For those of us GeekDads who play tabletop roleplaying games, we often enjoy a good whiskey to go with our gaming sessions…at least, when it’s just the adults playing!
So it’s almost surprising that it took this long for someone to think to launch a line of spirits that caters specifically to the TTRPG crowd. But now, three long-time friends have done just that: Celebrity actor and gaming entrepreneur Matthew Lillard, screenwriter Justin Ware, and Blue Run Spirits co-founder Tim Sparapani have joined forces to create Quest’s End.
What Is Quest’s End?
Quest’s End is a super-premium blend of aged barrels from Kentucky and Indiana. It is a collectible and limited release that will be available to order on the Quest’s End Whiskey website or from Seelbach’s starting on October 6th, for $149.99. The first release, Quest’s End: Paladin, will ship in November. The flavor profile of Paladin is notes of vanilla and fruit in keeping with the noble aims of a Paladin, with an undercurrent of spice to reflect her fighting spirit.
In 2024, it will be followed by Rogue, Warlock, and Dragon. Each new release of Quest’s End will be limited and named after a character, weapon, or location in a larger serialized story, with a separate flavor profile of that release inspired by each character’s role in the story.
I had a chance to speak with Matthew Lillard, who to most is best known for his legacy in film and television (Scream, Scooby Doo, and the upcoming Five Nights at Freddy’s). GeekDad readers also know Lillard to be a dedicated tabletop gamer and successful entrepreneur. He is the co-founder of Beadle & Grimm’s, whose products, like the DM Vault for Keys From the Golden Vault, I have been reviewing here on GeekDad for the last few years.
I also spoke with two of the artists involved with the unique creative challenges of launching a high-end whiskey for gamers, Kate Welch and Tyler Jacobson. Professional Dungeon Master and the first female game designer on Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, Kate Welch, is writing an all-new fantasy saga that will be released in chapters along with each release of Quest’s End. Bottle art and design was created by Tyler Jacobson, a world-renowned artist and illustrator whose portfolio includes numerous works for Dungeons & Dragons, Magic: the Gathering, and more, including the cover art for the 5th Edition Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide.
Read on for the interviews, where we discuss Quest’s End, as well as Matthew’s liveplay D&D show, Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill!
Let’s Talk About Quest’s End and D&D
Me: What was the genesis of Quest’s End?
Matthew: Yeah, it’s a good question. So I have a partner and a spiritual guru, we call him our spirit guide. His name is Tim Sparapani. He just sold his whiskey company called Blue Run. And we saw what an incredible time he was having and sort of his journey of building this whiskey company, and Justin (Ware) and I are both in the film and television industry. He’s a writer, I’m obviously an actor. And we have, you know, we spent our whole life in a career that you were only allowed to work when they say yes. And the older you get, the more frequent that becomes. We were looking for another avenue in which to spend our time, build something. And so we came and with the success that Tim was having, the success of Beadle & Grimm’s, we sort of put those two things together and came up with this idea: direct customer high-end whiskey experience that was really about telling story as much as it was about delivering incredible whiskey. We’re trying to speak to an audience that we love and build things that we would want.
Me: Kate and Tyler, how did you get involved with Quest’s End?
Kate: I have played D&D with Matthew Lillard for many years through when I was working with Wizards of the Coast, we started doing those like, charity and audience games together. And we just clicked, we hit it off really, really well. And so he had my number, he called me one day and it was like first thing in the morning. And Tyler is a huge movie fan, Lillard fan and didn’t know him at that point. And so I was like, “Oh, Matthew Lillard is calling me, hold on, hello.” You know, just being totally insufferable about it. And Lillard was like, “Hey, Kate, how are you? Hey, can I talk to your husband?” And I was like, “No. Oh, no, I was just a total chode about this, okay…”
Tyler: Matt’s a very charming guy. So he was right from the get-go, really excited and asked me if I wanted to come on as this sort of…We kind of just didn’t even have an idea of exactly what it would be, but we knew it would be like art direction and illustration work. So I was like, okay, this will be fun because I can make something new here. But yeah, that’s how we started. I worked on it maybe for like four or five months. And then we brought you in, right, Kate, because I was doing bottle design and logo design and trying to figure out like what our iconography is going to be. And then we were like, we really need some solid story here.
Kate: I think when they brought me in and they talked to me about the idea of writing stories to go with each of these bottle releases. Which was super, super exciting because I’ve never experienced anything like that before. I’ve drunk a lot of whiskey and never before has it come with little chapters of a fantasy story. So getting me involved was, I’ve been like dying to get involved at this whole time, just looking over Tyler’s shoulder like, oh, it looks so cool. So finally, finally getting the call myself was really cool.
Me: Why Paladin for your first release?
Matthew: I love that question. So yeah, because the idea that here we were as two men, (on a) mission, the idea that Paladin has is a character class that is based on a higher calling, that is based as a knight or as a warrior, and is chasing something bigger. And so for us, sort of symbolic of where we were at. This idea of taking back our own power, taking back sort of this dignity of work and applying that to this adventure was powerful. So the idea of being a Paladin, building a company and then building whiskey experiences or high-end spirit experiences for other things that we’re excited about is sort of why we decided to start with Paladin.
Me: In addition to the bottle design, how is the story and artwork being incorporated into the product?
Kate: So there is a booklet that comes with each bottle. It’s like 16, 18 pages. It’s basically just like a chapter of a fantasy story. And it’s about this character, this Paladin that we have created, just a brand new IP, a brand new world, a brand new set of characters. I really wanted to sort of start with people at their lowest point climbing up by finding each other, as what a classic fantasy and D&D story is so often about. So our Paladin is having a pretty dark moment in her life. And so she’s going to be climbing out of it using the help of these other people that she’s gonna meet with each subsequent bottle release. So getting to know her in the first chapter is kind of our big swing with that first one.
Tyler: I did an illustration for the cover of the booklet, which we will reveal at a later date. And then it does have lots of art on the inside as well, really, that I’ve put throughout. So it was a really cool design challenge for us to put this nice little artifact in the box. And I think people are going to love that, like, to open the box and see the story up front.
Me: So is there an overarching story? If you ended up getting all the whiskeys, would you basically have a complete novel?
Kate: The goal is that each of these releases will have this chapter of an ongoing story, but we’ll still be entertaining as a standalone. Just in case you don’t feel like buying every bottle of whiskey that we put out, you’ll still be able to enjoy a chapter of a story told from the perspective of a different character. And so hopefully they stand alone. But if you’re following the story via whatever means we provide, it will be like one contiguous, big storyline.
Me: How limited are the runs of the releases going to be?
Matthew: You’re the first person to ask that question.
Me: You can thank my girlfriend for that one actually.
Matthew: That’s a very wise woman. We worked a little like a movie studio. Like, so, you know, it’s like big blockbusters or horror movies or whatever, Academy Award movies. And each one of them, that’s what we’re doing with this brand. To grow the brand and to grow each vertical, we start really small because we don’t know if we’re gonna have a base. We don’t know how it’s gonna land. We don’t know how we’re gonna find communities, right? And so for this, we’re like, okay, we’re gonna start at 5,000 bottles. We (have), right now, 40,000 people on the waiting list. And that’s without this wave of publicity. So we have wildly underestimated the veracity of the community to build, to buy something for this first drop. The first week we saw these numbers coming in, we doubled the order for Rogue, which is the next drop. We have no desire to make this some kind of weird collectible. We just wildly underestimated the community.
Me: So which Wizards of the Coast campaign would you pair Paladin with?
Matthew: Oh, that’s hilarious. Let me just say real quick, we are not affiliated in any way, shape or form with Wizards of the Coast, but that’s a good question. I’m going to say Descent Into Avernus. We have this character, Seron of the Pit. She’s a Paladin of a god, Insa, which is this god of life. And we find her in the gladiator pits, and she’s fighting her last battle before she wins her freedom. And so there is this idea, she has this mace that’s represented on the shield on the front (of the bottle). That is a symbol that goes throughout her sort of journey.
Me: Are you thinking about doing any accessories to go with these releases?
Matthew: So we are, there’s something called the High Rollers Guild, which is you can buy all four bottles at the first drop, right? So the bottles are $150 each. It ensures that you get all four bottles. And then we are doing this thing where we’re trying to create a community in that space. So, involved with that is a signed lithograph from Tyler Jacobson. I haven’t talked about this with anyone by the way. So this is like exclusive and it’s going to be out soon anyway. So I’m giving you the exclusive.
Me: Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill! What can you tell me?
Matthew: It took a long time for us to get to it. I mean, we kind of, we came up with the idea like two years ago, but for us, the idea of being in the streaming world, like as a company, Beadle & Grimm’s is always considered like, how do we find more audience? How do we expand who we’re selling to? How do we continue to grow the brand? Right? And so part of that answer is always coming back to streaming and look what happened in Critical Role. And the more we look to Critical Role, the more we’re like, Critical Role is amazing. It’s a juggernaut. It’s irreplaceable. And nobody else can do what those people do. And why wouldn’t we try? Right? So us playing a three hour game every week isn’t an avenue for success. So we were like, well, what is that? What is that? And can we do our own iteration of that? And that’s how we sort of built Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill!
I don’t know if you know this, I’m sure you do, but it’s the story of four first level characters that meet an epic…They go off into the world to become the heroes of legend and meet an epic Dungeons & Dragons 10th level and above monster and get obliterated every single show. We did a show once, we thought it was hilarious. We did a show again, like early streaming, we thought it was hilarious. And then we started playing it internally. And the more we started playing it internally, we really thought that there was an opportunity there to build a show. And so we went to Dungeons & Dragons and said, “Will you give us permission to use D&D monsters as we build this sort of streaming show?” And they said, “No, we won’t, because we want to do that show with you and put it on TV.”
We cast an incredible diverse table that is as diverse as the tapestry of humanity gets. And we just made sure everyone was ready to have fun. And the thing we found is that you can play a million different ways. There is no wrong way to play Dungeons & Dragons. And each show in its own singular way, I think is going to be a love letter to Dungeons & Dragons and people that love gaming. Because there’s no wrong way to play. Each game has a different approach, different story, different players. And each game, I think, is as good as any piece of television on TV today.
Me: Kate and Tyler, do either of you have any involvement with Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill!?
Kate: Yes, as a matter of fact. I am on three episodes of it. I DM’d two of them, and I was a player in one. So I will be on that show. And I think we might be doing a live show upcoming. I don’t know if we’ve announced it yet, but I’ll be on that too. It was blast. It was so much fun.
Me: So what are the unique challenges of designing for a whiskey?
Tyler: So this is like a whole different experience because I’m working with a team of friends, and we are working together to create something that the community that we’re really involved in is gonna love. And on top of that, I have to be more of a designer. I have to design a bottle. I have to design iconography and logos. And then we also have Peggy on our team, who did all the actual graphic design parts of it. And she’s amazing. So getting that collaboration with her and then collaborating with Kate on story and with Matt and Justin on, you know, how we want the whole overall brand to look and be and feel like all of that is so different from how I’m used to making art. I’m used to just making illustration and sending it off and then it’s in print.
Kate: I really haven’t been involved in nearly as much as Tyler. But the big challenge for me is essentially like writing episodic content that I can’t go back and revise is going to be interesting. So I’m trying as I write to leave little dangling threads for myself to pick up six chapters from now and be like, “that was entirely intentional that whole time.” But like, I’m writing as we go, man. And that’s, you know, that’s what you do as a dungeon master, which is like what I do professionally also. You improvise, right? You’re like, oh, that thing that happens six episodes ago, we’re going to bring that around, that’s going to seem like a genius move.
Matthew: If you order something like a $200 bottle of vodka or tequila or whiskey, they’ll wrap it in bubble wrap, stick it in a brown box and ship it off to you, right? If you’re a direct customer. And so our whole thing is like, how do we change that? Like, how can we add value, not only in this incredible juice, but also the storytelling element? Like what are the things that would spark to us as game players, as guys that play RPGs? And that’s how we kind of came up with Quest’s End, this idea of marrying direct to customer, but speaking directly to a base and a community in an authentic way that, you know, we were really excited about. We’re trying to speak to an audience that we love and build things that we would want.
The first release from Quest’s End Whiskey, Paladin, goes on sale on October 6th. Be sure to head to the Quest’s End website to sign up up for updates and promotions.
