Welcome to our Creator Spotlight blog series! Nearly every Monday, we’ll present a question-and-answer session that highlights a different creator in the tabletop roleplaying games industry. We plan to focus on recognizing the efforts of Paizo staff members, freelance contractors, podcast players, streamers, YouTubers, licensed partners, and more. Each participant is provided a list of standardized questions from which interviewees can choose. You can request the Creator Spotlight form to be featured here by emailing marketing@paizo.com. This week we're shining a spotlight on community creator John Vanegas!

Name: John Vanegas
Pronouns: he/him
Role (if not staff): current player, occasional DM
Social Media Handles: @JohnaldV (Twitter/Instagram) and @SciStarMedia (Infinite Adventures Podcast on Twitter/Instagram)

Tell us about yourself. What is your bio? What's your story behind the bio? Why do you do what you do?

I grew up and have lived in the DFW (Dallas-Fort Worth) area. I am a second-generation immigrant who has some mixed feelings about his place in the world: but more positive ones than negative. I was raised under the presumption that I was a gifted kid and rode that in stride until I was knocked down a peg when I got to high school. Consequently, I straddle the line between grandiosity and self-forced humility. I love creating art because as cheesy as it is, it’s the easiest and most digestible form of self-expression. If you just say what you feel, people either write you off or call you pretentious. But if you present a fictional fantasy that conveys something important, the message can be taken with a bit of sugar. I think that art is a way of connecting and building bridges between other people. Everyone's a stranger after all. Observing and taking in art is a way to connect with the part of you that exists within other people.

Tell us about a project you are particularly proud of?

Of all the projects I’ve been a part of, I can say with absolute certainty that I am most proud of the Infinite Adventures Podcast! We have published almost 180 episodes, and I can’t be prouder of how far we’ve come. It is single-handedly the largest/longest project I have worked on, and I have enjoyed every minute of it (except when I am required to edit but that’s neither here nor there).

How have you seen immersive fantasy worlds and cooperative strategic play bring people together and create lifelong friendships?

One thing I can say about the TTRPG experience that I absolutely love is that it’s like a masquerade ball. You invite a bunch of your closest friends and hope that they get along with each other. And it becomes an easier experience in my opinion (for more socially anxious, nerdy types) when you allow them to interact with other people through the lens of fantasy characters. Doing so allows them to embrace self-confidence they otherwise might not have. After a while, most gaming sessions transform from focusing on going straight into the action to giving everyone a place to hang out in a safe space.

Please tell us about your pet!

Ok! I don’t live with them anymore—they live with my folks—but I have two adorable dobies and they are just the sweetest noblest boys in the entire world. Tyler is a black dobie with a passive curiosity about everything. He’s always looking around and watching what everyone is doing, and you can just see the spark of an intellectual buried in his canine soul. Austin is a gray dobie. He is incredibly playful, often exhibiting bursts of energy out of the blue. You absolutely do not need a mind reader for him; he telegraphs every minute emotion and feeling he has. If he could speak, this boy’s stream of consciousness could be heard out loud.

What character would you like to play next and why?

I have not played a dromite before and we need to fix that one day. I have always liked insectile species in fiction. I think that they’re not as common because many people feel scared of bugs, but there’s something fascinating about them to me. They’re like living machines, one of the closest things to aliens we have on our planet. We know they have societies and systems as complex as humans and yet they live alongside us doing their own thing. But being able to pretend what it’s like to be a large sapient ant person in a fantasy game sounds like too good an opportunity to pass up.

Welcome to our Creator Spotlight blog series! Nearly every Monday, we’ll focus on a different wonderful industry creator, as an individual, including Paizo staff, freelancers, contractors, podcast players, streamers, YouTubers, licensed partners, and more. The format is a list of standardized questions from which interviewees can choose. Request the Creator Spotlight form by emailing marketing@paizo.com. This week we're shining a spotlight on community creator, Dan Thompson!

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Name: Dan Thompson
Pronouns: (he/him)
Role (if not staff): GM of The Danger Club Podcast
Social Media Handles: @danthompson2099 @DangerClubPod

Tell us about yourself. What is your bio? What's your story behind the bio? Why do you do what you do?

I’m the GM for The Danger Club Podcast. We’re a bunch of actors from the UK who have been making a Pathfinder show for nearly four years now! I’ve been playing roleplaying games since I was a kid, and when I quit my job to move to London and be an actor, I didn’t really know anyone. So one day I invited a few of the cast from my show to play a game after we got out. We had a great time and started playing every week. Then people started asking to come watch us, and one of them suggested we try podcasting. Back when we started there were already lots of great shows, and I often felt intimidated by how good they seemed to be at playing the game and remembering rules. That’s impressive, but it’s not how my friends and I game at all. We just grab dice, make some jokes, and try to tell a story. People sometimes say that Pathfinder is a complicated game and you have to learn a ton of rules to enjoy it, so we wanted to show that you don’t need that at all. We’ve gotten good at recording and editing, but when it comes down to it, the podcast isn’t any different from those early days. It’s the feeling of sitting in the pub with your mates, making up characters, and having a good time.

Tell us about a project you are particularly proud of?

The thing I’m really proud of is the work we did during lockdown. We’re all performers, so when the pandemic hit, we literally lost our careers overnight—just years of work gone in an instant. My mental health was pretty bad at the time, and it would have been really easy to just call it a day and focus on getting through. But then we saw members of our community struggling the same way, and we just made a snap decision that we couldn’t bail on them. We learned how to record from home, we learned how to use Twitch, and we invited people from Paizo to come on and talk about their work. We put out two or three shows a week for two years, and we never missed a week. At the same time we got to know the Dangerling community in a way we hadn’t before and came away much closer.

What do you do as your day job?

All the DCP are actors/performers of one kind or another. In the “before times,” I worked as a comedian and was part of the acting team for a lot of London’s historic sites. I’d spend the day running around in armor and spend the evening pretending to be a character in armor around a gaming table. Since the pandemic killed off a lot of those companies, I’ve moved more into production, and now I stage manage a cabaret club and develop scripts for online games. I won’t lie, I miss the armor a little bit.

Where do you draw your inspiration?

As a neurodivergent person, my brain is quite a frantic place. Letting a part of it sit in Golarion and make up stories is a way for the rest of me to stay grounded. Part of my brain is pretty much always devouring things I see and turning them into Danger Club stories, which leaves the rest of my brain free to remember to eat lunch or leave the house on time. I’m not focused enough to be one of these GMs who knows every shop and NPC in their world, so I prefer to focus on key moments that I want to happen and cling for dear life, laying down track in front of the train until we get there.

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What piece of advice that you have been given as a creator that is either so great that you have to tell us about it or so awful that you have to warn us?

There are no competitors here, only potential collaborators. It’s easy to feel like other creators are so far ahead, but they probably have days where they feel the same about you. Some of my favorite projects are where we reached out to people we admired and asked if we could make something together. The more we lift each other up, the better we all do.

How did you get started writing/producing/creating content?

I’ve been writing my whole life. I’ve been a comedian, actor, comic book writer, and I’ve been making up roleplaying games since I was 12. In terms of podcasting, we used to play Pathfinder at a London pub every Monday, and over the years people started coming to watch, so we decided to record some and see what would happen. Now, here we are!

What are your goals or dreams as a creator?

I want to grow the DCP community to be absolutely gigantic. They’re such an awesome group of people, and every time somebody new joins the Discord, it’s like getting a new friend. We’ve been through a lot, and the way they’ve supported each other and us through it all just fills me with joy. I want everyone to get to share in that…but in a nice way, not a Borg way.

How have you seen immersive fantasy worlds and cooperative strategic play bring people together and create lifelong friendships?

Well, back in 2011 I suggested to a group of actors that we go play a roleplaying game after the show and we’ve played every week since then and now make a podcast together! That’s definitely got to count for something, right? You see it in our community as well. A lot of our listeners are new to Pathfinder so some of the more experienced GMs set up a channel on our Discord where they could form gaming groups. I got a message the other day that one of them is closing in on the end of Agents of Edgewatch, and I couldn’t be prouder.

Please tell us about your pet!

Sadly my apartment isn’t big enough to keep a happy pet, but I do have a unicorn who keeps me company while I write!

If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you live and why?

I’m a Londoner until the end. Every street here has a thousand stories to uncover, and no matter how much you learn, there’ll always be more. I’ve played Pathfinder in the Tower of London and in the foundations of London Bridge. I’ve not managed to play in an actual palace yet, but there’s still time.