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One downside of more and more celebrities coming into the Dungeons & Dragons community is the intense jealousy we the fans must feel for those lucky enough to sit at the table while one of our favorite stars acts as Dungeon Master. And unfortunately, I think that problem is only going to be compounded when the actual play/reality hybrid horror series Tales of Woodcreek drops this Halloween - as we'll get to see some very lucky players sit at the table of none other than Karen Page herself, Debra Ann Woll. 

Maybe because we're feeling especially green with envy ourselves, Popverse recently sat down with some of the folks involved in the production of Woodcreek - Kelly McLaughlin and Monty Martin, AKA The Dungeon Dudes - and of course we had to ask what the True Blood and Daredevil: Born Again star was like as a DM. Before they could answer that, though, they had to clarify - Tales from Woodcreek isn't your average game of D&D.

"It's a weird beast," says McLaughlin, "Because I felt it wasn’t just about maintaining a role-playing character."

Indeed, rather than just sit around a table and have the DM explain story to you while you make choices based off of a character sheet, Tales form Woodcreek had the Dudes (and some incredible guest stars like Iman Vellani and Wil Wheaton) interact with escape-room puzzles and conduct reality show-esque one-on-one interviews, all in the service of telling the story of a haunted town and the citizens therein trying to break its curse.

"I was too busy trying to solve puzzles and move around the room," McLaughlin continues, "So I kept breaking my role playing. But in that respect, we were also kind of immersed in it ourselves."

Immersion was the name of the game for Tales from Woodcreek, and it's here that the Dudes say Woll's talent as a DM really shone through - not just in helping them get into the game, but in making sure the story still felt like what they expected out of a game of D&D.

"[Woll] would be running around holding a dice tray," McLaughlin explains, "And she had given us all of our character sheets and a little booklet with a strap that we could wear over our shoulders. And those had very easy access that had all of our skills on the outside. So if I'd be looking around a room, and we have like this weird poem or something that we have to decipher, I would say, ‘Well, my character's a bard. I'm really good with like, poetry or something like that. Could I roll investigation?' Or if we encountered a magical device, ‘Can I roll arcana?’ Or, because I'm a bard and I know poetry. ‘Can I roll performance to see if I can learn something?’ And Deb just had a bunch of hints ready."

He continued, "She would run up, we would roll for our character, then she would give the person who was asking the question more information to help them along with, solving a part of the puzzle. So it does bring that D&D element back in, even when we're doing an escape room."

"Deb also found really cool ways," Martin hops in to conclude, "To make the puzzles feel like a very organic part of the narrative that she was telling. A lot of the puzzles have this feeling of investigating a haunted house or, a bit of a ghost story in the investigation, which was a lot of fun for us to experience. Oftentimes, we could we could apply that sort of creative thinking to the situations as well, to be like, ‘Well, this is a haunted school house; what is the logic of a school teacher?’ And we would use that to investigate the clues, to solve riddles and figure out what we needed to investigate. And then occasionally, we had to fight some ghosts along the way."

I mean, what is a Dungeon Master without a host of supernatural baddies they've conjured up to torture their victims? Er, friends.

Tales from Woodcreek debuts on the Dungeon Dudes' YouTube channel October 31. 

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