Published on

November 21, 2025

Introduction

The world is spinning at 900 mph, orbiting the sun at 67,000 mph, and being hurled through the galaxy at nearly half a million miles per hour. And yet—

we don’t feel any of it.

What we do feel is the opposite: the bills piling up, the job demanding extra hours, the exhaustion that sinks into our bones as we doom-scroll into the night. Life moves too quickly around us, and somehow we end up with no time at all.

This is you, hurling through the difficulties of life!

It’s only natural things feel this way. I spent months wondering when my life slipped from order into chaos, until the night I was prepping a DnD session half-asleep at my desk. I had a session to run the next day, and I was struggling to come up with ideas. I was struggling to even keep my eyes open. My eyelids drooped, my face nearly slammed into keyboard, and for a moment I just stared at the screen wondering, “How did it get this bad?” Something needed to change.

I wasn’t alone.

“But yeah, we have full time jobs, hobbies, spouses, kids. We’re busy adults and D&D has to fit around the rest of it.”

“We are all fully adult adults (in a way) and WE play once a month. … I have things to do and to prepare and this goes from my scarce free time.”

“The info at hand is some people don’t have time in their lives to play as long as before. The community can’t change that for you.”

When the real 9–5 arrived, my favorite hobby quietly became the 5–9. Something had to give. So I did the only thing I could: I dropped DnD for a few months.

But some small goblin in my brain refused to let it go. In that silence, I realized something important.

It wasn’t DnD itself draining me. It was everything around it.

The prep that didn’t matter. The admin work nobody cared about. The black hole that pulled hours out of me and spaghettified my free time into oblivion.

It didn’t matter that I could spend part-time-job levels of effort on a session. If my creativity was buried under rules, tables, notes, NPC logs, and logistics, none of the effort translated into magic at the table.

And that’s when the truth hit me:

The quality of art isn’t measured by hours spent. It’s measured by how clearly your creativity can shine through.

If I needed these tools to save myself, why wouldn’t I share them with others?

So that’s how Astro Artificer crash-landed into my mind: a fusion of my two identities, an aerospace engineer and a lover of fantasy worlds.

You can call me Astro. Welcome to my universe.

The Core Philosophy

As I stepped back and examined why any of this mattered to me, three principles kept emerging, again and again. They became the pillars of everything Astro Artificer stands for.

Creativity through Self Exploration
Clarity through Customization
Connection through Community

Creativity through Self Exploration

I don’t like hearing, “I’m not creative.”

We were all creative once.

Every child is a storyteller, effortlessly weaving worlds filled with dinosaurs, princesses, betrayals, and heroic triumphs, all while brandishing cheap plastic toys like legendary relics. We used to be those kids. Life didn’t stop being magical, we just stopped seeing it.

As Hugh Macleod once said:

“Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the ‘creative bug’ is just a wee voice telling you, ‘I’d like my crayons back, please.’”

DnD is alluring because it quietly hands us those crayons again.

It pulls us back into the version of ourselves that wasn’t bound by work schedules, social pressure, or the so-called “real world.”

But you can’t be creative if you don’t know who you are.

And for many of us, the adult we became is a patchwork of compromises, expectations, and survival.

To create is to peel that away, to let your inner child breathe again.

Tabletop roleplaying is one of the last places where we still get to do that.

Astro Artificer exists to remove the friction between you and that version of yourself, the one who dreams boldly, imagines freely, and builds worlds without fear.

Clarity through Customization

We live in a strange era. We have access to the sum of human knowledge, and yet we somehow know less than ever. Our attention is pulled apart by blogs, memes, tweets, videos, notifications, and noise. When we try to create, our thoughts scatter like stars thrown across the void.

This is where I find AI (and specifically LLMs) genuinely transformative.

I used to roll my eyes at “AI hype,” until I stepped back and realized something: the parts of DM prep that were draining me weren’t creative at all.

They were mechanical. Administrative. Repetitive. Soulless.

A machine can track NPCs. A machine can crunch numbers. A machine can handle encounter tables, rules lookups, summaries, and structure.

But only you can supply meaning: the heart, the story, the philosophy, the humanity.

LLMs allow us to outsource the mechanical thinking to silicon chips, so we can focus on the creative thinking only humans are capable of. They can wax poetic about love, war, betrayal, and friendship, but they cannot feel them. They cannot generate the insights born from the messy texture of lived experience.

If you could prepare a beautiful campaign in minutes, still guided by your ideas, your worldbuilding, your philosophies, why wouldn’t you?

I understand if you have reservations about AI. Truly. But Astro Artificer is built on the belief that technology should save us time, not steal it, so we can spend it with the people who matter, at the table where stories are born.

Connection through Community

According to the U.S. Surgeon General, half of American adults experience loneliness. It’s more than likely you, reading this right now.

Not because you failed. But because our society quietly dismantled the places where we once gathered.

Malls closed. Third places disappeared. Kids don’t trick-or-treat like they used to. Most of us don’t know our neighbors’ names.

And yet, TTRPGs have survived. More than that, they’ve flourished.

Why?

Because they are one of the last remaining rituals where adults sit together, unplug from everything else, and share an adventure.

Some of my closest friendships weren’t forged at school, work, or organizations, they were forged around tables scattered with dice, spilled drinks, scribbled maps, and chaotic energy.

“As an adult, I feel like meeting new people and interacting with new people happens less and less the more years that go by, so it’s wonderful for that … the fun environment allows people to let their guard down to build a sense of camaraderie.” — Miranda Fedoronczuk (Dungeon Master)

TTRPGs are the antidote to modern isolation. They give us permission to gather, to imagine, to play, to belong.

A relationship without shared adventures isn’t a relationship at all.

And that is why Astro Artificer exists: to make those adventures easier to create, more frequent to run, and more magical to share.

Blastoff!

Astro Artificer isn’t just a project. It’s my attempt to build a lighthouse for all of us who grew up, got tired, got overwhelmed—but never lost the spark.

I hope this becomes a place where your creativity is protected, your time is respected, and your sense of wonder is restored.

Join me as we blast off into the stars to find our next adventure. I’d love to share the journey with you.

- **Astro Artificer**