Ryan Standbridge
Ryan Standbridge is a Principal Incident Response consultant at Reliance Cyber who has spent years turning up after things have gone badly wrong. He leads high-severity ransomware, BEC, and intrusion responses, and delivers the IR plans, playbooks, and tabletop exercises that organisations hope they never need.
He's also watched enough incidents unfold to have strong opinions about why most of them were worse than they needed to be, and it's rarely a tooling gap.
Session
Your kingdom has a problem: the Shared Drive of Destiny is now the Shared Drive of Gibberish, the Helpdesk is on fire (metaphorically… probably), and a hooded messenger has left a ransom rune on the gates demanding tribute in untraceable coin.
Participants form an adventuring party where fantasy classes map to real-world roles. The facilitator (Dungeon Master) unleashes timed encounters and injects: phishing goblins breach the tavern, the SIEM turns out to be a mimic, the backup vault is cursed, the status page becomes prophecy, and the Executive Dragon arrives demanding “a quick update” every six minutes.
Players must make real response decisions under comedic pressure, scoping, containment, access lockdowns, restoration prioritisation, stakeholder messaging, and executive trade-offs, while the dice introduce just enough chaos to feel like a real incident. No D&D experience required. Expect teamwork, memorable lessons, and a post-game debrief that turns your party’s near-misses into concrete improvements for runbooks, escalation paths, and resilience planning.