Running a Conjuration Wizard Familiar Fight Club Campaign for 5E D&D
Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel Nerdarchists Dave and Ted dicuss the potential for indulging fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons players and the all too familiar scenario of creature collection. Anything from a cute and cuddly critter to a fearsome monstrosity appeals to lots of players interest in taming beasts, raising their own monsters or otherwise gathering pets. They start by wondering what a 5E D&D Conjuration Wizard Fight Club might entail and proceed to break all the rules by talking about it — in front of a camera no less! When it comes to organized conjured creature combat Nerdarchy advocates ethical and nonviolent treatment of any and all summoned, conjured, created, fabricated, imagined or regular real world creatures.
Adventurers of Adventure Guild Wants You! Creating a Guild for 5E D&D, Step 2
Organizations in your fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign world provide so many benefits for a Dungeon Master. Factions, guilds, cabals and any other collection of people sharing a common goal or interest can be quest givers, sources of information and structures for contextualizing any 5E D&D campaign setting. Even in the bleak land of Barovia, an organization like the Keepers of the Feather tells you something about the setting. In The Mandalorian, the titular character belonged to an organized tribe of warriors and the bounty hunter guild. In the first part of this series we went through the process of creating a guild for 5E D&D starting with the Dungeon Master’s Guide. The Adventurers of Adventure is an adventuring guild characters can join and gain renown with, earning benefits along the way. With Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica in hand the AoA can expand options for its members with Guild Spells and Contacts. The fly by night adventuring guild’s operating budget is pretty slim, so the selections might not top industry standards but hey — it’s free spells! So let’s get into it and proceed to step 2 of creating a guild.
D&D Ideas — Food
Welcome once again to the weekly Nerdarchy Newsletter. This week’s topic is food, which we discussed in our exclusive Patreon live chat. We hangout every Monday evening at 8 p.m. EST with Patreon supporters and talk about D&D, RPGs, gaming, life and whatever nerdy stuff comes up. You can get the Nerdarchy Newsletter delivered to your inbox each week, along with updates and info on how to game with Nerdarchy, by signing up here. The website for Nerdarchy the Convention is live! Our first annual event takes place Halloween weekend 2020 at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center. Halloween candy could be considered food, so there’s your bridge to the newsletter topic. As the site continues to grow we’ll be updating regularly with new guests, events and announcements up until it’s time to let the games commence. Discover more info about Nerdarchy the Convention here.
Hooked on Adventure — Reversal of Fortune
Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel Nerdarchists Dave and Ted roll some funny shaped dice and talk about all the ways a fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons character can become a dice master. Between the halfling Lucky trait, Lucky and Bountiful Luck feats and a slew of class features the probability of creating a fun, effective dice master character for 5E D&D is quite high. These characters step beyond inexplicable good fortune to begin actively manipulating chance. Call it fate, destiny, karma or kismet the dice master character sees the cascade of cause and effect and inserts themselves into the process. Pretty heady stuff! Dungeon Masters can certainly get in on the action too, and odds bending creatures, areas or magic items can be weal for DMs and woe for adventurers. In Fat of the Land a Rural Pig Sty became a low level adventure for 5E D&D giving adventurers a chance to investigate strange goings on leading back to a small family farm. In this encounter unusual behavior spreads through a town to the misfortune of all.
What Do Your Unearthed Arcana Subclasses Say About Your 5E D&D Character? Part 3
Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel Nerdarchists Dave and Ted discuss Unearthed Arcana 2020, Subclasses Part 3. The latest playtest document for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons includes new subclasses for the artificer, druid and ranger. During our look through of this Unearthed Arcana it was the Circle of the Stars druid’s Starry Form feature that sparked a thought leading to uncovering the upcoming Mythic Odysseys of Theros book several days before the title leaked and was then officially announced. I wonder what the next leak will reveal? Until then, while Dave and Ted go over the Armorer, Circle of the Stars and Fey Wanderer in the video, over here we’ll continue looking at these 5E D&D playtest subclasses with curiosity about what sort of characters they might represent. So let’s get into it.
5E D&D Quarterstaff Not So Simple After All
Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel Nerdarchists Dave and Ted examine what it means to fight with a quarterstaff in fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. Our theorycrafting videos like this one differ from our Character Build Guides in terms of specifics. We’ve been talking about roleplaying games with our friends for decades and turning on the camera invites other nerds into the conversation without tying down ideas to technical details. This video topic emerged while we were talking about the shillelagh spell and expanded into quarterstaves including wielding one in each hand or a quarterstaff in one hand and a longsword in the other like Gandalf is seen doing in the Lord of the Rings films.
A Group of Sorcerers is Called a Cabal
Salutations, nerds! Fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons sorcerers are on the menu today and as opposed to wizards, who are constantly gathering up in big towers and working together, sorcerers don’t tend to really travel in groups all too often. Regardless, we’re going to push forward and see what we can discover together about sorcerers in groups. Wizards will get their own turn, but where they have this tendency to group together in order to share their studies and research, in 5E D&D sorcerers just get their power from a variety of sources and don’t really have to share anything in order to use their magic. But there are plenty of other reasons for sorcerers to group up, including self preservation.
New 5E D&D Roguish Archetype — The Enforcer
Recently while talking, we at Nerdarchy realized fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons rogues just haven’t gotten as much love and attention from all of us as we would like, especially in the realm of homebrew content and subclasses. That’s a real shame too, because the rogue is one of the staple classes of the fantasy genre on the whole. As a class, I find it interesting that rogues are sort of disenfranchised. Even the definition for the word rogue implies someone who doesn’t travel the beaten path. Rogues are usually the tricksters, those who argue for pragmatism, usually devoid of morality and other such inconveniences. I’ve often wondered why there was never an enforcer rogue. We’re familiar with stories of criminals employing some muscle to intimidate their enemies. Why isn’t that a thing we can do in 5E D&D? Well, now we can… as an Enforcer Roguish Archetype.
Two New 5E D&D Feats for Grung
Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel Nerdarchists Dave and Ted hop into One Grung Above to examine the grung as a playable race for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. D&D players from all over (myself included) fell in love with these small humanoid frogs who made their 5E D&D debut in Volo’s Guide to Monsters. Despite their monster entry showing grung as neutral evil slavers, the accompanying art portrays them as cute and the One Grung Above one shot from 2017’s Stream of Annihilation showcased how fun a party of grung adventurers can be. The stats and features for grung player characters have been around for a couple of years through the Dungeon Master’s Guild and were recently added to D&D Beyond to the delight of an army of grung aficionados, with all monies Wizards of the Coast would receive from sales of the product donated to Extra Life. But all that is only prologue to what I’m interested in exploring — creating some special grung feats for 5E D&D characters. So let’s get into it.
Hooked on Adventure — Fat of the Land
Hello! We are introducing a new series here on the website. In Hooked on Adventure we’ll take inspiration from our 3D printed terrain and miniatures to create encounters for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons you can drop right into your game. In Cultivating Chaos we turned the Rural Chicken Coop into an engaging low level adventure for 5E D&D pitting adventurers against demonic forces to save a family farm. In this encounter strange disappearances and transformations lead back to a small farm with a dark history. To enhance the encounter we used Dungeonfog, an online map maker and authoring tool designed for Game Masters, to create a map image for the Rural Chicken Coop. Check out Dungeonfog and use the promo code NERDARCHY to get 10% discount on your first annual and annual-CL (Commercial-License) order here.
