Deborah Ann Woll talks Tales From Woodcreek’s DIY-heavy approach to D&D props
One of the most jaw-dropping moments in Tales From Woodcreek — Deborah Ann Woll’s new Dungeons & Dragons actual-play series — comes at the end of episode 2. It’s a cliffhanger that immediately cements Woll’s reputation as one of the strongest celebrity DMs working today, especially when it comes to designing physical puzzles that blur the line between tabletop role-playing and escape-room spectacle.
To learn how Woodcreek became such a tactile and terrifying D&D experience, Polygon caught up with Woll and co-creator Ed Gass-Donnelly on a group phone call to talk props, puzzles, and practical magic.
[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for episodes 1–3 of Tales From Woodcreek.]
In the world of the show, generations ago, a witch cursed the four founding families of Woodcreek. Today, three of their descendants — played by Dungeon Dudes’ Monty Martin and Kelly McLaughlin, alongside actress Anjali Bhimani — return to unravel the curse once and for all. Woll and co-creator Ed Gass-Donnelly built the campaign around physical spaces and tactile puzzles, filming the entire eight-episode season in just four days at the historic Black Creek Pioneer Village in Toronto, Canada.
After a brief intro on the outskirts of town, the adventure begins inside a Victorian schoolhouse, where the party is tasked with recovering the witch’s spellbook. After defeating a ghastly schoolteacher and venturing through a portal into space, they finally recover the tome.
That’s when Woll pulls out a book made of what looks like gnarled bark from behind a desk. She removes a panel on the cover. Then its eye opens and begins to swivel. Jaws dropped, and at least two of the players screamed.
The reveal, one of the season’s early highlights, is the most prominent example of the show’s commitment to practical props the players can touch, lift, open, and react to in real time — or, in the case of the spellbook, talk to.
“Part of what inspired the idea for this show is that I particularly love physical props and immersive storytelling,” Woll told Polygon on a group call.
Her preference for practical puzzles isn’t about following the same trends of other big actual-play productions. It’s about building something personal that makes players move, search, investigate, and discover.
“DMs should never feel like they need to imitate someone else’s style or someone else’s strength,” she said. “If you play to your style and bring the things that excite you personally to your table, your players will love it.”
In addition to traditional D&D gameplay with skill checks and combat, each two-episode leg of the campaign involves exploring a new physical space and engaging in some kind of mini-game. Each location in Woodcreek is also full of physical “Secrets,” small hidden burlap bags with various handmade clues, scrolls, and artifacts that lead to the next puzzle or encounter.
After recovering the spellbook in the schoolhouse, the party investigates the Stong residence in episode 3 for artifacts that can help break the curse. There, the group is joined by Jessica Henwick (Iron Fist), who plays the long-dead ghost of River Stong.
In one of the series’ most frightening sequences yet, the party explores an upstairs bedroom in the dead of night where the undead remains of River’s “Meemaw and Peepaw” sleep (described by Woll earlier in the session as “kind of nasty”). Actual bodies appear to be in the two beds, and the scene is lit only by sparse strands of moonlight and a single lantern as the party creeps around the room, checking cupboards and under beds looking for Secrets.
This level of interactivity in Tales From Woodcreek didn’t come easily. With only three days of pre-production and four days of shooting, Woll and Gass-Donnelly had to build or revise props constantly, often into the early morning hours before they were needed on set.
“We were like a rubber band stretching to the limits that threatened to break at any given moment,” Gass-Donnelly said. “All of these props and innovations, because they were so handmade and done by such a small scrappy crew, we didn’t always have time to test things out.”
Because the team didn’t have the time or resources to rehearse or stress-test every prop, they often discovered issues on the fly.
One of the series’ best behind-the-scenes stories involves a blacklight puzzle in the second episode that refused to work under actual filming conditions. The production had purchased specialty blacklight ink — expensive, finicky, temperamental — and none of it behaved the way it was supposed to.
“We bought all this fancy blacklight ink, and it didn’t work,” Gass-Donnelly said. “The thing that did work was a $1 highlighter from the dollar store.”
A $20 Amazon blacklight lantern billed as a “Lantern of Revealing” in-game picked it up perfectly. Problem solved — at 3 a.m. in the morning.
That crafty simplicity wasn’t a one-off, either. A pseudo-Ouija board communicates for a ghost early in the adventure, which Gass Donnelly said they achieved with magnetic components they found on Amazon and a bit of late-night crafting.
Inspiration for props came largely from the setting, but Gass-Donnelly once pre-production began, things evolved rapidly.
“Some fun discoveries were so last-minute,” Gass-Donnelly said. “I’ve got two daughters, and we’d be crafting in my kitchen just surrounded by dollar-store stuff and things I’d ordered on Amazon. And we would sort of just get inspired by something that we had in the fridge.” It was one of those nights that resulted in one of his daughters’ origami foxes appearing in an upcoming episode.
Actress Anjali Bhimani, who plays a Warlock named Vix, described how each new setting in the campaign introduced a new type of physical challenge.
“Every day felt like, ‘What fun toys do we get to play with today?’” she said. “The immersive factor of being in these old, creepy buildings, knowing that everything was practical…you wanted to lean into the fear.”
Woll calls the series “a fairy tale for adults,” and the show’s propwork leans fully into that ethos — tactile, spooky, whimsical, and just a little uncanny.
“This idea of ‘Tales From Woodcreek’ — what is that?” Woll said. “Are tales always true? Stories are things that we tell each other, that we tell ourselves. They’re the things that are passed down through generations. So what’s a reliable story and what’s not?”
The dubious nature of tales is already abundantly clear in season 1, where the animatronic spellbook has revealed the nature of the curse afflicting Woodcreek isn’t quite what the characters, or their players, expected. In other words, like in any good D&D campaign, there’s a difference between what the players have been told and the in-universe truth about Woodcreek.
For Woll and Gass-Donnelly, emphasizing the “Tales” in “Tales From Woodcreek” allows them to pursue even more stories set in the village in the future. Which is to say that a second season is already in early development, though the pair said they’ll need additional partners to make it sustainable. What won’t change? The show’s identity. “Scrappy” and “handmade” are at the core of Woodcreek, they said, and will remain that way.
And honestly? It works. The charm of Tales From Woodcreek comes from the unpredictability of the wobbly props and clever hacks that genuinely scare the players. It’s a D&D show built not in a studio, but in a workshop, a kitchen, and a haunted village.
Exactly where a witch’s curse belongs.
New episodes of Tales From Woodcreek drop weekly on the Dungeon Dudes YouTube channel on Fridays at 6 p.m. Eastern.