In the late 2010s, Clay was on The Book of Mormon American tour when one of his closest friends, Jacob Ben-Shmuel, joined the cast to understudy as Elder Cunningham. “We were all just itching for something to do that would be relatively easy as we were traveling around the country,” Clay told Polygon in a video interview. Ben-Shmuel had played some D&D before, but never sat in the Dungeon Master seat. They decided to give it a go. “It was perfect for our schedule because really, other than needing to go to work at night for the show, our days were free in towns that weren’t our own,” Clay added.
Despite having played the game for barely a decade, Clay’s D&D experience is a dense one: that tight group of actors played the game three times a week for four hours at a time for months, perhaps years. While that pace lessened as people moved between projects and went remote, Clay said D&D remains a huge passion for him.
“We were obviously in The Book of Mormon, which is this examination of religion and faith, so I built this cleric named Dama,” Clay said, explaining that after Dama left his home village and saw that all sorts of people were able to use magic “willy-nilly,” he had a spiritual crisis. Why should he remain pious when seemingly anyone can use magic? Naturally, as the DM, Ben-Shmuel worked it into the story that Dama’s power began to falter alongside his faith. He eventually had to face a divine reckoning delivered by his patron, the moon goddess Selûne. But with renewed piety, Dama’s power returned stronger than ever.
Clay later left the tour and made his official Broadway debut in 2018 as Elder Price, a role he continues to perform today. The show is gearing up for a special run dubbed “Magical Mormon Mystery Week” from June 9 to 14, when original cast members like Josh Gad, Andrew Rannells, Nikki M. James, and Rory O’Malley are set to make guest appearances, alongside surprise drop-ins from co-creators Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and Robert Lopez.
When Clay first debuted on Broadway, he also assumed another hugely important role: the forever DM. It’s a revolving D&D table to which he’s invited various friends from the Broadway community to play. Clay knew he was joining The Book of Mormon European tour in June 2019, so over the course of a few very intense months, he ran his first campaign in which players joined a war effort and eventually learned that the enemy faction was searching for blood descendants of the gods.
“It was my buddy, Cody Strand — who played Elder Cunningham in The Book of Mormon for years — he was playing this 400-year-old gnome wizard named Oopsie and was just the most chaotic character imaginable,” Clay said. At the end of the campaign, the party used Oopsie’s god-blood to open up a portal and found themselves in a futuristic city where they were greeted by a flying superhero with a cape. That impromptu cliffhanger stuck with the group — especially with Clay.
While on the European tour, Clay fielded texts and emails from the group wanting to learn more about this place full of superheroes. With a new group of players playing a different version of that same adventure, he codified the creation mythos of this place.
Long ago, on an island in an archipelago, early humans killed the primordial mother goddess of light. As Clay puts it, “the undercurrent of the whole world” involves her partner, a god of darkness, trying desperately across the ages to revive her. But the children of these primordial beings, obviously gods themselves, took avatars in the world and fought to prevent this, eventually sealing him away in four crystals. (Because reviving a dead god has to be very, very bad, right?)
Those crystals then became the family heirlooms of the four major houses that founded the city-state of Kardelheim. In Clay’s campaign, the encasements around these gems were weakening, so the players were tasked with visiting each temple to reclaim them. But pretty much nobody remembers what the gems themselves physically — or magically — do. Is it better to destroy them and help the lonely, sealed god revive his loved one? Or keep the potential evil sealed?
Clay also established distinct cultures among the four houses, emphasizing his acting chops with accents. The humans of Greenfold speak with an Irish accent. The house of druids speak standard American English. The dwarves speak like they’re from the deep American South. (What, you were expecting typical Scottish accents?) The biggest surprise? The elves speak with an old-school Georgia drawl. Clay said these accents disoriented one group of players and led to a hilarious outcome: Rather than fall in line with a group of Robin Hood-like honorable thieves, the party instead aligned themselves with the villain.
“They pretty swiftly fell in, kind of accidentally, with some not good people,” Clay said. “That was a big plot point for a lot of their campaign. I thought they would immediately be a little bit grossed out by this one villain, but for whatever reason, they love this dude and kept following whatever he wanted them to do.”
In the years since, Clay has fleshed out Kardelheim as a robust campaign setting with two vastly different time periods: In one, players deal with crystals and gods (which to me sounds like Avatar: The Last Airbender mythos fused with Final Fantasy — an absolute dream). In the other time period, 2000 years in the future, players use their magical D&D powers to become superheroes who deal with marketing teams and PR associates to work on their brand identities. Clay admitted that one’s heavily inspired by shows like The Boys and Invincible, as well as anime like My Hero Academia.
Clay’s biggest advice as a DM is to draw from whatever book, show, or movie you’re into at the moment. When first building out Kardelheim, he was re-reading Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy. More recently, he re-read all of Tolkien’s works and commented that his current campaign definitely has more Middle-earth vibes as a result.
And while his table has always played D&D, he likes to experiment with rules and systems from different TTRPGs. He’s a particular fan of the health system presented by The Burning Wheel, which has rules for how specific wounds heal. He also uses the more robust magic systems presented by Ars Magica.
“Ars Magica has this great system where you put points into various elements that influences how you can manipulate them,” Clay explained. “When it comes to magic, let’s just talk about it and get creative and vibe with it in the moment — but within a strict set of rules. That’s what I like: Let players get super creative within a hard framework.”
Another favorite of his is Wanderhome, a pastoral TTRPG that emphasizes the emotional journey of the player characters.
“My biggest advice I can give to DMs has to do with your players,” he said. “Wanderhome has this lovely method for creating the essence of your character.” Clay suggested always asking players these questions: How would a character describe themselves? How would someone else describe them? What do they want? He said this “actor-y” exercise helps players to better inhabit the role rather than simply pilot a character, which ultimately helps the table at large with the role-playing aspects of the game.
For Clay, Dungeons & Dragons isn’t all that different from what happens onstage eight times a week. It’s still about character, collaboration, and finding something real in the middle of make-believe. And like any great performance, Kardelheim is a story that keeps evolving, shaped by the people who step into it.
