Yax and I are very inspired by Monte’s newest labour of love and business endeavour, Dungeonaday.com. Gamers sign up for a subscription and receive a living, growing mega dungeon they can use in whole or in part for their diabolical campaigns. Not only is this a great idea, but it’s a business model we feel is embodied by Gamer Lifestyle: take something gamers need, put your own spin on the idea, and build relationships with your customers in the process to ensure a long-term thriving RPG business.

We spoke with Monte to ask him about this great new project, where he got the idea from, and whether he thinks there’s still room in the market for new RPG products.

Gamer Lifestyle: Dungeonaday.com roared off to a very successful start this spring. I’m a member and think the idea and content is awesome. Could you tell us a bit about what Dungeonaday.com is and what it does for gamers?

Monte: In Dungeonaday.com, I’m building a dungeon-based campaign one encounter at a time. Every weekday there is a new encounter, and every week there are new blog posts, background articles, and bonus encounters.

Dungeonaday.com really embraces the web format, making heavy use of hyperlinks to link not only from room to room but to related articles, new game material, the Hypertext d20 SRD, or even just the ever-growing glossary that contains the names of all the important people, places, items, and features of importance to the campaign.

As I go along, I’m also developing the nearby town, the surrounding environs, and beyond. It’s a great opportunity to see a campaign grow and watch an adventure develop (and get a peek behind the curtain and learn how and why it works the way it does), but first and foremost the material is meant to be used.

The huge megadungeon involved is called Dragon’s Delve, and gamers can run a Dragon’s Delve campaign or they can just use their favorite encounters in other adventures as they need. Each encounter is interesting and unique–no boring dungeon rooms here.

Gamer Lifestyle: Dungeonaday.com is a cool and innovative concept. In Gamer Lifestyle we teach our members to think outside of the box when it comes to digital products. Gary Gygax published many products, but 30 years later we don’t need to follow the same formats. What thought and business processes did you go through when figuring out what Dungeonaday.com could and should be?

Monte: Well, a number of ideas coalesced to create Dungeonaday.com. Originally, I had thought to simply create a website with a new encounter every day. These would be self-contained and stand-alone, unrelated to each other. Maybe they wouldn’t even always be in the same genre.

Then, I realized they should be linked, at least tenuously. I started developing the ideas for those links and that’s when things really got interesting! Still, the encounter-a-day aspect is still there. Any of the encounters can easily be lifted out and used elsewhere.

Even before that idea, however, I was thinking about how I’d seen projects I’d worked on in the past (Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, the Banewarrens, etc.) develop a following and a community of GMs that traded secrets, tips, add-ons, props, conversions, and so on.

The problem was, in all these cases, the product itself was done. I couldn’t really contribute, and even more importantly, the adventure itself couldn’t benefit from the wisdom of the community. I thought about how great it would be to create a really big adventure that grew along with the community of GMs running it, and to have the adventure shaped in part by that community.

Lastly, I had been kicking around an idea for a long time of doing a product that was sort of a step-by-step how-to campaign creation guide that would, as it went along, actually create a campaign (not a setting, but a campaign). That idea was probably too big for a product, but it’s not too big for an entire website.

Somewhere in the synthesis of all these ideas lies Dungeonaday.com.

Gamer Lifestyle: You were one of the Three Kings of D&D 3rd Edition. How did you land that gig? What did you do to fill your resume to get WotC’s attention? Did you start out with a plan for world domination? Or, did you just make the best cappuccinos in the world?

Monte: I’d worked full-time at TSR for about four years at the point when WotC bought the company (and for a few years as a freelancer before that). After we settled in at WotC, we began having discussions about 3rd edition and many of us were asked to “audition” for a chance to be on the team by writing an essay about how we would change the game system. After the fact, I was told that it was both my knowledge and passion for the game, as well as my ability to write more than simple, dry rules text.

Gamer Lifestyle: After D&D development you went on to form the hugely successful company Malhavoc Press. You released such killer products as the Book of Eldritch Might series and Ptolus. What went into running a company like this? What were the biggest lessons you learned?

Monte: There were a lot of hurdles. The first was that I wanted to sell electronic books and there were no venues for doing so at the time. Figuring out how to make that work required a lot of long days. On the flip side, the ability to turn these pdfs into print projects fell into my lap when the success of our first product, the Book of Eldritch Might, had publishers contacting me the day after it debuted. I eventually made a deal with White Wolf to be my print partner.

Perhaps the biggest challenge, however, was dealing with Malhavoc’s success. With great sales right out of the gate, conventional wisdom would have said, I believe, that we should ramp up and churn out books. That, however, would have been a mistake.

It was important to me that above all else “Malhavoc Press” meant quality. I didn’t believe in the idea that “they can’t all be great.” If you’re careful, and take the time, in fact they can. But that meant the designers and editors had to be top-notch every time. It’s great that I can look back at every single Malhavoc product with absolute pride.

Gamer Lifestyle: For Malhavoc Press you employed freelancers, including Mike Mearls and others. For all the future RPG freelancers out there, what advice would you give from a publisher’s perspective about being a successful freelancer?

Monte: Basically, I would say: professionalism uber alles. And I mean professionalism in all things, from meeting deadlines to completing assignments to not being a jerk online.

Gamer Lifestyle: Dungeonaday.com offers new content every day. Are you developing most of this content yourself? What is your writing schedule? What is your writing/working space like? How do you stay sane when facing daily deadlines?

Monte: With the exception of a monthly post by Pathfinder designer Jason Bulmahn about using the site with the Pathfinder rules, every word of the site is mine.

Basically, I gave up being a content wrangler a long while back. I’d rather just write it myself. Thankfully, I’m fairly prolific, so even with all that content to generate, I still think of Dungeonaday.com as a part time job. I’m also working on a number of other projects. I write about six to seven hours a day, and probably put in two to three hours of other work (like doing interviews).

I have a nice, dedicated home office with lots of space, lots of windows, and lots of books. I’m not a write-in-the-coffee-shop kind of guy. I need isolation.

The daily deadline is certainly the biggest challenge of Dungeonaday.com. However, early on I realized the way to do it is to keep ahead of the site. I’ve usually kept two to four weeks ahead in the design, so now I rarely think of it on a daily basis, more of a weekly one.

Gamer Lifestyle: With the internet and inexpensive self-publishing tools these days, what do you think the outlook is for today’s gamer looking to make money from some aspect of RPG?

Monte: Clearly it’s better than ever. I wonder sometimes if in the future, all remaining tabletop game design will be done by gamers working to supply other gamers with material, with few or no “game companies” involved at all. Could be.

I think even if I had a regular day job, I’d still be generating adventures for my game group, and would likely put them out there as pdfs for others to buy for cheap. I mean, why not? If you’re creating the adventure or the NPCs or whatever anyway…

I’ve always valued material generated by some GM who thought, “I found a need for this in my game” over that created by someone who thought, “I think this will sell well.”

Gamer Lifestyle: Do you have any final advice for aspiring RPG self-publishers?

Monte: If you’re not playing what you’re publishing, if you’re not loving what you’re creating, and if you don’t really care about the enjoyment of the end users, your customers will see right through you and you will fail.

About Monte Cook

Monte Cook started working professionally in the game industry in 1988. In the employ of Iron Crown Enterprises, he worked with the Rolemaster and Champions games as an editor, developer, and designer. In 1994, Monte came to TSR, Inc., as a game designer and wrote for the Planescape and core D&D lines. When that company was purchased by Wizards of the Coast, he moved to the Seattle area and eventually became a senior game designer. At Wizards, he wrote the 3rd Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide and served as codesigner of the new edition of the Dungeons & Dragons game. In 2001, he left Wizards to start his own design studio, Malhavoc Press, with his wife Sue. Although in his career he has worked on over 100 game titles, some of his other credits include Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, The Book of Eldritch Might series, the d20 Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game, The Book of Vile Darkness, Monte Cook’s Arcana Evolved, Ptolus, Monte Cook’s World of Darkness, and the superhero miniatures game, HeroClix. He was a longtime author of the Dungeoncraft column in Dungeon Magazine and now writes the column Game Theories for Kobold Quarterly. In recent years, Monte has been recognized many times by game fans in the ENnies Awards, the Pen & Paper fan awards, the Nigel D. Findley Memorial Award, the Origins Awards, and more. His current design project is the ongoing subscription-based website, Dungeonaday.com.

A graduate of the 1999 Clarion West writer’s workshop, Monte has published two novels, The Glass Prison and Of Aged Angels. Also, he has published the short stories “Born in Secrets” (in the magazine Amazing Stories), “The Rose Window” (in the anthology Realms of Mystery), and “A Narrowed Gaze” (in the anthology Realms of the Arcane). His stories have appeared in the Malhavoc Press anthologies Children of the Rune and The Dragons’ Return, and his comic book writing can be found in the Ptolus: City by the Spire series from Marvel Comics. His fantasy fiction series, “Saga of the Blade,” appeared in Game Trade Magazine from 2005-2006. His nonfiction book, A Skeptic’s Guide to Conspiracy Theories, comes out in October of 2009.