TTRPGs

What makes a good Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition official release or 5e-Compatible supplement?

June 21, 2022 by krisis

I thrill at checking out every new bit of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition material, whether that’s official releases, 3rd party D&D resources, or 5e-Compatible material. And, in 2022, there is a lot of 5e material!

Wizards of the Coast has been ramping up their official release schedule, it feels like there is an infinite selection on DMsGuild, plus massive new projects appear every week on Kickstarter. Given the pandemic-era surge in D&D’s popularity, plus its mainstreaming via Stranger Things and live play shows like Critical Role, I don’t think the tempo of releases will be letting up any time soon.

With so much 5e material to choose from… how exactly do you choose? Almost every player will start with either a Player’s Handbook or a Dungeon Master’s Guide, what should be your next purchase?

I think it’s important to understand what you’re looking for out of a supplement. Otherwise, it all looks equally attractive and you wind up buying more books than you could ever reasonably play through.

Even I, notable obsessive collector of stuff, know not to pick up certain materials with additions that will never make it to my virtual tabletop.

When it comes to choosing the right materials for you, I’d say that vast majority of official D&D, 3rd party D&D, and 5e-Compatible materials offer content that falls into one or more of nine possible categories. I’ve ordered them from the most-expansive to the most-granular, in terms of what they add to the game. =

Keep reading to understand what I mean by everything on the list! And, for each category, I cover the best official books and some of my favorite 3rd Party releases! [Read more…] about What makes a good Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition official release or 5e-Compatible supplement?

It’s time to DIE – pre-order the deluxe hardcover AND the role-playing game!

June 7, 2022 by krisis

DIE is a brilliant comic book about role-playing from Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans, and Clayton Cowles.

DIE is also a brilliant storytelling role-playing game (RPG) from Kieron Gillen and Rowan, Rook and Decard.

This takes some explaining.

The thing you need to know right now is that if you want a deluxe physical copy of the RPG you have only three more days to Kickstart it, and if you want a deluxe physical copy of the entire comic run you can pre-order it right now (including pre-ordering from your local comic shop – yes, it’s already time to pre-order November hardcovers).

Okay, now on to the explaining!

DIE is one of the most-fascinating indie comic books of the past few years, both in concept and execution. The comic has already come and gone – it ran for 20 self-contained issues from December 2018 to September 2021 in four tight 5-issue arcs with no fluff.

(Mild first-issue spoilers lie ahead.)

The story started something like Stranger Things: 25th Anniversary Reunion.

A group of friends used to play role-playing games together in high school, but it ended with their sudden, inexplicable disappearance – and just-as-sudden reappearance years later, minus one member of their party and with a bevy of physical and psychological scars.

Where were they? They’ve never uttered a word about it to each other or anyone else and went on with their lives. Some of them were successful, some started families, while others could never shake their trauma and subsequent guilt.

On the anniversary of their disappearance they receive an unsettling reminder of their shared experience and they cannot help but be sucked back into something they know is much more serious and deadly than any game.

There are plenty of “real world people are transported into fantasy” stories out there, but DIE had a special, undeniable magic to it.

Central to that were the real world characters – five wounded adults, some of whom had spent their lives trying to be completely different than their game characters while others chased after becoming more like their fictional selves. They each had relatable stories about loss, addiction, identity, and disability, and those themes were amplified by the fantastical world around them.

As the story progressed, it became clear that this was a fantasy story with a very specific structure. In fact, the structure was so well-formed we could refer to it as a set of rules.

That’s because Kieron Gillen, in all of his wild genius, not only scripted a 20-issue comic story, but also the complete ruleset of the role-playing game the characters were playing in the story. [Read more…] about It’s time to DIE – pre-order the deluxe hardcover AND the role-playing game!

My Dungeons and Dragons Lifeline

June 3, 2022 by krisis

Gather round, folks, because I bring you a tale that begins on the very precipice of the pandemic, extends through a year of extreme burnout, and involves a fantastical land full of dragons, dungeons, and indecisive half-elves.

Picture it: February 2020, AKA the last normal month on Earth. We were all reading COVID-19 articles with a sense of bemusement that grew into dread as they crept from the international news section forward to the front page, but most of our lives hadn’t been changed by it at all.

Three big things happened in my life in February 2020. First, I started what seemed like it was my dream job (spoilers: it was not).

Second, I started playing D&D remotely with my college friends back on the East Coast.

And, third, we were almost deported!

Of these three events, it seemed like starting the D&D campaign with friends would prove to be the least significant. It was the 18th anniversary of when we assembled to play together in college. That campaign ran for just a few months, but it gained an appropriately mythical status in our collective hindsight. When our beloved friend Dante passed away in 2014 we reformed for a one-off night, but none of us ever expected to play together again – certainly not with me halfway around the world!

During a catch-up with Lindsay about my new gig, she mentioned that some of the old gang would be assembling physically for a new campaign. We joked about how funny it would be to have me projected on a screen playing remotely – imagine that! But, the more we joked about it, the more the idea took hold. After making arrangements with our longtime DM, I appeared in that first session live from New Zealand!

I cleared off a desk in our spare bedroom, still packed with boxes from our recent move, and pointed it out the window so I could enjoy the sunny day while I played with friends who were up past midnight back in the US. It was ridiculous fun. We had forgotten all the rules and were all playing newly-invented characters and classes we had never played before. I inadvertently vaporized an entire alleyway of assailants with my first Thunderwave. Even though the session was meant to be a one-off, we agreed to reconvene two weeks later.

Two days later, the New Zealand government informed us we were 40 days away from deportation.

(This is too big a story to explain in full here, but in short: The NZ government told us repeatedly in writing that we absolutely should not renew our visas while we waited on a decision on our residency application. When we (as a pair assiduous rule-followers) did not renew our visas while waiting on said decision, the Ministry promptly informed us that our visas had expired, we were in the country illegally, we had to quit our jobs, and we should make plans to depart immediately.)

The weeks that followed our deportation notice were one of the most stressful periods I’ve experienced in my entire life. We lived every day wondering if we should put our newly-moved-into household into storage and look for a place to stay back in the states even as a global pandemic began unfolding. It was one of the many times in our lives as recent immigrants when we realized how powerless we were and how arbitrary the rules of borders and residency are in every country around the world.

Truly, I don’t know if I would’ve had the emotional fortitude to survive our tense process of getting emergency visas without the fresh connection with my best friends from the states and the knowledge that I’d see them all again in two weeks. We played that second session with all of us remote from each other as the early days of the pandemic reached into all of our cities. I certainly had a thrilling story to share in our “what’s been going on with you in the past two weeks!”

Then, between our second and third session, New Zealand began its first two-month COVID lockdown. That meant no leaving the house, other than for groceries, gas, banking, medical care, or a short walk around the neighborhood.

Even if the states wasn’t in an official lockdown, all of my party members were similarly shut in their houses. It was the perfect opportunity for us to set a regular date to play – none of us were going anywhere! Each session before playing we would catch up, sharing our stories of hunting for scarce groceries or finding the perfect pattern for sewing masks.

As our initial campaign drew to a close, I asked if I could take a turn at being Dungeon Master for a session or two while our regular DM prepped his next adventure. I had always been fascinated by DM-ing as a mash-up of carefully planned math and improvisational storytelling, but I never had the guts to try to convince people to play with me as a first-time DM. [Read more…] about My Dungeons and Dragons Lifeline