Elevating Adventures with quality wares
The Dungeon Strugglers delivers top-notch third-party content for Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition. As a founder, I lead as the primary illustrator, graphic designer, and manage social media and community engagement. We've crafted over 200 magic items, numerous monsters, and several rich campaign settings filled with captivating mechanics, stunning artwork, and immersive lore. To date we’ve amassed a significant social following and customer base of over 32,000 followers on Instagram, 1,600 Patreon supporters and followers, 4,300 followers on Tumblr, and 550+ Discord community members.
Illustration
At the outset of this project, I wanted to leverage my illustration and design skills on something that I enjoyed, something I would be inspired by with my friend and business partner, and that we would be proud to take ownership of. The photoshop illustrations below are a sample of a much larger catalogue of pieces I’ve created for the company over the past few years.
Learning the Market
When we set out to create content for the 5th edition space, we had a few references for products to build and some successful business models we were confident we could emulate with our existing skillsets. We saw a huge amount of engagement with magic items for 5e, and those creating items building successful businesses using Patreon and Kickstarter as sources of revenue. It was firmly within our abilities to create that content so that’s where we started. However the nuances of creating and managing a small business successfully for a niche space like D&D became apparent to us in year one.
Building strong products
The community has guided us since the beginning, making it clear that the easier for players and DMs to interface with our catalogue of wares, the more successful we’ll be. To that end, we’ve pored over the designs of our beautiful PDF compilations, digital and printable cards of our items, and Virtual Table Top (VTT) item packs for platforms such as Foundry VTT and Roll20.
The Hoard - a digital sorting tool
In 2023 we developed an interactive sorting tool to help our Patreon supporters more easily search through our current and future content. Looking at similar, existing tools in the marketplace alongside aspects of other tools’ architecture, I began to design a prototype for “The Hoard” to be developed with the help of our UX and developer friends at ThinkHuman.
Animating D&D magic
Using Photoshop, Figma, and After effects, I built the following icons to convey playful magical elements of a fantastical world for members of our Discord server. These are used as emoji and as stickers for community members to send to one another, or outside our server elsewhere on Discord.
