Ginny Di
Audio By Carbonatix
If you’re a gamer with even a passing familiarity with YouTube — or if you’re a fan of Critical Role, cosplay, Dimension 20 or any of the gaming-related explosions of popularity seen in the last few years — you know Ginny Di. Her YouTube channel is nearing a million subscribers alone; she’s both a gamer and a gaming educator, offering up ideas on how to be better as either DM or PC — and if you immediately recognized either of those abbreviations, you’re probably already a fan.
What even her fans may not know is that she’s also from Denver. Ginny Di graduated from Littleton High School and now lives in Denver, having earned her degree in English from the University of Northern Colorado. But she’d started there studying vocal performance — she says she was really into jazz at that time, but realized early on that the gig-life wasn’t for her. She does still sing — her tongue-in-cheek tune “Dungeonmaster,” a takeoff on “Santa Baby,” still makes the rounds around the holidays, and her Spotify profile is admirably full.
This weekend, she’s headlining the star power attending GhengisCon 2026, and she’ll hardly be alone in that; joining her in various capacities for the four-day event are a bulging dice-bag full of gaming celebs, including Luke Gygax, from one of the royal families of gaming; author/game designer Michael Stackpole; Dwarven Forge’s Stefan Pokorny, and many more. GhengisCon itself will take place from February 19-22 at the Hyatt Regency Aurora-Denver Conference Center.
It’s not surprising, perhaps, that Ginny Di is a creator with a lot of irons in the fire; she says her life has always sort of been a panoply of activities. “When I was in middle school, I made a newsletter for my cul-de-sac,” she grins. “No one asked me to do that; I just did it. I’d write word puzzles and interview people. That’s just the sort of kid I was. I hosted a Hogwarts-themed day camp for local kids in my basement when I was in high school.”
Given those two examples, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Ginny Di happily admits that she’s always been a nerd. “My dad raised me on Star Wars and Monty Python, and I always loved going to the Colorado Renaissance Festival. I always loved fantasy, but I came to the gaming table late.”
But it was her involvement with the Renaissance Festival in 2011-12 that initially got her into Dungeons & Dragons. “The Ren Fair was a huge part of my journey into professional nerd-dom, I guess,” she says. She was a singer at the Renaissance Festival for two summers in early college, and that experience opened up her eyes to the social aspects of loving all things nerdy. “I’d always been a nerd, but privately,” she admits. “I was always a bookworm and a little weirdo at school, but I wasn’t part of the zeitgeist of nerdery in the community. Until, that is, I worked at the Ren Fair, and discovered cosplay and conventions.”
Part of Ginny Di’s success in geek-dom has to do with timing, she says. “I was getting into cosplay just as it was starting to reach a wider audience,” she says. “And not just cosplay, but nerd stuff in general. It was around the same time as the beginning of the MCU era, and gaming was becoming more well-known, too. Both were establishing themselves as not these weird, niche things that people looked down on; they were already starting to become more broadly accepted hobbies. I caught that wave, and that’s one of the reasons I’m able to do what I do.”
It was the cosplay that first drew Ginny Di into the wider nerd-world; she initially left full-time conventional employment to become a full-time cosplayer when she was living in southern New Mexico. She says it was the low cost of living that made that jump from hobbyist to professional a little easier, but the decision itself took some planning. “I’m naturally a very anxious person,” she laughs, “which makes me a very cautious person. So I’m not the kind of person who’s just like ‘I’m gonna throw it all away and quit my job and pursue my dreams!’ Like, I didn’t actually leave my job until my side hustle revenue was enough to cover my basic bills.”
Ginny Di
She recalls the specific morning that she made the decision to do it. “I got up before sunrise to get into costume as Ciri from The Witcher,” she says, “and do a photo shoot at a local park before I went to work. I had to fit in this shoot after the sun was up, but be done in enough time to change and get to work. It was so stressful, and I was exhausted. I remember thinking that something had to change. Either I need more time to focus on the cosplay stuff — which was making money at that point — or I need to scale back on the cosplay stuff, because I couldn’t grow it any more without giving it more time.”
She gave it a little time to be sure it was financially feasible, but the result was quitting her job in marketing at a local food co-op and embracing the professional nerd that she’s become.
These days, her primary focus seems to be role-playing gaming, to which she came to relatively late. “The first time I ever played D&D was at Ren Fair,” she says, “and it was sort of a disaster. There were nine of us, and only half of us knew anything about the game, and they had us roll up characters, which took forever. Looking back now, everything went completely wrong. I remember thinking, ‘Why would anyone do this? This sucked.’ So it took me years to come back to it — a friend had suggested I listen to Season One Critical Role while I was sewing, actually, and I remember listening and realizing, Oh, this is why people love this. I saw the joint-storytelling aspect for the first time, and I thought, yeah, this is sort of my jam.”
And now, Ginny Di is a creator for D&D’s 5th Edition, a developer of both how-to gaming content and author of gaming supplements. She has a whole merch section on her website that offers up a plethora of treasures, from adventure modules to fantasy-themed apparel to dice and miniatures and more. It’s a wide scope of products that reflects the broad spectrum of her online presence, still inclusive (and happily so) of many of her passions become a profession.
“I really do love everything that I’ve ended up involved in,” Ginny Di says. “I really do believe in tabletop games as a community builder and creative outlet. It’s a powerful type of play. I feel super grateful that I got into it all when I did, because the world has sort of shepherded me towards it. I don’t know that I ever would have figured out just how passionate I can be about all this wonderful nerd stuff, if I hadn’t had that guidance.”
You can see Ginny Di’s work through her website and on her YouTube channel; she’ll be running an adventure at GhengisCon 2026, where there’s much to explore over the weekend of February 19-22 at the Hyatt Regency Aurora-Denver Conference Center, 13200 East 14th Place, Aurora.
