D&D Ideas — Being a Better Player
Welcome once again to the weekly newsletter. This week’s topic is Being a Better Player, 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. Out of the Box has arrived! The shipment of the hardcover edition was delivered to our fulfillment center and packages have already begun to go out for delivery. We are sending copies to Kickstarter supporters and late backers first, followed by preorders received through Nerdarchy the Website. There’s still plenty of work to be done shipping books and making sure everyone receives them along with the other accessories like custom Nerdarchy dice and art prints and we’re incredibly excited to reach this point! If you missed the Kickstarter campaign and late backer options never fear — we ordered plenty of extra copies. Now it’s up to you to conjure arcane energy and make them all vanish. Visit Nerdarchy the Website and check out Out of the Box: Encounters for Fifth Edition 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.
Speak With Dead #30: A Reprisal
For a while, once a week our resident necromancer Maxillae the Mad would take time out of her schedule of raising the dead and commanding the forces of evil to offer her insights and advice to the denizens of the multiverse. She’s been quiet for a while but there’s no one quite so stubborn as one death couldn’t keep in their grave and so long as there’s a letter, Maxillae is the necromancer with the answer. Not long ago, we had someone Speak with Dead to get in touch with her again, and she’s agreed to come back out of her coffin for a heartfelt response.
Through the Looking Glass | Tool Time with Glassblower’s Tools in 5E D&D
What mineral derived substance is more prevalent in the daily lives of construction workers, jewelers, churches and nearly everyone else in the fantasy world? If you answered glass, congratulations! You got it right, and we’re talking all about glass today when it comes to fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. After a hiatus from this series we’ve returned with our coverage of tool proficiencies in 5E D&D to go over what they contain, how to use them and creative applications for your games. As a quick disclaimer, while proficiencies are a core mechanic of 5E D&D, tool proficiencies are distinctly more nebulous than those for skills or weapons and your own Dungeon Master might rule how to apply tools differently from how we present here. With that out of the way let’s talk about glassblower’s tools.
Play Your Next 5E D&D Game with Twinned Spell Metamagic Mastery
Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel Nerdarchists Dave and Ted master the Metamagic for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons to find out what spells make best use of Twinned Spell. This versatile and powerful feature gives sorcerers the ability to duplicate the effects of a spell they cast and double the effect (with certain restrictions). While they discuss the best spells to twin I thought it might be useful for 5E D&D players and Dungeon Masters to compile a list of all the spells eligible for Twinned Spell. Thankfully D&D Beyond makes searching and filtering information super easy so all I need to do now is go through all 515 spells currently included as part of official 5E D&D content. After that for fun I’ll go through the spells we’ve created in our products for Twinned Spell candidates too. So let’s get into it.
Play Your Next 5E D&D Game with Snakes on the Brain and Cast Snake Magic Spells
Hey folks! Dungeons & Dragons has a long history of really cool spells and Nerdarchy recently went over one of my all time favorites — sticks to snakes — updating it for fifth edition D&D for a second time (once in a recent video and several years before through Lost Lore). This all got me thinking of other old spells I came across in my decades playing D&D. I started looking through old supplements and Dragon Magazines and realized there had been a good number of snake themed spells uncovered from several sources, notably the 3.5E D&D’s Complete Arcana and two issues of Dragon Magazine (Nos. 235 and 330). There are plenty of other snake spells out there but these three sources provided a good sampling of serpentine arcana from previous editions. I have done my best to update them to 5E D&D standards and language. After these updated spells I included a few original spells of my own creation to bring some new among the old. Many of these old spells are likely intended for a Dungeon Master to use against adventurers but, like most spells there is no reason they can’t be used by player characters. I hope you find these spells useful for your adventurers or monsters in your 5E D&D games.
5 Medicine Skill Challenges for 5E D&D
Salutations nerds. We’re back again with another set of flash skill challenges for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons and this time we’re talking about Medicine. If you ask me this is one of the more neglected skills in 5E D&D since there are so many healing spells to cast. Of course a couple of these could be solved with a quick healing spell but the vast majority of them require an actual skill check and this is, in fact, the idea. 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. Let’s get to it, shall we?
Play Your Next 5E D&D Game as a Mystic Seer
Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel Nerdarchists Dave and Ted indulge the latter’s love of puns and come up with the latest Character Build Guide for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. We tend to get a good amount of interaction and feedback on CBGs so I thought this would be a terrific opportunity to walk you through the process and highlight ways you’ll find these useful for your 5E D&D experiences whether you’re a player or a Dungeon Master. After creating so many of these guides we’ve gleaned some unexpected insights ourselves. The Mystic Seer combines the cleric and wizard into an unusual multiclass character with a strong narrative arc to their advancement. In addition where we typically create a generic creature stat block to go along with the player guide this time around we present a specific NPC ready to drop right into your game. So let’s get into it.
D&D Ideas — Fast and Fun Combat
Welcome once again to the weekly newsletter. This week’s topic is fast and fun combat, 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. Creating new material for RPG fans to drop right into your games to help speed combats up, spice up adventures and generally foster more fun at the gaming table is what we’re all about. Stay tuned as we explore a new path soon with exclusive content like magic item cards with custom art and maps for your incredible adventures. Find out more about this new direction and how you might be able to see your own ideas immortalized with custom art and game design 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.
Make Strength Your Dump Stat and Show How Strong Your 5E D&D Character Can Be
Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel Nerdarchists Dave and Ted set down the dumbbells for a moment to explore using dump stats and low ability scores in fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons, specifically about Strength this time. In the video they discuss different approaches for roleplaying, perspectives on how and why a character might have a low score and what it means to have low bodily power, athletic training and raw physical force. It’s interesting to note in 5E D&D Strength scores run higher than you might imagine as compared to real life. An average Strength score of 10 represents power perhaps greater than you would expect. Nevertheless in context low Strength is low Strength. In the first part of this series we looked at how Intelligence can be represented through different ability scores but this time around the same approach doesn’t work as well. Instead I thought it would be fun to look at the character classes and see how a character with Strength as their dump stat might still be effective or at least how much impact it might have on the adventuring career. So let’s get into it.
Play Your Next 5E D&D Game with 3 New Druid Cantrips
I’ve always been an avid fan of the druid class in fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. Whether playing a tabletop roleplaying game or MMO with friends there’s always been something I love about the notion of calling to the wilderness and having it answer in kind. In our campaign for Those Bastards! over on the Nerdarchy Live channel my character at present, Prudence, is a druid with some monk splashed in for good measure. No matter how you spin it, druids are my jam, hardcore. However, sometimes I get tired of the same old druid cantrips and I feel like there are things druids in 5E D&D should be able to do that isn’t really represented yet. As such, I’ve devised some cantrips for your favorite druid characters I think help to fill in some gaps the class currently possesses.
