How do you make your R Markdown lessons feel friendly for learners you’ll never meet? How do you make it engaging so they sit and stay a while? How do you make it memorable so they come back to visit again? In this talk, I’ll share lessons learned from my experience of making a series of online statistics modules (co-authored by Hasse Walum) that feel accessible and fun-- housed entirely in an R Markdown site, complete with a whimsical, illustrated narrative about teacup giraffes. I’ll show how adding good characters with your audience in mind, good design, and good play helped me make the most of HTML output. To help you get started, I’ll share resources that Alison Hill and I have developed--including a series of cookbooks and out-of-the-box templates-- so that you will have a leg up on applying these ideas to R Markdown collections of your own.