The Short Version

TL;DR: My name is Caleb! I’m a US Army veteran, a current IT Director for several charter schools. I’ve been a DM for a weekly DnD 5e group playing my homebrewed campaign that started in 2016. I’m also the founder of krakenships! I’m bankrolling every aspect of this company as well as dedicating a ton of my time towards it (it’s very difficult to say the least). I run every aspect of the company so that I can control the core focus of krakenships – to design and create tabletop miniatures that are relatively hard to find or lacking in the market with as low of a price tag as I can.

The Not-So Short Version

My name is Caleb and I’m the founder of krakenships. I’m very passionate about tabletop RPGs. I’ve been a GM for the past several years and I’ve slowly come into my own rhythm and way of managing my sessions. Miniatures are a huge part of how I prefer to manage combat, exploration, and better describe general situations and scenarios. I feel there can never be enough minis to pick from, so I’m just adding to the pile, so to speak, with krakenships. I hope to create miniatures that are lacking in anyone’s collections and use cases of fellow players! 

I’ve been concepting and making board games since kindergarten, just about. Creating board games of my own allowed me to harness my creativity and actually play my own creations with family and friends. Granted, most of the board games I made from my younger years were either very basic or not entirely thought out, both due to my age and the lack of knowledge I had to draw from when creating/concepting. During all those years of playing board games, I was always fascinated by the game pieces, and while some were simple and others more extravagant, I always appreciated the representation they provided.

When I discovered tabletop RPGs, my first being Dungeons and Dragons, I was hooked. Since then, I’ve played many other tabletop RPGs, each with their own rules and methods of play with the one commonality, for most, being the collective immersion through imagination. This is why I play. Imagination is the key to most tabletop RPGs, or at least for the immersive aspect of them. With imagination can come some syncing problems at times, regardless of how amazing your GM is. When everyone is grooving along on the same description but imagining something entirely different than one another, it can cause some pretty odd or anecdotally great and hilarious situations or events to unfold. While misunderstanding or miscommunication isn’t always a bad thing in tabletop RPGs, it can certainly cause some confusion and problems, particularly when trying to be tactical or specific. This is where visuals come in.

When it comes to cityscapes, combat, or just better immersion and syncing up imaginations, having visuals can generally do the trick. Have a really confusing puzzle that demands coordinated movement and placement of player characters? Thought there was a nice and juicy clumping-together of reanimated skeletons that an evil necromancer foolishly provided for you to fireball, but in fact they were scattered and you only hit one or two? Did you just describe trying to seduce a tree to your character’s left, and not the traveling merchant on the right, that is now scratching their head along with the rest of your companions? Visuals can clear a lot of things up and get the game moving at a constant pace with less hangups and confusing mishaps! Enter miniature figures, a useful tool for GMs and players alike, the time old representation of many a hero (or murderhobo).

I personally love using miniatures, and if I could grab every miniature for every situation I’ve GM’d for, I would have in a heartbeat! I unfortunately can’t, due to a lack of being able to find the right mini, creating a homebrewed creature or species for which a mini doesn’t exist, or just trying to avoid spending my life savings to acquire every mini out there. Getting that miniature collection started is great, and filling it up is a long road, but has always been well worth it in my book. I’ve started to make my own miniatures to help provide what I believe is missing in the world of minis.