Portraying History as Cultural Point of View in Collaborative Storytelling
Salutations, nerds. Today we’re going to be talking about cultural point of view and the way history is recorded. Particularly, we’re going to be talking about how that applies to your gaming setting and the things you present to your players in games like fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons or whatever your favorite game happens to be. One of my absolute things in games is the effect you get where you know “x” happened, but everyone who was around to talk about it after believes it happened differently.
Dungeons & Dragons Takes Manhattan
I went on a fantastical adventure in Manhattan in New York City. The Cauldron is a magical gastropub experience located on 47 Stone St., New York City. It’s a pub catering to the nerdier elements of the city. One of the first sights to greet me as I entered the establishment was two young ladies playing Operation. That’s right, the game with a red-nosed guy who lights up and buzzes annoyingly when you fail to remove a piece from him without touching the sides. The Cauldron’s aesthetic is that of a magical tavern as I made my way deeper in to see a 15 foot tree in the center of the bar. This is no ordinary tree — it has beer taps coming out of it. Magical wands activate the taps so patrons of this magical place can dispense their own ale. A true beauty to behold.
As cool as the surroundings are, I wasn’t on a sightseeing trip or even visiting to participate in the potion classes they hold. Oh, no, I came for the Dungeons & Dragons. Along with sharing my experience below including a photo gallery, you can watch the first episode of Cantrips & Casters I attended live in Manhattan.
D&D Ideas — Fast and Dirty Monsters
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The Pledge Manager is live. You can select your tiers, add-ons, or even late pledge. If you somehow missed the Out of the Box: Encounters for 5th Edition Kickstarter you can still get in on it. Check out the Pledge Manager here.
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Next up, the release of the Nerdarchy the Convention trailer is out there in the wilds as well. Check it out here.
Free Kobold Encounter Takes Your D&D Adventure Out of the Box
A couple of months ago, Nerdarchy launched our very first Kickstarter — Out of the Box: Encounters for 5th Edition. The community support and encouragement blew us away! Everyone on the team is super proud of the campaign and even more excited to get the final product into the hands of the 4,057 backers who pledged $256,734 to help bring this project to life. Since the Kickstarter campaign ended, we’ve received a lot of requests for another chance to support Out of the Box and get a copy from those who missed the opportunity to back while it was live. But fear not! Through the Pledge Manager those folks will have a chance to preorder the content and existing backers can add on to their initial pledge. So in classic Nerdarchy fashion, we decided to create even more stuff and give it away for free to celebrate.
(Re)Discover Monsters with Meaning Inside Tome of Beasts Pocket Edition
Everything old is new again! Kobold Press is set to release Tome of Beasts Pocket Edition on Oct. 29 according to Amazon (where you can preorder here) and I recently received an advance copy. I’ve long considered Tome of Beasts to be an integral part of my fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons experience. It’s been a minute since flipping through the pages, and getting the pocket edition was a great opportunity to remind myself why I dig the book so much. If I’m honest I’d never read the introduction so starting there was in order.
Art of the Encounter in Tabletop Roleplaying Games
One of the things we enjoy the most about tabletop roleplaying games is the collaboration taking place between Game Masters and players during a game. The emergent stories spun from game sessions, interaction between player characters with campaign settings and the way player agency impacts GM guidance and adventure direction is the juice! The art of the encounter in fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons or whatever game you’re playing has as much to do with how players connect with content as it does the content GMs create. A good GM presents engaging scenarios. A great GM works with players, guiding the group through creating the story of their characters. There’s a shared responsibility to making encounters better.
Alchemical Items in Deep Magic: Alkemancy by Kobold Press
I was provided a free copy of Deep Magic: Alkemancy by Kobold Press, and for the past few weeks I’ve been reviewing it. If you haven’t seen my previous articles, please check those out first, then come back to this. Today, we’re embracing RPG materialism and talking all about items!
Keep Mordenkainen Busy Keeping Track of Your DM’s Guild Content
Did you know over 4,000 new products stock the Dungeon Master’s Guild digital marketplace from 2019 alone? I read this on Twitter so you know it’s legit. Best-selling DM’s Guild author and cowriter of Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus M.T. Black shared the tidbit the other day and it really got me thinking. When I was a young Dungeons & Dragons nerd, I’d haunt the single column of bookshelves at Waldenbooks, perusing the games and modules there. They numbered in the double digits at best. It’s a great time to be a D&D player and creator. The DM’s Guild offers a marketplace to share your creations with the world, and we’ve got many thousands of products to enhance our games to choose from — including many of those old classics I browsed back in the day. Here’s a small sample of some of the DM’s Guild products that crossed my desk this past week.
Real World Adventure Hooks for D&D — How Do You Like Them Apples?
Players of fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons and other roleplaying games seem to always have at least a sliver of brain power devoted to thinking about the games we love. Art can inspire a character we play or the setting for an encounter. Dramatic relationships and interactions can inspire campaign plots and NPC motivations. And the world we see all around us can add clever details and verisimilitude to our settings. A recent tweet from Grand DM caught my eye and this installment of Real World Adventure Hooks for D&D comes directly from the image they shared.
Weigh Anchor for A Complete Guide to Nautical Campaigns
Vehicles and the sorts of exotic adventures featuring them are a big draw for tabletop roleplaying game campaigns. Nerdarchy friend and host of How to be a Great Game Master Guy Sclanders is no stranger to running epic campaigns on the high seas, in the skies or across the blasted landscape of Avernus, and he’s sharing that expertise with A Complete Guide to Nautical Campaigns. The Kickstarter is currently live and by the looks of it by the time I’m done writing this post it will more than likely be funded. Check it out here and navigate your way to the pledge level that works best for you.
NPC Relationships and Reputation in D&D Factions
Salutations, nerds! Today we’re going to be talking about fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons NPC relationships and reputation in D&D, something some player characters are very good at and others…not so much. Some PCs take the attitude that NPCs are basically just Popsicle sticks with faces painted on them who are supposed to vend gold because they were charming enough. Your job as the Dungeon Master is to make those NPCs feel like real people, and sometimes real people aren’t going to pay you more no matter how well you rolled because they just don’t have it.
Ravage — Dungeons of Plunder is an Adventure Board Game for Treasure and Teef!
Are you looking for a new board game? Do you like board games with great options like competitive and cooperative, as well as solo play? Is repeat play value through variable quests important to you? And No. 1: do you want to play with a tribe of orcs? If you answered yes to all of these questions, or even some of them, then I have a game for you! Ravage — Dungeons of Plunder is a dungeon delving board game where you play orcs, with three modes of play.
D&D Ideas — Using Art
Treasures Await! Adventurers: Choose Your Own Reward
Longtime visitors here to Nerdarchy the Website may remember the very first Out of the Box encounter posted right here about three and a half years ago. Mike Gould, the writer, remains an invaluable resource for the Nerdarchy community and we were so excited to launch our very first Kickstarter with Mike’s work in the spotlight. We set out to make a hardcover book of our own, and because of the support and encouragement from the RPG community we do so much more. We met all our stretch goals, including several that evolved because of the Kickstarter’s remarkable fundraising. And now the Out of the Box Pledge Manager is live, so backers can complete their surveys and anyone who missed the Kickstarter can make late pledges. This is a perfect opportunity to get your copy of the Out of the Box book, our entire digital library and more at special pricing — not to mention badges for Nerdarchy the Convention in 2020.
Shelter Divine Domain — Cleric Subclass for 5th Edition
The Mis-Adventurers: An (Almost) Epic Tale is a new adult comedic fantasy adventure novel that hits a lot of the beats of a D&D campaign and the lovely disasters that can ensue. As the author, I very consciously designed the story this way, because some of the best stories I’ve ever experienced have been around the game table.
A large part of what makes D&D work so well as a storytelling avenue is its codified rules. These define things like how magic works, what weapons can do, and even resolving complex maneuvers. As an author trying to capture the proverbial magic of a tabletop roleplaying game story, I knew I’d have to codify many of the book’s events in terms of game mechanics. As such, I devised a unique new D&D subclass for each character.
