Apotheosis Studios' Exclusive Interview With Robert Hartley
/Happy New Year, gamers!
We here at Apotheosis Studios have a great many friends out there in the world of table top role playing gaming. I know that Dungeons and Dragons have brought me some of my very best friends, but they’ve also introduced me to some of the finest creators and most colourful characters in our broad and big community.
I had the pleasure of having a discussion with Robert Hartley. Professional Dungeon Master and thespian in the hilariously well produced D&D Logic series over on Viva La Dirt League. It was great to get an insight into his in on this wide world of content creation.
Exclusive Interview with Robert Hartley
I believe that big things have small beginnings. What's your (hopefully not too tragic) backstory? Where did your journey in writing and in TTRPGs begin?
Well, there are obviously contributing factors that I wouldn’t be aware of, like the types of shows I watched on TV and the movies I watched at the cinema, the books I read as a kid and the fact I always gravitated towards playing make-believe as a child, rather than sports, but for the stuff I can actually concretely point at as directly contributing to me getting where I am, it went exactly like this:
Firstly, studied acting and pursued it actively as my full-time job for many years. Next, visited a friend in Oxford, UK, where we enjoyed a board game shop called the Thirsty Meeples. I fell in love with it and thought it was a wonderful business idea to avoid the cost and storage issues of buying your own games and, instead, rent them for a couple hours on site. I came back to NZ with the plan that I would open one in Auckland if there wasn’t one. Turns out, there was! A wonderful café called Cakes N’ Ladders. I started going regularly and further developing a love of boardgames while supplementing it by watching Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop series. In particular, I watched him play Dragon Age and thought ‘hmm, is this what D&D is like?’ So, I contacted a friend I knew was a DM and asked them to set me up my first game.
Then I blacked out and haven’t woken up yet, going on 6 years later!
Robert Hartley as Aaron, a sword for hire - image by Viva la dirt league
People in our communities are what I call, capital G, Gamers. I know my tastes are very diverse, but we want to hear from you. What kinds of games do you enjoy; PC, console, tabletop, or anything in between? Where do you go to relax? Do you have an all-time favourite?
I was just thinking about this very question the other day. I caught myself not thinking of myself as a gamer, and then paused and thought, ‘wait a second… I play board games, dice games, card games, bluffing games, social games, roleplaying games, pen and paper games, manual dexterity games, miniatures games, betting games, games of chance, and, lately, a whole bunch of PC games too; just because I don’t own a console doesn’t mean I’m not a gamer!’
As for favourites, I love deck builders, engine builders, resource management, turn-based strategy, platformers, miniature games, some social deduction games and, of course, TTRPGs. My least favourite, not that there’s anything wrong with them, just haven’t found them to my taste, are worker-placement games and first-person shooters.
Viva La Dirt League has been making gaming comedy content for many years. Fans have seen it grow and encapsulate gaming comedy from titles also including Dark Souls. It's also brought hilarious skits and sketches. How did you get involved with them?
A good friend of mine, Mike Glasswell, (whom I met through Cakes N’ Ladders!) is an animator, had worked with them on animating an episode of NPC Man before and he was also a friend of Adam King’s. He put us in touch after watching a three-part series from Shut Up and Sit Down reviewing some TTRPG, as he thought it would be a good fit for their channel to do something similar.
We trialled a OneShot where I had homebrewed them a simple character each and absolutely jammed it full of easter eggs from the series. They enjoyed it and it was well received on their Patreon, but not at a high enough production quality to add to their main channel. So, we treated it as a test and started looking for sponsorship to do it properly. As luck would have it, WotC reached out around that same time asking if we’d be interested in doing a short, sponsored series promoting Baldur’s Gate: Descent Into Avernus. Match made in Heaven! … or in this case, the first layer of the Nine Hells.
Link to the Avernus playlist on their main YouTube channel.
VLDL's D&D specific page has been going for around a year, and has the same level of rich production value and hilarious content. I imagine that you've been involved in that very heavily, but how did that come to be?
After our series on Descent Into Avernus released, it got mixed reviews. The people who were used to the VLDL format of 3-5 min comedy skits about PUBG had no love for this weird new diversion to a 30 min episodic D&D campaign, even if it did feature the same characters from the NPC series as the primary cast. However, the people who loved it REALLY loved it and vociferously demanded more.
So, we had a chat about how to continue, and it was decided that they would make a secondary channel and that I would help them to run it, growing in responsibility for the channel over time.
Here’s the link to the ongoing campaign.
Then the day we were booked in to film our first greenscreen for the first table session, we went into a lockdown in NZ, and so we had all this hype for a new channel and no content for it! Hence was born the ‘Isolation Games’; a short series run over Roll20 and Discord from lockdown.
Here’s the link to the Isolation Games playlist on our D&D channel.
Robert Hartley’s Aaron as the Judge dealing with the rules lawyer
The gaming community is vocal and opinionated. You see lots of members in the worlds of TTRPG, while VLDL have a lot of fun dabbling with AAA video games. How does interacting with so many different kinds of fans and gamers inspire your many kinds of creative work?
Not sure that my answer to this is that surprising or interesting, to be honest; Viva make content for video gamers and I make content for TTRPG folk as it’s what we each know! And thankfully, (though not coincidentally) its what we respectively find exciting and where our passions lie, so the creativity seems to flow, inspired by the wonderful support of the communities.
Being a Professional Dungeon Master is a strong ambition for many people in our community, myself included. How did you get started professionally DMing and how would you advise others to get into that line of work?
Yes, I still haven’t worked out a way to explain what I do for a living to my more traditional family… especially not without saying “I’m a Dungeon Master; I’m an entertainer and help groups of people act out fantasy stories.” and leaving them with a VERY different idea of what I do for a living!
My path to doing this full time started the way my career as an actor started, or my job as a tour guide at the zoo, or my job as a kids entertainer at birthday parties, or my getting a degree in applied mathematics and working in mathematics education research; namely, I followed what I enjoyed doing, put conscious dedicated practice into getting better at it and giving it my all, studying it in my spare time, performing it with gusto when given the chance, and getting good enough at a thing that someone wants to start paying me to do it.
Once I discovered D&D, I needed it in my veins. I bought dice, all the books, I read them cover to cover, I played whenever I could, watched Critical Role, pausing to look up spells and (now regrettably,) being a rules w***er in the comments when Marisha got a spell wrong (I was learning, I’m sorry!). Not long later, I was asked to take over a timeslot, running a game for a friend who needed a break from DMing. I prepped and started a home game that it still running 5 years later.
A friend of a friend, Lara, (also through Cakes N’ Ladders,) contacted me to say ‘Hey, I loved how into character you got when we were playing Dread the other day, would you run a D&D game for my kid’s birthday party?’. So that was my first time DMing professionally. She was impressed enough to invite me back to do the same the next year AND to take me on at the ground level of a new business she had, Game Changer’s League, helping children with special needs through the medium of D&D. I ran that with her for over a year before my schedule got too busy to continue it.
In the meantime, my work with VLDL was getting recognised and I was starting to realise I had a little fandom beginning. I heard that people were raving about my work on Ben Van Lier’s Twitch stream so I made an account to log in and say hi. Within a couple weeks I had started streaming, hit affiliate, and realised that, if I really put the effort in, I could turn it into a full-time job.
I made the decision to forgo my burgeoning career in mathematics education research and take a risk by focussing on the one I was more passionate about. And here we are about 20 months later and it’s going really well! I get tremendous support from wonderful friends, fans and fine folk and stream D&D-related content several times a week. I also post D&D-related content to YouTube.
It’s definitely worth me pointing out, however, that I am privileged to have had the opportunity to pursue my passion until I’m good enough at it to be paid doing it; not everyone will be in a position where that’s a viable option right away. See what small changes you can make and keep moving towards that goal, one step at a time. Never stop striving to be a better person than you were yesterday.
Link to my Twitch, and to my YouTube.
Robert Hartley’s Aaron Alongside the beaten and bloody Party - image by viva la dirt league
We all have similar interests as TTRPG creators. Movies, games, anime, and fiction call backs that set the genre like Lord of the Rings or Wheel of Time. These influence the games we write for our players, but what is one of your biggest influences that most people have never heard of?
Hmm, fantastic question. I rarely ever consciously grab inspiration from anywhere so it’s hard to know what is subliminally affecting my stories. I have been told an many occasion that something that has happened in game is very similar to something that I have never watched, so maybe it’s just a case of there only being a finite number of notes to make music from, so some are bound to sound similar!
One story I did consciously draw on heavily for my home game, is an anime called Tenga Toppa Gurren Laggan. I had never seen any anime, (at the time; I have since hosted a weekly anime podcast, no less!), but one of the players in that game told me his character concept was based on Kamina from that show, so, as homework, I told myself ‘if he's just given you the gift of flat out telling you what sort of story he’s keen on this being, you better get in there and watch it!’. So, I grabbed some character and plot concepts, transposed them into D&D, forced them into fitting my setting and tied them to his backstory which, incidentally, is the story they’re still following 5 years later!
I did the same when one of the other players told me he was playing a sort of amnesiac Oliver Twist and was keen on the Harpers (a sort if Robin Hood-esque gang of scrupulous pickpockets); I made a benevolent thieves’ guild run by a fella called Figan and tied it to his whole story.
Tabletop roleplaying games are at an all-time high. The sense of community and the wealth of creators have put streamed games and content similar to yours across the web. What are your takes on D&D and the wider TTRPG community as a whole right now?
I love that more people are getting into the hobby. I just yesterday met a guy who said, ‘I thought boardgames were kind of done.’ And when I asked him to clarify, ‘I thought there was just Monopoly and Scrabble and there couldn’t really be any new ones.’ And he isn’t alone in thinking so; I thought this way as well until about 7 years ago. So, if it wasn’t for these things being on an upward trend, I possibly wouldn’t have gotten into it myself, either.
Now, I love Monopoly as much as the next boardgamer, (that is to say, I loathe it), but the sooner we can get rid of this notion that that’s all this hobby has to offer, the better. I love that TTRPGs and Tabletop gaming in general are becoming more mainstream and finding new audiences.
The work you've done with us here at Apotheosis Studios has been a wonderful help. Your presence is felt greatly on Sirens: Battle of the Bards. How did you come to be involved with Sirens and Apotheosis Studios?
Thank you for saying so, you’re awfully kind. When Satine and Jamison put on the Kickstarter for it, one of the pledge rewards was that if you pledged enough money, you got to get your own sidequest in the module. Now, I was by no means well-off enough to afford that myself, (even though, with this as my career now I can write things like this as work expenses, which is an awesome perk of this weird job!), but I knew that I do have an insanely generous and supportive minifandom. So, while ever I was streaming duration their Kickstarter’s run, I had a donation goal in the bottom corner of the screen. Before the Kickstarter was over, I had raised enough to pledge the highest tier, essentially crowdfunding my donation to a crowdfunder!
As a thank you to my donators, I have worked in my community Discord server with everyone who contributed to the pledge and we have collectively created the NPC and sidequest!
Link to my Discord.
Robert Hartley’s Aaron Alongside the Party witnessing a party member’s cruel fate - image by viva la dirt league
What's the next big project on your horizon? What are you working on at present, that you can tell us about?
For projects with others, I hope to continue working with Apotheosis Studios on upcoming projects and, of course, with Viva La Dirt League on our ongoing campaign and supplemental ‘Behind the Screen’ episodes.
One huge project for me in 2021 was being writer and showrunner for my own web-series with Viva La Dirt League, called ‘D&D Logic’. It was a 10-episode, standalone series in the short, comedy, sketch style of VLDL’s main channel, with a leaning on the logical inconsistencies of TTRPGs. I had an absolute blast writing it and helping to create it and I am very grateful to the folk at Viva for giving me such an awesome (in the literal sense) platform to utilise for such high production quality D&D skits. So watch this space for Season 2…
Link for D&D Logic playlist on VLDL YouTube.
As for personal projects, I will be focussing on growing my YouTube channel and meeting new inspiring people from the community. On Twitch I routinely run a series I call ‘Short Rest’ where I get a guest on to just have chill chat-style interview and a general meet and greet. I’ve had on Satine and Jamison, the gang at Deerstalker Pictures, Felix from the Dingo Doodles Fool’s Gold Campaign, and other wonderful people. I have some exciting guests lined up for early this year as well.
I also plan to do more collaborative TTRPG streaming this year with fantastic streamers like DreadedGM and DeadAussieGamer among many others.
Finally, another project I have ongoing is an interactive D&D game on Twitch where the chat hivemind controls the actions of the main character. That story will be continuing throughout this year as well, no doubt, so jump in if you want me to DM for you!
Between fans asking about the minor details in the shows, and the co-workers asking for the meaning behind your writing, you probably field a lot of questions. What's a question you've never been asked but always wish you had, and how would you answer it?
Matt Mercer hasn’t yet asked me if he can play in one of my games… I’d probably answer it with a ‘umm, I’m kind of at capacity already dude, let me see if I can move some stuff around’.
Truly deep and interesting stuff from Rob Hartley. It’s great to hear the dedication to being a Game Master by immersing yourself in a genre all new to you. It’s also inspiring to hear his determination to act finally paid off after so long away from things.
Now we want to hear from you. How has hearing the experience and antics of a creator like Rob Hartley inspired you and your way ahead in our TTRPG world? Who would you like to hear from next? Let us know in our discord server or in the comments below.
Adam Ray contributes much for adventurers here on Apotheosis Studios. As co-founder of fantasticuniverses.com, they write all kinds of gaming press, while they write news about the League of Legends Card Game on RuneterraCCG. On Youtube, they can be found game mastering for No Ordinary Heroes, or editing the antics on The Hostile Atmosphere. Find where they dwell by climbing their Linktree.
