Keep Your Campaign on Track: Sidestepping Your D&D Adventure
Every RPG Game Master has been there. You’ve been hard at work preparing the next leg of your campaign, complete with great NPCs, memorable combats and lots of different possibilities depending on how your players choose to progress. You’re super excited to get into it, but your players just… don’t. There are a million ways this could happen, so I’ll begin by sharing something which happened in my Dungeons & Dragons game recently.
Kickstarter Korner for April 2018, Week 1
Each week during the Quests & Adventures live chat, Saturday at 2 p.m. eastern, Nerdarchists Dave and Ted and Nate the Nerdarch hang out live with fans from the Nerdarchy YouTube channel. It’s a chance to share announcements and news, answer questions from the live chat...
D&D Action: Pillars of the DM Craft, Part 1
This article is meant as a continuation of my introductory piece on the three Pillars of the RPG Craft: action, adventure, and association. In that article, I established what I meant by each of those components and how they related to each other. As a quick summary, action deals with conflict, adventure fills the gap between action, and association is interaction by the PCs with the world that cycles back around to create more action. All of these components form the backbone of narrative development in a tabletop RPG, in my humble opinion.
Growing the D&D Community with Clinical Roll’s Dr. Megan Connell
Hello! Nerditor Doug here to introduce a very special guest poster here on our website. Dr. Megan A. Connell, Psy.D, ABPP is a licensed psychologist who seeks to empower the people she works with, viewing therapy as a short term method while she focuses on specific treatment goals. Dr. Connell enjoys working with teens, adults and veterans in her specialty areas of procrastination, motivation, anxiety, adjustment issues, relationship problems, anger, trauma, assertiveness training and depression.
New from Paizo: StarFinder Pact Worlds!
It’s out of this world!
With Starfinder gaining as much popularity as their fantasy brother Pathfinder, Paizo has broadened your horizons. Released March 28, Paizo brings Pact Worlds to the vast reaches of outer space. This gazetteer will bring you 14 new realms, new alien species, new star ships to explore vast expanses as well as critters you may have wished you left in the airlock. Don’t worry, that’s not all. There’s new archetypes, NPCs for the Game Master, weapons, armor, techno-baubles, monsters and some interstellar cover art from Remko Troost. It’s on sale now in the Paizo store for $9.99 for the PDF. You can also get a copy on Amazon. Time to reach for the stars folks, there just became a whole lot more of them.
The Psychology of a Likable RPG Character Part 1: Fun
Somewhere on YouTube there is a self-help series where this guy goes through and talks about the four emotions you have to hit to make strangers like you. Unfortunately, I watched it at some point last year and have cleared my cookies and browser history many, many times since then and am unable to find the video in question, so let me open this with a bit of a disclaimer; these ideas are not mine. I would love to link that video here. If you happen to know what it was or who it was, please leave a comment so I can go back and properly credit him. (And then our wonderful Nerditor Doug found it for me, so if you want to check this guy out he’s over here and makes a lot of Game of Thrones references.)
Pathfinder Second Edition Preorders Are LIVE!
Pathfinder Second Edition preorders are live!
Less than a day off huge news from Paizo and their new weekly Twitch show, they give us the heads up once again! As of March 27, Paizo playtest sets are officially available for preorder. Everything you need to explore and get a leg up on the cool swag that is Pathfinder Second Editino is available from now until May 1.
Paizo TV Goes Live with a New Pathfinder Show
Breaking news!
Paizo announced in a press release on March 26 the start of a weekly live stream Fridays at 4 p.m. Pacific on their Twitch channel beginning March 30. The live stream will help answer fans’ Pathfinder Second Edition questions and provide news and entertainment based around both Pathfinder and Starfinder. Paizo has been cranking out the blog posts over at the playtest site, providing sneak peeks at leveling and different class features. The team has also been globetrotting to different conventions to showcase the playtests and get people involved.
RPG Immersion through Audio Aids
“Immersion” feels like a worn out word in the modern sphere of nerd culture. Video games belabor it as a tagline as often as they use “visceral” to describe combat or “realistic” to describe environments or “Dark Souls-like” to describe difficulty. We’re beset on all sides by virtual reality headsets claiming to be as immersive as real life, story-oriented video games touting their immersive open world experiences, and all manner of other advertising exploits of the word.
Spoiler Alert! D&D Beyond Ingest Quest Campaign Management Tips
Following on the heels of Ingest Quest episode 1, the live stream fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons Spelljammer game, I shared some tips on managing and running a campaign using the D&D Beyond tools for keeping all your adventure information in one convenient place along with tooltip creation for easy reference to monsters, magic items, conditions and more. As the campaign continues, the public and private notes grow right alongside the characters and story. This presents a challenge for quickly finding what I need during play. Fortunately, there’s an easy solution.
Help Save the Tarrasque: Gifted Vision Behemoth Mini Needs You
Hello gamers and fans of wonderful minis. Nerdarchist Ted here calling on you not only out of selfish greed to get the Gifted Vision Behemoth mini that I backed on Kickstarter but to help out an awesome company that makes cool miniatures. There is a bit of backstory here that I will try to explain as best as I can without being any more than a backer.
Kickstarter Korner for March 2018, Week 4
Each week during the Quests & Adventures live chat, Saturday at 2 p.m. eastern, Nerdarchists Dave and Ted and Nate the Nerdarch hang out live with fans from the Nerdarchy YouTube channel. It’s a chance to share announcements and news, answer questions from the live chat and generally just hang out and talk nerdy with the Nerdarchy community.
Why Do We Play? RPG Game Master and Player Differences Explored
In a recent video from Nerdarchists Dave and Ted, they explored the question of why we Game Master. It’s a fantastic video if you haven’t checked it out yet, and it gave me a lot to think about for my own motivations. In this article I’d like to explore a topic that runs parallel to theirs but at a higher level of generality: why the differences in motivations between being a GM and being a player leads to most conflicts at the table.
Worldbuilding: Where to Begin with a Homebrew Campaign Setting
You’ve been playing roleplaying games for a bit now. It might be Pathfinder, Dungeons & Dragons, Savage Worlds, or untold countless possibilities. The problem is you don’t like the setting. It almost fits the image in your mind but not quite. You’ve looked around, found some old campaign setting material at secondhand stores or eBay but no luck. So, what do you do? How do you make the world you want too? Don’t worry — Nerdarchy is here to help. Over the past month or so you’ll have seen some changes in the Nerdarchy landscape. We have Nate the Nerdarch and Kienata running the Nerdarchy After Dark late-night build sessions. We’ve posted some articles for items like World Anvil and Realm Works to help you organize things. However, none of these really give a starting point. Why not fix that now? Let’s look at how to start.
Kickstarter Korner for March 2018, Week 3
Each week during the Quests & Adventures live chat, Saturday at 2 p.m. eastern, Nerdarchists Dave and Ted and Nate the Nerdarch hang out live with fans from the Nerdarchy YouTube channel. It’s a chance to share announcements and news, answer questions from the live chat and generally just hang out and talk nerdy with the Nerdarchy community.
In the description of each weekly video, Nerdarchist Ted compiles a list and links to all the videos and website content from the week. But he also shares a selection of cool Kickstarter campaigns. As an avid Kickstarter supporter, he’s happy to share his favorite RPG and gaming-related Kickstarters with you, the Nerdarchy community. Enjoy!
