Voldgift

perfidious purveyor of parables, plot, and prophecy

About

Hello and welcome. Coffee's hot, the wiki's open, and somewhere in the back room a Jarl is quietly dismantling his own court without adult supervision — so I'll try to keep this short.I'm Voldgift. My pronouns are he/him, I'm in my mid-thirties with twenty-plus years of writing under my belt, and consider myself a long-haul GM and collaborative storyteller. I run dark, character-first fiction — rich with complex factions, motivated NPC's, and a reactive world that responds to my partner/players' decision like a ripple in water. Much of my work tends to live somewhere between gripping noir, pulpy action-adventure, and occasional eldritch undertow. Romance happens when it's earned. Eroticism happens when the story pulls it forward, not the other way around. Both are welcome, but neither are the headline acts.There's a few things you'll figure out about me eventually, so I'll save you the time:I write advanced lit, novella-leaning. Several solid paragraphs as the floor, longer when scenes need the room. Third person past-or-present tense by default; I'll flex on POV when the format asks for it. I post daily-to-every-other-day and expect roughly the same — though real life always takes precedence, and I don't take ghosting personally. Conversely, if you're looking for something a little more involved and dedicated with multiple posts a day, I am happy to try and accomodate.Dark themes are omnipresent. Death, coercion, addiction, institutional rot, prejudice, religious horror, the slow wreckage of trauma. I do take care to address mature themes in a mature fashion, for purpose rather than aesthetic; everything earns its place or gets cut. If that's not the vintage you're after, no hard feelings. Better to know upfront.I keep extensive worldbuilding bibles. Living wikis, faction dossiers, NPC profiles, location write-ups. I like the aesthetic layer too — moodboards, playlists, reference images, Discord servers with organized channel trees. Bring your own contributions and they'll become canon.System-wise: I enjoy the thrill of TTRPG mechanic systems. Dungeon World is my current home — PbtA, narrative-first, light enough not to fight the prose. I write third-party content for it in my spare time. I am happy to introduce it to novitates; no worries about lack of familiarity, it is very easy to pick up. 5e/5.5e is still workable when that's the preference, along with Call of Cthuhlu and even Genesys, but I prefer lighter weight systems for PbP.Current campaigns: Black Tide, eldritch-noir political horror on a fracturing island-kingdom in the Sword Coast of Forgotten Realms. Convergence Engine, pulp urban fantasy set in Sharn, City of Towers of the Eberron campaign setting. Both are duet-first, scalable, and well-built out — full pitches can be found further in. I'm also open to homebrew greenfields, especially with partners who want to build alongside rather than just tour.Outside the GM screen: I read across genre, watch across format, and have strong opinions about tone, trope, and pacing. I like the OOC side of a long partnership — the brainstorming, the playlist trades, the what if she'd done the other thing messages at midnight. I offer what I ask for: clarity, honesty, and genuine enthusiasm for the work.

Contact

Find me at Voldgift on Discord. Pitches, writing samples, and idle chatter all welcome. Door's open.

CAMPAIGN 1: BLACK TIDE

CONFIDENTIAL DOSSIER – EYES ONLY
Office of Alliance Integrity & Threat Abatement
Field Assignment: OPERATION BLACK TIDE
Operational Tier: Green Veil / Charter Bound
Operative Mandate: Oblique Engagement – Cell GUND-BAssigned Asset: [REDACTED]You’ll know the moment your badge stops being a shield and turns into a target.The Office of Alliance Integrity & Threat Abatement, or OAITA, serves as the Lord’s Alliance’s unseen hand in unstable territories, investigating corruption, sedition, and emergent threats too volatile for public response or diplomatic theater. We move in shadows cast by broken treaties and failed negotiations. We intervene where open force would only hasten collapse.You are being deployed to the northern island-kingdom of Gundarlun, under sealed charter and discretionary license. You carry legal authority, but do not mistake that for protection. In many quarters, your writ will be viewed with suspicion, if not outright hostility. In others, it will simply paint a target on your back.Gundarlun is a relatively young and brittle crown-state, newly sworn to the Lord’s Alliance. It clings to order by the collective stubbornness of its settlers, who have survived crisis after crisis. High Jarl Olgrave Redaxe's popularity is aging, as he draws deeper and deeper lines in the sand between him and his jarls: a fractious collection of fish barons and sea-blooded warlords. Some are loyal. Others ambitious. Many are silent, which often proves worse. There are whispers of populist coup and rebellion, veiled in tradition, cloaked in bloodlines, and hungering for secession.
Current Intelligence Summary:
• Ideological fractures are widening across clan, faith, and bloodline, threatening the island’s cohesion and future within the Alliance.
• Maritime anomalies, including unnatural storm patterns and monstrous cryptid sightings, are on the rise.
• Trade vessels are being found adrift, crews missing, miles away from their chartered voyage paths, and manifests untouched.
• Pirate aggression has increased, with raiders flying no known flag and leaving no survivors.
• Cult-like clergies have begun preaching erratic sermons, their rites corrupted with unknown sigils with no recognized Faerunian deities.You are not being dispatched to restore order. You are being sent to decide whether order is possible; and if not, what should replace it. The Lord’s Alliance's thin resources will not be expended on a dying cause. Your assessment will determine whether Gundarlun is reclaimed, reshaped, or quietly abandoned.Your Operational Directives:
By order of the Director’s Circle and under mandate from the Lord Protector of Neverwinter, you are hereby deployed to the island of Gundarlun under Full Veil protocol. You will act as the Lord’s Alliance’s internal safeguard and investigative presence in the region, with jurisdiction superseding all local military, magical, or religious authorities not cleared through this Office.Your operational objectives are as follows:
⸻Assess Disturbances and AnomaliesConfirm or disprove reports submitted by High Jarl Olgrave Redaxe concerning unnatural maritime phenomena, disappearances, monster sightings, and cultural instability. Pay specific attention to signs of veil breach, mythallar residue, temporal flux, or divine contamination. If any item proves real, contain or suppress it.⸻Root Out Subversive InfluenceIdentify and neutralize destabilizing elements. Priority targets include but are not limited to: rebellious domestic factions, cultic enclaves, arcane insurgents, foreign provocateurs (Harper, Zhentarim, or otherwise), and other ideological dissidents resisting integration into Alliance structure. If compromise is irreversible, excise the node.⸻Secure Strategic Alignment of GundarlunThe isle is a crown claimant of strategic importance, rich with untapped material resources, and well-placed for staging forces to ensure stability in the Sea of Swords. Its compliance with Alliance directives is non-negotiable. Use whatever combination of diplomacy, leverage, or liquidation is required to ensure Gundarlun remains firmly in the Alliance’s sphere. Deterrence is acceptable. Loyalty is better.⸻Filed by: Secretary Almareth Serpico
Liaison Officer, Diplomatic Corps – Neverwinter Command
On Behalf of the Lord’s Alliance Council and the Office of Alliance Integrity & Threat Abatement
Under Authority of Lord Protector Dagult NeveremberThis message shall self-destruct in three… two… one…

Campaign 2: Convergence Engine

Convergence Engine starts with a job. A crew, a cargo, and enough money that nobody on either end asks questions.The air stinks of ozone and cheap whiskey. Somewhere below, a bound elemental screams inside its ring to keep the Lyrandar airship aloft. The job was supposed to be simple: pick up a crate from Stormreach, deliver it to a contact in Upper Tavick's Landing, collect payment in galifars that'd feel greasy even if they weren't counterfeit. But nothing in Sharn, the City of Towers, stays simple for long, and this job's already tipping sideways before the city's thousand spires fully emerge from the morning haze.You run with a crew — a small, disreputable outfit that moves things across Khorvaire for people who would prefer to avoid walking in the front door. Contraband. Passengers who can't show up on a manifest. Sealed crates you get paid extra to leave sealed. We build the crew together: the fixer who lands the work, the muscle, whoever's flying the boat, and whatever you are in the middle of all that. Who's owed money. Who's running, and from what. Who you'd actually want at your back when the shooting starts.About the setting. Magic in Eberron isn't wonder, it's plumbing. Airships fly because somebody chained an elemental into the ring. The lightning rail runs city to city on a timetable. Magewrights patch the streetlamps and the speaking stones and clock out at the end of the shift like anybody else. Most people never cast a spell in their lives — they flip a switch and don't think twice about what's on the other end of it. That's what built the cities. It's also what wiped an entire nation off the map.Which is the other thing you should know. The war ended two years back. A hundred years of it, and it didn't end because anybody won — a whole nation was wiped out in a single night, gone in the throes of wild and unpredictable war magic, and no story since has fully explained it or claimed responsibility. Everybody still standing got scared enough to sign an armistice that ended the war and solved no one's problems. Nobody actually believes the peace. Veterans take jobs that don't fit them. Cyran refugees live walled off in cities that wish they'd keep walking. The warforged — constructs built to fight, people now by law — stand around trying to work out what that's supposed to mean. Every government's got a folder in a drawer for the day it all starts again.A smuggling crew belongs here. You work the places the law won't go and the Watch won't follow, which turns out to be exactly where the thing you've blundered into likes to do its business. It pulls you across Sharn — the bridges a thousand feet up, the lower wards where the lamps went out years ago and nobody ever came back to fix them — and then out past the city walls, across borders, into the parts of the map people leave blank on purpose.Nobody here is clean. The tavern keeper who gives you cover expects payment in favors. The fence who buys your stolen goods is the same one who sells you out when the price is right. The only people you can trust are the ones bleeding in the same room. And even that's a provisional trust. Your crew's no exception. You're just the ones still bothering to keep track of where the lines are — and choosing, one at a time, which to step over.This run goes bad, of course. By the time the spires of Sharn come up out of the haze, the job's already falling apart, and it doesn't stop there.Convergence Engine starts with a job. It ends when you figure out who you are — and which lines you're willing to cross to keep your crew alive.Eberron. Where the light runs on magic and the shadows run on blood. Your crew's just trying to stay ahead of both.

Characters

If you're not interested in me filling the role of GM, but would still like to write, here is a small sampling of the sorts of characters I tend to write. Any of these characters are available for interaction, but I very easily and swiftly write new ones. I have tried to reduce the summaries on these characters to a few short sentences, but do know that I have pages of lore behind each of them waiting to be unlocked by the proper partner and circumstance.

Rook BlackwellPronouns: He/Him
Species/Ethnicity: Were-touched Human
Themes: Gothic horror, dark fantasy, Ravenloft
Archetype: Monster-hunting moralistYou've seen his kind before. The ones who walk into a tavern and every local knows to look away. He's tall, lean in a way that suggests he's been running on spite and tobacco for a decade. The coat's good leather, but patched. The silver chain at his throat catches the lamplight like it's hungry for it. His hands are clean, but the rest of him tells a different story.He was born into a minor noble house that doesn't exist anymore. Everything he loved went up one night at the hands of nocturnal horrors — house, family, tenants, the whole estate — while the local authorities deliberated over jurisdictional paperwork. He took the lesson hard: good men deliberate while evil works. So he stopped deliberating.He found Rudolph van Richten, studied under the man who'd made a life of killing the things that hide in the dark. He took a commission in the Lathanderian Dawnmartyrs, a sect of religious beast-slayers, rose to rank, earned the kind of reputation that makes innkeepers leave a room unlocked without being asked. He also carries lycanthropy in his blood — the thing that destroyed his family lives in him now, and he keeps it on a shorter leash than he keeps himself.Now he's in Barovia, and it's not an assignment. It's closer to a desertion — a maybe-deliberate fall from grace, a deployment that his superiors will call unauthorized when they find out. He tells himself he's here because the darkness here needs answering. But the real question, the one that keeps him up in the cold hours before dawn, is simpler and worse: how much of himself can he sacrifice to protect people before the protection stops meaning anything? When does the monster-hunter become just another monster?Rook Blackwell. The beast with a leash made of everything he's lost. He'll save you if he can — and if he can't, he'll make sure you don't suffer long.

Mara d'DeneithPronouns: She/Her
Species/Ethnicity: Human (Dragonmarked)
Themes: Post-war drama, pulp-noir, corporate espionage, Eberron
Archetype: Bureaucratic antagonist
She arrives only after the killing's over. That's the first thing you notice—not her face, not her name, but the timing. The Sharn City Watch is still cataloguing bodies when the skycoach touches down, and out steps a woman in a tailored coat who looks at the scene like she's already read the report and found it wanting.She's lean, sharp-edged, the kind of woman who could make a killing in civil litigation if she weren't already making one in military contracting. Platinum hair pulled back in a severe braid. Leather gloves that she doesn't take off even to shake hands. The Watchful Eye of House Deneith pinned to her lapel—not ostentatious, just present, a reminder that she answers to an authority that doesn't answer to yours. Her critics call her the Vulture behind her back, when they think she can't hear.Captain Mara d'Deneith is a senior compliance officer for House Deneith, which means she's the one they send when something goes wrong and the House needs to make sure the wrong lands on somebody else. She's a veteran of the Sentinel Marshals—she's hunted down bounties, killed criminals, broken informants, buried people in unmarked graves that the House's legal team will swear don't exist. But that's not her primary function. Her primary function is narrative control. She arrives at the scene, walks the perimeter, interviews the survivors with the clinical patience of a coroner, and then she sits down with a stack of forms and a fountain pen and rewrites the timeline until the House's liability resolves cleanly.She doesn't enjoy it. She's good at it. That's enough.Every Dragonmarked House has one of her. She's not a political player within Deneith. She's a tool. A specialized instrument deployed when something needs to be excised from the record. A commander who let a contract go sideways? A team that left witnesses? A marshal who followed the law instead of the bottom line? She'll find them, she'll document them, and she'll make them disappear with enough paperwork to bury a regiment.And on the rare occasions when paperwork isn't enough—when someone's too dangerous to leave alive or too stupid to understand what's coming—she puts down the pen and picks up a sword. She's good at that too. She just doesn't advertise it.Mara d'Deneith. The House's clean-up specialist. She'll never arrive in time to save you—but she'll always arrive in time to make sure you were the problem.

Doctor Rozalyn Hassan O'Hara - aka "Doc Roz"Pronouns: She/Her
Species/Ethnicity: Human (Egyptian-North Irish)
Themes: Pulp action, modern fantasy, globetrotting adventure
Archetype: Morally grey archaeologistThe first thing you notice is the scar—a thin white line arcing from her left eyebrow into her hairline, the kind of mark that comes from something sharp and in a hurry. She doesn't cover it. She doesn't talk about it. What she talks about is the dig site, the relief, the way the sand tastes when it's been undisturbed for four thousand years and you're the first thing to breathe on it since.She was raised in Cairo by a grandfather who taught her three scripts before she could ride a bike—Hieratic, Demotic, and a handwriting analysis of the auction houses in Cairo's back-alley antiquities trade. Her mother was Egyptian, a scholar of Old Kingdom funerary texts. Her father was a Belfast Protestant who showed up one day with a crate of surveying equipment and never quite left. She grew up fluent in languages the museum curators only pretend to read, and she learned young that the difference between an archaeologist and a tomb robber is usually just the funding.The University had her for a decade. She published. She lectured. She wore the tweed and smiled at the donors. And then she had an incident at Saqqara—something involving a sealed chamber, a contract she didn't read carefully enough, a rival team that came out of it missing a man and a reputation. The University called it gross negligence. She called it a Tuesday. They didn't see the difference, so they parted ways.Now she works freelance. The people who hire her don't ask about her credentials—they've already seen her work. She reads dead languages like other people read faces, and she has a gift for knowing which door not to open and absolutely no gift at all for acting on that knowledge. She believes the past wants to be found, that the field has failed it by being too careful, too slow, too worried about grant renewals to actually do the job. She's the right woman to fix that. She also understands, in the quiet moments after a near miss, that she's exactly the wrong one.Doc Roz. She'll find what you're looking for. The question is whether she'll give it back.

Writing Samples

The following are a series of samples to exhibit the level of effort and focus you can expect from me as your GM and/or writing partner.Sample 1: Into the DarkThis is a sample of how I start and operate a scene as a GM. In this sample, I am writing in second hand, addressing the player/character directly, ala the Narrator from BG3. It is an option I provide for my partners, which works well if they're interested in writing first person, but is by no means mandatory.

The woman's hand is cold where she grabs your gauntlet. Cold, and wet, and the blood under her nails is fresh—torn from gripping something that didn't want to be held. She doesn't ask twice. She doesn't bargain. She just puts everything she has on the table: the grain, the roof, whatever's hers to give, all of it, for one girl. Her Sera. Twelve years old. Wandered past the treeline and didn't wander back.You find the ribbon first. Copper silk, braided by a child's fingers, lying in the mud where the birch roots knot together. It's still warm. The damp on it isn't dew.The drag marks are easy enough to follow. Three leagues north, where the woman said the trees grow thick and wrong, and she wasn't exaggerating. The oaks weep amber that smells like a barber-surgeon's table—that sweet-rot tang of old bandages and something left too long under the knife. Two sets of footprints run side by side toward the cave mouth: Sera's small bare feet, and a larger set directly beside them, stride for stride. The long grooves of something heavy being towed trail behind, but the steps themselves don't show hesitation. Wherever the girl went, she walked beside the thing that took her. Maybe holding its hand.The cave mouth is framed in bleached birch, the roots knuckled like old fingers. They shift as you approach. There's no wind.Inside, the floor gives under your boots like wet bread. Lichen glows along the walls in patches that pulse slow as a sleeping heart. The air is warm and close, fermented, with an undertone of wet wool and something older. A cold hearth sits at the center of the entry chamber. The ash is recent. You stir it with your boot and find small bones burned white—too hot, too fast to be a cooking fire. No meat left on them. Just the calcium crackle of something reduced to its essence.Three passages open from the chamber. The choice is yours.The Left Passage — A spinning wheel turns somewhere in the dark, its rhythm uneven, skipping like a bad heartbeat. A single spindle lies just inside the tunnel mouth, still rotating slowly with no thread wrapped around it. No thread at all. Under the creak of the wheel, a voice hums a lullaby pitched far too low to be human—a bass note that resonates in your chest like a second pulse. The words run backward, if they're words at all. This is where the Crone does her work. Unmake the thread, break the wheel, and you might weaken her power here; though you'll also draw he attention.The Center Passage — A driftwood rocking chair faces you at the end of the short tunnel, rocking steadily in still air. Beyond it, the grotto smells of baked apples and nutmeg layered over a copper reek of blood, fresh enough to coat your tongue. The warmth that washes out feels like a grandmother's kitchen—except it's body-warm, the heat of something that recently stopped living. Sera's footprints lead this way. Skip-stepping, still unhurried. This is likely where the Crone waits, and where the girl is being kept. The direct path.The Right Passage — A still pool reflects a night sky that doesn't match the cave ceiling—stars in constellations you've never seen, rotating slowly like a clockwork orrery. Roses on the bank bloom, rot, and bloom again in fast-forward, petals sloughing into the water and reforming on the stem in the same breath. When you look into the water, your reflection shows a face aged forty years—lines, grey, the weight of decades you haven't lived yet. Your skin is still firm when you touch it. This is where the stolen years are stored. The Crone's larder. Undo what was taken, and you might give Sera back her childhood. But surely the pool is unguarded for a reason...Behind you, the birch roots at the entrance tighten, groaning as they weave together into a lattice that will take time and steel to undo. From deep in the cave, a child moans—not a scream, not a cry for help, but the sound of someone who has stopped expecting rescue and is now just tired.Three passages. One girl. A hag who's been taking children since before your grandmother's grandmother was born.Mother Gretta's Warren. The wheel turns, the years drain, and the roots close behind you. Choose well.

Sample 2: Welcome to WaterdeepThis is a sample of how I start a campaign tailored to the specific background and interests of my writing partner, while applying it to a larger module. This is the start to a campaign of Waterdeep: Dragonheist, with a writing partner who roleplayed as an evil-leaning cultist with whom I have a strong rapport, with which we agreed there was some flexibility for writing the minor actions of each other's interactions. Content Warning: explicit sexual content, allusions to sibling incest.

“Dearest brother,” his eyes rolled over the letter for the thousandth time, tracing the curve of the handwriting, the neat smudge she dotted her i’s with, the scent of her perfume still clinging to the scroll—fragrant jasmine and sweet orange blossom. Marseille’s presence lingered on the message in a way much more intimately than the words themselves could express. He knew the contents of the message by heart, of course, but that didn’t stop the eyes from reading them again and again in perpetuity, even now, near six months after first receiving it.“Waterdeep is a city of life, both in its vibrant energy and rampant decay. I could spend a week writing to you of its many thousand splendors and another still, telling you of its impossible defects and imperfections. In form, how perfectly impure. In practice, how wretched and wonderful.” The cabin of the vessel in which he laid rocked, breaking the reverie for a moment. The scent of sea salt was fresh on the air, and the sounds of squawking gulls and the bell of another passing ship pierced the wooden hull of his mid-deck quarters.“The world reflected on itself in a microcosm; the perfect nesting grounds from which the Perfection may spread his beauty and terror to the world. How I yearn to tell you of my work here, in the City of Hands. How I yearn for your mind to advise and your touch to soothe; near as much as I do for that of the Lord of Lies himself.” Below, beneath the blanket covering him from the waist down, movement stirred, insistent and wet, but the attention remained fixed on the parchment’s decadent loops.“I know the temptation is equivocated by you, but have strength. There is a plan for you yet on Mintarn; all of us serve in glorious purpose.” The face of his mother’s disapproval remained sharp in the mind and in memory, difficult to fathom regarding his departure, despite explicit direction otherwise. The mere thought of it might have cooled the humors, but the hot, slick sensation wrapped about him below was quick to reignite the flesh, tight and clenching around rigid, dark heat.“When I have finally laid matters to rest here, you must come drink with me at the Yawning Portal; a vile establishment for vile sorts, but provides far more entertainment in the comings and goings of its clientele than even the most perverse of Father Eskel’s sermons. Well… perhaps not the most perverse.” His balls were stirring now, heavy and aching, drawing up tight against the base of his thick, swollen shaft. The fact that he didn’t have to look at the cabin boy polishing his flesh, covered as he was by the blanket, meant that imagination remained fit to fill the space with what and whomever it wanted. The perfume wafting off the letter once again tickled the nose; it was almost as if she were right there with him.“Try not to be murdered by mother before my next letter. You remain, as always, the favored of both me and our mutual master. With deep affection, Marseille.” Her looping, flamboyant signature was marked with a painted imprint of her lips in crimson, fat and welcoming, a covenant pressed in wax that seemed to pulse against the fingertips.He felt his cock suddenly sheathed deep in the throat of the attentive young man, fingers gripping his thighs and holding stiff, an eager tongue painting the underside of his fat, black cock with hot spit. The constriction was wet, divine, and relentless, the tight cavity fluttering around the swollen crown as the vessel swayed, driving the flesh deeper into the willing heat with each roll of the waves.The ship shuddered on a violent swell, the bell tolling deep and resonant through the vibrating wooden hull as the sensation peaked, thick, sacred bursts flooding the clenching throat below while the crimson imprint of her lips on the letter crushed against the chest. Jasmine and salt and sex commingled in a single, suffocating breath, the parchment trembling against sweat-slick skin as the nursing continued, reverent and milking, until the last tremor rippled through spent flesh and the perfume lingered, ghost-like and possessive, in the close, humid air.

Adult Content

I'm 18+ and I write with adults only. No exceptions, no negotiation — if you're a minor, this isn't for you, and I'll need that confirmed before we get into anything.Story comes first. I'm here for the plot, the characters, the slow build of two people becoming real to each other on the page. Sex is part of that when the story earns it, and when it shows up I write it fully and explicitly rather than cutting away. But it's seasoning, not the meal — if you're after smut with a thin coat of plot, we're probably not a fit, and that's fine.When a scene does go there, it should mean something — fallout, tension, a shift in how the characters stand with each other. I'd rather one charged scene that lands than ten that don't.On kink and limits: I keep a short hard-no list and I'm open to talking through most of the rest. I'd rather have an honest, slightly awkward OOC conversation up front than discover a mismatch mid-scene. Tell me your limits, I'll tell you mine, and we build inside that. Nothing's assumed without a check-in.I do tend to run a little more on the "extreme" side of what's acceptable, but please note that simply because I have it listed as a like or even a love, it does not mean it's something we have to engage with. My writing partner's enthusiastic consent is of biblical importance to me and I will always stress the importance of that communication.Full kinks, faves, hard limits, and contexts in which they exist live on my F-list.