Hire a professional Dungeon Master

Hiring a Dungeon Master means paying someone to do the job that usually falls on whichever friend owns the books: building the world, prepping the encounters, learning the rules, chasing the scheduling, running the NPCs and keeping the campaign moving for years. When that person is doing it professionally, the game stops collapsing in month four.

At Crit Fails and Fairy Tales you are not hiring a stranger off a listings page. You are joining a table run by a Dungeon Master we interviewed, trained and hold to a standard, inside a community of about a dozen other tables. Games run weekly on Foundry VTT with Discord voice, 2D and 3D battlemaps, custom tokens and ambient audio.

Most of our campaigns are Dungeons & Dragons 5e, mixing the 2014 and 2024 rules, though individual DMs also run Pathfinder 2e, Call of Cthulhu, Shadowdark, Mothership, Blades in the Dark, Star Trek Adventures, Pokemon Tabletop United and more. Sessions run three to four hours. Campaigns are built to reach level 20, which for a weekly table is measured in years.

How joining a game actually works

• Tell us what you want — night of the week, system, how much combat versus roleplay, whether you have played before.
• We point you at the Dungeon Masters who run that, and tell you which have seats.
• You sit a session zero. You meet the DM and a couple of party members, build a character, and set the table's expectations and boundaries.
• If it fits, you are in. If it does not, you say so and we find you a different table. Nobody is charged for a campaign that was not right.
• Then you play, same night every week, and the DM handles everything else.

What a session looks like

You join a Discord voice channel and open Foundry VTT in a browser. There is nothing to install and nothing to buy — the DM owns the licence, the maps, the modules and the soundtrack. Your character sheet lives in Foundry and does the arithmetic for you, which matters more than it sounds if you are new.

A session runs three to four hours depending on the DM. Expect a mix: scenes where the party talks its way through something, a set-piece fight on a battlemap the DM built for it, a dungeon, a puzzle, and at least one moment that only happened because of something in somebody's backstory. Between sessions the DM preps, and you do not.

What it costs

Seats are $20 to $30 per player per session, set by the individual Dungeon Master and always shown before you sit a session zero. That is above the marketplace average and well below what a production studio charges — the pricing page shows the whole market so you can see where we sit and why.

Full pricing →

Common questions

Do I need to own any books or software?

No. Your Dungeon Master owns the Foundry VTT licence, the rulebooks, the maps and the music. You need Discord, a browser and a microphone. Everything else is on us.

I have never played D&D. Is that a problem?

No, and several of our Dungeon Masters specifically enjoy teaching. Tell us you are new when you ask about a seat and we will put you with one of them. Session zero exists partly so a first-time player can build a character with help rather than alone.

What if I do not like the table?

You tell us and we find you another one. That is the practical difference between a company and a marketplace — there is somebody to tell. Session zero happens before you commit to a campaign for exactly this reason.

How long does a campaign last?

Most of ours run one to five years of weekly sessions, because they are built to reach level 20. A few DMs run shorter arcs of four to six months. Each profile says which.

What time zone are games in?

Sessions are scheduled in US Eastern time, but players join from everywhere. Check the openings table for the specific slot.

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