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 Ideas — Villains
D&D Ideas — Artificer
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.
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 Ideas — Downtime
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.
D&D Ideas — Side Quests
Welcome to another edition of the Nerdarchy Newsletter. This week we are talking about side quests in D&D. Our last weekly live chat was also on side quests in D&D. We figured there was more to be said on the subject. Let’s get into it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Magic Through the Editions of Dungeons and Dragons
We recently did a video about 5E D&D spells and how they affect the game. There is a huge difference between D&D magic now and throughout the editions of Dungeons and Dragons. We were discussed different effects various 5E D&D spells have on editions of Dungeons & Dragons compared to earlier version of the game. One of the comments I saw over and over again was some version of “that’s just a bad Dungeon Master”.
I find it to be odd people think it’s a lazy DM issue, because a DM might want to challenge players with things that are negated by spells. Couldn’t the same be said about simply overcoming random encounters during watch? What about wanting to introduce survivalist elements to the game even if only for a short time.
Sure a DM could temporarily nerf 5E D&D magic in order to do this but that seems even worse to me. I don’t find either methods pleasing and think we’ve gotta look a little deeper into D&D spells and magic.