Over the summer, my old roommate and I made a decision: it was time to stop sitting on a goldmine.
The Kitchen Table
For years, Alec D. Beck and I, along with our closest friends, have been telling stories, building worlds, and creating characters around the table. Week after week, D&D campaigns, Pathfinder adventures, and countless TTRPG sessions fueled our passion to create.
There is something magical about tabletop roleplaying games. You gather a group of people, some dice, maybe a few snacks, and suddenly you are somewhere else entirely. You are exploring ancient ruins, negotiating with dragons, or saving villages from threats only you can stop. The game master weaves the world, and the players breathe life into it.
Our sessions became more than just games. They became collaborative storytelling experiences. We developed intricate lore, memorable NPCs, and plot twists that left us talking for days. The phrase we kept throwing around after particularly great sessions?
"Bro, we're sitting on a gold mine right now."
Beyond the Table
Eventually, we realized enough was enough.
These worlds we had built, these characters we had brought to life, these stories we had told, they deserved to exist beyond our kitchen table. They deserved to be shared with other players, other groups, other dreamers who gather around their own tables every week.
The creative energy was already there. The passion was already there. The ideas were overflowing. What we needed was a vehicle to bring it all together and share it with the world.
Launching Ordinary Company
So we launched Ordinary Company.
The name might seem counterintuitive for a creative venture. Why "ordinary"? Because the most extraordinary adventures often begin with ordinary people. A farmer who picks up a sword. A scholar who stumbles upon forbidden magic. A group of friends who sit down at a table and ask, "What if?"
Our first venture under Ordinary Company is Guildworks, our tabletop game development brand. Through Guildworks, we are channeling years of world-building, game mastering, and player experience into games that we hope will spark the same magic for others that our own sessions have sparked for us.
Made by Humans, for Humans
Let me be direct: I do not support using AI for creative work.
I do not support the unethical training practices that scrape artists' work without consent. I do not support billion-dollar corporations profiting off the labor of creatives who never agreed to have their art fed into a machine. I do not support the race to replace human artists, writers, and designers with algorithms trained on stolen work.
When we were deciding what Ordinary Company would stand for, one phrase kept coming back to us: Made by humans, for humans. This is not just a tagline. It is a commitment.
Ordinary Company is committed to paying human artists. We are committed to collaborating with human creatives. We are committed to celebrating human talent. Not as a marketing angle, but as a foundational principle that will guide this company until the day we close our doors.
Will our work take longer than if we used generative AI? Yes. Will it cost more? Yes. Will it be imperfect? Almost certainly. But that is exactly the point.
There is something irreplaceable about work that comes from genuine passion. You can feel it when you read a lovingly crafted adventure module. You can sense it when you hold a game that someone poured their heart into. The imperfections are not flaws; they are fingerprints. They are proof that a real person made this, cared about this, and wanted to share it with you.
We want to fill the internet with more human-made work. We want to prove that you do not need to exploit artists to build a creative company. We want to show that investing in people is not just ethical, it is worth it.
That is the spirit we are building Ordinary Company on. For the love of the game. For the love of the people who make it possible. Always.
What Comes Next
This is just the beginning. We are taking the stories, systems, and settings that have lived in our heads and notebooks for years and turning them into something tangible. Something playable. Something that can sit on someone else's table and create new memories for new groups.
To everyone who has ever rolled dice with me, sat through one of my long-winded NPC monologues, or helped build these worlds alongside me: thank you. This company exists because of those sessions. Because of those late nights. Because of those moments when the story clicked and everyone at the table felt it.
And to anyone reading this who has ever looked at their own creative work and thought, "This could be something," I hope our story encourages you to take that leap. You might just be sitting on a goldmine yourself.
Follow along with our journey at Ordinary Company and check out what we are building with Guildworks.
