No AI in this loop.
Alongside consulting, I run Off The Map Games, a small operation coordinating paid tabletop RPG campaigns as a professional game master. It's not a side hobby I'm dressing up as work; it's a real operating business with real clients, real scheduling constraints, and real coordination problems.
What makes it interesting to me isn't the games themselves — it's the shape of the operation. No AI tooling in the coordination loop. No dashboards smoothing over the friction. Just a small number of humans trying to deliver a consistent, high-quality experience live, in real time, against constraints that are easy to state and hard to hit consistently: readiness, pacing, engagement, follow-through.
It's the same questions I work on with consulting clients — where does the promise of a system stop matching what it delivers, and what's the smallest true fix — just compressed into a much smaller, much more visible space. When something's misaligned here, I feel it in the very next session, not in a quarterly report.
I don't run this as a case study. I run it because I like doing it. But I'd be lying if I said it hasn't sharpened how I think about operational work at any scale.
What this actually is
Off The Map Games offers paid, professionally-run tabletop RPG campaigns — D&D, The One Ring, and Pirate Borg — booked through StartPlaying.
Prefer to see it in action first? Professional Game Master Services walks through the campaigns and how booking works.