Twenty-Three Years of Drawing. Thirty-Five of Playing.
Aaron Stein has been a working illustrator for 23 years and a tabletop player for more than 35. He started running games 25 years ago and never really stopped. Same hobby, different systems, three decades of learning what actually makes a session work instead of what just looks good written down beforehand.
Most of what’s on this site grew out of that overlap. GeekMakesFire started as an Etsy shop selling TTRPG apparel and expanded into a line of printable GM tools once the pattern got obvious: Aaron already knew what a prep sheet needed to do, because he’d been the guy filling one out (or wishing one existed) before every session for two decades. The art side works the same way. Twenty-three years of drawing characters means a lot of them were tabletop characters, so turning that into a commission service was less of a pivot and more of a formality.
He also runs paid games. Under the handle AaronDungeonMaster on StartPlaying, he’s hosted 909 games over four years on the platform, with a 5.0-star average across 49 reviews and a Top GM badge. Reviews don’t stay that consistent by accident at that volume, so here’s a few, in the players’ own words:
“He explained everything we were doing, gave us context… upgrades to the initial newbie campaign,” one player wrote.
“Open to a lot of ideas and knows how to keep me engaged,” another said.
“Very supportive and patient for new players… creates great atmosphere using music, visuals and voices… extremely inventive,” a third wrote.
Most of his tables run Dungeons & Dragons. He also runs Call of Cthulhu and Brindlewood Bay for groups who want something other than fantasy, and Daggerheart, Draw Steel, Crows, Shadowdark, and Stonetop are all coming soon to the rotation. He describes himself as an ally for the LGBTQ+ gaming community, and that shows up in how a table actually gets run, not just as a line in a bio.
Illustration, GM prep tools, and running real games all pull from the same habit: notice what a table needs before it has to ask. The shop sells that habit as printables. The art site sells it as a drawn character. The Skool community and the Wednesday table are where you get it directly, from him.