart that is now being filled. It was very gratifying. I had been training to be a comics artist at the time, and I just started applying those skills to making tabletop games, and it just kinda like snowballed from project to project and like here I am.
DJ: Cool, yeah, have you made any comics?
WW: Yeah I have. I was doing a webcomic for a while, but I burnt out on that because it would've been right around when Covid happened the first time in 2020, and there was just a lot of chaos going on with my day job. Still this position that I'm in at the library and we didn't know if we would be able to circulate items, you know that kind of stuff. And that petered off at the same time that I actually started getting serious about releasing tabletop games. I feel like one kinda naturally fed into the other.
DJ: Thats cool, yeah I do go back and forth among my different hobbies as well. So maybe someday you'll get really passionate about comics again or something. So yeah, next question then:
What metal album cover art should be an adventure module?
WW: Easy its Mirror Reaper by Bell Witch and if you're unfamiliar with Bell Witch, they're like a super slow doom band, that they play, Mirror Reaper is like I think and hour and twenty minutes and some change of doom, and its album cover is like this super massive wraith that's coming out of a portal, its reaching its hands out and like holding the portal to the side, and if I'm not mistaken I think its like a Beksiński painting, like if you're familiar with any of his work, really impressive oil paintings of hell and demons and shit.
DJ: Oh yeah, he's definitely a classic. So, what would the adventure module use this guy for?
WW: I feel like there would be some sort of hell ritual involving a massive gateway and theres probably a cult thats trying to summon this titan wraith, and that image of like its reaching its hands through and its grabbing the edges of the portal and its pulling itself out, it would be the beginning of a boss fight. I've felt that way ever since I saw that album cover for the first time. I'm just like, that definitely like the beginning of a Darks Souls boss fight.
DJ: Ok so third question: You wrote, made art and recorded an album for Pulvis et Umbra which is, it's like uncommon for people to do in he hobby space. So are there through lines or connections between these different types of media when you made Pulvis Et Umbra, how did you tie things together? And also as a side question, are there other artists in the hobby space doing similar things?
WW: Yes and yes and yes and yes. I feel like well naturally, it was a module for Mork Borg which is obviously reverential of the music Sacred Bull makes. Not necessarily like of the band Sacred Bull. I'm sure Johan Nohr has never heard of my band, but all of the, if you look in the front of Mork Borg there's a list of suggested listening, like every band in that suggested listening, are bands that either I listen to or someone in my band listens to, completely normal, I'm pretty sure Bell Witch is in that list like other legends, not necessarily metal, like Godspeed You! is definitely listed as one of the bands, probably Candlemass I would imagine. The idea for doing Pulvis et Umbra, was knowing about Putrescence Regnant, which is a first party Mork Borg product that is a soundtrack and I think they called it a bog crawl, and it's just a swamp. You're just trying to get through a fucking swamp, and that was scored by, I think it was Dead Robots. And the folks who made Putrescence Regnant made another album module thing called Death Robot Jungle. So it's like those were definitely the inspiration but from the flip side from the music side, every heavy musician I know especially people here in my scene are multimedia artists of some kind. Everyone in my band, were all visual artists, photographers one of the guys is an oil painter. Every Sacred Bull album cover, like literally every one, including the album covers for Pulvis et Umbra and the zine cover, all internally made art. Oil paintings and drawings by guys in the band. Typically I thinks its pretty common for heavy musicians to also be into table top. I remember running into a buddy of ours who's kind of a local scene mainstay, little bit of a legend in his own way, just like rolled up to me out of no where and said "so you're doing a Mork Borg product huh? Thats pimp." And I was like "thanks man", hahaha. You know these art forms are like really synergistic and there's probably more crossover than people realize.
DJ: That's awesome, its just like normal for you, I wasn't expecting that as an answer.
WW: Yeah well. More normal than you would think.
DJ: So next question, It seems like there are thriving TTRPG and music scenes in your city, its kind of a segue, like your collab with Mystic Punks. So yeah this is just a continuation of your last answer I guess. What are some cool aspects to the scene that people might not know about, but would think are cool?
WW: I'm going to actually start with something very uncool, which is that like, famous people like to hide in Athens [Georgia]. Like actors, musicians obviously, Athens is kinda legendary from its psychedelic rock music scene from the late 70s and the 80s, bands like REM, I have personally met Michael Stipe many times out in public like I used to work at the 41 which is a kind of, its not the biggest venue but its kinda like the longest running one, Queens of the Stone Age, Nirvana, Against Me, I've seen so many incredible bands play that venue but the uncool thing is that people like to hide here and not participate in the scene. Its very strange, but to the flip side of that, what's really cool is that Athens has a very strangely concentrated pool of tabletop role playing game talent. Obviously Jay Domingo of Mystic Punks, another guy I want to shout out is Wayne Peacock, he is the creative director of Kismet Games, they've released a few things recently, specifically the game Rustwater is awesome. He and his creative partner Dee used to work for White Wolf in the 90s. I'm pretty sure they worked on one of the editions of Werewolf from that time period in tabletop games in World of Darkness, he's been around for many years. And then most explosively most recently I hung out with Caleb Zane Hewitt who is the guy behind Triangle Agency. That guy is local too, surprise. The gold Ennie award winning psychedelic tabletop. Its weird it's such a small town, it really is a small town. I can't express that enough. People will move here are quietly make their masterpiece and release it just like go back into hiding. It's very strange.
DJ: I imagine they just like the atmosphere, its like a creative place where they can relax, but yeah its pretty whack to like not participate in the local scene
WW: And I'm not, I don't wanna be, its not like I'm calling any of the people out that I just mentioned. All those people, they've all worked with me on various things. Like Mystic Punks, we had a whole actual play thing and Caleb has very graciously donated his time to my library. But like the super famous people, like I've seen James Franco like in the street. Yeah, Mike Pence came one time to like a UGA game and there was a fleet of helicopters and like carrier jets that flew over our small town, its crazy. I used to joke, that it was on some ley lines, like there's some ancient power underneath the earth that is just drawing people who are like sensitive to creative energies. That was probably a little more woo woo than you were expecting.
DJ: That's cool, no I'm down with that kind of thing. It can be real in some sense for sure. Ok, last question: If you are not familiar with the micro-genre of Post Dungeon Fantasy, this is a super online genre, its kind of like the idea of traditional dungeon crawling plus modern elements, like teenagers who have to go to school and they have smart phones and the gig economy.
WW: You could say Persona Core.
DJ: Yeah yeah exactly! So this mash-up is something I've noticed in your work Pulvis et Umbra and Doors of Dimensia. What do you think of this genre and what appeals to you?
WW: I think the genre rules, I didn't know it had a formalized name until I read it in your message. My answer is a real downer. I'm sure. My answer is a real downer but I can preface it with like at least I can say were trying to do something with the downer answer. Which is our world is careening towards climate catastrophe faster and faster every day, and our nation states are back sliding into authoritarian fascism more and more every day. In fact right now here in Athens, there is a city wide general strike in solidarity against ICE. Obviously someone has to be here to run the library to make sure people have access to printing and the internet. Like in front of this big storm. But if I was working in retail, I wouldn't be going into work today. The average person not only knows these things are wrong but they've basically felt the ripple effects of it their entire modern lives. And it definitely builds up like sediment and eventually is starts to weigh you down if you don't do anything about it. And I think a lot of people don't have a creative outlet. Obviously a big one for me is playing drums in Sacred Bull, its an aggressive loud ass band were like I'm literally hitting my drums as hard as I fucking can without breaking something and sometimes I do break something, I've busted you know fingers and I've made myself bloody on he drumkit before, but a lot of people don't have that literal energy outlet and a lot of these games offer people a way to be able to do shadow work, to use a tarot term, to take the dark energy that's been kind of like building up in their psyche, and put it into something, in the way that most artists just kind of do intuitively. And I think the best way to engage with that is to die in a fetid dungeon you know. Just to like dungeon crawl your way to feeling better, it feels right in the wrongest way, but its good that people have a good outlet for it. Its something that they can do. Essentially they're just unknowingly making folk art. And that's just I think part of the human soul, its been with us since time immemorial and tabletop is a way of tapping back into that. Especially with all these broken machines and systems that are not working systems that are not working for like 99.999 percent of the people on the planet. But its nice that they can stab a goblin and feel better about it I guess.
DJ: That was a deeper answer than I was expecting I guess. Yeah it expresses the modern alienation.
WW: I think tabletop is the prime place for that.
DJ: Its a new genre, I mean its not new but its rising in popularity constantly and I think that is a reflection of how people are thinking and changing these days. Cool, so I guess we'll stop it there.
WW: Ok, well thank you for having me, it was great to talk with you here. And I am all in with Dead Internet Theory, I am looking forward to working on that with you and excited to see it get made.
DJ: Thank you, I'm excited to see Doors of Dimensia as well. I really enjoy your writing, this next work looks like an awesome concept.
Check out and back Wilderwhims crowdfunder for Doors of Dimensia now!