Capturing Chaos: D&D Adventures in the Menagerie Mayhem Zoo with Fantastical Creatures
Experience a Taste of Adventure with a Signature Style! 🎲✨ Fellow adventurers, step into the vibrant realm of 'Menagerie Mayhem', a unique encounter designed in the celebrated style of our renowned product: Out of the Box Encounters for 5th Edition D&D. From bustling city alleys to the...
Githyanki are Such a Cool D&D Monster
I recently did an encounter in our Out of the Box Encounters style for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons in our weekly newsletter. I thought it would be fun to expand on the encounter in its own post. The concept for the encounter is a small scouting party’s unsuccessful search and retrieval mission for a larger force to which they’re attached. Their orders are simple — scout and report back — but they take the opportunity for a little personal gain. The githyanki command doesn’t want their presence known until they are ready to strike so these scouts are in hot water if they can’t clean up their mess quick.
5E D&D Monster Spotlight — Chimera
The chimera is such a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster from mythology and has made an appearance in all of the editions of the game. In fifth edition D&D a chimera can be encountered in a few different environments — grasslands, hills, mountains and the Underdark. These are all straight out of the 5E D&D Monster Manual and I’d add the aerial environment as well. This gives us quite a few places we can drop an encounter in with a chimera. They enter gameplay during tier two with challenge rating 6. Chimera are quite formidable with a decent amount of hit points, a fly speed of 60 feet and three attacks per round, one of which can be replaced with its Breath Weapon. Let us not forget villains like to employ chimera as mounts. A single chimera would be a medium challenge for four 5th level characters. These nasty beasts average 53 points of damage on a single round when they use their Breath Weapon or 32 when they can’t. If this D&D monster is played up to its full hunter archetype this is significant damage potential.
Hairable Terrain — A Beardomantic Encounter for 5E D&D
For our April Patreon rewards we released Hairable Ideas, a follow up to last year’s Beardomancy. This proved one of our most popular products ever! Fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons players and Dungeon Masters alike enjoyed adding beardomancy magic to their campaigns and player wizards following this new Arcane Tradition. One of the players in Nerdarchist Ted’s D&D In A Castle 2019 campaign played a School of Beardomancy wizard as a matter of fact. So when April rolled around this year we knew we wanted to take another trip to the Beard Dimension and came up with lots of new spells and subclasses drawing on beardomantic energy. Of course there’s monsters and magic items too, but one of the snippets left on the cutting room floor was Hairable Terrain, an encounter based on the content and a play on our classic Terrible Terrain material. Since Hairable Ideas is now over at Nerdarchy the Store we thought it would be fun to include this encounter here on the website in a post. So let’s get into it.
D&D Ideas — Puzzles
Welcome once again to the weekly Nerdarchy Newsletter. This week we discuss puzzles in D&D. 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. In case you missed it the Pledge Manager is open and you can claim your Kickstarter rewards if you backed Out of the Box: Encounters for 5th Edition. Or you can pledge late if you missed it the first time around. Get the info here.
Free Kobold Encounter Takes Your D&D Adventure Out of the Box
A couple of months ago, Nerdarchy launched our very first Kickstarter — Out of the Box: Encounters for 5th Edition. The community support and encouragement blew us away! Everyone on the team is super proud of the campaign and even more excited to get the final product into the hands of the 4,057 backers who pledged $256,734 to help bring this project to life. Since the Kickstarter campaign ended, we’ve received a lot of requests for another chance to support Out of the Box and get a copy from those who missed the opportunity to back while it was live. But fear not! Through the Pledge Manager those folks will have a chance to preorder the content and existing backers can add on to their initial pledge. So in classic Nerdarchy fashion, we decided to create even more stuff and give it away for free to celebrate.
Art of the Encounter in Tabletop Roleplaying Games
One of the things we enjoy the most about tabletop roleplaying games is the collaboration taking place between Game Masters and players during a game. The emergent stories spun from game sessions, interaction between player characters with campaign settings and the way player agency impacts GM guidance and adventure direction is the juice! The art of the encounter in fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons or whatever game you’re playing has as much to do with how players connect with content as it does the content GMs create. A good GM presents engaging scenarios. A great GM works with players, guiding the group through creating the story of their characters. There’s a shared responsibility to making encounters better.
Out of the Box: Encounters for 5th Edition Lives!
The Nerdarchy crew has been hinting and teasing for a while, and working behind the scenes even longer, and now it is finally here — our very first Kickstarter! Out of the Box: Encounters for 5th Edition went live this morning, July 15, at 6 a.m. eastern. We could not be more ecstatic about how this project came together. The team working to bring the Out of the Box Kickstarter to life is incredible and we jam-packed as much as we could into the campaign. If you’re an experienced Game Master, you’ll find new twists and clever turns on classic monsters, traps, hazards and random encounters. Newer GMs will discover helpful insights to use these encounters to fill gaps in time or story. And players of all levels can use Out of the Box encounters to introduce new adventure hooks and add fantastic new concepts to campaign worlds.
Out of the Box D&D Encounters, Series 2, #50 – “The Sculptor”
Out of the Box introduction
There’s a song my wife and I hold dear that describes seeing someone differently all of a sudden despite seeing them a thousand times before. This sort of event is all too real. The moment of realization where the one viewing, reading, listening, or interacting with a person, place, song or book in a completely new and surprising way can be a huge flash of creativity. Have you heard a song in a completely new way because the context in which you heard it changed? It’s likely.
Out of the Box D&D Encounter, Series 2, #49 – “Sting of Life”
Out of the Box introduction
I have been remiss in one aspect. I have failed to reveal a villain that has played a role in some of the homebrewed creatures featured in the Out of the Box series. This villain has been mentioned in The Broker, and will be featured in re-writes of The Passenger, Smells Fishy and others. The reasoning for this is clear, and it’s something that happens at more than my table.
Out of the Box D&D Encounters, Series 2, #48 – “It’s Raining….Men?”
Out of the Box introduction
Terrain, planning and paranoia can play havoc with a Dungeon Master’s plans. Introducing an encounter becomes an adversarial game of justifying how an encounter could occur while any number of spells, class or racial abilities or magic items render surprise all but impossible. However, there’s always a way.
Out of the Box D&D Encounters, Series 2, #47 – “The Stray”
Out of the Box introduction
If there is one thing consistent with nearly every campaign I have played or Dungeon Mastered, at least one player will try to turn something (if not a lot of things) into either mounts or companions. There seems to be a little of “the collector” in all of us, but in these players the collection of creatures or things is king. It can be hard to either justify or facilitate such players, as their choices may be neither logical nor timely. Circumstance and choice often work against these players. Even worse, some groups always have the player who seeks to stir the pot and sabotages such efforts.
Out of the Box D&D Encounters, Series 2, #46 – “Your Deal”
Out of the Box introduction
Player characters have tool proficiencies they never use. That’s a fact. I cannot remember the last time any character used a gaming set at my table, either when I was a player or a Dungeon Master. Outside of bards, I cannot remember another character using a musical instrument. Therefore, let’s create a circumstance where at least the gaming set comes into play.
Out of the Box D&D Encounters, series 2, #45 “For Whom the Bell Tolls”
Out of the Box introduction
Different players have different playstyles. this can be a challenge for a Dungeon Master who might be attempting to engage conflicting styles of play at the same time. Failure to do so can lead to player disengagement and boredom. It’s always a risk and tends to be on the mind of many DMs. Therefore this encounter will combine two aspects of the roleplaying game experience. The intention behind this is to get all of the players cooperating in some degree.
Out of the Box D&D Encounters, Series 2, #44 – “Airquarium”
Out of the Box introduction
There are two occasions when a Dungeon Master might wish to make an encounter something other than an obvious combat encounter. The characters may be wounded or otherwise diminished to the point where combat is a lethal risk. Or, the party of adventurers may be so averse to combat as to wish to avoid such at any cost. The latter can be prevalent when running a game for younger players.
