Join the Guild

WoTC’s DMs Guild concept is a great resource for both players and DM’s alike. Not only can abundant home-brew and official content be found, but it is also a great place to turn your hard work into some reasonable pocket money. New Classes, subclasses, races, maps, encounters, items, backgrounds, spells, npc’s, adventures and one shots can all be found on the site for free or being sold.

My Experiences...

At the beginning of this year with a bunch of spare time and some creative inspiration, I set about creating a campaign to play with my family. I prepared the story, town, NPC’s and other important information into a document with similar formatting and layout to other D&D products. After finishing the first 3 parts and uploading them to DMs Guild (check out my stuff here), I continued working hard on creating the rest of the campaign and a bunch of other content for the next 4 months. I formatted edited and tested my content and then uploaded it to the Guild. Unfortunately, mid-year the real world came calling and I was forced back into a full time roll and I was no longer had the time to keep creating content.  

Now, through persistent advertising on Facebook, Twitter and Reddit and help from the great people on the DM’s Guild Facebook group, I created some reasonably good content and generated over $1,300AUD in sales, over the past 8 months or so. Now considering the time I spent working on the content I think it translates to maybe 20c and hour, but it was content I was creating for my own games anyways. It was hard and time consuming, but this money has paid for all my D&D books, dice, miniatures and other related odds and ends. How much did it cost me? Well I bought a Microsoft office suite for $60 to create it all.

YOU CAN/SHOULD DO THIS TOO!

I often talk to players and DM’s about joining the guild and giving it a go to make some extra cash on the side. Some of the more prominent members of the guild are making close to around $20,000USD a year. Most people however, when they look at the idea of trying to sell their content often undervalue their own worth. I know a few great DM’s/players with awesome concepts and ideas for encounters or traps or even items, that wouldn’t dare upload their ideas to try and sell. I think this is a damned shame, as the potential is there for people to turn their hobbies into a way to generate some extra income.

Additionally this also gives people a chance to involve themselves more with the community and also provides a worthwhile hobby/creative outlet if you have the time to spare. DM’s Guild does have a number of stipulations to adhere to when creating content. But they also provide templates, images and other resources to help get your content looking professional and stylish. I strongly recommend joining the facebook group which hosts a great community of creators who often happily help with formatting editing and play testing.

I try to recommend anyone who creates their own content to try the DM’s guild experience. I can’t speak highly enough of this website and I hope to see a few new names throwing their hat into the proverbial ring sooner rather than later.