Kickstarter Korner for October 2018, Week 3

October 21, 2018

Editorial/ Kickstarter/ Roleplaying Games/ YouTube

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!

RPG Related Kickstarters

Protip: The Saturday Quests & Adventures live chat below was one near and dear to me. I’ve been playing and running Dungeons & Dragons for since the mid-80s. Like a lot of people, I’ve been a Dungeon Master for much of that time. Someone had to do it right? But before the internet and social media there weren’t many sources of advice, at least not like there are today. There’s were magazines like Dragon, Dungeon, and Polyhedron — which were all awesome — but 24/7 access to limitless avenues for advice and inspiration were not a thing.

When I got back into gaming after a lull of a few years, back in 2016, I discovered lots of wonderful YouTube channels like, you guessed it, Nerdarchy. Like the Nerdarchists, it hadn’t really occurred to me there was such a vibrant online community of D&D players out there. Now here I am a couple of short years later the nerditor-in-chief of one!

All that is a preface to my thoughts on the topic of the live chat, which focused on improv DM tips. More often than not in all of my gaming history, I would run published adventures. I still do these days, except I’ve found the great joy of using them more for a framework and reference. From there I just employ the improv DM tips I’ve learned to make them my own.

One of my favorite tips, which forms the core of how I prep and run adventures, was something mentioned only off-handedly in one of Nerdarchy’s videos and that’s the 5 W’s. The concept really resonated with me and it’s the first step I take every time, even with published adventures. At a bare minimum, if I know who, what, where, when and why the adventure comes together, it becomes a lot easier to improvise whatever else happens at the gaming table.

Here’s a few examples from my own games.

In Grungle in the Jungle, I took a bunch of the different grung and gave each one an iconic character class ability, and the players all played grung out to recover eggs stolen by the lizardfolk. It was absolutely nuts!

Ingest Quest Episode 1

Who: A Guy Fieri analog
What: Hosts a cooking competition
Where: On Neros IV
When: Right before an interspherical spelljammer race
Why: Because there’s festival

Grungle in the Jungle

Who: Lizardfolk
What: Take over an ancient temple
Where: In the jungle close to grung territory
When: A few weeks ago
Why: To expand their territory

Derelict my Eyestalks

Who: Chazzeldazzel the beholder
What: Has intel on the location ofa derelict vessel
Where: In the Skyllian Verge
When: Now, before anyone else can get there first
Why: To find information on mysterious Void threat

As adventures develop and players steer the ship towards discovering the story of their characters, I find this technique is super helpful to me to keep in mind whatever my initial idea was. With these 5 W’s answered I can grab a map, encounter, or adventure from any of my favorite sources like Book of Lairs or the Prepared series from Kobold Press, one of the areas from Out of the Abyss, a dungeon map I find on Pinterest or nothing at all beyond my imagination and manage to keep things moving along. It’s a great shorthand for finding my way back to the thrust of an adventure.

There’s lots of other great improv DM tips here on the site and the Nerdarchy YouTube channel, but I want to hear yours! A lot of people in the live chat shared awesome ideas too, so you can follow along in the video below and add your own improv DM tips in the comments of this post. I can never get too many tips to try out in my own games!

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