DM is life. DM is love. For some of us, DM is also job. For the rest of us, job is job, and those are the DMs we sit down with on Nice Job, DM!
Today, we're blessed with the presence of Austin Holmes, a DM who gets paid to put the final touches on advertising campaigns before coming home to put the final touches on his TTRPG podcast, The Arcane Frequency.
Can you please introduce yourself and your day job?
Heyo! My name is Austin, and my day job is working as a Post Production Supervisor for an advertising agency. Basically, I oversee all of the post-production work across our projects and clients: video editing, motion graphics, visual effects, color grading, sound design, and everything in between.
It’s a really creative job, and honestly I love it. I get to spend my days helping shape stories, build emotional moments, and collaborate with talented creatives to make really cool things. A lot of those skills naturally carry over into DMing and podcast production too, especially when it comes to pacing, cinematic storytelling, music, and atmosphere.
In a lot of ways, Arcane Frequency feels like the perfect overlap between my professional creative work and the storytelling side of tabletop RPGs that I’ve fallen in love with over the last several years.
How did you get into that line of work, and what’s your favorite thing about it?
I’ve been interested in video production ever since high school, when I started making videos for our varsity sports teams to play during quarterly assemblies. The moment someone handed me a camera, something just clicked for me. I loved the process of capturing moments, editing them together, and seeing people react to the final product.
From there, I studied advertising in college and ended up completely falling in love with that world too. Ads are such a fascinating form of storytelling because they can take on so many different tones and styles. Some are heartfelt, some are hilarious, some are intense and cinematic, and others are just ridiculously over-the-top fun. That variety keeps the work feeling fresh all the time.
I think my favorite part of the job is still the actual creation process, taking all of these separate pieces like footage, music, sound design, color, motion graphics, and pacing, and slowly shaping them into something cohesive and emotional. There’s something incredibly satisfying about seeing a finished video finally come together after all the work behind the scenes.
What advice would you give to people who are interested in having that job?
Edit. Download DaVinci Resolve, CapCut, or even Instagram Edits on your phone, they’re all free, and start making things. Don’t get trapped in the mindset that you need expensive cameras, fancy gear, or a massive setup before you can create good work. Modern smartphones are already incredibly powerful tools.
The most important thing is simply getting reps in. Film things. Edit things. Try ideas. Make bad videos. Make better videos. Repeat.
A huge part of growing creatively is learning through iteration: ideate, film, edit, seek honest feedback, and then do it all again. Over time, you’ll suddenly look back and realize how much you’ve improved without even noticing it happening. That's what we hope to do with our podcast, the Arcane Frequency. Ideate, record, edit, and get feedback from our audience (which is still very small haha). We're hoping to make an INCREDIBLE narrative experience for all involved!
I also think one of the most important skills you can develop is learning how to handle feedback. Creative work is deeply personal, so criticism can sting at first, but learning not to take negative feedback personally is incredibly valuable. Instead of seeing it as an attack, treat it as an opportunity to sharpen your craft and discover new ways to improve.
It’s honestly such a fun and rewarding field to be part of, and there are more opportunities than ever to create and share your work. I wish anybody getting into video editing the absolute best of luck, it’s an awesome journey!
Please introduce and tell us about Arcane Frequency.
Arcane Frequency is a family-friendly fantasy TTRPG podcast built around one simple thing: a group of friends getting together to tell really cool stories.
Over the last few years, the tabletop RPG space has absolutely exploded with incredible new systems. Between Daggerheart, the Cosmere RPG, Kids on Bikes, Alien RPG, and so many others, we got really excited about the idea of not limiting ourselves to just one game forever. We wanted a space where we could explore all of them, experiment with different tones and genres, and tell stories that feel unique from season to season.
At the heart of it, though, Arcane Frequency started because we’ve been playing in the same fantasy world together for over six years now. There were always stories we never got to tell — other continents, other eras, other characters, hidden histories, smaller personal stories happening alongside the larger world-shaping events. This podcast became our chance to finally explore those corners of the world.
That’s why Arcane Frequency is anthology-based. Every season is its own self-contained story with new characters, a new era, and often even a new system. We wanted it to feel approachable and easy to jump into. Instead of asking people to commit to hundreds of episodes right away, we wanted someone to be able to say, “Hey, here’s a 10-hour story. Give it a shot.” If people love it, amazing! There’ll always be another story waiting for them. And as we grow, we’ll absolutely start telling longer and more ambitious stories too. But right now, we’re focused on building something fun, cinematic, heartfelt, and welcoming for both longtime TTRPG fans and people discovering this hobby for the very first time.
I’ve been interested in video production ever since high school, when I started making videos for our varsity sports teams to play during quarterly assemblies. The moment someone handed me a camera, something just clicked for me. I loved the process of capturing moments, editing them together, and seeing people react to the final product.
From there, I studied advertising in college and ended up completely falling in love with that world too. Ads are such a fascinating form of storytelling because they can take on so many different tones and styles. Some are heartfelt, some are hilarious, some are intense and cinematic, and others are just ridiculously over-the-top fun. That variety keeps the work feeling fresh all the time.
I think my favorite part of the job is still the actual creation process, taking all of these separate pieces like footage, music, sound design, color, motion graphics, and pacing, and slowly shaping them into something cohesive and emotional. There’s something incredibly satisfying about seeing a finished video finally come together after all the work behind the scenes.
What advice would you give to people who are interested in having that job?
Edit. Download DaVinci Resolve, CapCut, or even Instagram Edits on your phone, they’re all free, and start making things. Don’t get trapped in the mindset that you need expensive cameras, fancy gear, or a massive setup before you can create good work. Modern smartphones are already incredibly powerful tools.
The most important thing is simply getting reps in. Film things. Edit things. Try ideas. Make bad videos. Make better videos. Repeat.
A huge part of growing creatively is learning through iteration: ideate, film, edit, seek honest feedback, and then do it all again. Over time, you’ll suddenly look back and realize how much you’ve improved without even noticing it happening. That's what we hope to do with our podcast, the Arcane Frequency. Ideate, record, edit, and get feedback from our audience (which is still very small haha). We're hoping to make an INCREDIBLE narrative experience for all involved!
I also think one of the most important skills you can develop is learning how to handle feedback. Creative work is deeply personal, so criticism can sting at first, but learning not to take negative feedback personally is incredibly valuable. Instead of seeing it as an attack, treat it as an opportunity to sharpen your craft and discover new ways to improve.
It’s honestly such a fun and rewarding field to be part of, and there are more opportunities than ever to create and share your work. I wish anybody getting into video editing the absolute best of luck, it’s an awesome journey!
Please introduce and tell us about Arcane Frequency.
Arcane Frequency is a family-friendly fantasy TTRPG podcast built around one simple thing: a group of friends getting together to tell really cool stories.
Over the last few years, the tabletop RPG space has absolutely exploded with incredible new systems. Between Daggerheart, the Cosmere RPG, Kids on Bikes, Alien RPG, and so many others, we got really excited about the idea of not limiting ourselves to just one game forever. We wanted a space where we could explore all of them, experiment with different tones and genres, and tell stories that feel unique from season to season.
At the heart of it, though, Arcane Frequency started because we’ve been playing in the same fantasy world together for over six years now. There were always stories we never got to tell — other continents, other eras, other characters, hidden histories, smaller personal stories happening alongside the larger world-shaping events. This podcast became our chance to finally explore those corners of the world.
That’s why Arcane Frequency is anthology-based. Every season is its own self-contained story with new characters, a new era, and often even a new system. We wanted it to feel approachable and easy to jump into. Instead of asking people to commit to hundreds of episodes right away, we wanted someone to be able to say, “Hey, here’s a 10-hour story. Give it a shot.” If people love it, amazing! There’ll always be another story waiting for them. And as we grow, we’ll absolutely start telling longer and more ambitious stories too. But right now, we’re focused on building something fun, cinematic, heartfelt, and welcoming for both longtime TTRPG fans and people discovering this hobby for the very first time.
What's it like to run a table while you know you're being recorded?
Honestly, being recorded hasn’t really changed the experience between me and my players. At the table, it still feels like a group of friends hanging out and telling stories together. The chemistry and the fun are all still there.
What has changed is that I now hear myself constantly because I’m also editing the podcast. That means I get to hear every “um,” every awkward pause, every stumbled sentence, every filler word, and every moment where my brain is moving faster than my mouth. It definitely makes me a little more self-conscious about how I speak and how I phrase things. At one point I genuinely started wondering if I had a lisp because I’d listened to myself so much while editing.
More than anything, though, recording has just made me slow down a little. Sometimes I’ll stop mid-thought, backtrack, and restate something because I know there’s probably a clearer or more dramatic way to say it. My players have been very patient with that.
I also think it’s helped me grow as a GM. I wouldn’t call myself an incredible improviser, but listening back to sessions has made me more aware of pacing, clarity, and how to better communicate the scenes I’m trying to create. So while recording adds a little self-awareness, it hasn’t taken away the joy of the game at all, if anything, it’s made me appreciate the process even more!
When and why did you start DMing, and for what systems?
I started DMing in 2020 after one of my coworkers introduced our lunch group to Dungeons & Dragons. We had about an hour for lunch, so we squeezed in this tiny little session, and I immediately fell in love with it. Our coworker ran the first adventure for us, and I still remember, 30 lunche sessions later, how excited I was when the villain we confronted was actually a wizard I had written into my character’s backstory. That was the moment where it all clicked for me; collaborative storytelling is cool.
A little while later, he asked if anyone else wanted to try running part of the campaign, and I jumped at the chance. I thought it sounded incredibly fun to build a story for my coworkers and friends to play through. Looking back, though, my very first session was awful. I had planned out exactly what I thought was supposed to happen and completely failed to account for player agency. In my head, I had already decided what choices everyone would make, so the second they did something unexpected, I realized I had no idea how to improvise around it.
Thankfully, my players were very gracious, and over time I learned that the magic of tabletop RPGs isn’t controlling the story — it’s reacting to the chaos your players create.
Eventually, we started an entirely new campaign in a brand-new world, Feloria, and we’ve been telling stories in that setting ever since. That campaign culminated in 2025 with the party traveling through the Abyss, into Thanatos, and ultimately confronting Orcus in Castle Orcus itself. It was massive, emotional, and honestly one of the coolest tabletop experiences I’ve ever had. One of the players died during the final battle, and it felt like such a fitting and hard-earned conclusion to years of storytelling together.
After that, I started reading about Daggerheart and became really excited to try a new system. We decided to keep playing in the same world and timeline, but shift our focus to different regions, cultures, governments, and stories happening elsewhere across the setting. Starting over at level one in a new system while still building on years of shared history has been incredibly rewarding.
Since then, I’ve run both D&D and Daggerheart, and we’re hoping to expand into even more systems through Arcane Frequency. Right now, though, our table has absolutely fallen in love with Daggerheart. The system just really clicks for the kind of collaborative, cinematic storytelling we enjoy most.
What do you enjoy about Daggerheart versus other systems so far?
What I really love about Daggerheart can honestly be summed up in one of its core principles: follow the fiction.
Coming from D&D, I sometimes found myself getting bogged down in specifics: exact distances, exact timings, combat rounds, movement speed, and all the little mechanical details that can occasionally pull you away from the actual story being told. Daggerheart feels much more focused on the narrative first, and that really clicked with me as a GM.
It also helped solve something I personally struggled with while running D&D: feeling guilty for challenging my players. Because D&D relies so heavily on stat blocks and encounter balance, I sometimes felt like the only justification I had for making things difficult was, “Well, the monster can do this, so I guess I should use it.” But that occasionally created this weird feeling where the game could become a little adversarial between me and the players. If I pushed them too hard, it sometimes felt less like collaborative storytelling and more like me trying to “beat” them, or vice versa.
Daggerheart changed that for me completely because of the Hope and Fear mechanics. Fear gives the GM permission, an actual narrative resource to spend. The players can see it building. They generate it through their rolls. So when something bad happens, it doesn’t feel arbitrary or personal, it feels like the natural consequence of the story and the momentum at the table.
That system really helped me understand that I’m not being mean to my players by making things difficult for their characters. Great stories need tension. They need failure, sacrifice, setbacks, and moments where things feel impossible. The lows are what make the highs feel incredible.
Daggerheart has really encouraged us to lean into that collaborative emotional storytelling, and for our table, that’s been an amazing experience.
What is your favorite part of DMing?
My favorite part of DMing is, without question, the session prep, specifically the narrative prep. I absolutely love thinking about what the villains are doing behind the scenes while the heroes are off pursuing their own goals.
One of my favorite things is slowly revealing those unseen events to the players over time. Maybe they hear rumors, stumble across the aftermath of something terrible, or suddenly realize that while they were busy handling one problem, the villain has been making moves elsewhere the entire time. I love that feeling of hidden momentum in a world.
There’s actually a video essay I watched a few months ago about the early 2000's Eragon movie that really stuck with me. In the original book, Galbatorix is barely present, but the movie kept cutting back to him brooding in his chambers because the filmmakers wanted the audience to constantly feel the presence of the villain behind the story. That idea fascinated me.
That’s kind of how I think about DMing now. I’m constantly asking myself: What is the antagonist doing right now while the players are making their choices? Then eventually those storylines collide, and the players get to see the consequences of both their actions and the villain’s actions crashing together in real time.
Honestly, that payoff is one of the coolest feelings in the world to me.
It’s also why I love shows like The Legend of Vox Machina and The Mighty Nein animated series so much. Watching those stories from the audience perspective almost feels like getting a glimpse into Matt Mercer’s GM notes. You suddenly realize, “Oh wow… this entire time there were huge events unfolding behind the scenes that the players knew nothing about until it exploded into the story.”
Moments like the Chroma Conclave attacking Tal’Dorei are so impactful because the world feels alive beyond the players themselves. That’s the feeling I’m always chasing as a DM.
On a scale of The Witcher to Monty Python, how silly do your games tend to get?
Our home games definitely lean more toward The Witcher side of the spectrum. We love gritty fantasy, high stakes, political tension, tragic choices, and world-ending threats. The kind of stories where the fate of kingdoms, or entire worlds, hangs in the balance.
That said, for Season One of Arcane Frequency, we intentionally leaned a little more toward Monty Python. We wanted the show to feel approachable and fun right out of the gate. There’s already a lot of incredible serious fantasy storytelling in the actual play space, and we thought it would be fun to embrace a slightly more comedic tone while we found our footing as a podcast.
Season Two is probably going to stay somewhere in that middle ground as well — still emotional and story-driven, but with a lot of humor and absurdity mixed in.
Then Season Three… we’re swinging the pendulum hard back in the other direction. We want it to be dark, tragic, dramatic, and emotionally heavy in all the best ways, while still staying within that family-friendly or PG-13 space that’s important to us.
Honestly, one of the things we’re most excited about with Arcane Frequency being anthology-based is the ability to experiment tonally. One season can be weird and funny, another can be heartbreaking and intense, and another can sit somewhere in between.
If I had to guess where we’ll eventually settle long-term, though, I think we naturally drift a little more toward The Witcher than Monty Python. We just really love epic storytelling, impossible odds, and the feeling of heroes standing against something much bigger than themselves.
Can you tell us your best memory from recording Arcane Frequency so far?
Easily one of my favorite memories from recording Arcane Frequency was a moment where one of my players made the most perfect situational joke at exactly the right time.
As a GM, sometimes you’re setting up a scene and you can almost *feel* the comedic timing lining up in your head. I had this moment where I was basically tossing up the perfect alley-oop for someone to dunk, but obviously you can’t explain that to the players in the moment without ruining it. You just kind of have to trust that someone will pick up what you’re putting down.
And one of my players absolutely did. Perfectly.
For me, the joke landed so much harder than I ever expected it to, I completely lost it for a couple seconds haha. I was crying laughing while we were recording. It was one of those moments that reminded me why I love tabletop RPGs so much, you genuinely cannot script that kind of comedic chemistry. It only happens because a group of people are fully locked into the same moment together.
Honestly, those spontaneous moments are some of the most magical parts of recording the show, and this clip is still one of my favorites:
https://youtube.com/shorts/
Do any skills you use for your day job help you when you DM?
Absolutely. I think my day job has influenced the way I DM in a huge way.
I work in video production and post-production, so I spend a lot of my day listening to music, editing scenes together, and thinking about emotion, pacing, and visual storytelling. A lot of my campaign ideas honestly start with music. I’ll hear a song and immediately start imagining an entire story arc, a villain, a scene, or even a whole campaign.
Season Three of Arcane Frequency actually came from that exact experience. I heard one incredibly ominous song and immediately thought, "I need to build a story around this feeling." That song basically became the emotional foundation for the entire season. I cannot WAIT to get to it later this year.
I also think being a video editor and creative professional has helped me develop a kind of cinematic language when I GM. I naturally think in terms of shots, camera movement, pacing, framing, lighting, and tone, even while describing scenes at the table. Sometimes I’ll describe a moment almost like I’m directing a film scene in my head because I’m trying to evoke a very specific image or emotion for the players.
A lot of the time it’s subtle things, the way a scene “zooms in” emotionally, the pacing of a reveal, the mood created by a setting, or the contrast between quiet moments and chaotic ones. I think working creatively every day has definitely shaped the way I approach storytelling as a DM.
What advice or house rules would you share with new DMs?
One of the biggest things that helped me as a newer DM, especially whenever I hit creative block, was simply opening up a monster manual and flipping through it.
Seriously. Don’t underestimate how inspiring monsters can be.
A lot of the best story ideas I’ve had didn’t start with some massive worldbuilding concept. They started with me reading about a creature and thinking, "Wait… that’s actually really cool." Suddenly a whole adventure starts forming around it.
Maybe there’s a creature that burrows underground and can’t digest gemstones, so miners hunt it because its body is covered in valuable crystals. Maybe there’s a monster whose existence completely changes the politics of a region. Maybe an entire village has adapted its culture around surviving one terrifying creature nearby.
Those kinds of small ideas can spiral outward into entire campaigns.
I think new GMs sometimes put a lot of pressure on themselves to invent everything from scratch, but honestly, game systems already contain so many incredible creative prompts. Monster manuals, adversaries, locations, magic items, random tables, they’re all there to help spark your imagination.
For D&D especially, the Monster Manual is an amazing resource for that. Daggerheart is still a little lighter on adversaries right now, though the *Hope & Fear* book coming in 2026 is going to help with that a ton, which I’m very excited about. But regardless of the system, I think letting the monsters inspire the story is one of the easiest and most fun ways to overcome creative block as a GM.
What’s your dice situation, either when playing or DMing? How do you choose which sets to use?
My dice situation is honestly pretty simple: I’ve accumulated a bunch of really cool blue dice over the years (blue is my favorite color) and now they all live together in one giant dragon-shaped dice tray.
Some of the sets are metallic, some are wooden, some are just classic plastic dice, but almost all of them are some variation of blue because apparently that’s just become my color over time. I don’t really choose dice based on stats or luck or anything super scientific, mostly I just grab whichever ones feel right in the moment.
For damage rolls and larger handfuls of dice, I’ll usually just scoop up however many I need from the pile. But my d20s are a very different story. Those are under constant scrutiny.
I absolutely keep a dice jail nearby for any d20 that betrays me. And trust me, some of them DESERVE it. Episode 6 of Season 1 is a perfect example where my dice completely failed me as a GM and I was losing my mind a little bit haha. At that point, the offending d20 gets retired immediately and another one gets promoted into active duty.
So while I’d love to say there’s some deeply strategic method behind my dice choices, the reality is it’s mostly vibes, superstition, and punishing dice that refuse to cooperate.
Final Q: dice tower, rolling tray, or raw table?
I’m probably going to upset some people with this answer, but I’m firmly in the “raw table” camp haha.
Ironically, I do own a dice tray (a really cool blue dragon-shaped one) but I mostly use it to hold my dice, not roll them. One of my players absolutely hates this philosophy. He constantly tells me, “The dice tray is for rolling in, not storing dice!” But I completely disagree. To me, it’s the perfect way to transport and organize all my dice between sessions.
When it’s time to actually roll, though, I pull the dice out and roll straight on the table. There’s just something satisfying about it.
I do think dice towers are cool, but as a GM I already feel like I’m juggling a million things at once: notes, NPCs, rules, pacing, music, story beats, player reactions, all of it. So for me, rolling directly on the table is just the fastest and easiest option. I don’t have to think about positioning a dice tower or making room for it or feeding dice through it quickly during tense moments.
At the end of the day, I think my setup is basically optimized for convenience, speed, and the satisfying sound of dice clattering dramatically across the table.
Ironically, I do own a dice tray (a really cool blue dragon-shaped one) but I mostly use it to hold my dice, not roll them. One of my players absolutely hates this philosophy. He constantly tells me, “The dice tray is for rolling in, not storing dice!” But I completely disagree. To me, it’s the perfect way to transport and organize all my dice between sessions.
When it’s time to actually roll, though, I pull the dice out and roll straight on the table. There’s just something satisfying about it.
I do think dice towers are cool, but as a GM I already feel like I’m juggling a million things at once: notes, NPCs, rules, pacing, music, story beats, player reactions, all of it. So for me, rolling directly on the table is just the fastest and easiest option. I don’t have to think about positioning a dice tower or making room for it or feeding dice through it quickly during tense moments.
At the end of the day, I think my setup is basically optimized for convenience, speed, and the satisfying sound of dice clattering dramatically across the table.