Elevating Adventures: Empowering Players and DMs 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 200 magic items, numerous monsters, and several rich campaign settings filled with captivating mechanics, stunning artwork, and immersive lore. I've also created surveys to gauge community interest in types of content, email marketing campaigns to maintain a firm line of connection with our audience, a Figma prototype for a product to streamline content navigation for our Patreon supporters.
A labor of love
At the outset of this project, I was hungry to leverage my illustration and design skills on something that I enjoyed, something I could nerd out on with my friend and business partner, and that we would be proud to have ownership of. The photoshop illustrations below are a sample of a much larger number of pieces I’ve spent entirely too much time lovingly crafting 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 a strong presence
It wasn’t enough to simply make nice art and writing. The community has let us know since the beginning that making it easier for players and DMs to interface with our catalogue of wares is essential. To that end, we’ve dedicated resources to designing, building and collaborating on beautiful PDF compilations, digital and printable cards for referring back to your favorite items, and Virtual Table Top (VTT) item packs for platforms such as Foundry VTT and Roll20.
The Hoard
In 2023 we began developing 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.
Component variants to account for the unique information attached to each item
