Interview with Dael Kingsmill of Monarch’s Factory

Introduction

Hey folks! I’m back with another Draw Steel interview for you guys. This one is a fun conversation I had with Dael Kingsmill of the Monarch’s Factory. We talked about mythology and her experience playing in Dusk. We got into how her style of roleplaying can sometimes conflict with Matt Colville’s philosophy and now probably the philosophy behind Draw Steel.

Before we roll the interview though, I want to thank everyone who expressed their support for this interview series. I’m excited to make many more this year. I’ve decided to name the series “Insight Check” - it’ll be my avenue for having interesting discussions on tabletop RPGs.

The Interview

Aestus: We are joined now by our guest Dael Kingsmill. Dael is a popular YouTuber; her channel is Monarch Factory. She got her start over 10 years ago when she was selected for Geek and Sundry’s Vlog Channel. There she produced a bi-weekly segment on mythology, and her insightful, digestible videos on mythology continued on her own channel for years before she also started making Dungeons & Dragons content, which of course also became quite popular.

Besides those things on YouTube, she was a writer, actor, director, and producer on the web series Wolf Gang. She’s also been a generous collaborator, contributing to really too many projects and in too many roles for me to neatly summarize - although I do have to at least mention her ongoing work as co-host of the Eldrich Lorecast, one of the top D&D podcasts that isn’t an actual play. Of course, actual plays tend to dominate for views, but she’s no stranger to actual plays either since she was a regular on MCDM’s D&D Fourth Edition actual play broadcast Dusk. Since Dusk, Dael has produced and appeared in many MCDM videos, in particular hosting the monthly Patreon Q&A videos on Draw Steel.

Dael: My goodness, you’ve done your research! Well, certainly a long resume at this point. It’s an interesting thing being sort of a YouTube free agent for this long.

Aestus: Honestly, the research was really fun to do. I particularly enjoyed Wolf Gang - in fact, I was just finishing an episode before I called you.

Dael: I love to hear it! Wolf Gang is one of those things that it’s like - I look at it and I see all of its imperfections and I see all of the ways in which it’s kind of crumby because it was basically just me and a couple of friends. Like, we had no crew, it was all just us and a camera. But even with all of those imperfections, I’m very proud of it. I’m very proud of putting it together and getting it done.

Aestus: It’s definitely a step up from you know, the things that YouTubers are typically doing. I can’t imagine all of the hats you had to wear to get a production like that completed.

On Dusk and Draw Steel

Aestus: My plan for the interview - and I say my plan because who knows where we’ll go - but I would like to talk about mythology and Draw Steel and your experiences in Dusk. Because just speaking for myself, I really want to explore an evocative mythological style of writing and design in my own products I make using Draw Steel system, and I’m certain that I could learn a lot from your insight into mythology but also your experience kind of playing in Matt Colville’s games - you’re kind of experiencing the Proto-Draw Steel setting if you know what I mean.

Dael: Yeah, yeah. Man, I miss Dusk. I want to play more Dusk. We have to like kidnap Justice and make everyone play again. That’d be awesome. Come on, I want more! I want more!

[The conversation continues through discussions of Australian childhood experiences, mythology, law vs. chaos in gaming, and the connection between mythology and place…]

On Mythology and Place

Aestus: How much mythology is connected to things that are more geographical or environmental? Because that was another thing I really liked about Lillus and your game. I mean, you were a wood elf and you were kind of a disciple of nature, but I was impressed when I watched Dusk that it seemed like you had a kind of intuitive natural type of thinking which I don’t have, but which reminded me of growing up in Papua New Guinea. These were the kind of stories that people would tell - they always seem to be a little more aware of geography.

Dael: I do understand what you’re getting at, and there is something that is… I don’t even know how to describe it. I wonder how much of that is just the disconnect of being, you know, a white person from the British colonies, where there is such a disconnect from place in a big way compared to any number of indigenous cultures around the world.

One of the first things that comes to my mind is songlines in Australia. We talk about songlines - different Aboriginal groups would have songs and stories that were so deeply tied to place that it enabled long-distance travel. It’s this incredible sort of deep-set cultural thing. And when I say indigenous cultures around the world, I’m including, you know, like Welsh - it is so significant and so much in mythology as well.

Any mythology you go to the early stages and it is describing how the land was formed, how did these shapes happen. Whether it’s the Rainbow Serpent, whether it’s the Giant’s Way, they’re telling you this is how those mountains came to be. And I think that there is this deeply human kind of connection that the further we get into sort of an industrial cultural global mindset, the further we get from this part of humanity that is just learning to work with the place you’re in.

On Growing Up in Australia and PNG

Aestus: I was thinking we could take a minute or two to self-indulgently talk about our childhoods. This might surprise you given the way I speak, but I’m pretty sure from my research you and I grew up at roughly the same time and at roughly the same place, only I left Australia in 2007.

I always tell people I lived in Australia because they don’t know where I actually lived. I’ve never said this publicly, but I grew up - I moved in the early 2000s to the former Australian Colony Papua New Guinea, and that’s where I spent most of my childhood. So I didn’t actually grow up in Australia, but I went to an Australian curriculum school, I had Australian teachers, watched a lot of Australian television.

Dael: Were you getting like ABC?

Aestus: I can’t remember the channel, although some of the commercials are branded into my memory like old commercials for Home and Away and McLeod’s Daughters.

Dael: Closer each day…

Aestus: Exactly! I haven’t heard that in so long.

On Deltora Quest

Aestus: You used to do an old segment called Memory Lane where you would let prompts from your audience inspire stories about your childhood, so I wonder if I could give you one prompt about something from my childhood that might spark something for you? Here we go: Diamond, Emerald, Lapis Lazuli, Topaz…

Dael: Deltora Quest! Oh boy did I read those! I loved those books! Because Deltora Quest but not only that, lest we forget that she had a little duo of books “Finders Keepers” that I reference all the time and a Rowan series.

Aestus: I did read Rowan of Rin, I didn’t read Finders Keepers.

Dael: Rowan of Rin was again in the sort of fantasy - for folks who don’t know, for the folks who don’t know, Deltora Quest is like such good intro to fantasy for kids. And I mean, I think of that and I know that when I was reading the second book I was so scared at one point early in the book that I put the book down and I didn’t read it again for a year.

On Mythology and Storytelling

Aestus: When I read the Epic of Gilgamesh, I don’t think of him as a very three-dimensional character. I think he’s supposed to represent something in us, the readers, which is a kind of drive for immortality. So if you’re playing a game of Draw Steel or Dungeons & Dragons or whatever game you prefer, and you want to kind of tap into this vague and evocative mythological type of storytelling, how do you make a character like Gawain or like Gilgamesh which is maybe not three-dimensional? Is that something worth doing in your opinion, or am I just misunderstanding what these characters are?

Dael: It’s difficult. I mean, they - at least with Greek mythology - they often become slightly more complex towards the end of their stories, these heroes, just because a lot of the sources that we have for classical Greek and Roman mythology come from specifically competitions to write plays. We get some comedies but a lot of what we get are the tragedies, which were often submitted as three parts, and so you want to have that really dramatic sort of catharsis-evoking big finish for your character.

On Law vs. Chaos in Gaming

Aestus: To take you back, you were telling me about this decision that you made when you were playing Lillus in Dusk about why she was offended with the humans’ burials, and it’s because it reminded her of farming, of agriculture, right?

Dael: Yeah, well it signals that arrogance. It signals that thing that she views as deeply human, that idea of “you know better than the world, you know better than nature.” You enforce your will over nature instead of bending with it. She thinks it’s inelegant, she thinks it’s arrogant.

Aestus: To me, it sounds like you’ve built this character to engage pretty directly with the Matt Colville themes of a game, which is Law and Chaos, right? And for him, if I’m understanding it right - you will understand it much better I’m sure - law roughly represents civilization and Chaos roughly represents the wild. Am I getting that right?

Dael: Yeah, well that’s my impression as well. To be fair, when we went to play this initial, you know, two or three session sort of tester thing, I originally was going to play a human. Then Matt was like - I was going to play… on the table was human and also on the table was rogue, and he was like “you’ve been a rogue before, you’ve been a human before, you’re going to be an elf invoker.” I was like “all right, I’ll be an elf invoker.”

On Fantasy and Mythology

Aestus: Lord Dunsany was an Irish writer who first published in 1904, something like that. He’s in the generation of Tolkien and Lewis but slightly predates them as far as publishing goes, and is, my understanding is, considered one of the first modern fantasy writers. But his first work “Gods of Pegana” is just straight up a fictional mythology. The starting lines - oh, it still sticks with me - “Fate and Chance cast lots to see whose the game would be, and the winner strides to MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI and says ‘I’ve won the game.’”

Dael: That’s so fun! I got little goosebumps on my arms.

Aestus: I know! It’s kind of like a fictional version of the Book of Genesis and it’s written in a very King James Version Bible style, which a lot of people find difficult to read, but I absolutely love.

On System Design and Themes

Dael: The medium is the message, right? I always struggle to find like a good example of what I - at least what I… I can’t speak for Marshall McLuhan, but what I’m saying when I say the medium is the message, I’m talking about like a lecture hall says something. If there’s a space for someone to stand at a lectern at the front and then all these chairs that are tiered like an amphitheater looking down at that one person, that says something. It sends a message.

I think it’s very difficult to escape the inherent meaning in any structure, in anything that we do. A building will tell you something about its purpose just by the architecture, and I think that the game system in a similar way - it may be less obvious and I can’t give you concrete examples necessarily, but I think a game system inherently is going to tell you something about itself just because it will be designed, if it’s been designed with any finesse, to encourage certain styles of play and discourage other certain styles of play.

Aestus: Yeah, that makes sense to me because if we take 5e as an example, so it’s a class-based system, right? That’s obviously a system choice, but it seems like a class, especially one that’s well-designed, has a kind of narrative thematic package to it. That’s something I’ve always thought - like clerics or warlocks or paladins, these are classes which when you pick them, you kind of know something about the themes of your character.

Dael: If you look at the way that 5e approaches spellcasters versus the way Draw Steel approaches spellcasters and what they should feel like and what playing them should evoke - because it’s vague and evocative - you know, it’s drastically different from one another. There is a different intention behind those designs, and I think that you can feel that when you play them.

On Geographic and Cultural Connection

And I think that there is this deeply human kind of connection that the further we get into sort of an industrial cultural global mindset, the further we get from this part of humanity that is just learning to work with the place you’re in.

Aestus: Yeah, that same connection to place showed up in the stories I heard growing up. In Papua New Guinea, at least in my area, there are these phenomena called skull caves. Someday National Geographic’s going to find out about it and it’s going to be all over the Discovery Channel or whatever, but for now I think they’re mostly unstudied.

I got to visit lots of them just because we knew folks there, but they’re caves in mountains that are stacked - massive stacks of human skulls. And they’re ancient skulls, no one knows how old they are. According to the locals - this is a vague memory, this is my understanding - but the old burial practice used to be that you would bury your dead standing up, like vertically in the ground up to their neck, and then you would cover the head of the corpse with a clay pot and you would leave it for a while. Eventually the body would decay, and then you would take off the clay pot and the skull would be there, and you would take the skull and you would stack it in the cave with all the other skulls. It was a place for your ancestors, I guess.

Dael: That’s so interesting! That actually makes me think of a point during Dusk where - I don’t know how we got onto the subject but Matt just asked “I don’t know, what do elves do with their dead?” And I remember pondering on it for ages, and I don’t know what Matt’s opinion is because he probably has slightly more of an opinion now that they’ve started actually writing and working on Draw Steel.

But at the time, I remember thinking about it a lot and coming back and saying, you know, I think they probably find hollow trees and put the bodies of elves inside the hollow tree. And I think it would be cool if wood elves at least, instead of rotting, petrify like wood - like they just slowly harden and become basically rock. But this idea that they put them in hollow trees and let them become part of nature.

I think it’s fascinating that what is honorable is so different across different cultures. There’s a great zombie TV show called Kingdom - it’s South Korean and set during the Joseon period. They need to burn the zombies to stop them from coming back to life, but no one wants to burn the bodies because that is culturally abhorrent. That’s not how we should be getting rid of our dead.

It’s one of the questions that I think of first when I’m doing worldbuilding stuff and I’m setting up a city or something - I think “how do they dispose of their dead? Where are they putting their dead people?” Is it catacombs, is it a cemetery, is it on the side of the hill facing the sunrise? What do they believe about death? I think it becomes a very key way to understand even fictional cultures.

This interview was conducted as part of the Insight Check series, featuring discussions about tabletop RPGs and game design.