An Interview with Game Designer Morgan Eilish

Jared: First off tell us a little about yourself.

Morgan: I’m a queer Canadian game designer, illustrator and layout artist who likes to make queer spicy stories about queer spicy characters. I wrote my first game, There’s Only One Bed, in January of 2023 and since then I have made and contributed to 3rd party content for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, Monster of the Week, Apocalypse Keys, Spire, and Heart. I’ve also written a bounty for Huckleberry RPG and made a number of indie games, most notably Legendary and Meet Me Where I Am—both available as physical zines at Indie Press Revolution—and Demonic Deals which was nominated for a 2024 CRIT Award for Best 1pg TTRPG.

I also have an ongoing fiction series that I’m writing with a friend about the romance between our D&D characters, I’m GMing campaigns for D&D and Heart, and in my free time I design and sew clothing and historical costumes and grow veggies on my balcony.

J: When and how did you get started in tabletop games?

M: I had quite a few friends that were full-time game designers and a few that made smaller self-published games in their spare time. One of my friends, Sebastian Yūe, is in my D&D group and as a joke we decided to write a (very NSFW) short story about our D&D characters having a one-night stand that we published on Ao3 on April Fools’ Day in 2022. We had so much fun writing it that we decided that they should romance each other for real and we made an entire series out of it that we are still writing 3 years later.

I wanted to make it easier for others to do the same, so I figured why not make a card prompt writing game out of it. I wrote out a bunch of prompts, made some illustrations, downloaded Canva and made a layout for it, and published There’s Only One Bed up on Itch in January 2023. I had so much fun making it that I decided to make more.

Following that, I was recommended the Write Your First Adventure course from the Storytelling Collective and took the general path a few months later and made a Monster of the Week mini-campaign set in Victorian London at the height of the Spiritualist movement.

J: What made you want to make content specifically for tabletop games?

M: It’s fun. I really like sharing stories and making tabletop games is a great way to facilitate that. I like thinking about how a game’s mechanics can have an impact on the type of story that game can tell. I also like to make up funky little guys that mess with the players’ plans, because I like to see what people do with them.

I also get to use and learn a lot of different creative skills working in tabletop. Most of my work has been self-published and I don’t usually have the budget to hire others. If I need art for a project, I usually make it myself which has forced me to get a lot better at digital illustration. I have a ton of fun messing around with Affinity and layout has probably become my favourite step in the process. I love taking a mostly-plain Word document and turning it into something pretty and functional.

J: Next tell us what came first? Game Designer, Writer, Illustrator, Layout Artist?

M: The writing and illustrating came first. Drawing and writing have always been hobbies of mine. I have a pile of old sketchbooks from when I was a kid filled with predominantly fashion illustrations and journals from high school full of poetry. I went to university for fashion design where my favourite class every semester was the 3-hour illustration/life drawing class that was almost always scheduled first thing in the morning. It was a great way to start the day. I also used to write a lot of fanfic and I have an ongoing series I’ve been writing with a friend for the last 3 years about the romance between our two D&D characters.

The game design started towards the end of university. I joined a student group for making video games in my 3^rd year. I learned a little bit of C# and I helped to run the group when I was in fourth year. It was a lot of fun and we made some interesting projects using Twine and Unity. After I graduated though, I didn’t do anything related to game design until I wrote my first TTRPG There’s Only One Bed.

Fashion school actually taught me a lot of skills that I now use when making my games. In first year, we had lectures and labs on the fundamentals of design and colour theory—things that are essential to understand when making a layout. I took an entire course on drawing in Adobe Illustrator. And one of my courses in third year, Digital Pattern Drafting, had a single 3-hour lab where they taught us the absolute basics of InDesign so we could use it to make a look book for a group project that spanned 3 of our courses. I had fun with it, but didn’t really think about doing any kind of layout work until I had written my first game and wanted to make it look nicer than a Word document.

J: You just published Lich-King’s Laboratory in Oct of this year. Tell us about that.

M: The Lich-King’s Laboratory began as a fetch quest I wrote for my players in the D&D game that I’m currently DMing, although the published adventure looks very different from the notes I made and what I’d originally run for them. I wanted to take one of the magic items I wrote for Sigil’s Secret Menu and make an adventure for it because the seed of reclamation felt like something a DM would send their players on a quest to find.

So, I made up a circle of druids with ancestral ties to the item, a corrupted forest that the seed of reclamation could restore, and a beholder, because I really love a beholder. It’s a dungeon crawl set in Vecna’s abandoned laboratory. He used it to run experiments on various monsters and people while trying to find a way to prolong his life and acquire more power. Vecna’s experiments are ultimately responsible for corrupting the forest and driving the druid circle out of it.

One of his experiments, Xiddy the beholder, has freed itself and driven off or petrified the other experiments and now lives in the lab where it spends its time admiring the treasure Vecna left behind and creating beautiful paintings.

The adventure also contains a gauntlet of puzzles for the PCs to get through in order to acquire the seed of reclamation, a few shops they can stop at to get supplies for their trip, and several factions who are after the seed for various reasons.

J: What can people expect coming into your website/social media etc?

M: My website is a portfolio of my work so far. I use it to link to projects I’ve worked on and share samples of my writing, art, and layout work.

I am most active on Bluesky, but I cross post everything to Twitter, Threads, and Mastodon. I talk about all kinds of things on there—game design, writing, the games I’m playing and GMing, my sewing projects, books I’m reading, and more recently, my partner has gotten me into Magic, so I’ve been talking about that a lot too.

J: What do you see as your future in game design? Specific Goals?

M: I want to keep making games. My main goal is to get more freelance work. The majority of my work so far has been self-published but I love making things for other people’s projects. I had a ton of fun writing a bounty for Huckleberry RPG and got to make up a ton of really fun DM and Player facing mechanics for Tome of Intangible Treasures. I also want to re-familiarize myself with InDesign since it’s the industry standard for layout design and has a lot more accessibility features than Affinity currently offers. And I’d like to do print runs of more of my games.

J: What projects do you have coming up?

M: I’m currently in the very early planning stages for a bigger D&D project of religious initiation trials for the Forgotten Realms deities. The rogue in my game cursed herself by drawing the Talons and Euryale cards from the Deck of Many Things and decided to find religion (ie scam a god) about it. I made a series of trials for her to complete on her own for our home game setting’s gods of death and trickery, the two in the pantheon I thought she was most likely to try first (she went with trickery), in order to join a church so she could get a god’s attention to ask for their help removing the curse.

Hopefully by the time this is published, I’ll have a group of writers and designers assembled and we’ll all be working on a supplement of smaller single-PC trials and group adventures for some of the more commonly worshipped gods from the Forgotten Realms.

I’m also working on a Paladin subclass—Oath of Invention—about making the world a better place through crafting.

J: Anything else you would like to add?

M: On top of everything else I’m doing, I also have a newsletter, where I talk about what I’m up to, the projects that I’m working on, and the things I’ve learned working in game design.

I also want to add that you should 100% romance your friends’ PCs and then write really spicy stories about it because it could lead to some really cool things—like work in tabletop. Also it’s just a fun thing to do to distract from all of the horrors.