026 – Writing & Illustrating a new Guide to Ravnica with Sean & Brianna Atherton

A few weeks ago, I put out a call on Twitter asking for artists, makers, and cartographers to reach out if they’d be interested in coming on the podcast, and whew. The response was honestly overwhelming. I’m really excited about it, because before this, I really only ever had 2-3 interviews scheduled at a time, so it was a constant juggling act of essentially cold calling people within the industry, wondering if they ever saw my messages or if it’d gone to spam, and being excited when someone responded. But now I have enough interviews scheduled to get us into January. This is also incredibly helpful because on a more personal note, I’ll actually be undergoing a pretty intense surgery at the end of October, so now I get to have a whole bunch of episodes ready in the pipeline so y’all won’t even notice my absence for a while. Aw yeah, planning! So there’s a fun little glimpse of the logistics involved in hosting an interview podcast. The hardest part is booking guests, seriously.

Anyways, I also really enjoyed the results of that tweet because it meant I was hearing from folks that weren’t already in my feed, and now we all get to know even more creators! Today’s guests are Sean and Brianna Atherton, a husband & wife couple who are, as of the day of this episode’s release, one day out from releasing their first publication on DM’s Guild: Pryvyd’s Guide to Ravnica. They have poured a lot of love into this guidebook over the past two years, and I really enjoyed getting to hear about their process, which went from Reddit posts by Sean and character portraits by Brianna to this massive, really cool guide that includes races, subclasses, trinkets, magic items, and a whole lot more. I know you will enjoy hearing about their journey as much as I did!

Some ways you can support the show are via our Patreon page, which has a few different tracks depending on whether you’d like maps and adventures or tailored content for this podcast, including contributing questions for upcoming guests, a spotlight on our website, and even a shoutout on this podcast. You can also check out our affiliates. The affiliate I’m going to highlight today is Found Familiar Coffee, the most delicious and nerdy coffee you’ll ever taste, and you’ll get to collect some pretty cool D&D themed art on every package. I personally have a pretty large collection of the artwork from those packages now, and I can’t wait until I get every image. Go to foundfamiliar.com and enter code LightheartADV to get 10% off your order, enjoy delicious coffee, and help me keep this show running.

That’s enough from me–let’s go chat with Sean and Brianna.