Hi friends!
I wanted you to know about the City of Arches Kickstarter going on right now!
The City of Arches is a 160 page PDF and hardcover high-fantasy city sourcebook built for Lazy DMs and usable with any version of 5e or other fantasy tabletop RPGs. In this book you’ll find
- a high fantasy city setting surrounded by countless adventure locations.
- a setting easily dropped into any existing published or homebrewed campaign world.
- a setting where any race, species, origin, heritage, and culture makes sense.
- over a dozen adventure “biomes” with hundreds of adventure locations.
- three 1st to 20th level campaign arcs.
- an intro scenario, three adventures, and an adventure toolkit for building your own heist or infiltration adventure.
- beautiful full-color art, dungeon maps, and overland maps.
- a player’s guide with background hooks and setting-specific backgrounds.
Download the free 42 page preview on the Kickstarter page! I hope you’ll back this fantastic new book.
Thank you so much!
I'd love a go at Crown and Skull by Runehammer. It looks really interesting. I'd like to play it before I run it and, frankly, just don't have the time.
Show us some pictures of your gaming, notebook or binder. I’m getting back into using a physical binder now that my games are more in person, and I need the inspiration!
I gave my opinions about it here: https://youtu.be/_v-jnQCTZ1Q?si=yOklCEzs4gkqg4n1
Here’s some data on the topic!
https://slyflourish.com/facebook_surveys.html#onlinevsoffline2023
Question: This is a poll for D&D DMs and RPG GMs. Do you primarily play online or in person?
YouTube poll posted 18 April 2023 on YouTube, 2,900 respondents.
Response % of total Primarily online 41% Primarily in person 46% Both roughly equally 13%
Also some advice for in person maps:
Awesome stuff! The one thing I’d consider adding are some random names. They’re the number one improv tool.
This article may help: https://slyflourish.com/getting_started_with_dnd.html
I don’t see anything in here about them removing the art.
As a guy who used Twitter extensively for more than a decade and had over 40k followers, I can tell you it went from a great place to promote one’s RPG work to a terrible place just about overnight back in 2020 or so – just about the time users focused on algorithmic sorting of tweets over the timeline.
I was lucky to get 400 people to click a link and maybe one would buy something. Engagement was shot.
Luckily I found the social media platform of the future – email! It’s a network I control, can move to the service of my choice, and lets me directly connect with those who expressed interest in what I make.
I’m glad I started building up my email list a few years ago. It takes time but it’s worth it.
I feel like a lot of creators on Twitter simply can’t let go even though the network isn’t the same as all anymore.
MCDM, Matt Coleville’s company, just released Flee Mortals! This 400 page book includes new takes on existing 5e monsters and a few brand new ones – all in MCDMs style of cool tactics and action-oriented designs. I had the great pleasure of designing the vampires in this book including the monstrous Count Rhodar Von Glaur!
Check it out!
I think they’d work fine. You found the icons on gameicons?
Regardless of motivation, spending the money to translate the 5.1 SRD into four languages and then putting it out into the CC opens up a lot of expansion of 5e into other countries and people who never would otherwise play. And it does so regardless of what WOTC does in the future. It’s prudent that we don’t trust WOrC. With this out there, we don’t have to trust them.
D&D Beyond - Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition Tools, Rules, Races, Classes, Items, Spells, Monsters, and More
Wizards of the Coast has released the 5.1 System Reference Document (basically the core rules of D&D 5e) in four new languages alongside English including Spanish, Italian, German, and French.
https://media.wizards.com/2023/downloads/dnd/SRD_CC_v5.1_FR.pdf
https://media.wizards.com/2023/downloads/dnd/SRD_CC_v5.1_IT.pdf
https://media.wizards.com/2023/downloads/dnd/SRD_CC_v5.1_DE.pdf
https://media.wizards.com/2023/downloads/dnd/SRD_CC_v5.1_ES.pdf
All of these have been released under a Creative Commons Attribution License which means creators are free to copy, modify, and use these works – including commercially – by referencing the document and it’s license in their work.
In my opinion, this is an amazing effort and one that helps Wizards of the Coast improve its reputation as a good steward of D&D and good partner of the hobby.
I’ve been using the Tome of Beasts 1 2023 edition for a few sessions now and I love it.
I just played Shadowdark and my players and I found it refreshingly simple to play. I did a video about it here:
This week, Morrus and Jessica talk with special guest Mike Shea about Open5e. In the news, Dungeons & Dragons comes back to Gen Con, Pathfinder coming to mobile, D&D 5e SRD has been translated into four languages, and more! Plus a brand new sketch about a very odd potion shop. --------------...
I had a great time checking in on various D&D news and talking to Morrus and Jessica about https://open5e.com on Morrus’s Unofficial Tabletop Podcast yesterday. I hope you give it a listen!
Hi there! I have a couple of articles that may help:
I’m putting a lot of hope in the extra 32 pages the sourcebook gets. I’m hoping for more text and tools to help me run my own Planescape adventures.
I usually try to drop in one scene or situation along the way usually at the site of a notable landmark. You can roll randomly for the landmark and maybe two groups. Maybe they’re fighting. Maybe one group already beat the other group. Maybe they’re friendly. Just a situation to expose something about the world and it’s history and people.
You can also use it as an opportunity for campfire tales. Ask each player ahead of time to think about what their character thinks of what they’ve done so far and where they’re going. Have each player share their thoughts during a long rest along the journey.
Finally, if the characters are traveling anywhere with risk you can define some traveling roles like who is scouting, who is trailblazing, and who is provisioning. Have them roll checks on these jobs to give you some interesting ideas about what might happen along the journey.
Hi friends! To do my small part for the TTRPG fediverse, I resurrected an old RPG blog rss aggregator I ran about 10 years ago and refreshed it with some GPT-based summarization. You can find it right here:
https://dndblogs.com/
It updates every morning from the following feed lists.
https://slyflourish.com/sly_flourish_rpg_blogroll.html
If there are any great TTRPG blogs I’m missing, please let me know!
Friends! In case you didn’t know it, there’s an awesome volunteer-run website called https://open5e.com/ that includes tons of OGL-released 5e material. If you’re looking for a quick spell or monster lookup, this is your place. If you’re developing a system of your own, you can access the data there through an API in a structured format. It includes the 5e SRD, a lot of material from Level Up Advanced 5e (including all of their awesome monsters), it includes all four Kobold Press monster books and we’re already working on the new Tome of Beasts 1 2023 edition. It has backgrounds and subclasses from Tome of Heroes. It’s just packed with awesome stuff.
You’ll always get better descriptions, art, and design from the books themselves but if you’re looking to link to 5e material, this is the site for you.
If you like what you see there and want to help out, there are lots of ways you can do so. Join the Open 5e Discord server, introduce yourself, and jump on in!
https://discord.gg/EWgm7CeKek
