Interview with Joe Wetzel of Inkwell Ideas – New DungeonMorph Dice and Cards Kickstarter and More

Joe Wetzel is the mastermind behind the many roleplaying game accessories created by Inkwell Ideas. Mapping software like Cityographer, Dungeonographer, and the newly revamped, all-inclusive Worldographer; monster cards for SRD, OGL, and Kobold Press’ Tome of Beasts and Creature Codex monsters in the 5E Creature Decks and the Deck of Beasts; and geomorph maps in the form of DungeonMorph Dice and various map tile sets. All of that is designed from the get-go to help you run games at your table.

And there’s a new set of DungeonMorphs now on Kickstarter: DungeonMorphs Revenge – RPG Dungeon Dice & Cards!

Join us as we chat about the new Kickstarter, Inkwell’s many products, the company’s origins, its future, and more!

One of the forthcoming DungeonMorph tiles by Tim Ballew

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Tell us a little about Inkwell Ideas. How did it start? How has it grown?

In 2005-2007 I think we were just making some blog posts on general RPG issues. Our best from that time was a series of Worldbuilding articles, particularly on religion.

Then I had a brainstorm for a map tool to easily make maps in the Mystara and classic World of Greyhawk map styles, which became Hexographer and has now been replaced by Worldographer. After Hexographer was introduced in 2008, we had the idea for Dungeon Geomorph Map Dice & Cards (DungeonMorphs) in 2010. The company has grown consistently and I went full time 3.5 years ago. Artist/Cartographer Keith Curtis transitioned to nearly full time with us a little over a year ago (see the Inkwell Ideas Map Icon Patreon), and Bryan Fazekas has begun doing dedicated software testing for us over the past few months.

You just announced a new set of DungeonMorph dice and tiles already up on Kickstarter. What was the inspiration for the original DungeonMorph dice? How many sets have their been?

I’m not sure I can point it to one thing inspiring the dice. Dyson Logos had been doing these 10×10 designs with 2 corridors to a side so each design can be placed adjacent to any other for a few months by then and somehow I thought that would be cool to put on dice so you could literally roll up a dungeon. I reached out to him and several others making similar designs. After a couple of false starts, we found Q-Workshop could engrave the designs with enough detail that you could read the symbols.

There have been 6 sets so far (2 dungeons, 1 cavern, 1 city, 1 village, and 1 ruined city set). We also have two sets of cards: one for the dungeon & cavern sets, one for the city, village, and ruined city designs.

The original Explorer Set DungeonMorph Dice

What’s new for this set of DungeonMorph dice? What sorts of designs are you hoping to highlight? Doing anything different with the manufacture of the dice themselves?

I think it has been several years since any of us have done many geomorph designs, and 9 since we did the original dungeon and cavern sets. On the one hand we’re doing more of the same… on the other hand, it is cool to see how much we’ve improved our designs. For example, in the case of Dyson Logos, his style has progressed a lot from what he was doing 9 years ago. We’ll highlight some of that as updates during the Kickstarter campaign.

But I’m adding descriptions for each design (a paragraph or so for each major room of the design) which forces us to think through the design. You sort of think of the design as being an area of a dungeon under the control of a particular faction. How do the rooms relate? For example, if the design is guard barracks, maybe the largest room is for the grunts to sleep, and a side room is for any captains of those forces. But we still may have a couple more rooms. What are they for? One may be a training area. A wide corridor may be part of a main highway of the dungeon and is a listening post. So these descriptions help us make sure the design is thorough. And a PDF of all of this is an early stretch goal so you can see what we were thinking and use it as we planned. Plus, another early stretch goal is to add to those descriptions some alternate ideas, such as maybe that room isn’t a training area, but instead a trap room that the guards try to lure the PCs into. Or even just cool variations on the original idea, such as the training area features a chained troll who is being used and abused as a sparring victim. A guard trains and “defeats” the troll, and a short time later another guard has a go at the same troll! [ED. Three cheers for regeneration!]

The dice themselves will still be made by Q-Workshop. They made a big leap forward with the detail they can put on a die about 5 years ago and we already took advantage of that around that time when we revised all the original designs. For example, the original dice just have slanted lines showing filled in/impassable areas, but the revised versions have a pretty stone fill pattern.

You’ve Kickstarted (Kickstartered? I have no idea!) more than just physical gaming tools. How have you found Kickstarter for those sorts of things versus for digital tools like your Worldographer mapping program?

Kickstarter works well for either our digital or physical products. It is incredibly valuable for getting the word out about a project. And we’re still small enough that without it we’d have to think twice about investing the money and effort into a project like this.

There are a few quibbles I have with Kickstarter, mostly around helping with fulfillment and letting people pick 1, 2, 5, 7 or however many specific reward items instead of pre-packaged reward levels. But considering how much it helps, I can’t complain too hard.

DungeonMorph’s Revenge new dice mockup

I use your Monster Decks and Magic Item Decks every session; many of them are available for multiple different game systems such as D&D 5th edition, Fate, and system neutral versions. Recently, you worked with Kobold Press to release 5E monster cards for their Tome of Beasts and later the Creature Codex? How has working in multiple systems gone for you, and how was it working with the Kobolds specifically?

It’s hard to be an expert in too many things. I’m glad we found some excellent partners in all of the examples you mention.

Kobold Press & Wolfgang have been a dream to work with. I think/hope we’re at a point where we are pretty much trusted to be doing our best effort on a project. The specific process has been:

• We sort the creatures into decks basically by challenge rating.
• We convert the creature text and artwork to the card size/format (while we keep the meaning of the rules complete, we do rephrase it to fit–often using cave-man like English).
• Then, Wolfgang reviews that conversion looking for typos, places where we lost the meaning of a rule (and he’ll give us phrasing to fix that), and a few cases where the art background don’t match.
• We address the things he finds, send him a final PDF to make sure we addressed the issues, and then we go to print.

Creature Card Codex High-Level Creatures is going to print now! And the 4th deck of that series is in progress.

Anubian from the Deck of Beasts

Any thoughts on the various community content programs, such as Dungeon Masters Guild (D&D 5E), Storyteller’s Vault (World of Darkness), Pugmire, Miskatonic Repository (Call of Cthulhu)?

For us they haven’t been a good fit yet because of some of the print restrictions and ownership issues. But those programs can be great for creators who want to work with the additional content allowed.

7. Lightning round! Short answers only:

Favorite D&D edition?

Depends on my mood/needs. I like the crunch of 3.5 & Pathfinder, but for a quick game at a con I like 1e. 5e is a happy marriage of the two.

Favorite non-D&D roleplaying games?

Call of Cthulhu, Champions, Star Wars d6

Favorite board games?

Diplomacy, Acquire, Civilization, Settlers

Favorite hobby outside of gaming?

Reading SF.

Flumphs or flail snails?

Neither are in the SRD, so I don’t think about them.

Megadeth or Metallica?

“Do you like Huey Lewis and the News? Their early work was a little too new wave for my taste….”

Did I tell you I ran the Huey Lewis and the News website for almost 20 years? Well, if not, now you know. I gave it up a few years ago to focus on Inkwell Ideas. But it was a lot of fun to do and I’d see them play 20+ times a year, usually 5 feet to the right of one guitarist or the other.

Favorite holiday?

I’m still a kid on Christmas.

Advice for folks who use your DungeonMorph dice at the table?

Take a picture of the dice as you use them if you’ll need the dungeon layout handy. As an alternate, jot down the dungeon layout by writing each design’s letter number code oriented in the same way as the die.

Several of the new cards in the classic blue format side-by-side.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and what inspires you to keep creating.

I think it is just my nature. I tell my wife that even if I were retired or independently wealthy, this is what I’d do. For example, when I was 12 I’d write character sheet-like software for my Commodore 64 and Amiga.

Thanks to Joe for his time and insight!

Check out Inkwell Ideas and all of their projects here, and back the Kickstarter for DungeonMorphs Revenge – RPG Dungeon Dice & Cards here!

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Happy gaming to ya!