August 31, 2019
On a crisp fall night some five years ago, the villagers of Hillboddom were woken by screams.
Running into the streets, they discovered five children in the woodland village had been spirited away in their sleep. Mysteriously, the sign of the ancient demon Pazomat was painted on their doors.
The jarl called for volunteers and five brave souls stepped forward. Before the sunrise, they embarked on their quest: retrieve the children and bring them home safe from whatever foe had taken them.
It was cultists, of course, maniacally bent on freeing the ancient demon from the stone vault where he'd been sealed for millennia.
"Standard," Jeremy Pillipow now says of the first campaign he ran in the world of Dungeons & Dragons, the venerable tabletop roleplaying game. "Everybody's first game, they run cultists."
Now, five years later, amid a resurgence in the game's popularity, the former contractor has turned his hobby into a full-time job, producing YouTube tutorials on how to make tabletop terrain pieces for a subscriber base of more than 163,000 people.
Sitting in the studio in his Charleswood home, Pillipow — or Black Magic Craft on YouTube — was surrounded by the tools of his trade: a rainbow of paints, utility knives, stacks of insulation foam and electrical cutting equipment.
A wall behind him displays dozens of the intricately detailed set pieces of a fantasy world in miniature, from castles and shacks to tentacled monsters. A tiny guillotine is delicately spattered with painted blood.
As dungeon master, his role in that first campaign was to create the narrative of the game, leading his players — or party — through the twists and turns of a fantasy universe. Six months in, the heroes managed to get the children home safe — or so they thought.
"It turned out the kids weren't the kids," he said. "They were possessed spirits that tried to murder the whole village."
Pillipow's first creation was a diorama of a swamp, complete with derelict shack. He built it out of things he pulled from his recycling bin.
"It looks like a high school kid’s art project — maybe a really talented elementary school kid," he said, laughing.
"But it worked, and we played our first game that I ever ran with it. ... It served its purpose and everybody playing thought it was amazing, and that was the magic of the hobby."
Dungeons & Dragons has been around for decades, dating back to the mid-1970s and booming as a pop culture phenomenon in the '80s. But enthusiasts say they’ve recently seen an explosion in the game, particularly after the release of its fifth edition in 2014 and accelerating over the past two years.
Pillipow, though, was initially reluctant to try it out. He agreed to play as a favour to a friend’s wife but worried it would be awkward or weird — the same kind of social pressures he feels often hold people back from trying new things.
"When you play a game like Dungeons & Dragons or any other kind of roleplaying game, you have to leave that at the door," he said. "You cannot do it without putting that aside, opening up yourself, making yourself vulnerable, and just doing it.
"As soon as you do that and you realize that you're surrounded by friends who support you and it doesn't matter, it is one of the most liberating experiences you can imagine."
He knew right away he wanted to play with physical terrain — not pen and paper as some players do. At the time, he told himself he needed to see the terrain there in order to play the game. Now, he thinks it was just an excuse to build.
He made the leap to posting videos online shortly after he started building. Video editing filled the void left behind by his former side gig as a musician — a pursuit he left behind after the arrival of a new baby made the travel and loud noises at home impractical.
From the first videos he posted, shot on his iPhone, he said he saw potential for his channel. When he decided to treat it as a business, the growth exploded.
He made YouTube his full-time job in May 2018, when his earnings from his channel — through affiliate sales, ad revenue, sponsorships and fan donations — equalled his previous salary.
"Now, in retrospect, I don't know if I'll ever go back to music in my life," he said. "This is so much more fulfilling and rewarding."
Pillipow came to Dungeons & Dragons as a lover of horror, not fantasy. His campaigns and terrain builds tend to be based in a grittier, low fantasy — where fantastical elements take place in an otherwise normal world — rather than the more epic worlds of high fantasy, like Lord of the Rings.
His status as a relative outsider to the world of model-making helped him stand out, too, he said. Instead of materials you’d find at a hobby shop, he reached for things you’d find at Home Depot. Insulation foam, drywall mud and tile grout are all mainstays of his craft.
"I was a contractor. I built houses for real, in the real world," he said.
"To build something in miniature was really intuitive to me, because I understood how things go together, how forms are supposed to look — but more importantly, I had access to all of these materials that very few people were utilizing in the hobby, materials that might intimidate the average person."
Pillipow attributes some of the recent interest in Dungeons & Dragons to the Marvel cinematic universe, which opened the door for comic book superheroes to enter the mainstream.
"While the door was open, certain important media swept in," he said. "It's no secret that shows like Stranger Things made [Dungeons & Dragons] a household name," he says of the Netflix hit, which is set during D&D's 1980s heyday and has featured its main characters playing the game.
Brian Mitchell, owner of A Muse N Games in Winnipeg, also attributes some of the game's recent resurgence to the success of Critical Role, an online show where actors play the game. The show’s website says it gets half a million viewers a week.
At Mitchell’s store, kits for D&D are his best-selling roleplaying game guides, and players have to book in advance if they want to participate in one of the three D&D nights held a the shop each week.
Jonas Pagé, a supervisor at GameKnight Games and Cool Stuff in Winnipeg, said where the store once ran Dungeons & Dragons games two to three times per week, it now runs six.
Compared to other tabletop games where the majority of players are male, Pagé said the growth in the D&D crew has been diverse.
"We've been seeing a lot of different kinds of people coming out for D&D," they said. "Young kids and a lot of women, people of different sort of ethnic [backgrounds] and gender diverse people.… It's a very diverse community."
Pillipow said there’s value in bringing fantasy and world-building into your daily life, no matter how old you are.
"I think that we have a tendency to grow up and ignore our imagination. You know, we get stuck in our routines," he said. "Our imaginations are a really powerful thing, and the older you get, the stronger they can get, if you continue to develop it."
For people who want to do that, Dungeons & Dragons is a welcoming setting, he said.
"It doesn't matter if you're, like, a nerdy little kid or a ripped bodybuilder dude who plays football and goes fishing and hunting. It's kind of this universal acceptance," he said.
"Maybe that's part of the reason this hobby is becoming so popular now, when it is. Because I think people are starting to let themselves be vulnerable and experiment.
"And I think we really, really need that right now."