Tag: Dungeons and Dragons

  • Lore 24: Mijdaf, the paddler

    Lore 24: Mijdaf, the paddler

    One of the great parts of Dungeons & Dragons is the impromptu nature of it all. When you’re at the table, especially for a homebrew campaign, things just happen. The participants riff off of each other and a story is created that shouldn’t exist and can never exist again. It is a moment in time. Mijdaf was born in one such moment recently.

    Mijdaf, the paddler

    Mijdaf is an NPC in the current campaign. He started because the group needed transportation up the river from their neighborhood to one on the very edges of urbanity.

    Me: There’s a barge pulled along the ropes on the side of the river.

    The PCs: That seems slow.

    Me: There’s also a paddleboat operated by a goliath.

    The PCs: We take that.

    That’s how a desert goliath living in the largest city of the region started to grow into relevance in the game. But at this point he’s just a ferryman in a boat. Sure, he’s huge and can paddle upriver faster than those humans can pull themselves, but he’s not yet unique.

    PCs: What kind of birds does he have?

    Me: Four seagulls that mostly rest on a branching perch above his head. He asks where your companions are.

    PCs: We’re trying to get a new one for Lauray. Do you know a good breeder?

    As Mijdaf I talk about two options and why he has one that he prefers. It’s one that doesn’t recognize the current government. Mijdaf starts talking about the history of the region that connects to an artisan that they’d met in the previous session.

    They riff off of this, pulling more information from the goliath. It’s interactive at this point. They roll very well. I start playing into Mijdaf being willing to talk, constantly. Soon the PCs figure out that the reason that Mijdaf was available is because no locals will ride in his boat.

    He’s not just a talker — he’s a conspiracy theorist.

    Mijdaf pulls out a slate with tangential connections between various politicians, professors and military leaders. He keeps going.

    At the table this was great. The players with me that day were smiling, nodding and laughing. The total scene may have been 10 minutes. There were some social dice rolls and a lot of me as the DM picking up on table clues to see what the group was enjoying and emphasizing that.

    And then Mijdaf reached the destination, dropping them off. He and they never expected to see each other again.

    A day later in game time the group needs to get back from the nearly rural neighborhood to their home base deep in the port city. They recognize a paddleboat, but don’t see Mijdaf. They steal the boat.

    That’s how Mijdaf, the paddler, went from a simple single scene NPC into a character with purpose, gaming joy, and just possibly a problem for the future.

  • Lore 24: School of Herbimancy

    Lore 24: School of Herbimancy

    Within the World of the Everflow magic is relatively new, well besides the Everflow’s healing power and ability to flow in two directions and the powerful bond between beast and Kin. In the current Proctors of Song and Book magic returned ~27 years ago. First that was via the Born Generation when over a period of a year every child of Kin came of age knowing a single cantrip. About 7 years ago the Lorebook of Divination was found and over the following years, magic started to spread with the realization that there were 17 or so Lorebooks scattered across the lands.

    The current campaign takes place in Sas Rurulit, where the Proctors are attempting to collect two Lorebooks. But the ingenious groups that control the Lorebooks down in this land broke them up. The Lorebook of the Book are people who cast directly from books and scrolls.

    These peoples are manifesting magic at various colleges. The college of metallurgy used every fire and electricity spell to forge metals. The college of hydrology was water and air spells, with a bit of illusion. The Proctors (PCs) have essentially destroyed these two schools ability to function by either capturing or damaging the master books there.

    In the last session they visited a public park that is also the School of Herbimancy.

    Photo by Chris F on Pexels.com

    School of Herbimancy

    Unlike traditional D&D approaches to herbs, the School of Herbimancy isn’t about ingesting herbs in some fashion to gain magical effects. Instead, the plants themselves are the magic.

    For example, the paths in the park were softly lit at night via the glowing flowers of a particular plant (a version of Dancing Lights). Maybe the smell of burning needles from a deciduous tree heals (Healing Spirit). Fallen branches from a tree are a magical staff (Shillelagh). Within Sas Rurulit, this school’s magic is artifice meets druid — the plants are simultaneously technology and magical.

    The group failed a series of checks, one with a natural 1, so they don’t know the professor in charge of the school. Instead, they got the name of the banker financing the project. A way to turn a nat 1 into a meaningful failure!

    They also didn’t quite figure out that the seed room may be the equal of a scroll room or library at the other schools they’ve raided (some read this site and it would be a natural conclusion for the characters to reach after fleeing the fires they set to cover their raid).

    I’m doing Lore 24, an attempt to write small lore elements daily in the year 2024. Each element will be something that’s come up in play or will come up in play within my homebrew World of the Everflow — there will be actionable threads for PCs to grab onto and advance the story.

  • My Best Writing of 2023

    My Best Writing of 2023

    Every year I publish a look back at my favorite writing, podcast and video appearances for the year. This helps me remember what I’ve done, re-up things to people who discovered me late in the year and when attempting to freelance it gives me a handy spot to find work to share with editors and other hiring managers.

    Dungeons & Dragons

    The most popular story in the history of Full Moon Storytelling is no longer about sports. My essay on how to use third places to amplify verisimilitude surpassed the sports and cultures essay and then lapped it, twice in just a year. This helped boost Full Moon Storytelling to have 74% more views than last year. Alos, in 2023 FMS had more total views and visitors than the total of either from its founding in 2014 to 2022. Federating via WordPress helped contribute to that growth as well.

    D&D: Honor Among Thieves had an interesting release to judge as a success or not. Opening week was fine, but not great. The falloff was significant, and yet there are many reasons to think that there will be a sequel. It was a massive success when it came to marketing D&D and is one of the most streamed movies of 2023. My fascination with the mainstreaming of the hobby by Hollywood is one of my favorite writings.

    I’m probably not going to do a full post on Honor Among Thieves overall streaming success. Here’s the end of year data from Flixpatrol;

    • Ended the year as the 8th most popular movie to purchase on Google, Rakuten and Amazon.
    • It spent 246 days in Google’s top 10 most purchased movies & shows again globally. That’s basically every day it was available.
    • On Paramount+, its primary streaming platform, it spent 228 days in the top 10 globally good for 9th overall. It spent the last weekend of 2023 in 6th worldwide and 4th in the USA on P+
    • On iTunes it finished 12th, with 224 days in the top 10.
    • In most Asia it was streamed on HBO Max. It spent 83 days in the top 10 globally for HBO movies, despite only being available in limited markets.
    • In much of Latin America it was on Star+. It finished 11th among movies on that platform, spending 46 days in the top 10.

    Backgrounds continue to be my specialty. The most popular released this year was the Weaver, working its way into the top 5 all time.

    You can find five of my backgrounds, converted to A5e, in Worlds to Go! The Elysians, my first ever Kickstarter. There’s also Sports in D&D rules in that book.

    During a vacation I saw roads with funky names and decided they can inspire D&D and other fantasy settings. You too can find inspiration in normal places.

    Why do I keep a d20 in my pocket? Because it gives me a sense of belonging.

    I sponsored two soccer teams. Our Flag Means Offside FC and What We Do On The Sidelines FC had opposite records on the field, but they’re both #1 in my heart. I’m already sponsored a spring 2024 team. I can’t wait to see the new jersey.

    Sounders and other soccer

    Back in 2008 I founded Sounder at Heart. In 2019 I left to work for Tacoma Defiance and Reign FC, rejoining SaH in late 2020. This year the current Managing Editor, Jeremiah Oshan took the site independent. As part of that effort I now write the twice-weekly newsletter now called the Ship’s Log.

    The most popular of those was a Reign themed newsletter on network effects and the sum of a team being greater than the individual pieces.

    I also help maintain the Depth Chart and cover Defiance.

    Risk Intelligence

    For Factal I also help with a newsletter — Benchmarker. Similar to the SaH newsletter, the open rates are climbing, click-through rates are climbing and distribution is growing. Mostly, my job there is to help people within Global Security, Business Continuity, Resilience and Crisis find our free resources (and then our paid service). The work we do there helps keep people alive and business operating. You can read more about that in our annual recap.

    People outside of security and continuity fields will enjoy things I don’t do — the Factal Forecast and The Debrief. The Forecast is our editors’ look at the planned news of the next week. The Debrief dives deep into an issue that isn’t on the front page of US media, but needs attention.

  • Tasting the official D&D coffee: Dragonfire Roast

    Tasting the official D&D coffee: Dragonfire Roast

    Licensing incongruent products is hard. We’ve all seen poor attempts at Big Screen Movie + Pancake House, or French Fries and that other Big Movie Franchise. Getting the proper fit for tie-ins is art and science.

    Dungeons and Dragons attempted bologna in the 80s and these days the lifestyle brand has a $70 two-slice toaster. Those don’t work. Their t-shirts have been great — I strongly recommend the Harper Motto shirt.

    Merging coffee and a brand is also difficult. I’ve been part of this with a major morning show and a coffee brand in the past, that was a fairly natural fit. Gamers of all types and caffeine tends to be a good fit too. Mt Dew and various energy drinks have partnered with numerous video games over the decades.

    D&D’s official coffee does a couple things really well. There’s also a major miss.

    Dungeon's & Dragons Dragonfire Roast bag with the zip-pull opened. The art shows a red dragon breathing fire on a solitary fighter with a shield. The bag is black. In the background are two cafe art pieces.

    The art and branding continuity is perfect. This coffee looks to be a perfect extension of official Dungeons & Dragons and presented by Wizards of the Coast. Easy access to the art is a big reason for that.

    But there are plenty of these kinds of partnerships that get the art and branding wrong, despite the easy legal and marketing access.

    The bag’s language is very 5e D&D in writing style. The ampersand is all over the sidewalls of the bag. That central art piece is tremendous — matching the aesthetic of modern D&D.

    When I was a full-time apprentice coffee taster we focused on four major elements to coffee flavor — body, acidity, flavor and finish. Despite not working in that field for a decade now, that’s still how I approach flavor, including when selling beer or tasting wine for pleasure.

    This is where Dragonfire fails.

    Per the bag it is a medium roast, preground “for any filter” which basically means for various drip techniques/filters and wholly Brazilian beans. The label did not call out 100% Arabica (the website does), but there are no tell-tale signs of robusta or other varieties. It also says that it is “medium flavor.”

    I did not perform a cupping, as the coffee was pre-ground.

    I tasted multiple Chemex pourovers using a metal filter over the past week — my current traditional coffee preference. I also attempted to use it in an espresso machine, but was unable to tamp sufficiently enough to make up for the different grind size.

    Body: fairly low body for a Brazil
    Acidity: essentially neutral
    Flavor: no spikes of premium flavors such as nutty, vanilla, etc
    Finish: very clean, no roughness which can be common in lower grown Brazils (this is where robustas would have been obvious)

    For a coffee fan Dragonfire would not be a coffee I would suggest. As a gift to a non-flavor nerd who likes D&D and drinks coffee with sugar and/or cream it’s a decent choice.

    For the flavor nerd who likes D&D I prefer Found Familiar coffees. I have a bag of Fey Magic waiting for a cupping, espresso tasting and pourover just as soon as I’m through my Middle Fork roaster and right before switching back to Campfire’s Summer Camp.

  • Baldur’s Gate 3 is the next D&D TV show in development, maybe

    Giant Freaking Robot says that Netflix is in talks to bring Baldur’s Gate 3 to the screen. They don’t know if it would be a movie or a series yet, but the series makes more sense considering the amount of content in the video game.

    There’s already one Dungeons & Dragons show that’s been picked up by Paramount+. The Marshall Rawson Thurber project is in pre-production. Thurber is probably best known for Netflix’s Red Notice.

    Derek Kolstad, known for John Wick 1-3, is also writing and showrunning a different “untitled D&D” series. Kolstad’s project, but that may still be just a pitch, rather than a purchased series. It was supposedly connected to Drizzt Do’Urden.

    There’s also a long simmering rumor that once Joe Manganiello gets done with he and his brother’s D&D documentary he’ll resume pitching his long-sought Dragonlance series. Manganiello is helping push the previous efforts at the doc over the line, there will be archival footage of many of the early particulars plus modern interviews with those in the current culture.

    Yes, Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast let a lot of people go this week. The weakness of their position may be why Giant Freaking Robot has the exclusive about the deal. It’s a way to get funds for the struggling company fast.

    Additionally, on Plex and Freevee there are three recently new D&D shows. On D&D Adventures you can watch a Heroes Feast (D&D cooking), Faster Purple Worm! Kill! Kill! (D&D comedy where everyone dies) and Encounter Party (an edited actual play). The Free Ad-Supported Television channel also has the original D&D cartoon, DesiQuest and Rivals of Waterdeep.