They call it The Island of the Prince – England, a realm scarred by pestilence and bled dry by war. The Black Death has emptied the villages, leaving fields untended and halls in ruin. Those who remain send their sons to die on foreign soil, as the endless struggle with France devours the kingdom’s strength. Join us as we take a journey through the adventurous mind of GM Terrancedavis in the first interview of 2026
First off, feel free to tell us about the person behind the GM screen. Where are you from? What do you do aside from gaming? Alter Egos? Life partners? Family? Where can we interact with you on the internet?
My name is Terrance Davis, I’m from Queens, New York, and that background has shaped how I see the world and how I run games. I’m an Army veteran, which taught me discipline, responsibility, and how quickly situations fall apart when people stop paying attention. Those lessons carry directly into my work behind the GM screen.
Outside of gaming, I run a small welding subcontracting business. It’s practical, physical work where shortcuts show immediately and mistakes carry real consequences. Metal either holds or it doesn’t. That mindset influences my campaigns as well. Preparation matters, choices matter, and immersion only works if the foundation is solid.
I’ve been with my fiancée, Crystal, for nearly eleven years. She has supported me through long nights of prep, creative risks, and the constant balancing act between work, life, and storytelling. She keeps me grounded when my head disappears into medieval France or a war-torn future America. I have a Daughter and three sons.
I don’t really think in terms of alter egos. I’m a welder, a veteran, a business owner, and a lifelong storyteller, and all of those parts show up at the table in one way or another.
People can reach me and interact with me through;
Obsidian Portal (https://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign_invites/891a9b47a897f93793a80bbb/accept),
Discord (where you can hear our Deep Dive Podcast about Island of the Prince topics) under the name terrancethedungeonmaster,
Startplaying
(https://startplaying.games/gm/islandoftheprincecampaignsetting),
Chronica, you can further explore the Island of the Prince,
( https://chronica.ventures/join?ref=495d44d05607ceb91af5)
Patreon, you can read short stories and learn other lore (https://patreon.com/Islandoftheprince?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLink).
I stay engaged with my community and enjoy talking about campaign design, history, and what makes a story feel real rather than staged.
At the end of the day, I believe tabletop games can be more than entertainment. They can feel like shared history.
Your campaign is set in the historical world of the 100 Years War between England and France. What inspired you to create a fantasy role playing game during this time? What sources did you use? What adaptations have you made?
The Hundred Years’ War appealed to me because it was a time when the world genuinely felt unstable. Borders shifted, loyalties fractured, the Church was under strain, and ordinary people lived with war, famine, and plague as facts of life. It’s a perfect historical backdrop for fantasy because the fear, desperation, and moral uncertainty are already there. I didn’t need to invent a grim world. History did that work for me.
The campaign itself grew out of a much older place. My older brother, Darren, has been the one consistent player since the very beginning, going back decades. We started imagining this world as kids, long before it had a name. Even now, with all that shared history, he’s still a player at the table, which means I deliberately keep information from him like I would any other character. That tension between shared roots and narrative secrecy is part of what keeps the campaign alive.
In terms of sources, I lean heavily on historical material. Contemporary chronicles, military histories, maps, church records, and firsthand accounts of medieval life all inform the setting. I pay attention to things like travel time, weather (which we track in our Chronica calender, along with events), food shortages, social class, and how authority actually worked on the ground. Fictional influences matter too, but history is always the spine.
The adaptations come in where fantasy needs room to breathe. Supernatural elements exist, but they are rare, feared, and costly. Magic is dangerous and often misunderstood. Monsters don’t replace human cruelty, they sit beside it. I’m not trying to rewrite history so much as thread dark fantasy through the cracks that already exist in it.
The goal has always been to create a world that feels lived in. A place where legends are born not because they were destined to happen, but because someone survived long enough to be remembered.
You are using some version of Dungeons and Dragons for your campaign. What version of the game and what made you decide on the particular system.
I use a hybrid of Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition, primarily drawing from the 2014 rules and selectively incorporating elements from the 2024 updates. The main reason is practicality. We’ve been playing almost entirely online for the past year, and Fifth Edition remains the most accessible, well-supported system for virtual play. It’s familiar to players, easy to reference digitally, and flexible enough to be shaped into something more grounded.
That flexibility is the real reason I chose it. I’m not interested in running Fifth Edition “out of the box.” I ban a lot of options, starting with the most obvious one: this is a humans-only campaign. The setting demands it. The tone, the historical grounding, and the horror elements all work better when characters are fragile, limited, and unmistakably human. Many abilities, ancestries, and character options that lean toward high fantasy or power fantasy simply don’t fit, so they’re cut.
Using Fifth Edition as a framework lets me keep the mechanical language familiar while enforcing a very different philosophy of play. Choices matter, resources matter, and survival is never guaranteed. The rules serve the setting, not the other way around. Fifth Edition gives me a sturdy chassis, and everything that doesn’t belong gets stripped away until what’s left supports the story I want to tell.
Tell us about your players and your typical gaming sessions. How often do you play? Online? Tabletop? Who does what in any typical session?
I’ve been a Dungeon Master for many years (since 1985), and one of the things I value most is a table where players take the world seriously and respect each other’s role in it. I’m fortunate to have exactly that.
Christian acts as my co–DM and moderator, especially since we play online. He helps keep sessions running smoothly, manages logistics, and serves as a sounding board when I’m stress-testing ideas. As a player, he’s exceptional. He plays Sir Wilhelm, an English lay knight fighting in France, and when I run one-shots he also steps into the role of Sir Guiscards de Beaumont, a French Hospitaller. He understands tone, restraint, and character motivation, and he elevates every scene he’s in.
Kurt plays Absolon Gyllenstierna, a rogue from Gotland who fights alongside the Ravenguard in France. I’ve run games for a long time, and I can honestly say he plays a rogue better than most. Absolon isn’t underhanded or treacherous. He’s a dashing, capable fighter who uses skill and intelligence in service of the group. He proves that the rogue archetype doesn’t need to rely on deception or selfishness to be compelling.
My big brother, William “Darren” Davis, who is in Law Enforcement in real life, has been the one constant player since the very beginning of this campaign’s long history. He plays Sir Arkan Warwind, a Moorish convert to Christianity and a Hospitaller knight, and in one-shots he plays Sir Michael Brigge, an English Hospitaller stationed at Sainte-Flamme du Refuge in northern France. Despite our shared history and decades of worldbuilding, he’s still just a player at the table, and I deliberately keep secrets from him like anyone else. That boundary is important, and it keeps the game honest.
We play once a week on Sundays, entirely online, which has been our format for the past year. Sessions are structured but flexible. I handle narrative, pacing, and adjudication. Christian supports moderation and flow. Players drive the story through choices, roleplay, and hard decisions rather than mechanics alone. Combat is tense and grounded (we use a brutal critical hit and miss table), but much of the session time is spent on investigation, moral dilemmas, and character interaction.
Looking ahead, I plan to expand in 2026 by running additional sessions through StartPlaying, but the heart of the game will remain the same. A consistent table, serious roleplay, and a shared commitment to treating the world as real, dangerous, and worth caring about.
Your adventure logs are well written and seem to be in the form of tales told by “Carla the Serving Wench”. Tell us a bit about her. Why is she an important chronicler? Is it just you as GM writing, or do other players get involved?
The adventure logs are written as tales told by Carla the Serving Wench, and she has been part of the campaign for its entire life. Carla is a bard, a traveler, and a witness. She isn’t powerful in the way knights or monsters are, but she survives by listening carefully and remembering accurately. In a world where most lives pass unrecorded, that makes her quietly dangerous.
Carla is important because history in this setting is not written only by kings, generals, or the Church. It is shaped by rumor, song, and repetition. Carla moves freely between taverns, villages, camps, and courts, hearing things no official chronicle would ever record. When events are remembered clearly, it is often because Carla chose to tell them straight.
She also stands in contrast to the other storyteller who circulates through the campaign, Martha the Goodwife. Martha is well known in markets and village greens, and her stories are always louder, juicier, and far less accurate. She exaggerates, slanders, and reshapes events to suit gossip, personal grudges, or whatever will hold an audience. Between Carla and Martha, players see how the same event can become either history or rumor, depending on who tells it.
Players write their own adventure recaps in Chronica.
The style of the logs reflects my own background. After leaving the Army, I briefly studied journalism, and that perspective never really left me. I’m interested in how truth is filtered through bias and voice. Before the Army, I went to welding school, which reinforced the same principle in a different form. Structure matters. If it doesn’t hold, it fails.
I write the Obsidian Portal logs as the GM, but they are never written in isolation, and are always wrong in many ways (stories change as they travel). They are shaped by player decisions, table conversations, and moments that genuinely land with the group. Carla does not invent heroics. She reports what she believes to be true, while Martha ensures that exaggeration and slander spread just as quickly.
Together, they show how legends are born, not from facts alone, but from who gets believed.
Tell us a bit about the central characters in your campaign. What roles do they play, and how do each of the players contribute to their game personalities.
At the heart of the campaign are a small number of central figures whose choices shape events far beyond themselves. Some are player characters, some are NPCs, but all of them matter, and all of them carry consequences.
Sir Arkan Warwind, played by my brother Darren, is a Hospitaller knight and paladin, a Moorish convert to Christianity who lives with constant tension between faith, identity, and duty. Arkan is not a simple holy warrior. He questions authority, struggles with the Church’s failures, and yet remains deeply committed to his vows. Through him, the campaign explores faith as something lived and tested rather than assumed. Darren plays Arkan with restraint and seriousness, treating belief as a burden as much as a strength, which gives the character real moral weight.
Sir Wilhelm, played by Christian, is an English lay knight fighting in France. Where Arkan wrestles with belief, Wilhelm represents loyalty, discipline, and endurance. He is a professional soldier who keeps moving because stopping is not an option. Christian brings a grounded, steady presence to Wilhelm, anchoring scenes that might otherwise drift into abstraction. When I run one-shots, Christian also plays Sir Guiscards de Beaumont, a French Hospitaller, which allows the story to show both sides of the war without flattening either into stereotypes.
Absolon Gyllenstierna, played by Kurt, is a rogue from Gotland who fights alongside the Ravenguard. Absolon defies the usual expectations of the class. He is not underhanded or deceitful, but a dashing and capable warrior who uses agility, intelligence, and timing in service of the group. Kurt plays him as a hero who solves problems through competence rather than treachery, often bridging the space between investigation and violence.
Traveling with the Ravenguard are two NPCs who are just as central to the story.
Lady Athena is a Hospitaller knight whose presence challenges every assumption about power, gender, and leadership in the medieval world. She is an extraordinary warrior, but her importance goes far beyond combat. Athena represents idealized knighthood colliding with a corrupt and compromised reality. Her choices force the party to confront what honor actually means when institutions fail.
Sarah Marsh is equally important, though in a very different way. She is a seer and survivor, marked by loss and guided by visions she does not fully control. Sarah brings the supernatural consequences of the world into focus. Where others argue about faith, politics, or duty, Sarah shows what happens to ordinary people caught in the wake of those decisions. Her presence keeps the campaign grounded in human cost rather than abstract morality.
Opposing these characters are larger, darker forces, most notably the Order of Judas, a shadow successor to the destroyed Knights Templar. Led from behind the scenes by the Black Pope, the Order is driven by vengeance against a Church they believe betrayed them. Sir Jordan, once a knight of the faith and now bound to that betrayal, embodies the cost of choosing revenge over redemption. He is not a simple villain, but a man who refuses to admit that his choice may have damned him.
All of these threads converge around the campaign’s central struggle, a brutal race for the True Cross. It is not merely a holy relic, but a symbol capable of legitimizing power, justifying war, and reshaping belief itself. Arkan sees it as a test of faith. Wilhelm treats it as a duty. Absolon views it as something that could either save lives or destroy them, depending on who claims it. Athena and Sarah understand that whatever happens, the world will change afterward.
Each player contributes not just a character, but a worldview. Together with the NPCs who travel beside them, they turn the campaign into a story about belief, loyalty, and consequence in a world where even holy things can be used for terrible ends.
How close does your game run to historical fact? What embellishments have you added? I note that you have dragons within the campaign. Tell us about them.
The campaign stays very close to historical fact in its foundation. The political landscape, the Church, the conduct of war, travel times, social class, famine, plague, and the general instability of the Hundred Years’ War are all grounded in real history. England and France behave as they did in 1356. The Church wields power the way it historically did. Most suffering in the world still comes from very human causes: ambition, fear, and betrayal.
Where I embellish is in what history could not record, only explain away.
Dragons exist in the campaign, but they are not common, casual, or heroic adversaries. They are closer to natural disasters than monsters. Their appearances are rare, cyclical, and catastrophic, and they leave scars on the land that shape history for generations. In that sense, they function much like real medieval events such as famine, plague, or mass slaughter. People plan around them, fear them, and build belief systems to explain them.
The two most important dragons are Flame (True Name: Pyraxia) and Pyre (True Name: Voradracus), both red dragons whose names are spoken with dread. Flame is the younger and more frequent of the two. She appears roughly every two years and is remembered for cruelty and spite rather than strategy. She can change her color to hide like a chameleon. Her attacks focus on crops, livestock, and forests. Flame causes famine. Villages don’t fall immediately under her shadow, they starve months later. To the common folk, Flame is remembered not as a battle, but as empty granaries and buried children.
Pyre is far older and far more destructive. He appears roughly every five years and devastates entire regions. Pyre does not harass. He erases. Castles, fortified towns, and armies are reduced to ash when he awakens. His attacks are remembered as historical ruptures, events that reset borders, depopulate regions, and force mass migrations. Entire political decisions are made based on when Pyre is expected to return.
No one has ever slain a dragon in the campaign. Knights who try become footnotes, if they are remembered at all. The Church teaches that dragons are hellspawn and must be destroyed, but history quietly shows that faith alone has never been enough. This tension between doctrine and reality is intentional. Dragons expose the limits of power, belief, and heroism.
In short, history remains the spine of the game. The embellishments are deliberate, restrained, and consequential. Dragons do not replace history. They complicate it. They give the medieval world another reason to fear the sky, another excuse for atrocity, and another legend that future generations will argue about, long after the ash has settled.
You have described your campaign to me as a low magic campaign. How do you fit magic into the historical context? What else have you added to “spice up” the historical context?
I describe the campaign as low magic because magic exists, but it is rare, feared, and costly, much closer to how medieval people actually believed the world worked than to a high-fantasy setting. Most people will live and die without ever seeing a spell cast. When magic does appear, it is treated as an event, not a convenience.
Magic is woven into the historical context the same way superstition, faith, and rumor were woven into medieval life. The Church condemns arcane magic as heresy or witchcraft, while tolerating miracles so long as they fit doctrine. Folk magic exists at the margins in the form of charms, blessings, curses, and whispered rituals, but even those carry risk. True spellcasting shortens lives, attracts attention, and leaves marks. People who practice it rarely live long or openly. If someone can hurl fire or heal the dying, the question is never “how?” but “who is coming for them now?”
Divine magic is not treated as guaranteed or transactional. A prayer is not a vending machine. Miracles are rare and often ambiguous, and even holy power demands sacrifice. Faith can protect, but it can also be tested, withheld, or misunderstood. This keeps belief meaningful instead of mechanical.
To spice up the historical context, I add pressure rather than spectacle. Weather is tracked. Food shortages matter. Wounds linger. Rumors spread faster than truth. Relics like the True Cross are powerful not only because of what they can do, but because of what people believe they justify. Institutions such as the Church, knightly orders, and secret societies actively respond to anything that threatens their authority.
Supernatural elements like undead, witches, or dragons exist, but they are treated as existential threats, not encounter fodder. When the unnatural appears, it warps the world around it, changing behavior, belief, and politics. The result is a setting where magic deepens the horror and the stakes rather than softening them.
The goal is always the same: to make the world feel real first, and uncanny only when it absolutely has to be.
I see you have customized the layout of the campaign. What tools did you use in setting things up? What advice can you give for new GMs who want to do what you have done?
I’ve customized the campaign layout primarily through Obsidian Portal’s built-in tools, using custom CSS and careful page structuring to control tone, readability, and atmosphere. The goal was never flash for its own sake, but immersion. The site should feel like it belongs to the world, not like a modern wiki with medieval content pasted into it.
I’m fortunate to know someone who is very strong with coding and troubleshooting, especially when it comes to working within the limitations of hosted platforms. Having access to that kind of expertise made a huge difference, particularly when dealing with finicky CSS rules, browser quirks, and the trial-and-error that comes with customization. It allowed me to experiment without breaking things permanently and to recover quickly when something went wrong. My pages are still a work in progress.
Beyond that, I rely heavily on consistent structure. Clear navigation, predictable formatting, and restraint go a long way. I use Chronica for in-world timekeeping and event tracking, Discord for communication and session management, and Patreon for community support and extended content. Each tool has a defined purpose, and I avoid overlap wherever possible.
For new GMs, my advice is simple. Start small. Don’t try to build everything at once. Focus first on content, tone, and consistency. A plain site with strong writing will always outperform a beautifully styled site with nothing to say. Learn just enough CSS to make meaningful changes, and don’t be afraid to ask for help from people who know more than you do.
Most importantly, remember that the tools exist to serve the game. If the world feels alive at the table, everything else is just scaffolding.
Whereabouts are your players in the 100 Years War? Are there any specific adventures you have yet to engage in that you are particularly looking forward to that you can give us a glimpse of, without ruining the surprise for your players? You can be as cryptic as you like.
At the moment, the campaign it is in the month of March of 1356, with the party operating in northern France, moving through contested territory during a tense lull in the Hundred Years’ War. This is the period before open catastrophe, when armies are maneuvering, supplies are thin, and everyone knows something terrible is coming but no one knows exactly when. Historically, this is the calm before the storm.
The major historical event looming over the campaign is the Battle of Poitiers, which will take place in the fall of 1356. Poitiers is significant because it is not just a battle, but a rupture. The English capture King John II of France, shattering French authority, destabilizing the realm, and turning the war decisively in England’s favor. In the campaign world, Poitiers represents the moment when order collapses. Alliances break, mercenary bands multiply, the Church scrambles to control the narrative, and entire regions are left exposed. Everything the players are doing now exists in the long shadow of that coming disaster.
As for what lies ahead, there are threads already tightening.
Relics are moving when they should be hidden. Old oaths are being tested by new commands. Certain factions are racing toward the same destination for very different reasons, and not all of them plan to arrive openly. Some truths about the Order of Judas are closer to the surface than they appear, and some allies are carrying secrets that will not survive the summer.
By the time the leaves turn and Poitiers comes, the players will understand that the battle was never just about armies. It will be about who controls belief, who survives the collapse, and which stories get told afterward.
That’s as much as I can safely say.
Okay, as a last question, we always ask for the GM’s “pearls of wisdom”. What GM insights can you offer the community this month?
My best advice is this: write a story worth interrupting.
Give your campaign a grand narrative, one with real stakes and a clear sense of direction. A larger story, made up of many smaller ones, gives players purpose. It helps them understand why their choices matter and why the world keeps moving even when they aren’t looking. Momentum is not railroading. It’s respect for the setting.
At the same time, build your world to respond honestly. Don’t protect plans that no longer make sense. Let player decisions alter outcomes, break assumptions, and force you to adapt. If the world bends, it should bend for reasons the players can see and feel.
Finally, remember that immersion comes from consistency, not spectacle. Keep your rules, tone, and consequences steady, and players will meet you there. When the world feels real, the stories that emerge will stay with your table long after the dice stop rolling.
Thank you to the community for making this campaign of the month possible! That’s all for now, join us on our next adventure February 1st, and don’t forget to nominate your favorite campaigns for our next Campaign of the Month!
