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Quill & Compass

Who’s building this

One person.
Between the school runs.

Quill & Compass is built by me, Dave Jones, in London, at a desk I share with a four-year-old’s opinions and a baby who has strong views on sleep. There is no team, no investors and no subscription — which is why the app is £29 once for the first two hundred people, £39 once after that, and why your players never pay at all.

Pictured, once the picture exists: the founder; the CFO, asleep on his shoulder; the head of QA, mid-review. The shirt is not a costume.

What I do all day

  1. 06:40The baby files her first complaint of the day.
  2. 08:50School run. Negotiations about shoes.
  3. 09:20Build. The Game Master’s side of the app: the maps, the walls that block light, the weather, the thing that remembers.
  4. 12:00Lunch at the desk, once the dice have been moved.
  5. 15:10School run. Negotiations about shoes, reversed.
  6. 19:30Bedtime, theirs. Then the players’ side: sheets, dice, the join-from-a-phone-with-nothing-to-install flow.
  7. 22:30A rum. The shirt stays on. Tomorrow’s list gets written on the back of today’s.

Where I came from

Fifteen years in customer and finance operations for banks and insurers, and most of my evenings at one end of a table or the other. In 2021 I started a small design studio — logos, branding, 3D — and in 2024 I retrained as a developer and put the two together. Since then this app has been the job.

That order matters. I could draw before I could code, which is why every mark on this site is drawn by hand or is a real screenshot, why the logos are inked and not typed, and why I will not let a model draw a dragon. The people who built this hobby drew their own; the First Tome is my thank-you to them, and the standard I am trying to hold.

What I’m trying to make

An app a Game Master buys once and keeps. The map, the dice, the monsters and the campaign’s memory in one place, on your own machine, with your players joining from a browser on any phone. Local-first, because your world is yours. No generative AI writing your story — just a quiet librarian that never forgets where you put the plot.

You can see the real thing in the screenshots on the story page, try the free tools that came out of building it, or roll a world in A Thousand Worlds, which is the app’s own scene engine let out to play.