It All Began in a Shopping Mall Long, Long Ago...

Many of us have known each other for a good portion of our lives now.  Dave and myself have been friends for nearly half that time, meeting during a summer high-school drama production.  Then years later when I was an Assistant Manager at our local GameStop, I brought Dave into the ranks at that shit-tastic store.  It's at that time that we met a pint-sized high-and-tight security guard named Besse, working at the mall our store was in.  We would play matches of Super Mario Striker and have Donkey Konga competitions for hours.  Yeah, we worked really hard.

About a year after all of that, we got an old man with a pony tail for a manager and a foul-mouthed ginger started hanging around the store.  The manager ended up being pretty cool, and was cool enough to have us all over his house to play 4v4v4 matches of Halo (remember when you could still play with your friends in the same room?).  That holiday season, when we had an opening for part-time, the girl applied and got hired because boobs sell video-games to nerds.  We all became friends and then Kelli met Besse.  They started dating (after months of being "just friends" despite Dave and myself warning her that it wouldn't stay like that for long) and so our quartet began to take shape.

It was in 2008 that the idea of playing Dungeons & Dragons first came up.  I had found a renewed interest in the hobby after listening to the first Penny Arcade session.  When I started talking about it, I found out that Dave had dabbled in the dice for a bit, however Besse and Kelli were role-playing virgins - tabletop speaking.  We had a coworker who was a DM whom I had been talking to for a while about possibly joining his game, but when the rest of them showed interest we decided to start our own game.

After a month of planning - getting together whenever we could to sit down and hash out the rules, roles, and rolls of the game - we were finding it rather difficult to sync our schedules, and eventually our DM had to leave.

A year later, after listening to the second series of Penny Arcade games, I decided to reignite the D&D flame; volunteering to become the DM of the group.  We invited a couple other people into the campaign (a friend we lovingly nicknamed Teagues - she loved the name, trust me - and our current associate Gabby).  We played for about a year before things broke down, schedules changed, and players left.

In 2012, the group came together again and we started up the current series of campaigns.  About this time I had started to get heavily into listening to D&D podcasts - specifically the actual play podcasts of Nerdbound, Critical Hit, RPPR, and various others.  Then I had the thought, "This doesn't seem that hard - we can do this!" and I pitched it to the group.  They thought it was a great idea and so we started recording. That's when I found out that it wasn't nearly as easy as I had originally thought.  In fact, it was fucking hard.

However, with trial and tribulation, along with some amazing advice from Neil and Jason of Nerdbound, we managed to drag ourselves off of our bellies and start to crawl.  We have since made our way from D&D 3.5 edition, into Pathfinder, and now into 5e, though the spirit and soul of our game stayed the same.  We have dabbled in other systems - namely Iron Kingdoms, Gamma World, and Mouse Guard - and have plans to make headway in many others to expand our general geekery.  We've never had the hopes of being famous (or even internet famous), and through the short time that we have been "on air" we have been slowly focusing ourselves.  Who knows, we may branch out into other things along the way, though we will always stay tried-and-true to the core of what The Dragon Fisters are - A group of friends who ramble and shamble while dice rumble and tumble.

Now, I'm guessing that you all are very interested in where our name comes from.  Well, the gist of it is that we're hilarious.  You see, we all used to play World of Warcraft together and had hated the various guilds that we had been in, so we decided that we would start our own.  This was right around the same time as the Cataclysm expansion was on the verge of releasing.  Now what was in Cataclysm?  A dragon.  And what do you do to dragons?  Punch them.  Therefore, we named our guild The Dragon Fisters (because "Dragon Punchers" just doesn't have the same flow).  And it was only right that we named our Dungeons & Dragons group the same.  See, it all makes sense when you think about it.