“The challenging part is in the beginning; it’s a leap of faith. But I think the most important thing is to just do it. Start.”
-Tom Szaky
Good friends plus creative thoughts. Mix in a healthy dose of love for TTRPGs and what do you get? Bardic Mischief comes into reality. Six people following a dream of producing game content and sharing it with others. It is something we have thought about and discussed for years but have been somewhat shy to begin until our leader, Drew Phillbrick aka “Jinjeet”, pulled us together into a chatroom and challenged us to take a leap of faith with him. “Let’s form a gaming content company. We can do this”! Now, four months later, here we are. Bardic Mischief has begun building a catalog and will be releasing content to the public by the end of March 2024.
What makes us different from other content producers? Let’s be real. We are so new at this; we don’t know the answer to that question yet. What we do know is that we are going to write things we think are fun for the games we love. Simple, yet honest and to the point. It could be Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder 2e, Old School Essentials, Call of Cthulhu or any number of games we are interested in. Our current focus is writing content following the Shadowdark RPG ruleset. There are several reasons we are starting out with Shadowdark RPG. It is a fresh take on classic fantasy gaming. It’s streamlined rules and dark survival-based gameplay is really appealing to us. We as a group also find Kelsey Dionne, Shadowdark’s creator to be an inspiration. Her work through the Arcane Library is not just excellent writing and great fun, but thoughtful and good for the TTRPG community. For those reasons, Bardic Mischief’s first grand campaign “The Torn Lands” is being written for the Shadowdark RPG ruleset.
Our group has set the date of Gary Con 2024 as our birthday. Several members of Bardic Mischief will be at Gary Con this year to enjoy the RPG activity and to learn more about running a content production company. Before Jinjeet flew to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin this week for Gary Con, we had talked about how wonderful it would be to actually meet and talk to Kelsey Dionne. Then this happened, proving that we do live in a small world. Jin had just arrived at the hotel in Lake Geneva and bumped into Kelsey. Both Jin and Kelsey were wrestling their luggage up the stairwell. Thanks, Kelsey, for the well wishes and for being so kind to Drew as he turned into a fanboy temporarily.
