David Haddad: How Buying the Wrong Book Was the Right Move

September 25, 2026

Everyone remembers their first D&D campaign. For some, it was decades ago, but for others, it’s still waiting to begin.

David Haddad is the Dungeon Master tapped to run the inaugural First Campaign Mode at D&D in a Castle.

First Campaign Mode is designed for players who are new, newish, or returning to D&D. When playing at a First Campaign Mode table you’ll experience a complete, beginner-friendly D&D Campaign that takes your character through levels 1-4 over the course of a 4 day D&D vacation adventure.

First Campaign Mode is perfect for those players who have been playing for less than a year. It’s also great for players who have yet to experience a complete story arc in their home, online, or hobby store campaigns. Lapsed players from prior editions will also find First Campaign Mode a great way to rediscover D&D and reintroduce themselves to the magic of the experience. The mode features low-stress learning, an inclusive community, and the immersive experience of playing in a castle.

The campaign David is bringing to the castle for this moment is The Beast Left Behind: a memory-horror premise in which players discover that something vast and wrong from their shared past has been waiting for them, remembering their names, patient in the way that ancient things tend to be.

It's a sophisticated premise for a newer audience, and for David this is a deliberate choice. His entire career has been built around the idea that D&D is one of the best available tools for human connection: for fighting loneliness, for building relationships, for creating shared memories that outlast whatever was happening in the rest of your life.

So the newer player at David Haddad's table doesn't get a simplified, low-stakes story. They get the real thing, run by someone with a couple of decades of experience making it fun for people at every level.

The beast, he assures you, has been waiting. It remembers your name.

The Road to Becoming a Pro Dungeon Master

Today David Haddad spends a considerable amount of time thinking about Dungeons & Dragons and its community. But the story of how David Haddad became a Dungeon Master begins with a mistake.

A friend had been talking up Cyberpunk, a TTRPG set in the future, full of technology and adventure and everything a group of kids wanted to spend a weekend doing. David volunteered to run the game, so he and his friends pooled their money so that he could buy the Cyberpunk rulebook. David went to a games shop, saw a hardback book that depicted a guy with a metal arm on the cover. It seemed exactly what his friends had described, so he bought it.

It was Shadowrun.

"My friends were not happy," he recalled years later. The group nearly dissolved on the spot. David went home, read the Shadowrun book, and discovered that it was also excellent. He convinced his friends to let him run an adventure for them, and that was the moment: he never really stopped running games after that, finding his way to Dungeons & Dragons soon after, and becoming a professional Dungeon Master in the last several years.

Two Decades Behind the Screen

That was more than twenty years ago. Today, David not only runs campaigns at D&D in a Castle, but he’s the Dungeon Master who the organizers turn to when emergencies happen. Need a series of fun and exciting one-shot adventures with minimal prep time? David has you covered. Need someone who can create an epic, fun, and memorable three-day campaign on short notice because another DM has fallen ill? David’s the guy.

In addition to his interest in community, music, and Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA), he’s a founding member of Big Bad Dungeon, a production studio and actual play community he co-created with Trevor Garner and Keith Brooks in Atlanta, Georgia. Big Bad Dungeon produces the Firevalanche actual play series, currently in its third season, and operates out of what David describes as "an old bomb shelter with real dungeon vibes.”

Before Big Bad Dungeon, there was a long series of roleplaying game groups, streaming shows, and community-building that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. David talks about these previous projects with the equanimity of someone who understands that even if things don't work on the first try, they often create new opportunities or connections, and the lessons from what didn’t work can be as valuable as those from success. The important thing is to keep going, keep trying.

After one particularly bad day at work, he made a key decision: he would find a way to do the thing he actually wanted to do, which was create and share his stories and build community, even if it took years to accomplish.

The thread running through his journey is a very particular kind of seriousness about storytelling that simultaneously doesn't take itself too seriously. David's D&D campaigns are genuine narrative experiences with real stakes and real character work, run by someone who also thinks the whole thing is gloriously fun and isn't interested in pretending otherwise.