“One day, my phone rings, and it’s like nine in the morning. It says ‘Matthew Lillard’. And I was like,‘Oh,just gonna take a call fromMatthew Lillard.Don’t mind me,’” formerDungeons & Dragonslead designer and writer Kate Welch tells me in an exaggerated tone, imitating the moment when she was bragging to her partner. “And Lillard goes, ‘Hey, can I talk to your husband?’ I was just smug about this. This is terrible. So, I hand over the phone.”
This is how art director Tyler Jacobson and content director Kate Welch would come to join Scream andScooby-Dooactor Matthew Lillard on his unique project, whiskey for D&D fans. It’s a market that Lillard knows well thanks to his other company,Beadle & Grimm’s, a tabletop accessories business that offers maps, artefacts, and other bonuses forMagic The: Gatheringand D&D, even featuring collaborations withPathfinder.
RELATED:Queen By Midnight’s Designer On Warrior Princesses, Clock Towers, And Darrington Press
Lillard has been playing D&D ever since he was a kid, but over the past six years, he has taken his hobby to another level, entrepreneurship. He started Beadle & Grimm’s with his longtime friends, Bill Rehor, Charlie Rehor, Jon Ciccolini, and Paul Shapiro, and found huge success in carving out an audience among tabletop players. It’s no wonder that for his new venture into fandom-driven alcohol, he looked to those close to him to treat this luxury expansion with similar intimate care.
Called Quest’s End, this fantasy whiskey is a premium, limited edition product bundled with stories and artwork inscribed onto the bottle, each with a tailor-made flavour profile based on the characters Welch wrote.
“Each bottle furthers an ongoing story,” Lillard says. “That story goes through 16 drops, each a different character. We went to Alé Ochoa, our master blender who doesn’t play Dungeons & Dragons or RPGs, and we said, ‘Hey, her name is Seron of the Pit, she’s a Paladin of Inxa, the God of Life. And we meet her in the gladiator pits and she’s fighting her last combatant to win her freedom. She’s got this mace and Tyler Jacobson built the shield.’ Alé took that information and interpreted that into whiskey flavours. She procured all these different samples and we combined three to create the palette and flavour for [the] Paladin.”
Jacobson and Welch were very hands-on during the creative process - which meant drinking a lot of whiskey. “We received multiple samples for both of our first two releases. We could all have a meeting and comment on tasting notes and vote on what blend we liked the best. We’ve also had some friends over to taste it and the responses have been very positive.”
“We were all on a Zoom call,” Jacobson says. “We all had our little samples that Alé sent us and it was early, nine in the morning. But it was fun to bounce off each other’s taste, so we’re all saying, ‘I like this part, and I like this part’, bringing our consensus together to focus on the one that we think totally represents Quest’s End and the Paladin character. It was really fun editing and compromising.”
Lillard’s passion is palpable as he speaks about piecing together what these characters would evoke through flavour. It’s something I also noticed when watching the candid announcement video he posted to Instagram and TikTok in which he filmed himself on his mobile eagerly announcing the whiskey, like a kid on Christmas unwrapping their first gift.
“We’ve been doing this shit for a year and a half, and sofinallysomeone is asking me what the fuck I have been doing,” Lillard says. “Let me tell you why we’re excited.”
This enthusiastic energy pours over to his story of how the project came together. For years, he had been trying to find something collaborative he could work on with co-founder Justin Ware, who he met while filming the 2009 movie The Pool Boys. Rejection after rejection, the two decided it was enough and that they were going to forge their own path.
“I’m a director, he’s a writer, so we were trying to put things together. It never happened,” Lillard says. “Hollywood is a riddle, it’s perseverance meets energy meets timing, and all these things have to line up. We got tired of waiting. The thing that sucks about our careers is that it’s 100 percent dependent on somebody saying ‘Yes, you’re good’. Or ‘Yes, I want to make that movie’. The idea of building something together and being in control of our own destiny was really powerful for us and that’s why we chose [a] Paladin. It’s a warrior that has a higher calling, and we were like, that’s us.”
None of this would have been possible without Welch’s characters and stories, which she was given complete creative freedom to bring to life.
“Tyler had been working on the visuals for a long time, and then they asked me if I wanted to join and work on the story,” Welch tells me. “I was like, ‘Okay, what do we want? What are our themes?’ They were just like, ‘Do something freaking cool.’ I think that was the whole remit of the process.
“I’ve played these games, read tons of these books, and so one of the things I was trying to do was emulate my favourite fantasy writers. There’s a very specific fantasy writer I’ve emulated who I won’t name at this point. It’s like a private homage to all my favourite things as I ape their styles writing these chapters. There’s tons of creative freedom, it’s a wild dream opportunity.”
The narrative is so in-depth that the team even created detailed maps that would become part of the whiskey bottle, tying the story with the drink itself.
“We started with a vague map, some blobs, some landmasses, some city names, and that was all me,” Welch says. “I was like, ‘Hey guys here’s a stab at a map’. We identified what we liked in the city names and kept those, and then Tyler ran with that and made a completely original design […] you’re able to see the map through the bottle and it’s a beautiful visual. One of my favourite things about reading fantasy books is opening it and there’s this map that makes no sense at all because you haven’t read the book.
“You’re like, ‘This is an overwhelming map. This is like, all of Westeros. I don’t know what this is. I’ll just keep reading and skip it.’ But then, halfway through the book, you’re like, ‘Oh my god! I’m so glad there’s a map at the beginning because I have no idea where anything is.’ That’s one of my favourite tropes of a fantasy novel.”
It was a challenge for Jacobson unlike anything he had worked on in the past as a contributing artist for D&D and Magic: The Gathering. Prior to Quest’s End, he didn’t have much experience in crafting maps or designing whiskey bottles, but the two new ventures bled together to form the unique fantasy design we see today.
“When I was a kid, I drew maps in my notebooks and stuff,” Jacobson says. “I always love the Tolkien maps, so I was building on top of that. I think the way of planning and plotting everything and seat-of-your-pants planning is how we did the map, let’s just make some cool stuff and. It was fun, it was really cool to see on the back of the bottle, as you drink, the map starts to reveal itself.”
It’s not just the map that helped Jacobson bridge fantasy and alcohol into this premium product for D&D fans. Much of the design was inspired by the game.
“I was working on what the bottle was going to look like and what kind of imagery we were going to have,” Jacobson says. “There’s hit points on the side and a map on the back. We wanted a fantasy symbol on the front, which ended up being the shield. All these things we’d sorted out before Kate started writing that character, but then we started shifting everything to line up with that because it was super cool and we wanted it to sing on the bottle a lot more. I’ve never designed a bottle, I’m more of a painter, so thinking in terms of design and shape and what’s going to catch people’s eye and what’s going to make them want to reach for our bottle of our whiskey, that was a different challenge altogether.
“But it’s fun in a way that I’m on the other side a little bit more [as art director instead of contributor]. I get to be a champion for the art side. If there are certain things that people on our team are trying to figure out visually, I can be like, ‘Well I’ve got this covered because I have so much experience.’ I can be the eye, if Kate’s the mouth, speaking all the beautiful words.”
“We are abeholder,” Welch adds. “The two of us, we’re just a giant beholder.”
The first bottle is nearly in the hands of fans, but it has far exceeded the team’s expectations, reaching an audience Lillard was hopeful he’d find.
“We have 40,000 people on the waiting list for Paladin, which is alotfor 5,000 bottles,” Lillard says. “We’ve immediately doubled our size. If this keeps going, and we keep generating this kind of success, we’ll start to move into bigger distribution.
“We’re already moving into other fandoms and building them side-by-side. We consider ourselves a movie studio, they can have action-adventure, romantic comedy, horrors, so we are constantly moving and building to different verticals based on different fandoms.”
Lillard says the ultimate aim of Quest’s End is to bring something to people that lets them celebrate the thing they love most. The whiskey is a bonus, rather than a necessity to play, something to enhance the experience.
“Our goal is to be a part of people’s joy, to bring them something so they can celebrate the thing they love most, “ Lillard says. “If you love whiskey and you love RPGs, Dungeons & Dragons, whatever, then this is something that is built for you.
“When you’re part of a niche community like gamers are, very few people build bespoke items. People sell million-dollar watches, right? That will be for a certain class of person. They’ll buy high-end jewellery or high-end handbags, but nobody is really spending and building luxury goods for games. Our whole thing is like, ‘Why not?’ It just so happens, I’m building things that I love for the thing that I love.”
The first bottle in the Quest’s End series ships exclusively in the US later this year in November. You canright now to be notified when sales go live.
