About Crit Fails and Fairy Tales

Crit Fails and Fairy Tales started because paid Dungeons & Dragons had a quality problem. The marketplaces will sell you a seat with anybody who signed up, and the good games are hidden among the ones that fold after four sessions. We built the opposite: a small team of Dungeon Masters we chose, trained and keep training, running to one standard.

That standard is specific. Every campaign opens with a session zero, so you meet the DM and a couple of party members before you commit to anything. Every character backstory becomes part of the plot rather than a document nobody reads again. Every table gets roleplay, combat, dungeon crawls and puzzles, because a campaign that is only one of those runs out of road. And every campaign is built to reach level 20, which means our DMs are planning in years.

Some of our worlds you will recognise — Faerun, Eberron, Barovia, Thylea. Others are homebrew settings our DMs have been building for a decade. Both get bent around the player characters, which is the part that makes a table feel like it is yours.

The community sits on Discord, and it is genuinely the point rather than a support channel. Players sit in on other people's sessions. DMs swap NPCs. Events run across multiple tables. Crit Fails Academy grew out of that: the DMs kept asking how to do the things our DMs do, so we filmed it.

How we work

• We interview and train every Dungeon Master before they run a paid table under our name.
• Prices are published. You will never have to ask what a seat costs.
• Session zero comes before money changes hands for a full campaign seat.
• Backstories are load-bearing. If you write one, it turns up in the plot.
• We take a smaller cut than the marketplaces, so more of your seat fee reaches your DM.
• Beginners are welcome everywhere. Nobody here treats a first-time player as a problem.

The team