Put the Sparkle on Your 5E D&D Game with WizKids Sapphire Dragon
Dragons are an important part of Dungeons & Dragons. Lets face it — they’re built right into the name of the game I have been playing for almost 30 years. Gem dragons came to my notice in third edition D&D through the Monster Manual 2, an edition with five such books as well as several others with monsters. But when you have something as amazingly powerful as gem dragons do you really want them to be a throw away in a sequel book? Dragons have a rich lore, with metallic dragons being the good ones and chromatic dragons the bad ones. There is a bit of safety built into knowing you can trust the dragon or if it will betray you or eat you because of the scale color. Granted, dragons are individuals who have their own set of ideals and morals, but good is good and evil is evil. So how do you handle neutral gem dragons represented the middle ground like the sapphire dragon in 5E D&D?
Create Your Own Customized RPG Character Art for Physical and Virtual Games
Tabletop roleplaying gamers enjoy unprecedented numbers of add-ons and accessories for the fantastic games we play. Whether you roll your funny shaped dice with friends virtually or gathered around a table the options for enhancing one of the biggest draws for any RPG — customizing your character — offer a huge scope of choices. If you’re like me you might create Pinterest boards to find inspiration for your characters (seriously, try it and see how fun and useful it can be!). As fun and fruitful as it can be to discover evocative artwork to represent your character, it’s way cooler when you can design your own custom character art yourself! Ancient Lair followed up their Campaign Medals Kickstarter with Custom 2D Miniature Website, a new web based application that lets you customize 2D miniatures for use in your physical or virtual table top adventures.
5 Investigation Skill Challenges for 5E D&D
Salutations, nerds! Continuing with the theme of five flash encounters for the skills in fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons, today we’re talking about Investigation. So put your detective hats on, get out your magnifying glasses, because we have some small mysteries to solve today. The idea here is to give you a few small encounters based around a skill challenge you can drop into your 5E D&D game to slow the action down and give characters a chance to flex their skills they don’t get to use perhaps as often. Investigation comes up fairly frequently anyway and sometimes it can be nice to have investigation for investigation’s sake. So with farther ado…
Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything Has, Well… Everything for 5E D&D
The follow up to 2017’s Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, on Nov. 17, 2020 fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons upcoming Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything must indeed possess powerful magic to contain so much stuff in 192 pages — the exact page count of its predecessor according to Jeremy Crawford, principal rules designer of the game. The product of 18 months work the book includes material for Dungeons Masters and players of 5E D&D alike. I had an opportunity to join the press briefing with Crawford and Greg Tito, communications and press relations director for D&D and let me tell you, sitting on this was really exciting. Reading and hearing what players speculated on and wanting to say, “You’re all right! It’s all in the book. All the character options and new stuff you’re guessing about are inside!” So let’s get into Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything.
Play Your Next 5E D&D Game with 6 Epic Weapons Inspired by Hero Forge
Smiths and magic users across the multiverse of fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons seek to create better artifacts than those of legends. Most fail — especially when compared to the epic weapons detailed below. The incredibly high detail on the customized tabletop miniatures of Hero Forge inspired me to create these six magic weapons for 5E D&D, and you can certainly change the weapon type to whatever awesome weapons of destruction best fit your game and the heroes wielding them. Epic weapons should bring powerful features to bear so I aimed to make these give characters cool and iconic abilities.
D&D Ideas — Lore
Welcome once again to the weekly newsletter. This week’s topic is lore, which we discussed in our live chat. We hangout every Monday evening at 8 p.m. EST on Nerdarchy Live to talk about D&D, RPGs, gaming, life and whatever nerdy stuff comes up. Speaking of lore, Standing Warning is one of several Out of the Box encounters with opportunities for customized lore drops baked right into the description for the encounter. This and 54 other dynamic encounters ready to drop right into your game come straight Out of the Box here. You can get the Nerdarchy Newsletter delivered to your inbox each week, along with updates, info on how to game with Nerdarchy and ways to save money on RPG stuff by signing up here.
Play Your Next 5E D&D Game in the Bag of Beans Magic Item Campaign
Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel Nerdarchists Dave and Ted explore crafting a magic item as a plot device leading to more fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons adventure. During one of our weekly live chats Ted took inspiration from the bag of beans, a magic item that’s been part of D&D since the earliest days and even way back then advised Dungeon Masters how “thought, imagination and judgment are required with this item.” While researching the bag of beans further for this here post I came across a story shared by a player about this magic item’s tremendous impact on their very first 5E D&D campaign. Turns out campaigns and adventures across the history of D&D experienced the ups and downs of this kooky magic item. So let’s get into it and look at some first hand accounts of how the bag of beans affected some D&D players and give you some ideas for your own games.
Meet the Lovable Lug with a Dark Past and His Tasty Giant Crab Companion in Those Bastards 5E D&D Live Play
Missing constellations, infernal plots and all the sibling feels are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg in Those Bastards, our live play fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons game streaming on Tuesdays 8-10 p.m. eastern on our second channel, Nerdarchy Live. We got the players and Dungeon Master together to share about the game, their characters and themselves.
Play Your Next 5E D&D Game With Immersive Magic Items
A refrain from fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters I have seen in public forums and other social media is this: “How do I make magic items more exciting?” There are two approaches to this I’d like to share, regarding the rarity and special nature of magic items in 5E D&D.
Play Your Next 5E D&D Game with Exciting Exploration Encounters
When it comes to fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons most people agree there are three core types of gameplay experience — combat, social interaction and exploration. These three types are called the Three Pillars of Adventure and the latter of them is often the most forgotten, neglected or misunderstood. When talking with friends who are Dungeon Masters a recurring theme emerges when it comes to exploration. How does a DM make exploration as fun, engaging or suspenseful as social interaction or combat? There’s a severe lack of understanding when it comes to executing the third pillar of the game. A core component I find to exploration is a misunderstanding of when to speed things up vs. slow things down. Sometimes you just want to get characters from point A to point B and all you need is a line or two of narration but sometimes players want to know what’s on the road between places. They want to explore. We’re not addressing what to let them explore at present. For now, let’s focus on how to run an exploration encounter in 5E D&D.
