Beth the Bard: When the Game is Lived and Not Just Played

Beth the Bard didn’t grow up playing Dungeons & Dragons. She heard about it in passing during her childhood, and came across it again in high school. She found the game’s appearance on the TV series The Big Bang Theory interesting, but not compelling. Then Stranger Things arrived and that was the end of her indifference.

Her first purchase was the D&D Starter Set, which she found a less than ideal solo teaching tool. “What the hell is a d20?” she asked herself. It wasn’t until she discovered Girls Guts Glory, an actual play on YouTube (featuring fellow D&D in a Castle DM Kelly Lynne D’Angelo) that it all clicked for her. 

She decided at that point that she wanted to be a Dungeon Master, and has never particularly wanted to be anything else. 

What 2,000 Sessions of D&D Teaches You

At the time of writing this profile, Beth has run more than 2,000 paid D&D sessions. She is a professional Dungeon Master, a writer for Modiphius and Dungeon in a Box, the co-founder of Bardhouse Studios, a layout artist, a web designer, and a former teacher. And she holds a certification as a therapeutic dungeon master.

That last credential, she has said, shapes every session she runs, and understanding what it actually means helps explain why her table feels different from other tables.

Beth is not claiming that DMs should act as therapists, or that players should put DMs in that position. She is drawing a distinction between therapy and therapeutics, and the therapeutic elements she builds into her campaigns (consent tools, session zero, safety frameworks, and an unwavering commitment to “Yes, and…” story guidance) are about creating the conditions under which great stories and memorable campaigns can happen, safely and with deep emotional impact. 

She works to ensure that each player character’s backstory is integrated into the campaign's actual content, not referenced occasionally as window dressing. She tailors her campaign story to the specific group. No two of her sessions look the same, even when she's running the same adventure. Questions like "What does this feel like for your character? How is it different from how it felt last year?” and “Where is the connection between your backstory and this NPC, give me a reason you’re longtime friends,” are common at her tables. 

The game, in Beth's view, belongs to the players, and it’s the DM's job to make it possible for them to own it.

She Is the Ancient

Beth is a lifelong reader of Gothic horror and it shows in her choice of D&D campaigns. She grew up on Dracula, Anne Rice, and Camilla. So it’s no surprise that when she learned about Curse of Strahd, the definitive Gothic horror campaign for D&D, set in the mist-shrouded domain of Barovia under the sinister rule of vampire lord Count Strahd von Zarovich, she was interested immediately. 

Then she started preparing to run it and began making changes immediately, rethinking what the horror premise of Barovia was actually about, what it required, and what it didn’t. She reconsidered the whole thing from its foundations, considering what to keep and what to leave intact, and most importantly what to change that would make the campaign truly her own take. 

The result was She is the Ancient: A Genderbent Curse of Strahd, published on DMs Guild and now a Gold Best-Seller. The book reimagines Countess Strahd von Zarovich as a woman, and is widely recognized as one of the most thoroughly intriguing takes on the classic campaign. The book is proof-of-concept for Beth’s approach to the horror genre more broadly: dark and scary does not require exploitative content. The fear can come from many other places, and finding out what those sources are is the most interesting creative problem for her. 

What Her Table Actually Looks Like

Beth's games emphasize narrative-driven combat, rich roleplay, and morally complex choices. She has described her style as always including "a touch of humor and chaos to keep players on their toes,” which is an accurate description when you understand that her chaos is the earned, character-specific kind, not the random silly variety. The NPCs in her campaigns are evocative and specific. Her settings are vividly described. The storylines interweave, in her words, "the fantastic with the profoundly personal,” which means essentially that she tries to find the place where your character's specific history and fears intersect with the story she's built, and to bring those elements to life.

Her D&D in a Castle campaigns carry the same design at larger scale. When she runs her signature campaign She is the Ancient at the castle, it typically sells out. The Hourglass Coven, her dark fairytale adventure through  the lens of Wild Beyond the Witchlight where whimsy curdles into horror, reflects the same sensibility: familiar source material reconsidered, darker in tone than the original, built around what a party of players can discover together rather than what a single DM can impose. Fallen Darklords returns to gothic horror territory with a story of redemption and ruin walking hand in hand, a campaign built around the idea that the most interesting monsters are the ones who might, under different circumstances, have been something else.

She has said that the most important thing she brings to a table is making players feel seen, supported, and empowered to bring their characters to life. The answer, as she frames it, is not a single technique or a set of rules. It is attention: the specific, continuous, calibrated attention of someone who has run enough games to know that every table is different, and who has chosen to treat this truth as the most interesting part of being a Dungeon Master.

Beth the Bard has 2 seats left for her upcoming D&D Weekend. She is also running campaigns at D&D in a Castle in the UK in 2027, and returning to the faculty of Dungeon Master University in March 2027. Browse her upcoming events and claim your seat here.