I began writing fiction in second grade, and it's a practice I've maintained in some form or fashion throughout my life. I obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts in English from Trinity International University in 2012, and took several communications courses in my time there as well. 

While most of my writing is fiction, I find frequent use for my writing background in my day-to-day position at Herff Jones. Usually this involves catching grammatical errors, tweaking old copy to work in a new context or for a different audience, or writing short blurbs about a product. I also occasionally do more technical writing in the form of written tutorials for others on the team, such as a Photoshop guide on frequency separation or a best practices document for managing files in SharePoint. 

My personal writing is varies between prose fiction, tabletop roleplaying games (which veer toward technical writing, albeit about fictional things), or lore surrounding these fictional universes. 

PROSE FICTION
As a young child and teen I wrote a large number of short stories, and also had a fantasy "novel" that I revised endlessly, never reaching an endpoint before returning to change some earlier chapter. My first serious and complete effort was a science fiction novel of 144,000 words written in college. It was about a well-intentioned CEO of a weapons manufacturer and his bodyguard, both of whom end up in the center of an interstellar war whilst also slowly falling into a romantic relationship. It was, quite frankly, an extremely naïve view of how any of those things functioned, but it did give me good practice in actually finishing something. Plot, character arcs, and foreshadowing all had to be tied together, and then put through subsequent drafts. I even submitted it to a publisher that accepted unsolicited manuscripts—unsurprisingly, it was rejected. 

In the years since, life and full-time jobs haven't given me the chance to finish a full manuscript like that again, but I continue to write. Sometimes it's short stories, or another chapter of an ongoing novel, or, more recently, a transition to more episodic writing that is more self-contained, but also capable of continuing for as long as the story requires. 

All this practice and evolution over the years has not resulted in a published novel, but it has honed some skills you might be looking for: sentence-to-sentence writing skill in adaptable styles, an eye for editing and slicing away the unnecessary fluff, an understanding of character motivations, a love for deep worldbuilding, and a sense of what resolutions are desired by the reader or audience. 

TTRPGS & IN-UNIVERSE LORE
I've done a great deal of writing for tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) over the years, which is often very specific and focused on the minutiae of rules and mechanics. For more about my experience with that, see the section on Game Design below. 

As the Game Master of many campaigns, I also frequently find myself writing many documents, letters, decrees, speeches, bestiaries, timelines, or reference material for use during play. These usually serve to either provide players with new clues or to further immerse them in an imaginary world. 

In what is usually a condensed space, the goal is to be evocative in some way. A letter might deliver an emotional gut-punch by showing a small snapshot of someone's life, or it might provide players with a lightbulb moment of putting the pieces of a puzzle together. 

In my own time, I have been an ardent fan of tabletop roleplaying games (such as Dungeons & Dragons, Delta Green, and Stars Without Number) for over 15 years. I've been a player of such games many times, but most enjoy occupying the game master's seat and bringing new worlds and characters to life. 

My first foray into designing my own systems began in college with a sci-fi game that was largely a ripoff of d20 Future. As a game, it was clunky and a bit lopsided, but it taught me a lot about balance, the value of playtesting, and developing mechanics that catered to multiple playstyles and personalities.

My development of systems and tools in the years since has taken me in many directions. In 2017 and with multiple updates afterward, I released the Discerning Merchant's Price Guide, a tool for D&D 5e that has become an Adamantine Bestseller on dmsguild.com, the game's official site for third-party content. 

My spouse and I published Ready Set Bake in 2020, a cozy game about baking competitions inspired by the Great British Bake-Off. A year later, in 2021, we released the alpha version of Sturm und Drang, a Lasers & Feelings hack about being melodramatic characters straight out of 18th-century Romanticism. 

I am currently in active development on a sandbox, steampunk-themed game based on the open source rules released by Kevin Crawford (the author of Stars Without Number and its sister games). In 2021, I also created a hack of Stars Without Number for the Fallout video game franchise and ran a two-year campaign using it—this was a personal project and is not publicly available, but you can see more about its design here. 

Lastly, a note about the emotion and inspiration of this hobby: I adore tabletop roleplaying games. They are one of my great passions in life. I get endless joy out of imagining characters and new worlds, exploring them with my friends, and creating our own unique collaborative stories together. And I love designing them: I love tinkering with weapon lists and damage numbers, crafting roll tables to inspire GMs and make running games easier, and creating character options that will excite players and prod their own imaginations. I love making battlemaps and world maps, writing letters and lore, imagining the hierarchical structure of a magical academy or a starship navy, or stringing together Foundry macros to splash cool effects across a virtual tabletop. 

If you've got a job available that lets me put those loves to use, you can be sure I'll be excited to hear about the opportunity—just send an email to dave@eisinger.design or hit the contact tab up above. 

Creating new worlds is one of my favorite parts of both writing fiction and playing tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs). And inevitably, readers or players want to know where events are happening and how they relate to one another. The answer is maps, both on a macro and micro scale. 

Maps have always fascinated me. As a child I remember seeing the Piri Reis map on display in the Topkapi Palace Museum, and getting a replica in a cheap frame. Portolan charts in particular are incredibly cool, and I sometimes include rhumb lines on my large scale maps to tap into that era of wooden ships. 

My earliest maps were naturally hand-drawn, while I later moved to Cartographer 3 for assistance, and for some science fiction have even made use of Google SketchUp to place star systems in 3D space. In 2017, I hand-painted a map of an entire continent in Photoshop, but have since moved away from its more simplistic style. Currently, I use Wonderdraft to create the base of the map, and use Adobe programs for markers and labelling. 

While unnecessary for prose fiction, TTRPGs reliably feature battles and skirmishes that the players are involved in, and in many cases those require battlemaps. These are top-down, orthographic maps of a specific area, such as a vampire's castle or a starship's deck plan. They're set on a grid that's usually at a 5 ft. or 2-meter scale per square, and players take turns to move tokens that represent their characters around these maps to simulate the battle. Every TTRPG has different rules for how this is done, but the maps remain a straightforward visual aid to help players understand what's going on and where they are. 

For many years, I primarily made my battlemaps in Photoshop, utilizing hundreds of layers to the point that the software sometimes struggled to keep up. During this time, I primarily used assets and textures from like-minded folks who had posted art on the old Dundjinni forums (which are now defunct and offline). 

In 2020 & 2021, I moved my processes entirely over to using Dungeondraft, a purpose-made tool for creating battlemaps with a huge variety of third-party assets available. The maps I make are for personal use, although I sometimes release them for free to other TTRPG enthusiasts. While I would enjoy working on maps full-time on a commercial basis, it's a difficult market to break into and would require a large time commitment that I'm not currently positioned to pursue. 

But if any of these skills—map-making, 2D level design, encounter design, or worldbuilding—sound useful for an position you have available, just send an email to dave@eisinger.design or hit the contact tab up above.