Creator Spotlight: Goblin Points

Hey Folks,

With the amazing amount of community support that we have received over the past few years I felt we should try and use this platform to reciprocate. I don't know if this will become a regular feature, but there are lots of great community creators making stuff, so there is certainly have a healthy list to pull from.

Back in November of 2023, before we launched The MCDM RPG crowd funder, Jon de Nor kicked off the Goblin Points podcast, "covering MCDM, the MCDM community, and whatever else MCDM related." With so much going on at MCDM these days it can be hard to keep up with everything and Goblin Points provides an easy to digest monthly rundown of things you might not otherwise know. I personally have it in my podcast subscriptions and listen to it regularly.

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I caught up with Jon via email to get a bit of background on himself and his various projects.

GC: Who are you and where are you?

JDN: I'm Jon de Nor, not my given name, but a name that's easier to write and pronounce in English. In the MCDM community, I'm the host of Goblin Points and the developer of Stawl. I live in southern Norway. I could say close to the coast, but the whole of Norway is close to the coast, especially by American standards.

GC: How did you get into TTRPGs?

JDN: I'd known about D&D as a nerdy hobby that I was mildly interested in, but it wasn't until I started a new job, and the gang at the office discovered we were all curious about trying D&D. Over the summer holiday 2018 I bought The Three Books, and binged YouTube videos to get ready to start DMing. That's when I first came across Matt's videos and started following his work.

GC: When did you start following Draw Steel?

JDN: From the beginning. I'm a regular watcher of Matt's Twitch stream VODs (shout out to the VOD people), and had heard him talk about wanting to do a new RPG. Being constantly present in the Discord, and watching the streams, I was always up to date on development. I started doing Goblin Points because I wanted to save people the need to keep close attention to the development to keep up to date. Going by the questions asked on Discord and on Reddit, it's debatable how well it's worked out 🤣.

GC: How do you feel about your role in the MCDM Community?

I started Goblin Points because I wanted to help the community to stay up to date on the development of Draw Steel. Then I started doing interviews to bring attention to great people in the community. Also, the interviews are a great excuse to get to speak with people I admire. My end goal though, is to be a river to the community.

About six months ago I also started work on Stawl, which is a digital toolset for Draw Steel. I suspect many have become used to digital tools when they play TTRPGs, and Stawl aims to make the transition to Draw Steel easier.

I agree with Matt in that the community is the most important part to make this endeavor work. I'm just trying to help out in the small ways I know how.

GC: Any other community projects (by other creators) that you want to point out to our patrons?

JDN: It'd be a crime if I didn't mention Goblin Points' sister podcast The Dice Society, hosted by Caio. We could've become rivals, but thanks to the kind of people MCDM foster in their community spaces, Caio and I are collaborators, more than anything.

I also want to mention Forge Steel, by Andy Aiken and collaborators. It's the great character builder Stawl doesn't have. Creating a character is so quick!

There are many more I could mention, and I encourage people to check out the interview episodes of Goblin Points or the links section of the roundup episodes. There's so much being created, and that's even before the game is out!

GC: Anything else you want me to share?

JDN: Honestly, my appreciation and thanks to all the people that make the MCDM community a nice place to be: the folks at MCDM, Matt and the many mods on Discord, Twitch, and Reddit. I honestly believe that the MCDM community is a unique place on the internet. Goblin Points and I stand on the shoulders of those fine folks.

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I want to thank Jon de Nor for taking the time each month to keep us all informed. If you have a favorite community resource, let us know in the comments or send us an email to hello@mcdmproductions.com

Thanks for tuning in,
Geoff