Welcome to the first in a brand-new series here at Young Dragonslayers called Meet the Dragons! This series takes you behind the screen to meet the Game Masters behind our games. First up is Jesse Edmonds, also known as Doc Palindrome, a podcaster, improv comic, pop culture blogger and proud Girl Dad. A self-described “old school nerd,” Jesse has been rolling dice since 1985 and they have a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of roleplaying games, comic books, and classic editions of D&D. Game Master Jaclyn got to talk with him about his game design, being a dad, favorite stories from his games, and the origin of all his geekiness at the ripe age of 2.

Designing and Running Tabletop RPGs for Friends

The Girl by Moonlight tabletop roleplaying game

Jaclyn: Hello everybody. I am Game Master Jaclyn here with GM Jesse, here to chat about who he is, what he's up to, and what kinds of things they do in and outside of Young Dragonslayers. So just as a kind of opening question, so that people know who you are and what your deal is, what kinds of things do you do outside of Young Dragonslayers? I assume you do not run games of Dungeons and Dragons 100% of the time.

Jesse: No, but it's a lot. The fun thing about this being my career is it's also my hobby. And I have some amazing groups that I get to run games with that are outside of YDS where I get to kind of do some…Dungeons & Dragons is great with what it allows. But you and I both know that there's a ton of other games that are out there. In fact, is that on your back shelf, Girl…?

Jaclyn: Girl by Moonlight.

Jesse: Yeah, Girl by Moonlight! Yeah. So I have the opportunity to run some games with a group of international people that met through that. Then another one is a group of parents that don't get to go out, and so, you know, we all kind of get to play games together. Then I do a podcast. It is meant for adults, but it's a podcast called Scritches. The last episode, I think, is coming out this week as we're talking. So I don't know when it'll be, but by the time you're hearing this, all the episodes should be out. Scritches was pitched to me as the movie Zootopia meets Chinatown.

That's the other thing I do is I create games, and I create more games sometimes than I really need to. One of my groups said, “Hey, I'd like to do Monster Hearts or I'd like to do Masks.” And those are both this system known as Powered by Apocalypse, which is very story-forward. The original game was Apocalypse World, and it uses 2d6. They're similar games, but they're very different in approach. So, I actually ended up merging them, creating my own game that I'll probably run for that group. It’s a way of thinking like a game designer. So, outside of doing YDS, to answer your question, and not make a long story short because I've made it very long, I do a lot of game stuff. I do a lot of game design stuff. I'm a big nerd. I love comic books. I love superheroes. I'm a dad – that's that's a big one. I probably should have started with that one! I have a beautiful little girl named Mickey. That's been an amazing experience. I stay at home with her and then run games nights and weekends. which is a ton of fun.

Jesse’s Geek Origin Story

Comic books are how Game Master Jesse learned to read!

Jaclyn: What's your origin story as far as tabletop roleplaying games? How did you get into them? Was there like a moment or an element of them that got you? You’ve done a bunch of different stuff and like this is the thing that you've chosen to stick with. Why?

Jesse: As a kid, I was an only child. My mom was a a single mom, and I was growing up, and I got really into comic books. I didn't know that I was dyslexic at the time. By the way, just so the audience knows, I'm old as we speak. I am 50 years old, and I'm aging, so I'll probably be older by the time you hear this, but back in the 70s and 80s when I was growing up, the comic books you got were all handlettered. So they'd hand me, you know, See Spot Run, and I'd just I couldn't pick it out because it was all, you know, Times New Roman type face. Meanwhile, they'd hand me a comic book. Four or five years old, I'm reading those all the way through and I'm not touching like any other books. I assumed that people thought I was a weirdo.

The big part of it was that the characters all were a little bit different, and that's how I learned to read. So, you know, when people are like, “Oh yeah, I got into geeky stuff early,” like it was really the first thing I got into! I was watching The Incredible Hulk reruns at like 2 or 3 years old. I was watching Star Trek. I remember I got chickenpox and I was out of school for three weeks, and my grandmother had just gotten knee surgery. She watched a ton of PBS, and she had a big crush on the fourth doctor, Tom Baker, so that got me into Doctor Who. But Doctor Who to me was like a whole different thing. You know, Star Wars is taking place far away and a long time ago, and Star Trek is taking place in a way in the future, but Doctor Who is happening now.

Playing Tabletop Roleplaying Games

The Planescape setting got Jesse to pick up Dungeons & Dragons

Jesse: Real early on, I was intrigued by the idea of Dungeons & Dragons. My stepfather, when my mom eventually met him and started dating him, he was very religious, and he wouldn't let me touch Dungeons & Dragons, because it was the ‘80s, and Dungeons & Dragons back then was evil. Just kidding! It wasn’t. But everybody thought it was, The thing about that I don't think people always realize is that there were a lot of other games. The company that made Dungeons & Dragons made another game called Marvel Superheroes. When that came out, that was my 10th birthday. Marvel Superheroes was my first game. I was like, “Great, I want to play this game with people,” and nobody was around to play the game. So I was like, "Hey, does anybody want to play a game?" And I started rolling up random characters for people. And you know, people are like, "Oh, I'll choose Spider-Man or Hawkeye or you know, whatever." And I just started running games. And that's how I started. But a couple years later, they came out with Planescape, and credit to Tony DiTerlizzi for creating a setting that I was just like…I need to run this game. And so I learned how to run Dungeons & Dragons in order to play and run that setting. So my first D&D games were a combination of Spelljammer and Planescape.

Jaclyn: That sounds like such a good time.

Jesse: I love the random characters. Like building these random weird characters that just, you didn't know what they were going to be able to do or what they were going to be like. And the same with Marvel. Marvel had the Ultimate Powers book and you could build these just wacky builds that could do anything. And I really love that. I think the reason that I started D&D with the weird settings that I did was because I was like, "Oh, I'm out there already."

Being A Professional DM: “It kind of is the dream!”

Jaclyn: You started pro-DMing in 2007. Was it for adult players, young players, whoever?

Jesse: Adult players. I'd run for kids a few times. I mean, partially running for kids was being a kid and then remembering what that experience was. But I'd run for kids a couple times. Friends would have kids that would want to play, either in their group or together, that kind of thing. Then I remember in 2007, there was a store around Rochester – that’s where I live and I’m from, Rochester, New York – that's known as the largest roleplaying game store, called Millennium. I used to play there every once in a while. I'd go meet up with people or play some of the games that were in there. And I ended up meeting this guy that was like, “I wish I could find somebody to run games for me.” And he wanted to do GURPS. And he was like, I can't find anybody that runs GURPS. I'm like, “I run GURPS all the time.” And he was like, "Oh, will you run some games for my group?" I'm like, "You know,I don't have a ton of time." And he's like, "Well, I could, I could pay you." I'm like, "Wait, I could get paid to do this?"

I did tech for 30 years, and I had lost my job in 2020 and was trying to find something else and ended up doing this. It’s just been amazing. This is what I do; this is how I make my money now. It's pretty great. I get to be a dad and run games, and those are like the two things I'm really good at. So yeah, it kind of is the dream in a lot of ways!

Stories From Jesse’s D&D Games

This is Spank, a beloved NPC from Duskfall Gulch. Jesse makes custom minifigures like this for all his key NPCs!

Jaclyn: What are some of the things that your players have been most drawn towards that you've put in your worlds, whether you expect it or not?

Jesse: Oh boy, so this last quarter, I have a setting that I've kind of played with a little bit that is another extrapolation of Gate World called Ponopoulos. I’ve been running two of my games that take place in that, and they've pulled it different ways. In one of them, they ended up in this place called Duskfall Gulch, which was this Western town, but it was populated almost entirely by drow. And then the opposite town, it was a Hatfields-and-McCoys type situation, is a town of paladins who are elves called Dawn's Hollow. So the two were against each other. And the leader of Duskfall Gulch was Mayor Trinia, a drow, and [one group] liked her a lot, like right away. The other group not as much, which I was like “okay.” But then they met Sir Elellanad, who was the leader of the paladins; they were called the Dawn Forge. When everything was going on, they didn't like him. But at one point, I have the two of them in the same room towards the end of the story arc, and suddenly there's this flirtation going on between them. And suddenly, the players were like “We have to get them together. Like it has to happen.” So funny. I didn't expect that at all. So that was a lot of fun.

You have to treat everything with a little bit of the same urgency, the same importance because you don't know what they're going to be like “this is the thing I like the most.: So, you know, it's easy to have a dragon show up. I have a thing that I always tell everybody every quarter, ever since like my first two or three quarters, I've basically said “Every quarter there will be at least one dragon and at least one dungeon, ‘cause that is the name of the game.” And so, you have to have that. Now, how that shows up will be weird and random. Sometimes it'll be like a little tiny dragon. Sometimes the dungeon will be a little weird , but that's something that, you know, having the dragon show up usually feels pretty significant!

A Message For Young Dragonslayers

Jaclyn: Anything you'd like to say to players, or parents of your players, if they happen to be watching? Or or the parents that are out there that don't get this, that are like, “I don't understand this. I don't know what this is.”

Jesse: It’s the sheer level of synaptic responses and elements and all those like the brain power things that D&D just triggers all the time, constantly. It’s beyond anything else. And if you're looking at your kid and you're like, “I want this kid to be like the smartest person in the world,” have them play D&D. Because problem solving and teamwork and improvisation and all those elements, project management? The correlation between project management and D&D, especially running D&D, is huge.

Jaclyn: That is lovely. Well, thank you so much, Jesse, for sharing all of this. I'm really excited for folks to get to know you more. Thanks to everyone out there who is watching and is part of Young Dragonslayers in some way or another. Hope you have a lovely rest of your day and thanks again. Bye!

Jesse: Bye!

Thanks to you all for reading as well! If you’d like to learn more about Jesse’s work as Doc Palindrome or if you know a geek-minded tween or teen who might like to join his games, check out the links below.

Meet the Dragons: GM Jesse, aka Doc Palindrome