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Film, TV and Video

Nerdarchy > Film, TV and Video (Page 37)

D&D Wizards and Their Words

We recently did a video about fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons called: D&D Wizard 5E — 3 Deadly Spells Verbal Components Only. In making that video we created a list from the wizard spell list of spells that only require only verbal spellcasting components. It occurred to me we haven’t put the list anywhere for the folks who might be interested the rest of the spells we came up with. It also occurred to me we’ve go the perfect place to put that list, with us having a website and all. D&D wizards have at least one spell at every level they can cast only using verbal spell components. This opens up a lot of possibilities. For instance in fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons a wizard could focus only on verbal spellcasting components.

D&D Wizards

D&D Ideas — Blood and Bone

Welcome once again to the weekly Nerdarchy newsletter. This week our topic is Blood and bone. Before we jump into it I want to apologize. For the last couple of weeks haven’t been able to run our Saturday Live Chat sessions. The Nerdarchy streaming laptop went down and failed its death saves. Fear not! We got it to the temple and had a team of clerics work on it. They were able to resurrect it. This past Saturday we were back at and talking about Critical Role’s The Legend of Vox Machina Kickstarter and what it means for our beloved hobby.

D&D villain hero

D&D Ideas — Villains

Welcome once again to the weekly Nerdarchy Newsletter. Sorry for the late newsletter. The Nerdarchy computer went down causing all kinds of issues. Luckily we were given a loaner to see us through. This week we will be talking about D&D villains. Before we jump into that I just want to let you know we launched two new series this week on the YouTube Channel. One is inspired by the Dungeons and Dragons Cartoon that we thought would be fun. The other comes from you, the viewer.s There were many requests for us to do the best character class for all the races after we picked the best race for class series. We started with D&D Dwarves — What is the best 5E Character Class.
D&D artificer Unearthed Arcana

D&D Ideas — Artificer

Welcome once again to the weekly Nerdarchy Newsletter. This week we’ve been inspired by the Unearthed Arcana release of the Artificer Revised. With that it was an easy topic for a weekly live chat this past Saturday as well as a great topic for the newsletter. But before we get into discussing artifice, the artificer, and it’s place in a D&D game, it’s Monday which means we had a video go up today- D&D Death From Real World Threats. You can watch it here.
D&D renown factions

D&D Ideas — Renown

Welcome once again to the weekly Nerdarchy Newsletter. This week we are going to dive into renown in Dungeons & Dragons. You can find rules for it in Chapter 1 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. You can find additional information in Chapter 2 of the Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica. Renown gets discussed right in the introduction of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist. These three sources alone will give a ton of information and suggestions on how to use renown specifically, which is great for running D&D and using renown in Forgotten Realms or the world of Ravnica. We will explore other options and ideas below from the Nerdarchy team. Remember — just because those are official D&D campaign settings doesn’t mean you can’t pull them apart and reassemble them for your homebrew D&D campaign.

necromancer Speak with Dead

Shades of Magic in 5E D&D — Necromancers and Necromancy

Ah, necromancy. The gift that keeps on giving, even beyond death. In fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons, the Arcane Tradition of Necromancy deals largely with animate dead and bringing other undead under your control. Nerdarchy’s longtime stance on bringing skeletons and zombies into the world remains rooted in the undead creatures’ evil nature, making this sort of magic straight up evil. But that’s Nerdarchists Dave and Ted. I’ve got my own opinions about necromancy, necromancers and their supernatural relationship to life and death. So I’m going to smudge the palette of black, gray and white necromancy for 5E D&D a bit and add a few more shades of magic.

D&D 5E downtime

D&D Ideas — Downtime

Welcome fellow Nerdarchist! It’s that time again for the three-headed beast that is Nerdarchy to lay down some gaming advice for Dungeons & Dragons via the weekly newsletter. Last week we experimented with something new and we’ll continue it. Both the live chat and the newsletter topic are the same. In this case we are talking about D&D downtime.
5E D&D druid magic cantrip

D&D Druid 5E — Best Race in Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons

Fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons has given several character classes a facelift. The druid among them. Two of the druid hallmark abilities are spellcasting and wildshape. The D&D druid 5E gets wildshape earlier than most of the editions of D&D if not all. My first 1E D&D character was a druid. You could say I am a bit fond of druids throughout all of the editions of D&D. You might be wondering what all of that has to do with the title of this article. I’ll get to that on the other side of our best race to play character classes druid video.

multiclassing

Is D&D 5e Multiclassing Just for Power Gamers

Multiclassing has been a part of D&D 5E since nearly the beginning of the game. For that matter so have power gamers and power gaming. In the earliest days of Dungeons & Dragons, multiclassing was strictly the purview of the demihuman races. Humans could only dual class and the other races had level caps. With third edition Dungeons & Dragons the role of multiclassing greatly changed. In fourth edition D&D the multiclassing rules took a bit of a turn. D&D 5E realigned the rules back to a system like 3.5 D&D. Now let’s discuss multiclassing, power gamers, and D&D 5E.

5e D&D

Path of the Justicar Barbarian Paladin D&D Character Build

Nerdarchy recently switched how we do our 5E D&D character builds. Currently we are on a kick of creating Adventurers League legal builds. We are enjoying the limitations and challenges of exploring these builds. One of our latest was a barbarian paladin multiclass build. One of the things I really like about these character builds is crafting the story to go with them. The background behind this specific build was Nerdarchist Ted is joining an upcoming 5E D&D stream. You’ll be able to catch it over on the Mini Terrain Domain Twitch Channel. We do a little retooling of the barbarian character class. They get changed from being primal savage warriors. I would still call them primal, but instead of drawing from nature they pull their power from the history and past of their people.

D&D Barbarian 5E — Path of the Frost Wyrm

Nerdarchy has teamed up with Pacesetter Games & Simulations as well as Vallejo Paints to put together something special in our opinion, but we might be a bit biased. For one, both companies are sponsoring this article, video, and contest. So, disclaimer out of the way if you care about such things. Inspired by the Frost Wyrm miniature by Pacesetters Games & Simulations we came up with the concept of the Frost Wyrm barbarian tribe. As well as a brand new D&D barbarian primal path for 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. For some extra inspiration we had our former intern Jake Kosman work his magic with Vallejo Paints.

Matt Colville

Strongholds and Followers from MCDM

Many of us look back at the old editions of Dungeons & Dragons with rose-colored glasses. Reminiscing about THAC0 and the uniqueness of the old races and classes. One thing I always liked though that slowly died out was strongholds as a level reward. This mostly died off after second edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. There was the Strongholds and Builders Guide in 3.5, but I found it more of a Dungeon Master supplement and players never gave it a glance. This goes back to something removed from D&D — politics. Old settings like Birthright, Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, and Ravenloft all had factions that lead to a lot of political intrigue and plots. Due to this it was not uncommon for people to be awarded baronies in these games and used as quest points themselves. As the editions changed, we would see the leadership feat come and go, and followers and cohorts fall to the wayside. Now from the brilliant mind of Matt Colville and the creative staff from MCDM they have returned these things to the light with the 5E D&D supplement Strongholds & Followers. For those of you unfamiliar with Matt Colville you can check out his Running the Game series over here. Let’s take a look at the book.

Become a Legend in a 5E D&D Spell Duelist Campaign

One of the most recent videos on the Nerdarchy YouTube channel is the Ultimate Spell Duelist 5E D&D character build. From the initial planning discussion all the way through the comments on the video, my imagination was firing on all cylinders. And based on the video comments, a lot of other people were too. Like all the recent 5E D&D character builds, we set out to create a character legal for Adventurers League play. This of course limits our character options, but that makes it a fun extra little challenge, plus it’s really rewarding to consider not just mechanical benefits but roleplaying opportunities for these characters as well. Outside of Adventurers League play is where this character really got our creative juices flowing, from chances for personal character moments and growth to campaign implications. So let’s get into it.

5E D&D plant creatures

Plant Creatures Are Cooler Than Zombies in 5E D&D

Nerdarchists Dave and Ted were back at it in the video below, coming up with ideas for replacing some commonly used 5E D&D monsters with alternatives. This series is one of my favorites. There’s so many awesome creatures in the D&D multiverse, from earliest sorts of threats like goblins and bandits all the way up to the eponymous dragons. All of them are fun for a Dungeon Master to deploy. But you can create some really memorable and unique experiences with the same sorts of encounters by simply swapping out the usual suspects. In the videos on the YouTube channel, they get into the ecologies and methods various creatures tend to employ before sharing their thoughts on other creatures that can fit the bill. In this case, they take a look at one of the all-time classic monsters — zombies — and give some ideas on achieving a similar feeling with a few different types of creatures.