The Eldritch Author: Taking Villainy from the Screen to your Table

What’s it like to turn your own TikTok character into its campaign setting? That’s the challenge that faced Michael Yacone aka “The Eldritch Author”, a TikTok creator with over 300,000 fans on the platform. Most people know him best for playing Hughe Percival Lockcross, a top-hat-wearing, mustache-twirling figure who wields eldritch powers and presents himself as the epitome of villainy with a touch of Victorian style in his body language. It’s like watching a version of Dick Dastardly who was scary and who just wanted to have you make a deal for your soul.

Now, people have a chance to fight Lockcross at their tables.

But you wouldn’t know it from talking to the man. Yacone, dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans, had a cigarette tucked between his fingers while we chatted. He nodded enthusiastically throughout our conversation, with a bright grin and an attractive charisma that fans might recognize after all these years.

Origins of the Ringmaster

Yacone’s persona, known to most as the Hughe Lockless aka the Dark Ringmaster, originally existed at a friend’s D&D table around 2020. His home table had started a new campaign after a years-long run through Curse of Strahd, and the DM set their mind on running a carnival campaign. The table then decided that Michael would be a ringmaster and a warlock connected to a homebrew patron he called the “Eldritch Author.” The patron was his rendition on H.P. Lovecraft, the man best known for creating the Cthulhu Mythos and introducing the world to cosmic horror. The warlock would act as the “face” of the party, seeking to bring his machinations to the world with a smile.

And so Lockless came to exist. As Michael got into character and began to dress up as Lockless at the table, he found himself bringing the villainous energy to the table. “I was the last to know that I was good at emulating charismatic characters, whether or not the stat of charisma matched that,” Yacone told TTRPG Insider. “So this whole journey surprised me in all aspects. It still feels surreal because it I feel like I accidentally ended up where I'm at today.”

His friends eventually pushed him to start making TikToks as Lockless in 2020. This was back when Gen Z men and women decided it was time to play their D&D characters on social media. Whether responding to each other’s posts, lip-syncing to clips, or just riffing off another creator’s content, it created this intersectional community of fantasy narratives where bards, barbarians, and wizards interacted and played out stories on people’s phones.

Yacone joined the community with no plans to grow his audience, and he found that people quickly fell in love with the Ringmaster. “I never touched TikTok before COVID-19, I hopped in without a plan at first. But I became friends with many other creators. I also just kept expanding and adding to the Ringmaster’s lore.”

He also claims that the fact that he was just there to have fun and not to become an influencer played some role in his growth. “I think that drew many people to me, especially in the beginning, was I wasn't there with a plan. I was there to have fun. And I still have fun. It's the only reason why I'm still in it If. If it became too much work, I would take a hiatus. If I do not love what I do, I miss the point of why I showed up there in the first place,” Yacone emphasized.

While the Ringmaster often has the energy of a theatre veteran in his gestures and performances, Yacone denies that he was ever trained as an actor. “I was a closet nerd in high school, okay?” Yacone told TTRPG Insider. “I was very much into the hobby spaces, going to card shops, bookshops, all that in my childhood. But woe betide me if anybody in my school found out.”

The role has allowed Yacone to embrace content creation as a full-time career with full support from his partner. “I'm in a relationship where my partner has straight up said, “I will beat you with a pan if you take up a job,” Yacone said with a chuckle. “Because they and many people in my circle believe in what I'm doing.”

From TikTok to Publishing

But a TikTok career like Yacone’s has a limited lifespan, a fact that Yacone realized. That’s why it worked well that he was drawn into writing for TTRPGs alongside Storytellers Forge and fantasy veteran Rick Heinz.

Heinz, a long-time veteran writer in the TTRPG and fantasy space, met Yacone after publishing his first TTRPG book with Storytellers Forge, The Red Opera. While initial conversations started as Heinz blindly sharing his new project with an influencer, it soon became a friendship. Heinz eventually hired Yacone to help write several spells for Heinz’s next book, The Black Ballad. And Yacone found that he had a knack for writing about TTRPG mechanics; a skill that earned him other contracts in the TTRPG space.

After some time, Yacone contacted Heinz and asked what he could help with next. Heinz said he was interested in publishing something on The Dark Carnival, a series of Fifth Edition online supplements Yacone had published as free material over the years. Yacone had written about several new subclasses for 5e that he wanted to share, while Heinz and his team helped create a new storyline focused on Lockless and his traveling multiplanar carnival. “I don't want us ever to make a book that doesn't come with fiction, a storyline or something like that,” Heinz told TTRPG Insider.

Festival of the Forgotten

That project became Festival of the Forgotten: Revelations of the Dark Carnival, a Backerkit campaign launched in March that raised over $85,000 on Backerkit. While the book’s numbers may pale compared to other campaigns, it is the first TTRPG campaign that this author is aware of that’s written about a TikTok D&D personality. Lockless is the central antagonist in Festival of the Forgotten, as he has orchestrated the theft of several items and memories from others for his purposes. These thefts would be the instigating reason for why players would visit the Dark Carnival, an interplanar place of revelry that hopped between planes and was led by Lockless himself.

There’s a unique challenge in taking a character you’ve played for years and turning them into their setting. It’s not hard to see a project like Festival of the Forgotten as an opportunity for the author to make an unbeatable “DMPC,” a common term used to describe a character that a dungeon master might use to play out their particular fantasies. That’s why Heinz urged Yacone to ensure Lockless “have consequences for his actions” in the endings for the campaign. “[Lockless] needed to be held accountable for his actions, for any sense of climatic payoff,” Yacone emphasized.

This included the option to fight and kill Lockless, a decision some might find hard to do sometimes after playing a character for so long. “I was scared to make a stat block for [Lockless] because I didn't want him to be killed,” Yacone admitted. “And then I realized, wait a minute. Why do I care? Technically, every table is an alternate universe. Why am I getting prideful as a writer that people can do that?”

It’s an odd feeling to send a character you’ve written and played online into the wild for the public, particularly one you may have played before. Yacone is no stranger to this notion. Yet, he’s eager to see what other tables do with the Ringmaster and their campaigns. “At the end of the day, I'm just happy and honored that people get to play in my sandbox. We provided players with guidance on how to run Lockless, and it’s entirely possible that they’ll play the game in a way that doesn’t reflect my vision. That’s okay. I'm just happy they get to play it.”

Heinz intends to continue playing Lockless for the foreseeable future and creating content in the D&D space, including future projects with Storytellers Forge and others. Heinz mentioned plans to combine all of Storytellers' published books into a coherent universe and to provide additional supplements for the campaign, which could lead to the Ringmaster reappearing in future Storyteller Forge books. For now, fans will have to wait until the first half of 2026 to get their chance to bring Lockless to their tables.

Thanks to Yacone and Heinz for agreeing to this interview. You can learn more about Storytellers Forge at their website. Yacone can be found as Theeldritchauthor on most social media platforms.

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