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.
5 Reasons for Your D&D Adventurer to… Adventure?
Salutations, nerds! One of the big things that comes up a lot in terms of characterization is, “What reason could your character possibly have for wanting to risk their life in a dungeon?” And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. I give you five reasons a character might want to be an adventurer.
Roleplaying the Other: The Queer Experience
Hello, and welcome to Roleplaying the Other. In this column, I’m going to be largely focused on roleplaying, worldbuilding, and interactions at the table. They will be filtered through my own personal lens of queer experiences in the hobby. Firstly, I should define that when I say “queer,” I am referring to LGBT+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) experiences. This is a blanket term that encompasses asexuality and other distinct identities, as well. If you are not one of these letters of the acronym you may be asking yourself what you’re doing here. I’m glad you asked. I’m going to be sharing insights I’ve gained that can, hopefully, help anyone’s table run a better game. I am not a spokesperson for all identities and I’ll be reaching out to people within the community for their perspective from time to time.
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.
D&D Fighter — Best Race in 5E Dungeons & Dragons
Our Best D&D Races for the fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons classes seems to be a pretty popular series on our YouTube channel. This time we will delve into the D&D fighter. The fighter in 5E D&D is so much more interesting over the previous editions of Dungeons and Dragons. Because in 5E D&D a fighter can be built with either Dexterity or Strength as the primary ability score it makes for a lot options. Only the ranger is as flexible. Yes, I know other classes can be built using an alternate ability score but they usually are more interesting than optimized. But in the case of the ranger and fighter they loose any of their optimization.
We came up with 40 official D&D races optimized to play a fighter. That is a lot variety. When you factor in the seven different martial archetype subclasses to choose from you’ve got a lot of combinations.
Monstrous Humanoids in 5E D&D
Over the years Dungeons & Dragons has offered many different races for players to choose from. I know that some Dungeon Masters are very much against anything that does not look normal. Let’s forget the dragonborn and tielfing and play with humans, dwarves, elves, gnomes and halflings. With those races there are plenty of options even without all the subrace choices. But if you are like me you enjoy all the choices and you want to play the things that are bizarre and interesting. If you happen to look around this site you will see many different monstrous humanoids I statted out for 5E D&D and even made up some of my own, so feel free to poke around. I’ve had a fondness for monstrous humanoid races from the beginning of my roleplaying days. The Complete Book of Humanoids was always my favorite, with races like the wemic, the ogre mage and of course the dino people — saurials. I used this book over and over again playing second edition AD&D. And now Deck of Many has an free PDF designed for anyone who enjoys anthropomorphic characters for 5E D&D.
Melkor’s Advanced Guide to Wizardry: Archmages, spell lists, and you!
Let’s fix the archmage in 5E D&D, starting with the spell loadout. Greetings fellow nerds, nerdettes, and gamers! I am your humble host Kenneth Woody (aka Melkor the Mage), and today we’ll be discussing ways to fix a monster that a lot of 5E D&D worlds have — the archmage.
Absolute Best Race to Play for the Paladin 5E D&D Character Class
Nerdarchy set out to come up with the best races to play a paladin. We had to comb through all the current D&D books to find the answer to the question. The purpose of our discussion is to figure the optimal mechanical D&D race selection.
Disclaimer: Best is for the most part subjective. We are speaking purely from a mechanics stand point. Fun is a personal matter for each person to determine for themselves.
Below we’ve broken down our race selections based on different criteria. Those criteria are relevant ability score modifiers, racial traits, and thematic elements. In this case for the paladin we are looking at Charisma as the prime ability score, followed by strength. We also include a Charisma- and Dexterity-based build as well. Finally there is the concept of the unorthodox character build that doesn’t worry about ability score placement as heavily.
Finding Adventure or Letting Adventure Find You in D&D
One of the greatest things about being a D&D player these days is the opportunities to game with lots of different people. Whether it’s through Adventurers League, online games or the huge number of people out there excited or curious to try fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons to invite to the table at home, I’ve been fortunate to play way more D&D than ever before in my 30 years of gaming. It’s provided so many chances to improve as a Dungeon Master and as a player. And I’ve learned that running D&D benefits your time as a player and vice versa. You can learn a lot about what you enjoy as a player through being a DM, and carry what you learn as a DM to the other side of the screen, too.
5E D&D Magic Item Deep Dive — Stone of Good Luck
The stone of good luck, or luckstone, has been a staple good, yet persistently underrated, Dungeons & Dragons magic item since some of the earliest editions of the game. It retains this status in 5E D&D, as an (un)common item virtually any player would say is good, but which nonetheless gets overlooked compared to other items. In my experience, for the cost of one attunement slot, there are few items out there — even of higher rarity — that greatly surpass the luckstone for a wide variety of characters, though any given class or race has some specific items that beat it out.
Big Monsters Have More to Love for Exciting D&D Encounters
Part Dungeon Master creativity, part player buy-in, exciting D&D encounters with big monsters in fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons have a lot of moving parts to consider. Whether a low level party needs to deal with an awakened tree situation, or a group of characters at the pinnacle of their adventuring careers take on the tarrasque — or Tiamat herself — there’s more to consider than hit points and armor class. Adventuring ain’t easy, and anything from a pack of goblin bandits all the way up to Acererak itself are dangerous foes. But when huge and gangantuan sized D&D creatures squares off against the party, the threat escalates by orders of magnitude. A clever DM looks beyond the stat block, and collaborates with the players to create an immersive and memorable experience.
