If you’re lucky enough to have a tabletop gamer to buy for this holiday season, we’ve found the perfect presents for them—including the most popular new games, incredible gifts for Dungeon Masters and Dungeon & Dragons players, and even a game designed to get you outside to literally touch grass.

And if you’re the tabletop gamer? Give someone one of these picks from our Holiday Gift Guide and you’ll immediately have someone to play with! Win-win.

The Deck of Many Things

The Deck of Many Things is a D&D magic item so legendary that most Dungeon Masters shudder when they hear its name. (Or they cackle, which is much worse.) Just in time for the holiday season, The Deck of Many Things is now available as a gorgeous gift set with updated rules, a 66-card deck (which includes the 22 classic cards), its own supplement guide for incorporating the reimagined deck into your game, and more.

Dungeon Masters will love its ability to create adventures on the fly complete with traps and puzzles; D&D players will find new character backgrounds, spells, and star-signs inside. ($99.99, available digitally on November 14 with the physical copy release date TBD)

Disney Lorcana

Lorcana is a Disney-themed trading card game that’s taking the tabletop by storm! While the first starter sets quickly sold out, more are on the way to stores everywhere. Rise of the Floodborn, the second chapter of the game, is due out in December.

In Lorcana, players take the role of Illumineers and use character and item cards to collect 20 lore and win the game. This trading card game is easier to learn than most, but still encourages thought-out strategy and card collecting. And have you seen some of the art? Pick this up for the Disney or TCG fan in your life, and be sure to grab a starter pack for yourself while you’re at it. (2 players, Ages 8+, $5.99-$49.99)

Linkee

Part trivia, part lateral thinking, and part party game, Linkee is the perfect gift for the social butterfly in your life. (It also has two-player rules if your gift recipient prefers to cocoon at home.) Each Linkee card features four short trivia questions. Players remember the trivia answers as they’re revealed, and once they see the connection between them, they shout, “Linkee!” The first team to successfully find the common link for the answers wins the card.

Work together as a team to find the connection and earn bragging rights for eternity. Well, maybe until the next game night. (2+ players, Ages 12+, $8.45)

Magic: The Gathering – Doctor Who

All we really have to say is “Doctor Who Magic cards” and you’ll know immediately who to give this to for the holidays. But, if you need a little more info, we have you covered. The new official “Universes Beyond” set features gorgeous art of 13 Doctors and their companions. These cards with Doctor Who-themed mechanics are now available to join the Magic lineup.

Choose your gift recipient’s favorite Doctor to find the perfect 100 card Magic: The Gathering – Doctor Who Commander Deck, and allons-y! (2 players, Ages 13+, $59.99)

Nine Arches

Nine Arches might be designed like a tabletop card game, but it’s intended to take you and your friends and family away from the table. The game includes a 54-card deck similar to tarot cards that are used to choose your next adventure. Cards feature activities like “dance party,” “caravan,” and “ghost.” With the drawn cards and input from each player, the group adventure’s is talked out. Will you do the activities all at once? One at a time? It’s up to you and the group. Then you’re all off on a real-life journey based on the prompts on the cards!

If your recipient is the type who appreciates experiences instead of plain gifts, you’ll wow them with this one. (1-5 players, Ages 13+, $34.99)

Potion Pack – Cantrip Candles

Whether your lucky gift recipient is a fan of tabletop role-playing games or video game RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3, this three-candle set from Cantrip Candles will be met with delight when it’s unwrapped. The Potion Pack comes as a lovely gift set of 10 ounce soy wax candles in decorated glass containers.

The Health Potion, Stamina Potion, and Magicka Potion candles are sure to heal and reenergize any weary adventurers (or office workers) who lights them. And how can you pass up the opportunity to give someone a container labeled “Dragon’s Blood”? ($80.00)

The Practically Complete Guide to Dragons

Do you remember being a kid and re-reading your favorite book so many times you had every page memorized? This is your chance to give the youngest Dungeons & Dragons or fantasy fan in your life that same experience!

The Practically Complete Guide to Dragons is exactly what it says on the cover: an imaginative, in-depth look at the dragons that populate the D&D setting of Dragonlance. Written in-character by the kender Sindri Suncatcher, this guide to dragons is packed with personality—along with, you guessed it, lots of dragons. Dragon facts, dragon stories, dragon lair maps, it’s all here. Your lucky gift recipient will spend hours staring at the gorgeous art alone. ($39.95)

Sea Salt & Paper

The stocking stuffer-sized card game Sea Salt & Paper is a delightful set collecting game with a dash of luck to keep things exciting. Collect and play pairs of cards to score points and use their effects to earn even more points. If the player thinks they have enough points in hand, they can call for the end of the round or give everyone one last chance to try to beat them for bonus points. Reach the necessary number of victory points to win the game!

Not only does each card feature charming and original origami art, Sea Salt & Paper includes bold icons so that colorblind players aren’t excluded from the fun. (2-4 players, Ages 8+, $14.95)

Kelly Knox is a pop culture writer and the author of Star Wars Conversation Cards, Be More Obi-Wan, and the upcoming Star Wars Dad Jokes. You can still find her on Twitter at @kelly_knox.

The post Holiday Gift Guide 2023 – For the Tabletop Gamer appeared first on Nerdist.

October is always full of excitement. This week, Netflix released The Fall of the House of Usher and gifted us with some truly gory deaths, McDonald’s revealed its latest Boo Buckets to the world, and A24’s The Iron Claw shared its trailer to the world. But that’s not all that took place. Plenty of other exciting happenings revealed themselves, and we wouldn’t want them to get lost in the shuffle.

Here are some of our favorite pop-culture news odds & ends that you don’t want to miss reading about.

This Week’s Odds & Ends in News

Jump to:

• New Digimon Adventure 02 Movie Heads to Theaters
• One Piece‘s Showrunner Reveals He’s Writing Doctor Kureha for Jamie Lee Curtis and Other Season Two Teases
• Ian McKellen Told Patrick Stewart NOT to Do Star Trek
• Ghostface Is Here to Cause Halloween Mayhem in Youtooz Line
• Netflix Has Renewed Castlevania: Nocturne for Season Two (But Canceled Vikings: Valhalla)
• Girl Scouts Have Discontinued Popular 2022 Flavor, Raspberry Rally
• Go Camping with Pokémon in Adorable New Live-Action Hybrid Series
• D&D Beyond Wants to Make Gameplay Easier with Maps Tool
• Mickey and Friends Celebrate Avengers and X-Men‘s 60th Anniversary with Disney What If? Variant Covers
• Gaming Highlights: Slimmer PS5 Coming for the Holidays, Logitech Shares Cool Star Wars Gear

New Digimon Adventure 02 Movie Heads to Theaters

Feeling nostalgic for Saturday morning cartoons of yore? Us too. That’s why we were excited to hear about a new Digimon Adventure 02 movie coming soon to theaters. A release shares more about Digimon Adventure 02 The Beginning:

This November the DigiDestined are back in theaters with a brand new movie.  Toei Animation and Fathom Events revealed today details for the U.S. theatrical release of “Digimon Adventure 02 The Beginning” as a two-day event on November 8 & 9. It is present day and the chosen children from “Digimon Adventure 02” have returned with all new adventures — but now they’re 20 year old young adults! 

If Kari, T.K., and Ken are among some of your favorite Digimon characters ever, like they are mine, then you’re in luck. You can snag tickets from Fathom Events. The film will screen in both the English dub (November 8) and in Japanese with English subtitles (November 9). Additionally, “the first 50 guests to arrive at each night’s screening will receive a complimentary Digimon Card Game Tamer Party Pack -THE BEGINNING- ver. 2.0, which includes 3 out of 14 possible cards from the new Digimon Card Game deck commemorating the film (first come, first served). Lucky recipients will be among the first fans in the U.S. to own these new “Digimon Adventure 02 The Beginning” themed cards before they are released to the general public in December.”

Sounds like some throwback fun to us. A synopsis for the new Digimon movie further shares:

It’s 2012, and ten years have passed since the adventure in the Digital World. Daisuke Motomiya is now twenty, and he and the rest of the DigiDestined seem to be changing bit by bit in terms of appearance and lifestyle. Then one day, a giant Digitama suddenly appears in the sky over Tokyo Tower. Daisuke and the others encounter a mysterious young man named Lui Ohwada, who informs them that he’s the first ever DigiDestined in the world…

For even more nostalgia, check out our Power Rangers throwback, here:

One Piece‘s Showrunner Reveals He’s Writing Doctor Kureha for Jamie Lee Curtis and Other Season Two Teases

Netflix’s One Piece defied the anime adaptation curse to become a much-beloved piece of the long-running franchise. Happily, Netflix green-lit season two of the show, and with the conclusion of the WGA strike, we can now hear more about it. Speaking to Deadline, One Piece co-showrunner Matt Owens discussed one of the most eagerly anticipated season two castings. For a while now, buzz has been circulating about Jamie Lee Curtis joining the live-action One Piece adaptation as Doctor Kureha. And it turns out, it’s more than just buzz.

Owens notes, “Doctor Kureha, very luckily, is a character who is coming up in our story, and is someone who is perfect for Jamie Lee Curtis.” And further adds, “After she won her Oscar, the writers’ room sent her a figure of Doctor Kureha with a nice note that said, ‘Congratulations on your statue, here’s another one to put next to it. Hope to speak to you soon.’ When she reposted that, it got a lot of fan interest, and I commented on it. We’re trying to manifest it.” Of course, with the current SAG-AFTRA strike still in play, no official casting can be confirmed. However, Owens shares of the writers’ room, “We’re writing for her — we really, really want her to come and play with us in Season 2.” Fingers crossed!

In a Reddit AMA, Owens further noted that he’d love to see live-action spinoffs, especially on starring a Young Mihawk, that One Piece’s Lougetown arc remains upcoming in the live-action, and that he can’t wait to adapt Law and Carrot.

Learn how to watch One Piece without filler episodes, here:

Ian McKellen Told Patrick Stewart NOT to Do Star Trek

In a different timeline on the multiverse, beloved actor Sir Ian McKellen almost destroyed the universe. Well, not exactly, but he may have convinced Sir Patrick Stewart not to go forward with Star Trek, thus denying us Stewart’s rendition of Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

Patrick Stewart’s memoir, Making It So, has given us many fun and fascinating tidbits about the actor’s journey. But recently, via Insider, we learned Ian McKellen urged Patrick Stewart not to sign on to Star Trek. Stewart reveals in his book, “When I told him I was going to sign the contract, he almost bodily prevented me from doing so… ‘No!’ he said. ‘No, you must not do that. You must not. You have too much important theater work to do. You can’t throw that away to do TV. You can’t. No!'”

It was an impassioned plea, but Stewart followed his gut. He writes, “There are few people, particularly with regard to acting, whose counsel I trust more than Ian’s… But this time, I had to tell him that I felt theater would return to my life whenever I was ready for it, whereas an offer of the lead role in an American TV series might never come again.”

Happily, Stewart says, “Ian has acknowledged that he was wrong and I was right… More than once, in fact – primarily because I like making him say those words.” What a delightful friendship and conclusion to this tale.

Check out more stories from Patrick Stewart’s memoir, here:

Ghostface Is Here to Cause Halloween Mayhem in Youtooz Line

You scream, I scream, we all scream for Ghostface. Who doesn’t love the ever-changing masked menace? As we wait for Scream 7, and whatever new kills and frights it will bring, you can take Ghostface home for yourself. On Friday the 13th, Youtooz will release three, dare we say, adorable Ghostfaces that we can add to our collections. They are classic Ghostface, Aged Ghostface, an Entertainment Earth Exclusive, and Glow in the Dark Ghostface, also an Entertainment Earth Exclusive.

You can check out the full Ghostface collection on Youtooz’s website.

Enjoy other Youtooz shenanigans, here:

Netflix Has Renewed Castlevania: Nocturne for Season Two (But Canceled Vikings: Valhalla)

Fans of Netflix’s gorgeous Castlevania series and its spinoffs can rejoice. Netflix has renewed Castlevania: Nocturne for another season. The Castlevania series follows Richter Belmont, weaving “a never before seen origin story” for the Belmont descendent and tells the tale of vampires in the French Revolution.

Its beautiful first season is now available to stream on Netflix. And we can’t wait to see what exquisitely intense tales Castlevania: Nocturne season two will reveal.

Sadly, it’s not all good news for spinoffs. Netflix has canceled Vikings: Valhalla after three seasons. Vikings: Valhalla existed as a sequel series to History’s much-watched drama Vikings, and fans will be sad to see it go. The third and now final season of Vikings: Valhalla, however, has not yet aired. The Vikings spinoff will arrive on Netflix in 2024. Hopefully, the season will bring the show to a fulfilling close.

Catch up with season one of Castlevania: Nocturne, here:

Jump to:

• One Piece‘s Showrunner Reveals He’s Writing Doctor Kureha for Jamie Lee Curtis and Other Season Two Teases
• Ian McKellen Told Patrick Stewart NOT to Do Star Trek
• Ghostface Is Here to Cause Halloween Mayhem in Youtooz Line
• Netflix Has Renewed Castlevania: Nocturne for Season Two (But Canceled Vikings: Valhalla)
• Girl Scouts Have Discontinued Popular 2022 Flavor, Raspberry Rally
• Go Camping with Pokémon in Adorable New Live-Action Hybrid Series
• D&D Beyond Wants to Make Gameplay Easier with Maps Tool
• Mickey and Friends Celebrate Avengers and X-Men‘s 60th Anniversary with Disney What If? Variant Covers
• New Digimon Adventure 02 Movie Heads to Theaters
• Gaming Highlights: Slimmer PS5 Coming for the Holidays, Logitech Shares Cool Star Wars Gear

Girl Scouts Have Discontinued Popular 2022 Flavor, Raspberry Rally

Cancellations are really everywhere. As if it weren’t enough that TV shows get canceled, now the Girl Scouts are canceling cookie flavors. We learned via Food & Wine that the Girl Scouts of the USA announced that they have discontinued 2022’s hit flavor Rasberry Rally. Rasberry Rally, a chocolate-coated Raspberry cookie, became an instant hit. The cookies sold out almost everywhere. I personally never got to try one. And now it seems they will not return. A Girl Scout representative offered the following statement, “Last year, Raspberry Rally cookies were introduced as part of a pilot online-only sales strategy… While Raspberry Rally was extremely popular last year, we are taking a pause this season to prioritize supplying our classic varieties.”

We guess Thin Mints couldn’t take the competition. But happily, many Girl Scouts cookies will return to us shortly. The next season of cookie-selling begins in January.

Learn how else you can enjoy Girl Scout Cookies, here:

Go Camping with Pokémon in Adorable New Live-Action Hybrid Series

Need something soothing for your soul? How about a live-action/CGI hybrid web series starring Pokémon nomming on delicious-looking desserts as they prepare to go camping? In all honesty, we have no notes. We could watch this Pokémon series all day. Camping with Pokémon will run for three episodes, but that doesn’t feel like nearly enough.

Next, we hope to see Pokémon telling scary stories around their Charmeleon campfire; maybe they can be joined by some ghost Pokémon for the occasion. And we also hope one day we can go camping with Pokémon ourselves.

We also want to give an honorable mention to Pokémon‘s Dream Plush collection. Could anything be cuter than soft, napping Pokémon plushes?

Indulge in more adorable Pokémon fun, here:

D&D Beyond Wants to Make Gameplay Easier with Maps Tool

Playing Dungeons and Dragons can feel intimidating. After all, there’s a lot to plot and execute in order to create an amazing campaign. But D&D Beyond has introduced a new tool that aims to help simplify gameplay prep and get players going.

D&D Beyond shares:

Prep less, play more. That’s our guiding star for Maps, the latest tool for D&D Beyond. Whether you play online or in person, we want Maps to offer a quick and easy way for DMs to connect with players and launch their adventures on D&D Beyond. 

With Maps, you can pull official maps and monster tokens from your D&D Beyond digital library to play with. You can also upload your own maps, drop in player tokens, and apply a fog of war. When you’re ready to play, you can invite players who have a free or upgraded D&D Beyond account into the shared play space. The Game Log will help you keep track of dice rolls on the fly. 

The Maps tool is still on the first step of its journey. So stay tuned for more updates.

You can now introduce Baldur’s Gate 3 characters into your D&D campaign. Check out our article about it, here:

Mickey and Friends Celebrate Avengers and X-Men‘s 60th Anniversary with Disney What If? Variant Covers

We love a good crossover, especially one that involves our favorite franchises. In celebration of the 60^th anniversary of two all-star Marvel teams, the Avengers and the X-Men, Marvel Comics will release 12 Disney100 Variant Covers that bring Disney and Marvel even closer together. These fun Disney What If? covers will see “Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, and more take over milestone moments in both Avengers and X-Men history.” That’s what we call iconic. This “monthly variant cover program [adorn] select issues of Amazing Spider-Man.” The covers will also be available in black and white.

Click To View Gallery

A release further shares, “The first trio of covers kicks things off in the Silver Age with a spin on the Avengers and X-Men’s very first appearances in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s original Avengers #1 and X-Men #1 from 1963. Both homages also feature Peg Leg Pete as the group’s respective archenemies–Loki and Magneto! Then, Mickey and friends assemble for a turning point for the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, Avengers #16, which saw Captain America lead a brand-new Avengers roster that included new recruits like Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver!” That Peg Leg Pete is always causing trouble.

To get your hands on these Disney What If? variant covers, check in with your local comic shop or keep an eye on Marvel’s website. The first three covers will go on sale on January 3, February 14, and March 6, 2023.

Learn more about the Avengers and X-Men’s Marvel Comics anniversary, here:

Gaming Highlights: Slimmer PS5 Coming for the Holidays, Logitech Shares Cool Star Wars Gear

The PS5 is getting a whole new look for the holidays, kind of. It doesn’t look that much different to me, but it is slimmer. According to PlayStation’s official blog, the PS5 has “been reduced in volume by more than 30%, and weight by 18% and 24% compared to the previous models.” That does feel significant, even if it doesn’t necessarily look it. This new PS5 model also comes with “an attachable Ultra HD Blu-ray Disc Drive and a 1TB SSD for more internal storage.” Nice. The updated PS5 will completely replace older models over time. Its rollout begins in November. In the US, a PS5 with Ultra HD Blu-ray disc drive is projected to cost $499.99, while a PS5 Digital Edition will cost 449.99 USD.

Meanwhile, Logitech G wants you to game in style with a new gaming mouse and mouse pads that celebrate Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi. We especially love the mouse, which, among other excellent utilities, offers “custom Millennium Falcon-inspired thruster animations and graphics with 8-LED full-spectrum RGB lighting.” Plus, it just looks really cool. And it really ought to because it will cost you $159.99. Steep, but fabulous.

The Battle of Endor and Darth Vader editions of the Logitech G840 XL Cloth Gaming Mouse Pad will only set you back $49.99 each.

Game in style, we must!

Check out more on PlayStation’s latest updates, here:

The post ONE PIECE Eyes Jamie Lee Curtis, Girl Scouts Discontinue Cookie Flavor, and More News Odds & Ends appeared first on Nerdist.

The world of Dungeons & Dragons is impossibly rich. And that’s before everyone comes to the table and builds on it with their imaginations. The tabletop roleplaying game has continued to evolve with every edition. Dungeons & Dragons‘ fifth edition debuted in 2014, and in recent years, the game’s success has ballooned. A new book, Lore & Legends: A Visual Celebration of the Fifth Edition of the World’s Greatest Roleplaying Game by Michael Witwer, Kyle Newman, Jon Peterson, and Sam Witwer, delves into the art and history of D&D‘s Fifth Edition. We have an exclusive look at early character sketches featured in this Dungeons & Dragons book.

This spread of sketches shows off some of Dungeons & Dragons‘ most iconic dangers. We have a look at the deadly gelatinous cube from Conceptopolis (which also made an appearance in the recent Dungeons & Dragons movie). Below the cube are hook horror concepts from Cory Trego-Erdner. Then there’s a glimpse of a fresh owlbear look from artist Brynn Metheney. But my absolute favorite sketch on this page is the wereshark. That expression! Those teeth! Dungeons & Dragons rules.

The Lore & Legends synopsis is as follows:

When the reimagined fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons debuted in the summer of 2014, the game was on the brink of obsolescence. But within a few short years, D&D found greater success than it had ever enjoyed before, even surpassing its 1980s golden age. How did an analog game nearly a half century old become a star in a digital world? For the first time, Lore & Legends reveals the incredible ongoing story of Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition from the perspective of the designers, artists, and players who bring it to life. This comprehensive visual guide illuminates contemporary D&D—its development, evolution, cultural relevance, and popularity—through exclusive interviews and more than 900 pieces of artwork, photography, and advertising curated and analyzed by the authors of the bestselling and Hugo Award–nominated Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana.

Lore & Legends: A Visual Celebration of the Fifth Edition of the World’s Greatest Roleplaying Game arrives on shelves on October 3. And if you can wait until November 28, you can get a special edition of the book. This edition comes with an adventure map, a custom d20, and even a pull-out drawer that doubles as a dice tray. Get all the details on the Lore & Legends special edition here.

The post This LORE & LEGENDS Exclusive Shows Early DUNGEONS & DRAGONS Creature Sketches appeared first on Nerdist.

Honestly, this D&D game just had to happen. It was too good of an opportunity to miss. Baldur’s Gate 3 has taken the gaming world by storm, and, of course, it owes a lot of its gameplay mechanics to Dungeons & Dragons. The characters can even officially join any Dungeons & Dragons campaign. So it only made sense for there to be a major Dungeons & Dragons game celebrating Baldur’s Gate 3. And what better way to do it than to gather the voice actors of Baldur’s Gate 3‘s major characters around the table? High Rollers DnD made these dreams come true. And you can come along for the ride. Below is the full Dungeons & Dragons game played by the voice actors who give life to Baldur’s Gate 3‘s Origin characters.

The Baldur’s Gate 3 voice cast sat down for a real game of Dungeons & Dragons. That means nearly five hours of gameplay for us to watch. But for Baldur’s Game 3 fans, it’s a huge treat… Especially if you’re really in love with whoever it is you are romancing. There are hours of content in Baldur’s Gate 3, and probably some scenes you haven’t even discovered yet. But can there really ever be enough of your fav to go around?

The description for this special D&D one-shot gives the short version of what you can expect from these hours of dice rolling. It notes, “All 6 Origin Characters from Baldur’s Gate 3 join High Rollers to play a game of D&D for the first time EVER! When Tav gets hit by a powerful spell it’s up to Astarion, Gale, Karlach, Shadowheart, Wyll, and Lae’zell to gear up and save the day!”

We’re sure they’ll save the day. Although, many things will go awry as they always do both in Dungeons & Dragons and in Baldur’s Gate 3. In all honesty, we’d really like to see more of our fictional favs extending their canons in Dungeons & Dragons games… But for now, Baldur’s Gate 3 is the perfect place to start.

Featured Image: High Rollers DnD

The post BALDUR’S GATE 3 Voice Actors Play DUNGEONS & DRAGONS as Their Game Characters appeared first on Nerdist.

Everyone knows you can’t put a price tag on a dragon. They’re magical fire creatures of grace and power few foes can oppose. Having even one of them to call your own is invaluable. At least that’s true in fantasy worlds where they own the sky. In our own realm dragons don’t really exist. (We’re like 99% sure they don’t.) Ironically that means you can put a dollar sign on them, because the only way to get one is from a store. And a beautiful new one from WizKids which brings to life a little baby Dungeons & Dragons Red Wyrmling comes with a big price tag.

The new D&D Replicas Of The Realms: Red Dragon Wyrmling Foam Figure celebrates the RPG’s 50th anniversary by recreating one of the game’s most visually striking figures. But this new collectible doesn’t show the flying leviathan at the height of its powers. This isn’t the beast you normally have to roll to beat. This figure is based on the creature’s earliest days. This young version of Dungeons & Dragons‘ Red Dragon Wyrmling appears as an adorable baby. Instead of bathing enemies in flames, he looks eager to eat some chicken nuggets or play peekaboo with his mama.

The Wyrmling figure might be of a small child dragon, but it’s not small. This D&D creature figure measures just a shade under two-and-a-half feet. It’s also, strangely enough, pretty safe to have around actual babies. It’s “made of sturdy, lightweight foam and hand-painted to show off every tooth, scale, and claw in incredible detail.”

What’s not tiny about this delightful item is how much it costs. You can pre-order your Red Dragon Wyrmling Foam Figure now for $649.99. With a price tag like that, hopefully, your coin purse has a few gold coins at the bottom you forgot about. For those who do, this baby dragon should arrive at your home sometime in the spring of 2024. Until then, start stocking up on foam nuggets.

The post Celebrate D&D’s 50th Anniversary with an Adorable Baby Red Wyrmling Foam Figure appeared first on Nerdist.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is probably your new favorite game. It’s breaking records on Steam, and just about everyone is talking about it, from hardcore gamers to folks just hearing about it through all of its buzz. The magic of Baldur’s Gate 3 truly lies in how it combines the mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons gameplay with the brilliant graphics and immersive worlds of video games. But if D&D is what brought you to Baldur’s Gate 3 in the first place, we have good news for you. You can now complete the feedback loop and bring Baldur’s Gate 3 back to your favorite tabletop with official Dungeons and Dragons digital dice and character sheets from D&D Beyond.

D&D Beyond shares more about the Baldur’s Gate 3 characters you can claim. It notes:

Bring the magic of Baldur’s Gate 3 to your D&D campaign with promotional dice and a collection of downloadable character sheets for companions like Shadowheart and Astarion. Will you find lasting love on your adventures, or just adversity? Only the dice can say!

In addition to Shadowheart and Astarion, you can also download the rest of the six Origin companions. That is Gale, Lae’zel, Wyll, and Karlach all have character sheets ready to go. The Baldur’s Gate 3 character sheets faithfully recreate the game’s characters to fit perfectly into your next campaign. For example, Wyll’s charisma is through the roof. Meanwhile, Shadowheart’s wisdom can’t be beat. And Lae’zel, well, we wouldn’t want to cross her in battle. And, although stats are important in a D&D game, our favorite parts of these Baldur’s Gate 3 character sheets are the backstory sections. Not to mention, we love the gorgeous illustrations accompanying this wealth of information. Of course, we also love a pair of free digital dice. Who doesn’t?

These Baldur’s Gate 3 characters can become your next in-game character, or they can enter the Dungeons & Dragons world as NPCs. Perhaps they can meet up with some of the characters from Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves in there D&D forms. It would make for a fun campaign crossover.

To get these Baldur’s Gate 3 Dungeons & Dragons assets, simply claim them from D&D Beyond. The character sheets and dice are free for all.

The post BALDUR’S GATE 3 Is Coming to Your Next DUNGEONS & DRAGONS Campaign appeared first on Nerdist.

There’s a whole lot of advice on how to be a great Dungeon Master out there, but not a lot on how to be a great Dungeons & Dragons player. Having an awesome DM helps, but players have so much power to make the game come to life and be amazing. No DM can do it without players (otherwise it’d be called writing a novel). So how can you be the best Dungeons & Dragons player possible? Consider these tips.

Before the Game

Be a good person.

Wil Wheaton’s Law: “Don’t be a dick.” You’re all friends here, and you should treat them that way. Don’t forget that the DM is your friend, too. They aren’t out to get you, even if it might seem like it sometimes. Is the roleplaying getting too heated and it looks like people are getting angry in Real Life? Take a step back and assess: are we still having fun?

Make friends with your gaming buddies.

Gamers in school don’t have to worry about this one as much; odds are your gaming group is already made up of close friends. But if you’re not, try and put in the effort to get to know your party members.

Make your DM’s life easier.

A good DM is more precious than gold. If you don’t know why, ask your DM how much they do to prep for the campaign, schedule game nights, get snacks… the list goes on. How can you give back? Look for little things you can do for the DM, things like showing up right on time, bringing snacks of your own (or offering to pay them back for food), and even taking over little tasks during the game, like tracking initiative. If you’re an artistic person, you might even want to make drawings, short stories, or songs about your campaign. Everyone (everyone!) loves fan art.

One cool, low-intensity artistic thing you can do is to create custom initiative tents for your party members! The players always get to see them, and they serve a functional purpose.

Learn the rules.

You don’t have to know the rules backwards and forwards—but if you only have time to learn the rules that pertain to your own character, that makes a world of difference. As long as you don’t become a rules lawyer or start being a jerk about it, your encyclopedic knowledge will be helpful.

Build characters that play well with others.

So, your character has a great personality. Awesome, that’s step one! But take a second look at your new alter-ego. Is your character a brooding lone wolf who sits smoking in the shadows of the tavern? They might have a tough time fitting into the team. Is your character a cowardly peasant who wants to hide from every fight? It might be funny for a bit, but the joke’s gonna get old fast. 

During the Game

Find the fun.

We keep coming back to this “fun” thing. It’s because D&D and other RPGs are roleplaying games. While you don’t have to be riding the joy train to Funtown the entire time (a little bit of frustration can actually increase enjoyment in the long run), don’t torture yourself over this game with elves and wizards. If you’re not having fun, ask yourself why. Can you start having fun without ruining someone else’s fun? Yes? Do it. No? Be patient, but also be willing to talk it out IRL if the not-fun goes on for too long.

Don’t build dice towers.

Please.

Help speed up the game.

A game that drags is boring. It’s not called Dungeons & Drag-ons, people! (…I’ll show myself out.) We talked earlier about how sometimes frustration can be a good thing sometimes, but this isn’t one of those times. The next tips elaborate on this idea, giving examples of how you might speed up play at the table.

Stay invested.

Or, “pay attention when it’s not your turn.” Telling people to pay attention sounds condescending, but we all get distracted sometimes. And getting distracted is okay, but try to make sure your focus always comes back to what your friends are doing. They’re trying to be awesome, badass fantasy heroes, they want people to notice how cool they are! Also, having to ask “what just happened?” all the time slows the game to a crawl.

Know how you want to act.

Or, “don’t make people wait around for you to figure out what to do in a fight scene!” If you’re playing a Wizard or another class with complex powers, figuring out how your spells work on the fly is a huge task that requires a lot of time spent digging through the Player’s Handbook. An easy way to avoid putting a moratorium on gameplay is to figure out what you want to do while other people are taking their turn! You’ll feel more confident when you take your turn because you’re prepared and the game keeps moving. It’s a win-win! 

What’s the takeaway of all this? Long story short, take it easy, be proactively kind and helpful, and make sure that your fun isn’t infringing on anyone else’s. Or in other words, live and let live. Unless there are monsters involved. Those guys gotta die.

Originally published on April 7, 2016.

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As Wizards of the Coast works toward updating the Fifth Edition of Dungeons & Dragons in 2024, public playtesting plays its own critical role. For years Wizards has used feedback from “Unearthed Arcana,” the moniker given to the playtesting materials offered to D&D players, as a metric for future development of the TTRPG. The D&D design team shared insights at a recent press event about how influential survey results from Unearthed Arcana can be, and how that feedback has already affected the 2024 updates for the core books.

Wizards regularly offers playtest materials for specific areas of the game they wish to focus on. Player’s Handbook is the current focus for Unearthed Arcana, a.k.a. “UA,” as of the writing of this article. (Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monster Manual will have their turns in the near future.) Wizards of the Coast is offering a free download of rules for testing weapons and spells, along with a new glossary and more. After a pre-announced amount of time, Wizards invites players to submit a survey about their experiences using the rules in playtesting. It’s much more important than you might expect.

“The ​​Unearthed Arcana survey is the primary way we can dig into what people have written in a very systematic way,” said D&D Game Design Architect Jeremy Crawford. 

The D&D design team looks for a 70% satisfaction rating by UA players for officially adding playtested changes to the game. That means no matter how much Crawford and fellow Game Design Architect Christopher Perkins might personally like a rule or mechanic update, they said, if it doesn’t reach that 70% it won’t make it into the 2024 update of core books.

The Ardling as a new playable species, for example, didn’t pass muster during the Unearthed Arcana phase. It only garnered the satisfaction of “little more than half” of players surveyed, Crawford said. A change that made rolling a 1 or a natural 20 guarantee automatic failure or success respectively also didn’t make it past UA playtesting. Neither change received enough approval in the survey to make the official leap into the 2024 Player’s Handbook.

Once a design feature or mechanic does reach that crucial 70%, it doesn’t mean the work on it is complete. The Dungeons & Dragons team keeps iterating on and improving the design until it’s ready to officially become part of the game.

With measurable data and feedback, Crawford said, he and his team can see not only the results as a snapshot of recent playtesting, but also track longtime trends as players change the way they play the game. “The survey is like a collage collected over years to see cycles of popularity,” he said.

Digital toolset D&D Beyond, which joined Wizards of the Coast in 2022, gives the design team even more data about characters and beyond. Rangers have a reputation for being unpopular, Crawford recalled as one example. However, class ranking data on D&D Beyond says otherwise. Druid and monk are actually the least created classes, he revealed.

“Fighter, cleric, rogue, and wizard are almost always in the top four classes,” Crawford said. (Warlock once enjoyed a nice stint in the top four.)

While quantitative data in the Unearthed Arcana surveys are one of the primary sources Wizards looks at while developing the biggest update to D&D in 10 years, the designers also consider comments in the UA feedback, along with social media reactions and more. “Sales are another factor,” added executive producer Kyle Brinks. 

If you’re ready to get in on the playtesting action to make your voice heard, it’s happening now on D&D Beyond. Wizard plans staggered release updates to the core rulebooks in 2024.

Kelly Knox (she/her) is a Seattle-area author and entertainment writer who also contributes to StarWars.com, DCComics.com, and more. Follow her on Twitter at @kelly_knox to talk about just about everything pop culture.

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The familiar black and red Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition books are going to look very different in 2024! Wizards of the Coast is currently working on updating the core books of the roleplaying game: the Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual. These wide-ranging changes are not part of a new “sixth” edition of the game. This means the rule updates will be 100% compatible with all the 5e content you already own.

Popularly called “One D&D,” although that’s not the official name, the 2024 rules update has an easy-to-remember guiding principle: your table, your way. One of the initiative’s overall goals is updating the quality of play for both players and Dungeons Masters so that Dungeons & Dragons is more accessible than ever. 

At a recent press event, the D&D team talked about what’s in the works for the 2024 update, their goals for the most significant changes since 2014, and what you can expect when you have the new books in your hands. 

Player’s Handbook

D&D Game Design Architects Jeremy Crawford and Christopher Perkins were on hand to give Nerdist a sneak peek at the current state of the rules. They revealed that the 2024 Player’s Handbook (PHB) features 12 classes, 48 subclasses, and over 144 origin options, as well as new feat, spell, and weapon options. 

Class will be the first decision a player makes during character creation in the 2024 Player’s Handbook. Next is origin, the heart of character creation. “Race,” like human, half-orc, or elf, is now known as “species” and players will pick this after the character class. Then players choose a background with ability score bonuses and a first level feat, their alignment, and their languages. All together these characteristics craft a character’s origin. 

“We’re giving people more tools than they ever had before to flesh out who their character was before becoming an adventurer, and who they will be going forward,” said Crawford.

The handbook redistributes subclasses so that each main class has four subclasses. The wizard and cleric will have fewer subclasses to make room for those of other classes, noted Crawford, but anything removed from the 2014 PHB is still officially playable in Fifth Edition. 

Not only is the team going over the text on every page of the original core books with a fine-toothed comb, but the art inside the books has also been a big focus.

“We want it to be a dazzling visual experience,” Crawford said. The updated artwork will include some aspects of the game that haven’t been illustrated in the PHB before, like certain locations, named characters, all classes and subclasses, and the equipment characters can buy.

The D&D team is working to ensure the PHB and the other core books feel like they’re inviting everyone to the table. “[We want to] represent as broad a range of humanity as possible,” said Crawford, “[and] go even further than we did the 2014 rule book in showing the glorious richness of humanity.”

Dungeon Master’s Guide

As for the 2024 Dungeons Master’s Guide, Perkins said, “[The goal is to be] a useful, practical guide for all Dungeon Masters and an indispensable part of their game.” They reorganized the entire book with a different layout from the 2014 Dungeon Master’s Guide (DMG), with an emphasis on making it as easy as possible to find what you’re looking for.

The 2024 DMG will address common questions that Dungeon Masters previously had to scour the internet to find answers for. Some of them include, “How do I start finding players? How do I compete with Dungeon Masters I’ve seen online? How do I avoid discomfort at the table? How do I deal with a TPK or character death? How do I build a campaign or adventure? How much of the rules do I actually need to know?”

More magic items than the 2014 DMG, a glossary, an expanded appendix of maps, player handouts, and more will make the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide an invaluable source of guidelines and inspiration for any D&D game.

Monster Manual

The 2024 Monster Manual will be a treasure trove of baddies, about 500 in total, estimated Crawford and Perkins. All 2014 monsters are back along with new foes, including monsters with high Challenge Ratings like a CR 20 ooze and an Arch-Hag. (Not even dragons want to mess with an Arch-Hag!) 

The 2024 Manual won’t have any CR changes to existing monsters. Any adventures using them are unaffected, added the D&D team. However, some may receive mechanical adjustments to make sure their CR is correct. All stat blocks will be updated to make them easier to use and to add some “spice.”

The core Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition rulebooks will have a staggered release in 2024. Want to make sure your voice is heard about the upcoming D&D rules update? Find out more about Unearthed Arcana and the power of playtesting.

Kelly Knox (she/her) is a Seattle-area author and entertainment writer who also contributes to StarWars.com, DCComics.com, and more. Follow her on Twitter at @kelly_knox to talk about just about everything pop culture.

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Players have a lot of decisions to make when they put together a Dungeons & Dragons character. Spell choices, weapon choices and where to put ability scores influence how a character comes together mechanically. But what about the fictional side of the character? In Dungeons & Dragons, the Background choice offers some mechanical support for what a character was like before they became an adventurer, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. A character with a good background can give a Dungeon Master several wonderful ways to hook a character into dashing into danger.

A useful background doesn’t have to be a full-fledged biography about a character’s life before first level. Most serial stories take their time to spool out juicy bits of background info as the story unfolds. Sometimes it makes more sense to leave specific elements open so that what happens in the game can inform details. This series of articles offers five background questions for Dungeons & Dragons classes that a player can answer with a few short sentences whenever they want (yes, we’ll be doing one for each class). Players can answer these questions ahead of the first Dungeons & Dragons session, or DMs can facilitate this character building exercise with a session zero.

Ask these questions build your cleric’s backstory.

How Did You Know You Were Called To Serve Your God?

Gods have many followers but they only gift a few with the powers of a cleric. Did you manifest your powers randomly? Are you carrying on a family tradition? Did a holy ritual awaken your clerical powers?

Who Gave You Your Holy Symbol?

The symbol of your god is how you identify yourself as a servant of the divine and also helps you channel your magic. Did a mentor give it to you as they sent you out into the world? Was it passed onto you after the death of another cleric who served in your god’s name? Did you travel to a holy site and create it as part of your initiation?

What Non-Magical Ritual Means the Most to You?

Clerics often perform other rites and blessings that aren’t necessarily manifestations of divine power. Do you love to see the bright, smiling faces of people in love as you perform a wedding ceremony? Do you offer a shoulder to cry on when completing funerary rites? Have any of the children that you’ve given a naming ceremony gone on to greatness?

How Do You Feel About Rival Gods and Followers?

Tensions between religious groups often cause conflicts that may be up to you to help settle. Is there a rival god of the same concept whose followers you often encounter? Are any gods positioned as your god’s opposite in the pantheon? Do you respect the beliefs of others even if they disagree with your own?

What Rank Do You Seek within Your Own Temple?

Most clerics are part of an organization of religious worshippers. Are you expected to convert those who don’t follow your faith? Do you hope to establish a parish or build a temple? Are there rival factions with whom you butt heads?

Originally published on March 7, 2019.

Rob Wieland is an author, game designer (Star Wars RPG, Firefly RPG, Camelot Trigger) and professional nerd. who occasionally tweets and livestreams RPGs with the Theatre of the Mind Players while his meat body is resides in scenic Milwaukee, WI. 

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Players have a lot of decisions to make when they put together a Dungeons & Dragons character. Spell choices, weapon choices and where to put ability scores influence how a character comes together mechanically. But what about the fictional side of the character? In D&D, the Background choice offers some mechanical support for what a character was like before they became an adventurer, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. A character with a good background can give a Dungeon Master several wonderful ways to hook a character into dashing into danger.

A useful background doesn’t have to be a full-fledged biography about a character’s life before first level. Most serial stories take their time to spool out juicy bits of background info as the story unfolds. Sometimes it makes more sense to leave specific elements open so that what happens in the game can inform details. This series of articles offers five background questions for Dungeons & Dragons classes that a player can answer with a few short sentences whenever they want (yes, we’ll be doing one for each class). Players can answer these questions ahead of the first Dungeons & Dragons session, or DMs can facilitate this character building exercise with a session zero.

Ask these questions build your barbarian’s backstory.

What Is Your Relationship with Civilization?

Barbarians exist on the edge of the civilized world. How do you feel about those who bring law and order to the natural world? Are they the target of your wrath because of how they change things? Do you find something fascinating about their customs or technology?

Whom Did You Honor with Your Name?

Ancestry and familial ties are very important to barbarians. Barbarians choose names deliberately to honor those who came before. Are you named for a mythological figure? Did you receive your name to clear an ancestor? Is the person you are named for still alive?

How Did You First Discover Your Rage?

The barbarian’s rage is what sets them apart from other party members and other members of their own tribe. Did you go through a rite of passage to unlock these abilities? Do you think of the slaughter of your clan to trigger your fury? Were you taught that when you draw your blade it must not rest until it tastes the blood of your enemies?

What Is Your Place within Your Family?

The families and blood ties that barbarians have strengthen their tribes but also offer rich elements of drama. Are you destined to lead someday? Maybe you’re a black sheep adventuring against the wishes of your elders? Are you the last member of your family seeking to join your brothers and sisters in the afterworld?

How Do You Mark Yourself with Distinction?

Barbarians often cover themselves in tattoos and other strange markings to let their friends and enemies recognize them on sight and grow their legends. Do you scar your body for every adversary killed? Or do you dye your hair in honor of the animal totem you follow? Do you add a little bit to a full-body tattoo to chronicle each of your adventures?

Originally published on March 19, 2019.

Rob Wieland is an author, game designer (Star Wars RPG, Firefly RPG, Camelot Trigger) and professional nerd. who occasionally tweets and livestreams RPGs with the Theatre of the Mind Players while his meat body resides in scenic Milwaukee, WI. 

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Creating an entire campaign story arc for your Dungeons & Dragons players can be a monumental task. It requires a lot of thought and work to make it happen. But, it’s absolutely possible to do, no matter how daunting it seems. It all starts with an idea. Thankfully, you can find inspiration for those ideas everywhere, including the D&D 5th edition primary sourcebooks: Dungeon Master’s Guide, Player’s Handbook, and the Monster Manual. Following are six Dungeons & Dragons campaign ideas drawn directly from the Monster Manual. We included quotes and page numbers for reference, along with thoughts on various ways you can turn each idea into a campaign.

Search for the Seven Shards

The Wind Dukes of Aaqa come from a race of elemental beings called the vaati, which once ruled many worlds. A creature known as the Queen of Chaos arose and initiated an interplanar war against vaati rule. To combat the threat, seven vaati heroes combined their powers to create the mighty Rod of Law. In a battle against the queen’s greatest general, Miska the Wolf Spider, a vaati killed Miska by thrusting the rod into him like a spear. The rod shattered into seven shards that scattered across the multiverse. Aarakocra seek signs of the pieces’ locations in order to rebuild what is now known as the Rod of Seven Parts.

(Aarakocra pg. 12)

Drop hints and clues about a possible location of one piece of the Rod of Seven Parts. Or, let your players find a piece in some random creatures’ loot stash and see if they discover what it really is. Then develop scenarios based on their search. Research and throw in encounters with the vaati, aarakocra, and Miska and prepare the party for traveling across the multiverse. Tada, you have a campaign.

Roots of the Gulthias Tree

Legends tell of a vampire named Gulthias who worked terrible magic and raised up an abominable tower called Nightfang Spire. Gulthias was undone when a hero plunged a wooden stake through his heart, but as the vampire was destroyed, his blood infused the stake with a dreadful power. In time, tendrils of new growth sprouted from the wood, growing into a sapling infused with the vampire’s evil essence. It is said that a mad druid discovered the sapling, transplanting it to an underground grotto where it could grow. From this Gulthias tree came the seeds from which the first blights were sown.

(Blights pg. 31)

Blights in Dungeons & Dragons are “awakened plants gifted with the powers of intelligence and mobility.” During some random quest early in their career, your players discover some mention of Gulthias, or Nightfang Spire, or the journal of some mad druid whose babbling tells of finding a wooden stake he’s searched for his whole life. As your players slowly discover more clues about these blights, they begin encountering them in greater numbers, along with other nature beings trying to drive them from their quest, or perhaps aid them.

Unfinished Business

A ghost yearns to complete some unresolved task from its life. It might seek to avenge its own death, fulfill an oath, or relay a message to a loved one. A ghost might not realize that it has died and continue the everyday routine of its life.

(Ghost pg. 147)

“The surest way to rid an area of a ghost is to resolve its unfinished business.”

A single ghost wouldn’t be much of an adventure for a quality party. So, how about a village of ghosts? What about a town, or even an entire city? Ghosts hang around actively trying to complete some unfinished business, so have multiple ghosts available to provide quests that need finishing to your players. All those quests could lead to whatever great calamity caused them all to become ghosts.

Abyssal Origins

Ghouls trace their origins to the Abyss. Doresain, the first of their kind, was an elf worshiper of Orcus. Turning against his own people, he feasted on humanoid flesh to honor the Demon Prince of Undeath. As a reward for his service, Orcus transformed Doresain into the first ghoul. Doresain served Orcus faithfully in the Abyss, creating ghouls from the demon lord’s other servants until an incursion by Yeenoghu, the demonic Gnoll Lord, robbed Doresain of his abyssal domain. When Orcus would not intervene on his behalf, Doresain turned to the elf gods for salvation, and they took pity on him and helped him escape certain destruction. Since then, elves have been immune to the ghouls’ paralytic touch.

(Ghouls pg. 148)

Doresain was the first ghoul, and his tale would make for a grand campaign. Start with undead encounters, and some obvious (and red herring) indications of Orcus. But then, slowly over time, drop in elves and gnolls to deepen the mystery of what they could possibly have to do with the undead. Guide your party on what they think may be side quests that are actually the main quests, eventually leading to Doresain’s destruction, or redemption.

Original Name

Whether these tall, gaunt creatures were peaceful or savage, cultured or primitive before the mind flayers enslaved and changed them, none can say. Not even the original name of their race remains from that distant time.

(Gith pg. 158)

Or does it? For this campaign, your players come into possession of a single page torn from a book (perhaps a page from a Book of Keeping?) with a single word written on it: the long lost secret name of the gith. As they begin investigating it, word could get around, and suddenly creatures from every plane want to know what they have. Of course, at some time they discover what they possess, which leads them right into the middle of the war between the githyanki and githzerai. And it’s a sure bet the illithid would love to have that name, in order to bring the gith under their control once again.

King Obould Many-Arrows

King Obould of the Many-Arrows tribe is a legend among the orc war chiefs of the Forgotten Realms, and he is the most famous orc chief in the history of the D&D game.

(Orcs pg. 245)

King Obould Many-Arrows spent years plying his violent temper to incorporate thousands of orcs into his own tribe, using them to destroy and conquer what he wanted. Then, suddenly, King Obould made peace with all his enemies with a treaty that baffled the creatures under his leadership. Now, many years later, the peace treaty is in danger of coming undone. This threatens the lives of thousands of civilized and peaceful beings. But what brought about the peace treaty in the first place? Do your players work to take on King Obould’s army directly, or do they investigate the reason for the peace treaty?

We hope these ideas help you create your next epic campaign. For further help, be sure to read “Chapter 3: Creating Adventures” in the Dungeon Master’s Guide.

Originally published on January 7, 2017.

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Mass combat has always been a tantalizing idea for storytellers, but it can be difficult in execution. Imagine two (or more) armies waging a lethal battle with all the magic at their disposal. It certainly makes for an epic backdrop to highlight the player’s actions. However, once the characters join as generals it often falls apart. Most game systems hinge on around three to six second combat rounds. This mechanically falls apart once you start using big armies. Long term spell effects or other class features that can be used endlessly spark fun conversations, but they make running mass battles hard.

Typically, storytellers will simply make the rest of the battle a cinematic backdrop and let the players do small scale or goal-orientated missions on the field. This works very well if the outcome of the battle is already predetermined, or you have multiple tables that can each hit some major objectives. Some game systems (like Legend of the Five Rings or Dungeons & Dragons) have books and chapters dedicated to running mass combat but the mechanics can be confusing. So here’s a GM tip for a quick way to run mass combat between system agnostic armies.

Let’s Crunch Numbers

Your first step is to write down the two “generals” and their army size. The generals could be a council of wizards on one side versus a single war veteran on the other. Let’s say they each have an army size of 100,000. Give each general an arbitrary leadership score based on your game system and gut feeling. In Dungeons & Dragons you might use their charisma modifiers. In Vampire: The Masquerade you might simply use their leadership score. Finally, determine general army advantages and simply increase the generals’ leadership score by a flat amount based on them. If one army has more magic they might get a +2. If another has better-trained soldiers, add +2 to that general’s score. Even army size can be a factor! Be as robust or as simple as you prefer.

Next, you want to write down each main “player” on each side of the battlefield. This step is really fun and where this system shines. The “enemy” side gets a mini-hero to match each of the main armies and they can be as customized as you want or as simple as “battle wizard 1.” Of course the more flair you add, the better it is. You don’t need to have their full stats, just use their “leadership value” on your note sheet. It will be different than their generals. Everyone should have some variety because your players will have variety as well. If the characters have allies and enemies, this is a great spot to slide them in as well.

The war begins! At the start of the first turn, have all the listed characters (but not the generals) roll their leadership score versus the other. Again, your specific system determines how this is rolled, be it a simple D20 with a modifier, or a bucket full of D10s. Go through the whole list and record what each person rolled. You aren’t looking to total them up, just simply if they bested their “opponent.”

Each mini-victory adds a simple +1 or +2 modifier to their generals’ dice pool. Finally, using all the modifiers, have the two generals roll against each other. The winning side loses 5% of their army, and the losing side loses 10% of theirs, plus an extra 5% if the roll was particularly lopsided (i.e. one general rolled 30 and the other 5). This entire turn takes about one hour of in-game time for the party, and most armies are typically routed when they lose 40% of their troops.

All said, this is a very simple way to add some gamification to the battlefield. Once you roll the dice for the party, you can play matchmaker behind the screen as a GM. If you notice two people rolled the same dice, you might elect to have the two generals duel. Other fun tasks could include sneaking into the reserve or using clever party tricks to gain a battle edge. Run those tasks as you would normally in between these combat rounds. If they are successful, give more bonuses to the respective general.

By running mass combat in this way, the players can continue to be as creative and have real battlefield impact, but also feel like they are part of a larger machine in the entire army.

Originally published on September 19, 2019.

Rick Heinz is the author of The Seventh Age Series, Dread Adventures, and a storyteller with a focus on D&D For Kids, Wraith: The Oblivion, Eclipse Phase, and an overdose of LARPs. You can follow the game or urban fantasy related thingies on Twitter or Facebook or reach out for writing at RickHeinzWrites@gmail.com.

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The thing about being part of a party of heroes is that, at some point, fighting will happen. You’ll also probably have to do some running. In Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Regé-Jean Page’s paladin Xenk is fortunately experienced when it comes to the adventuring lifestyle. Xenk has to wield a blade and take down foes with ease. The character has a whole calmness about him, too; he’s not one for flailing about. The below exclusive clip from the Dungeons & Dragons movie digital release’s bonus features focuses on Regé-Jean Page’s physicality and training for Xenk.

Page notes that finding the character’s physicality helps him get into the role. It’s not only about training, but finding the right discipline for the character. Stunt choreographer Troy Milenov follows that up by complimenting Page’s skills. He cites Page’s experience with dancing that helped the actor pick up the choreography. Page certainly demonstrated his comfort on the dance floor repeatedly in Bridgerton.

This feature on Page’s physicality is only a small part of the bonus features for the movie. From Paramount Home Entertainment, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves will be available to purchase on Digital May 2. All bonus features will be available with a digital purchase.

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Dungeon Masters are a hybrid class. They’re a little bit writer, a little bit producer, and a little bit actor at the table. The best ones know how to think on their feet because tabletop RPG stories grow out of the action/reaction of the players as well as their contributions to the fiction. Few players will have Robin Williams or Tina Fey as their Dungeon Master, but these legends got to where they were thanks to several rules of improvisation from places like The Second City and The Groundlings. We’ve chosen some key improv rules that Dungeon Masters can apply to their Dungeons & Dragons games. We also have some tips on how these rules specifically apply to tabletop games.

Say Yes

This is the big rule of improv. When someone makes a choice in a scene, go with it. So often, Dungeon Masters fight what their players want to do because they have a specific vision for their story. That can mean both small choices like requiring the PCs to do a specific thing to move a scene forward or large choices like setting up plots that players don’t engage in. When a Dungeon Master says no, that endangers player buy-in and disrupts the flow of the game.

Saying yes doesn’t mean giving the players everything they want. This rule has risen in various gaming spaces as Say Yes or Roll the Dice. This particular version lets GMs say yes until the players get to a point where failure has some interesting meaning beyond “no”. Then the dice come out and the story continues on whatever path the dice say they it should.

Yes Is Good, “Yes And…” Is Better

The players and the Dungeon Master both contribute to the story at the table. As much as players build on and react to the Dungeon Master, so too should the Dungeon Master build and react to what they players do. It can be easy to get specific when a player asks if they can do something and use the rules as a justification why they can’t. Or the Dungeon Master can let the players run with their crazy plan and build on the consequences.

This rule also highlights a favorite dirty Dungeon Master tactic: Sometimes, The Players Have A Better Plot Than You. Dungeon Masters should listen during the scenes when the players get back to their tavern or tower and discuss what’s going on. The players might make a good argument for why the duke is the vampire instead of the duchess. Or they might remember a detail from three sessions ago that the Dungeon Master overlooked. Building on the player’s plot here—saying “Yes, And…” to their theory—not only makes them feel smart for figuring out the story, it makes for a smoother transition between scenes.

Make Statements

Building the story requires story elements to be in place. The Dungeon Master usually gets the first crack at these because they have the plot in mind. Asking the players can often be helpful for ideas but at the end of the day the Dungeon Master says what’s in the room or what the lord of the castle looks like. These statements can be big or small.

There’s an element of confidence here that many first-time players and DMs struggle with. People new to the RPG scene often talk about how they’ a’re afraid to say or do things because they don’t want to be wrong or embarrass themselves in front of others. But Nobody Knows You’ve Messed Up Unless You Let Them. Dungeon Masters aren’t infallible, but as long as they make confident statements and stick to them, the game will flow.

There Are No Mistakes

In an improv scene, there isn’t time to go back and fix things. Everything is about forward momentum. Dungeons & Dragons sessions also thrive on that momentum. Stopping to look up a rule or class feature can kill the flow of the game. Sometimes it’s best for the Dungeon Master to make a ruling in play and then clarify it after the game.

Rulings, Not Rules allow the DM to be flexible at the table, but the DM should also take the time afterward to explain to players if the ruling in play was incorrect. It’s okay to play a rule one way and then change the rule later, so long as those changes are clearly communicated with the rest of the table.

Originally published on July 19, 2017.

Rob Wieland is an author, game designer and professional nerd. He writes about kaiju, Jedi, gangsters, elves, Vulcans and sometimes all of them at the same time. His blog is here, his Twitter is here and his meat body can be found in scenic Milwaukee, WI.

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Dungeons & Dragons is many people’s first experience in the world of tabletop RPGs. Part of D&D 5th Edition’s success has been because it’s a version that new players can easily understand while also keeping a mix of elements from previous editions for returning players. The new edition also has a lot of new Dungeon Masters creating adventures for the first time. Dungeon Mastering is a skilled art that can be a little scary. For those tables full of first-time players and first-time Dungeon Masters, here are a few things you can do to help out the person taking a risk on the other side of the screen.

Say Yes

RPGs have benefited in recent years from designers who have their feet in both the geek and improv worlds. One idea that really keeps the game moving is saying “yes” whenever the Dungeon Master tosses out a problem. If the players spend time refusing the quest of the shadowy man in the corner of the tavern, that’s less time for awesome heroics and witty banter. There will be time for more personal quests as the players develop their characters and the Dungeon Master develops the world.

Roll Damage and Attacks Together

Pacing is one of the areas where new Dungeon Masters often have trouble. Commanding a table’s attention for hours at a time is difficult, but even small things on the player’s side can help. Keeping combat fast is certainly something everybody wants. A good way for players to do that is to roll the attack and the damage at the same time rather than rolling one, seeing if it hits, and then rolling the damage if it does. The other dice don’t matter on a miss, but they might also give whoever is describing that moment of combat a little more inspiration if a big miss could have meant big damage.

Write Down Your Powers and Abilities Clearly

Everyone at the table should help keep the rules straight. They don’t have to be strictly followed, but the more things a player has written down on their character sheet is less time spent looking up spells or special abilities. Character sheets don’t always have a lot of room. However, even doing something as simple as writing down a page number next to a spell or an ability will speed things along until character abilities are second nature. (Tip: index cards are great to make personal reference cards for this sort of stuff).

Pick Up Your Own Supplies

Most of the time, the Dungeon Master buys all the initial supplies for a game. That can include the books, the dice and so on. This works when a group is just starting out, but as a campaign rolls on, it can be helpful for each player to pick up their own supplies. It can be simple as a set of dice to cut down on passing around a communal set. Or maybe someone can grab an extra Player’s Handbook to speed up rules consultations or reading the book to a greater degree in between games. Online resources can be a huge help here.

Be a Good Guest

A good Dungeon Master knows hungry players means grumpy players. Often they’ll share food (or even cook) for the group. There’s a lot of prep work, a wonderful experience if done right, and requires some cleanup afterwards. If the Dungeon Master is hosting, be sure to bring some snacks, drinks or other items that make the burden of hosting easier. If the game is at a bar or game store, show your appreciation by picking up a drink tab or buying snacks to keep the Dungeon Master working at peak efficiency.

Originally published on October 27, 2017.

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Spellcaster classes provide Dungeons & Dragons players with the most options. Utility spells help players that come up with creative solutions to dungeon problems. Fighting classes often had these options built into their weaponry. Entire books detailed to the differences in speed, weight and deadliness between weapon choices. Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, however, streamlined the weapons selection process to make combats run faster. And while, mechanically, there isn’t much difference between a longsword and a katana, there are a series of keywords that offers a little extra bit of tactics to players who don’t want to just grind out combats. These Dungeons & Dragons weapons basics will help you in combat.

Finesse

The most commonly known keyword is this one: finesse. Most weapons go with the Strength modifier for melee attacks and damage. Finesse weapons can use either the Strength or the Dexterity modifier of the attacker for this purpose. Most rogues know this rule by heart to allow for a little extra hurt to come from a Sneak Attack. Rogues prize Dexterity above all other attribute scores.

These weapons also come in useful for ranged builds (since you’ll use Dexterity for ranged attacks) and builds that have used their best scores elsewhere. Worrying about one score instead of two for melee removes a little pressure.

Reach

One of the main advantages of having a bigger weapon than an opponent, other than doing more damage, is keeping them away. This avoids counter strikes. Weapons that do this well provide reach, which allows attacks farther away than normal weapons, usually by five feet. It allows fighters equipped with polearms or halberds to engage an opponent without having to worry about opportunity attacks should the fighters decide to move away from their target after an attack.

Weapons with this trait should end up in the hands of characters that need mobility for healing. That includes clerics and paladins. It would also benefit characters that have a bonus that stacks with reach, such as Bugbears.

Versatile

Fighters often struggle with an existential question: to shield or not to shield? A shield provides an armor class bonus, but using one shuts off the weapons that really bring the hit points down since most of them require two hands to use. This trait offers something of a compromise. Players can use versatile weapons with one or two hands. Each style has a different damage die. Fighters with versatile weapons can judge in the moment whether or not they need extra protection or if they want to hit a target harder.

Originally published on January 19, 2018.

Rob Wieland is an author, game designer and professional nerd. He’s worked on dozens of different tabletop games ranging from Star Wars and Firefly to his own creations like CAMELOT Trigger. He can be hired as a professional Dungeon Master for in-person or remote games. His Twitter is here. His meat body can be found in scenic Milwaukee, WI.

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Dungeons & Dragons is having quite a cultural moment again. There’s a live-action D&D film in theaters, Honor Among Thieves, as well as a TV series in the works. And of course, all of those Stranger Things references continue to make this game larger than life. So it makes sense that the legendary RPG would have a cross-promotion with a known brand right now. Thanks to fan demand, fast-food chain Arby’s is once again offering a special promotion featuring limited edition Arby’s Dungeons & Dragons dice. You can check out images of the new 2023 D&D Arby’s dice below:

The limited-edition complete D&D dice sets dropped on April 17 at ArbysShop.com for $12. They made the dice of a transparent material with a small Arby’s hat embedded inside. Each dice features gold lettering and has a tiny Arby’s logo in place of its highest number. Now, the initial round of Arby’s Dungeons & Dragons dice sold out rather fast. The fans ate them up as fast as they’d eat up an Arby’s corned beef sandwich. But for those of you who missed the first drop, worry not. There will be a final drop on April 21. For more details on exactly what time, be sure to follow @Arbys on Instagram. 

These dice don’t represent the first time Arby’s has worked with the D&D brand. Back in 2021, Arby’s released its first set of dice. They were so popular, they sold out almost right away. Fans paid exorbitant amounts of money for them later on eBay. So because of popular demand, they’ve decided to go for round two. And wisely, they planned a second drop for these this time, knowing how in demand they were during the last go-round. Hopefully, one day they start naming some actual food offerings after D&D iconography. We hope to walk into our local Arby’s and ask for a Bard Beef n’ Cheddar, or a Mindflayer Milkshake. Beholder cake for dessert, anyone?

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We’ve had a ton of big-budget high fantasy on TV recently. Game of Thrones kicked the doors open, and followed up with House of the Dragon and its many beasts, but The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, The Wheel of Time series, and more have all followed up with excellent TV outings. But get your swords ready and learn your spells properly. Because now the iconic roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons is heading for TV as well. Paramount Pictures has ordered an eight-episode, live-action Dungeons & Dragons TV series for Paramount+. Here’s what we know so far.

We first heard this news in 2021, at that time, Derek Kolstad, the creator behind the John Wick series, was developing a Dungeons & Dragons series for Paramount and Hasbro. But now, Variety reports that Rawson Marshall Thurber will bring the show to life. Thurber has written the pilot for the Dungeons & Dragons TV series and will also direct the show.  According to Variety, “the series is a co-production between eOne and Paramount Pictures.” While we don’t know much about the plot yet, or which aspects of Dungeons & Dragons‘ world the series will pull from, it is important to note that this is a separate project from the Chris Pine-starring D&D movie, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.

In addition to Thurber, Deadline reports that Drew Crevello will serve as showrunner of the series.

This would actually be the second time a D&D show made it on the air. A kid’s cartoon show ran for two seasons in the ’80s. The roleplaying game was a sensation, selling millions by the early ’80s. It also coincided with the “Satanic Panic” gripping the nation at the time. Parents wanted it banned. In an effort to make the brand “kid safe,” a Saturday morning cartoon was produced.

The popularity of Dungeons & Dragons continues to skyrocket. So one can see why Paramount wants to attempting to strike while the iron is hot. We know we can’t wait to see Beholders, Displacer Beasts, and Tiamat fighting off warriors and wizards on our TV screens.

And if you want more D&D, please relive the amazing time Vin Diesel sat down with us for a campaign.

Originally published on January 15, 2021.

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Actors prepare for roles all sorts of ways. If they’re playing a character based on someone in real life, they research that person. If they’re playing a character from a book, they read the book. In the case of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, the cast prepared by actually playing a game of D&D. After all, what could be better research than that? It’s not like you can go out and find a Tiamat to fight, or a wizard to give you sage advice.

In the video below, you can see how actors Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Sophia Lillis, and Justice Smith played D&D together before production began.

Wizards of the Coast confirmed (via Dicebreaker) that the main cast ran a one-shot D&D 5E scenario on the day before principal photography began. In fact, this was also on the very first day that the cast ever met in person, so the two-hour tabletop session was used as a bonding exercise for them. We actually think this is something other movies should do when the cast first meet each other, whether the movie is a Dungeons & Dragons one or not. Although we suppose Monopoly might work just as well.

Honestly, we would like to see an expanded edition of this video. How did this campaign go? How long did it go on? What perils did they face together? We have so many questions. From the look of things, it looked like everyone was having a really good time. Chris Pine had so much fun, in fact, that he later went on to play D&D with his family. Although he wasn’t in the movie, it seems like movie star/D&D super fan Joe Manganiello probably should have been invited. It almost feels wrong not having him at a celebrity D&D game, doesn’t it?

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is currently in theaters.

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Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves overflows with many things: adventure, magic, and several Easter eggs. One of our favorite Easter eggs—in addition to the adventuring group dressed like the classic D&D cartoon characters—is a subtle Critical Role reference. When Edgin (Chris Pine) and Holga (Michelle Rodriguez) locate the sorcerer Simon (Justice Smith), Simon is performing his magic tricks for an audience. His tricks don’t exactly impress, but he performs as a distraction so he can steal from the audience. That’s where the Critical Role Easter egg comes in.

Simon throws out some sensory effects in an effort to keep the crowd’s attention. One of them is making the air smell like fresh cut grass. And yes, that Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves moment is a nod (and quite the clever Easter egg) to the character Fresh Cut Grass in Critical Role. Sam Riegel voices Fresh Cut Grass, a.k.a. FCG, in Critical Role‘s currently airing third campaign. Fresh Cut Grass is an aeormaton (robot) cleric. His one-time associate bestowed the name Fresh Cut Grass upon him because she named all her creations after her favorite smells.

Riegel himself confirmed the connection to his character on TikTok. I love that the Dungeons & Dragons movie included a Critical Role Easter egg. I love it even more for not being super obvious. And for it to be a nod to FCG, maybe my favorite member of Bells Hells? Perfection.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is playing in theaters now.

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The game part of “role-playing game” primarily comes when dice hit the table. The story the players and the Dungeon Master are telling in their Dungeons & Dragons game comes to this point where both sides want to see what happens. Whether the roll succeeds or fails, the story should continue to be interesting. This binary result works most of the time. However, some tables want to have more dynamic results when players throw dice. Here are some of our favorite ways to spice up dice rolls beyond “I did the thing!” and “I didn’t do the thing!” while playing Dungeons & Dragons.

Player Driven Critical Rolls

Officially, Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition only has critical successes on attack rolls which allow for double damage on attacks. Natural 20s and natural 1s are automatic successes and failures, respectively but that’s it. In some editions of the game, these rolls lead to critical successes and failures where the character succeeds or fails at a higher level.

For example, the 20 on a Persuasion check doesn’t just convince the guard you’re meant to be there. Instead, the guard escorts you to the evil Duke directly! The 1 on the Stealth check doesn’t just mean you’re caught. It means your boot got stuck in a crack in the wall and you are at a disadvantage until you can pull free.

A great way to ease this idea into a game is to let the players take control when one of these rolls happens. Dungeon Masters can still guide the player to make sure that they don’t push the narrative off the rails. But most players should have a sense of what a great success or terrible failure should feel like.

Success at a Cost

Rolling a 1 is heartbreaking, but sometimes rolling a 14 when you need a 15 hurts just a little bit more. Players want to succeed and do cool things with their characters. In moments like these, players can negotiate a success at a cost. The Dungeon Master and player have a brief negotiation over what the player might take as a consequence in exchange for succeeding. This happens all the time in narratives; the hero doesn’t realize they are hurt worse than they initially thought. Or later, at some point, the noble will realize the statue is a forgery.

Success at a cost in Dungeons & Dragons is particularly useful in using or breaking equipment to put pressure on parties looking to rush through a dungeon. Should they head back in town for thieves tools? Should the paladin explore other rooms to find a shield she can use?

Critical Hit Cards

The base rules for 5th Edition keep things pretty clean and simple. Players roll double their damage dice on a natural 20 roll. But many players have a long-standing tradition of getting into the nitty gritty details of a critical hit. Past editions have had charts on which to roll. They detail what body parts they smash, sever, or slice off.

A product like Nord Games Critical Hit Deck for Players adds this element to 5e by not only offering alternate conditions for the player’s vicious blow, but also altering the damage based on the type the weapon inflicts. GMs can also pick up their own deck to really expand the options. The cards make a critical roll feel like a slow-motion cutscene from a console RPG.

They also have a deck for critical failures for players who want to make a natural 1 a special occasion.

Minor Effects

Natural 20s are great, but what about those poor 19s? There’s a lot of room to explore between the success of hitting a difficulty class and the big success of a natural 20. A high enough roll could still offer a minor effect, like a five-foot push back or gaining hit points equal to the attacker’s Con modifier as a rush of adrenaline hits from the solid hit. The options could expand as the character grows, too. Minor effects might occur whenever the character succeeds in an attack roll on a number equal to or higher than 20-their proficiency bonus.

Originally published on March 7, 2019.

Rob Wieland is an author, game designer (Star Wars RPG, Firefly RPG, Camelot Trigger) and professional nerd. who occasionally tweets and livestreams RPGs with the Theatre of the Mind Players while his meat body resides in scenic Milwaukee, WI. 

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Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is an enthusiastic romp through the Forgotten Realms that anyone can enjoy. But let’s be honest. If you’re a D&D player, you’re going to enjoy it a little bit more than everyone else! With amazing details from playable species to iconic locations like the Underdark, this movie is absolutely a love letter to anyone who’s given the World’s Greatest Roleplaying Game a try. That includes the monsters our hapless heroes fight. The original Monster Manual introduced now classic creatures like owlbears and mimics. Honor Among Thieves playfully pays homage to those monsters and many others from the first edition of D&D. We’ve got a list of some of the monsters in the blockbuster film that you wouldn’t want to face in a dark dungeon (or anywhere else). 

Axe Beak

The ostrich-like Axe Beak, which Doric tries to use to her advantage as she’s chased through the streets of Neverwinter, first appeared in the original Monster Manual. The seven-foot-tall flightless birds are easily recognizable by their hatchet-shaped beaks. They’re also rather grumpy.

Black Dragon

It wouldn’t be a D&D movie without dragons! Honor Among Thieves has a few, including a black dragon dispersing its devastating acid breath as it swoops across the battlefield. Just the mere presence of a black dragon can overwhelm even the most stalwart of warriors.

Displacer Beast

Also one of the first monsters to appear in the role-playing game, the puma-like displacer beast chases our heroes during the Highsun Games. These monsters are capable of displacing light to create a duplicate image of themselves a short distance away. The two toothy tentacles protruding from its back attack the distracted prey with ferocity.

Ettin

This two-headed giant monster makes a quick cameo in Honor Among Thieves‘ closing credits, but veteran Dungeons & Dragons players will spot it immediately.

Gelatinous Cube

Almost as iconic as dragons, the gelatinous cube is a Dungeons & Dragons mainstay. Anyone who’s run into one of these dungeon dwellers during a game knows exactly how dangerous the ooze cubes are. The cube can engulf an unlucky adventurer – as it does the thieves during the Highsun Games – and while inside they suffer acid damage and are unable to breathe.

Intellect Devourers

Resembling a brain walking with little legs and feet, the intellect devourer’s funny appearance belies their threat. Edgin might have been slightly insulted that the intellect devourers didn’t engage the group, but he should count himself lucky. These aberrations can magically consume a humanoid brain and take over its body. Yikes.

Mimic

Treasure chest or monster? You might want to approach slowly before trying to open it! These predators are hard to detect even for the most seasoned adventurer. The mimic, which Holga discovers by accident during the Highsun Games, can use polymorph to transform into any inanimate object. Doors are another of their favorite shapes.

Rust Monster

Small creatures the color of rust fight over scraps in the alleyways of Neverwinter. They’re known as rust monsters. They’re typically docile so you might not consider them a thread until you learn what they can do. Rust monsters, a bane of adventurers who wield blades and shields, use their feathery antenna to seek out metal to corrode and ingest the rust.

Snowy Owlbear

This distant cousin of the owlbear roams the tundra in the frozen north of Faerün. The large creature has characteristics of both the snowy owl and polar bear and is typically considered a monstrosity. The druid Doric, however, candidly views the snowy owlbear as just another natural creature. This grants her the rare ability to Wild Shape into the terrifying—but cute—predator.

Yuan-ti

Blink and you might misssss the snake-like creature known as a yuan-ti. These creatures, who are also a playable species in Dungeons & Dragons, have both serpentine and humanoid features. (Basically, snake people.) Yuan-ti were originally humans who used dark magic to transform themselves into these striking creatures.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves hides even more winks and nods for veteran players to discover outside of its monster lineup. My personal favorite? The ground in the arena in which the heroes face these creatures has the appearance of being covered in squares, just like the grid of a battle map!

Kelly Knox (she/her) is a Seattle-area author and writer who also contributes to StarWars.com, DCComics.com, and more. Follow her on Twitter at @kelly_knox to talk about just about everything pop culture.

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Dungeons & Dragons is an amazing game. It helps people make friends, helps people work on social skills, has a role in some therapy. However, for all of the awesome stuff that Dungeons & Dragons does, it also holds a dark power. Yes, friends, our beloved RPG can not only create relationships, but it can also destroy them. Once, it nearly destroyed a Major League Baseball team from within (via Royals Review). I’m not even joking.

The Royals are a baseball team out of Kansas City, Missouri, and prior to the 2016 season starting, the team started a D&D campaign. What started as a pleasant escape and a unique way to build camaraderie among teammates slowly deteriorated and caused such a huge rift among Royals players that it started to affect how the team played. Royals Review interviewed one of the players. They anonymously explained the situation in more detail.

Ned Yost, the Royals’ manager, took on the role of Dungeon Master. While it’s kind of awesome that the team’s manager stepped up to the DM plate, apparently Yost was no Matthew Mercer. Yost’s campaigns were confusing, according to the Royal Review‘s anonymous informant, and Yost also had a really bad habit of pitting the players against monsters that were far too advanced. However, the dice would always seem to roll just right, and the adventurers would find themselves victorious despite overwhelming odds. While the rolls were good, the team was happy—it was actually kind of funny to them. Of course, Lady Luck did not always bless the team’s rolls, and so tensions ran high whenever the natural 20s became more and more rare.

But a shaky DM wasn’t the only problem. There was also the issue of the team’s healer in the Dungeons & Dragons campaign, played by Royals shortstop Alcides Escobar. The role of the healer is crucial to a campaign, and they have to be careful about how they interact with threats. Escobar, however, adhered to the Leeroy Jenkins school of thought. He had a bad habit of plowing ahead, right into the clutches of danger. Much like Yost’s overly challenging monster fights, Escobar’s Leeroy Jenkins antics made the team laugh at first—until they didn’t stop. It didn’t take long for the joke to get old.

With issues like that paired with players who were really dedicated and invested in the game, it seemed this fun game of D&D pulled the Royals apart at the seams. Tensions weren’t only high on game night. The conflict also made the Royals play pretty poorly. The team had to work to repair their D&D-sized rift. We can only hope they switched to watching Critical Role together rather than actually playing D&D during the baseball season.

Originally published on August 2, 2016.

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Roleplaying tips abound in Critical Role. If you’ve seen every episode, or only one, then you’ve witnessed myriad roleplay techniques, whether you noticed them or not. So if you enjoy immersing yourself into the heart and soul of your Dungeons & Dragons characters, or if you want to learn how to do so, here are some Critical Role-inspired D&D roleplaying tips just for you.

Detail Your Character

Giving your character plenty of details is an important way of bolstering your roleplaying. Adding details, from the obvious physical ones to the private cerebral ones, will build a solid base from which your character can grow. The 5th edition D&D Player’s Handbook puts it this way: “Your character is a combination of game statistics, roleplaying hooks, and your imagination… [you] invent the personality, appearance, and backstory of your character.”

A sterling example is Vox Machina’s backstory and development. Each is an example of how characters are so much more than race, class, a list of stats, or a walking pile of weapons and equipment. Think about your personal characteristics and how they present in your daily life. Now, think about how you want your in-game avatar to experience and affect the world. Give them characteristics that will allow them to do that.

Play Your Character

As mentioned earlier, your character as a whole is greater than the sum of its individual characteristics or pieces of equipment. However, those things are all still a vital part of your character. Make sure you play them in game to fully support and reflect your character’s personality, both in and out of combat.

For example, think about Vax’ildan’s signature attack involving his Boots of Haste combined with his daggers. Average pieces of equipment, for the most part. Yet, how integrated with Vax has this simple attack method become? So much so that it has its own catchphrase: “Dagger, dagger, dagger.” I’ve been playing D&D many years, in hundreds of games with hundreds of other people, and I’ve never heard “dagger, dagger, dagger” used. Liam O’Brien does it with such flair, that I will forever associate that phrase with Vax, and no one else. That, folks, is how you play your character.

Interact

As much as D&D is a roleplaying game, it is also a game of interactive storytelling, which raises the experience to another level. The 5th edition Player’s Handbook describes these interactions neatly under the phrase “social interactions” (pg. 185), and categorizes them into two styles: descriptive approach and active approach.

Descriptive approach is when “you describe your character’s words and actions to the DM and the other players.” Active approach is when “you speak with your character’s voice, like an actor taking on a role,” even going so far as to physically display “your character’s movements and body language.”

My favorite Critical Role example of interacting can be found in “Episode 14: Shopping and Shipping.” This episode is highly notable for its top quality interactive roleplaying, but also shows that D&D can be hella fun even without getting into combat. Oh, and Vox Machina make a trip to Gilmore’s Glorious Goods. Gilmore!

Role the Dice

Yes, “role” the dice. Three participants make up a standard D&D game: the DM, the players, and the dice. The dice have as great a part to play in the interactive storytelling as the DM and players do.

So what does “role” the dice mean? It’s the difference between saying “you take 10 HP damage” and saying “you take 10 HP damage as the kobold deftly finds an opening in your defense, surprising you with a sword cut to the ribs.”

Critical Role DM Matthew Mercer does this exceptionally well. The best example comes with that phrase we all know and love, “How do you wanna do this?” Instead of merely spouting a bunch of combat numbers and ending at that, he instead gives the last die roll over to the player and has them roleplay how their chracter ends a fight. That is powerful stuff, my friends.

Avid Critical Role watchers may have also witnessed how much importance Mercer gives to role-ing the dice. More than a few times he has rolled a die on some critical event, and then Instagrammed a photo of that die roll. That act shows tremendous honesty, and also shows the value he places on letting die rolls have their role in game.

And if you need more convincing, click over and watch the ritual skill challenge (starting at 4:19:45) Mercer puts Vox Machina through in “Episode 44: The Sunken Tomb,” as they attempt to save a fallen Vex. That is, if you can bring yourself to experience the feels again.

Let It Flow

Finally, don’t try to force your roleplaying into play. Allow it to develop and flow with the game, and as you interact with your fellow players. Vox Machina were a D&D group for years, even before Critical Role. And they, have been real life friends for many years more than that. They know each other very well, both as people and as players. The quality of interactive roleplaying they have together has been nourished and grown over those years. Don’t compare yourself to them!

Originally published on June 14, 2016.

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Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves will attempt to finally give the iconic role-playing adventure the big screen adaptation it deserves. It’s been a long journey from tabletop to big budget blockbuster. And that road strangely enough went straight through the set of Freaks and Geeks. That’s where the film’s co-director John Francis Daley first fell in love with the game. So it’s only fitting Daley got together with his old Freaks and Geeks cast members for a crossover promo that will have fans of both D&D and the TV series feeling like they posses the Orb of Constant Pleasant Vibration.

Turns out (a still-waiting-to-hit-puberty) Sam Weir has been DM’ing a session of D&D for 23 years. He’s been joined at the table by his fellow Freaks and Geeks Bill Haverchuck (Martin Starr) and Neal Schweiber (Samm Levine). They’ve clearly been having a good time. You have to be having fun not to notice if your family is still alive or not. But it’s for the best that their long-standing game has finally come to an end. That means they’ll be able to go see Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Of course, like other fans of the RPG, they’re a little skeptical it can work as a movie.

At least they know the film is in good hands. Daley has previously talked about how his long love affair with D&D began on the set of their show. He started playing because his character was really into Dungeons & Dragons. In a case of life imitating art, that turned into a genuine and lasting affection for the adventure game. From there you can draw a long, straight, unexpected line to him actually co-directing a film based on it. That’s a monumental win for geeks everywhere.

Just imagine how different Hollywood might be if Sam had really loved Monopoly instead. Actually, don’t. We’re much more excited for Honor Among Thieves than we would be a Monopoly movie.

We also need to know if this promo is canon for Freaks and Geeks. Maybe to find out we should honor both Sam and John Francis’s admiration for D&D by rolling for the answer.

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Full of entertaining archetypes, action, and all manner of creatures and magic, Dungeons & Dragons feels made for the big screen. That said, previous live-action D&D movies haven’t been as amazing as one would hope. But Paramount Pictures is trying again with Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. The action-adventure movie focuses on a heist with a star-studded cast playing our band of heroes.

Here’s everything we know about Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.

Title

The D&D movie is testing the record for the longest movie title ever. It’s called Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves‘ Plot

As a tabletop roleplaying game, D&D is all about the quests, and Honor Among Thieves has a quest at the heart of the story. The trailer teases our heroes’ missions and their foes. It comes with a healthy dose of humor and silliness, a tone that seems just right for this adaptation.

Honor Among Thieves‘ official synopsis is as follows:

A charming thief and a band of unlikely adventurers undertake an epic heist to retrieve a lost relic, but things go dangerously awry when they run afoul of the wrong people. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves brings the rich world and playful spirit of the legendary roleplaying game to the big screen in a hilarious and action-packed adventure.

A new featurette for the movie reveals new glimpses at the characters and world of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.

You can also get a closer look at our party with their individual posters below. We have to say this looks like an incredibly fun adventure.

Click To View Gallery

A recent clip from the Dungeons & Dragons movie teases that our hero team won’t be the only party around, though. As Chris Pine’s Edgin and co. prepare to enter a dangerous maze filled with some of D&D‘s most terrifying creatures; they realize they’re up against two other teams. And one of these teams is none other than the cast of characters from the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, which aired in the 1980s. In the series, a group of friends from the real world get pulled into a fantasy world, and they must fight their way home.

We can’t say for certain whether we’ll actually meet these characters or they’ll just be fun Easter eggs. But it’s definitely a fun homage.

Behind the Scenes

The movie features a screenplay by Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, and Michael Gilio. The story is from Gilio and McKay. Goldstein and Daley direct (the duo also directed Game Night).

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves‘ Cast

This movie has an impressive cast of veteran actors and relative newcomers. Here’s who we know about so far:

• Chris Pine – Edgin, a bard
• Michelle Rodriguez – Holga, a barbarian
• Regé-Jean Page – Xenk, a paladin
• Justice Smith – Simon, a sorceror
• Sophia Lillis – Doric, a druid
• Hugh Grant – Forge Fitzwilliam, a rogue (and possibly the movie’s villain)

Chloe Coleman and Daisy Head also appear in the film, but we don’t have details about their roles yet.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves‘ Release Date

Dungeons & Dragons Honor Among Thieves arrives in theaters on March 31, 2023.

Originally published December 2, 2022.

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As part of Tuesday’s D&D Direct, Wizards of the Coast and Mojang Studios announced a collaboration on a Minecraft DLC coming soon to all platforms! The story-driven Minecraft Dungeons & Dragons brings legendary player classes, Forgotten Realms locations, and of course, monsters to block-shaped life. Nerdist saw an extended preview of the upcoming downloadable content. It’s a game inside the game that promises to be a completely unique Minecraft experience.

Riccardo Lenzi, Senior Producer at Mojang Studios, and Tom Sargent of Wizards of the Coast described Minecraft Dungeons & Dragons as an action RPG inside Minecraft. Estimating the total play time at around 10 hours, Lenzi said that the content kicks off as almost all great D&D adventures do: by rolling dice in a basement. Then the magic happens, and the game transports your character from the Minecraft world to the Forgotten Realms.

Players can take on the role of a barbarian, paladin, rogue, or wizard as they embark on their journey.  The DLC story is optimized for a single player, said Lenzi, but friends can enjoy the world alongside each other. In the Forgotten Realms they’ll face beholders, mimics, mindflayers, and so much more. Each will be depicted for the first time in the iconic Minecraft block style. The action makes use of a 20-sided die, including conversation options based on ability checks D&D players will be very familiar with.

In the preview we saw, for example, the player had an interesting choice to make during conversation: they could roll an insight, intimidation, or persuasion check with a click of a button. New user interface elements like those buttons along with a full, custom in-game menu demonstrate how the development team wanted to make Minecraft D&D feel like a true D&D experience.

And, yes, there will be dungeons and dragons.

While the Dungeons & Dragons items and mobs won’t be available outside the DLC, a set of skins celebrating all 12 D&D player classes will be part of the pack. Players can show those off anywhere in the Minecraft world.

Minecraft D&D is a far-ranging adventure across five Forgotten Realms locations. The original, fully-voiced story brings the World’s Greatest Roleplaying Game to life inside one of the world’s greatest online games. But what about the other way around?

Monstrous Compendium Vol. 3: Minecraft Creatures, available today on D&D Beyond for no additional cost, gives Dungeon Masters new but very familiar creatures at their disposal. You can now seamlessly add five classic Minecraft mobs, each with their own stat blocks, descriptions, and brand-new art, to any D&D campaign. Among them are the Ender Dragon, Enderman, and Creeper (aww, man).

Minecraft Dungeons & Dragons DLC will be available on the Minecraft Marketplace later this spring.

Kelly Knox (she/her) is a Seattle-area author and writer who also contributes to StarWars.com, DCComics.com, and more. Follow her on Twitter at @kelly_knox to talk about just about everything pop culture.

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If you’re new to Dungeons & Dragons character creation, picking a class and figuring out how to build a fun-to-play first level character can be overwhelming and intimidating. Trying to figure out which stats should be a priority, which skills and spells you should invest in and how to get the numbers on the sheet so you can start playing can be a juggling act.

With that in mind, we’ve compiled guides to starting characters of every D&D character class to get you rolling. These aren’t pre-built characters, however, so you have lots of room to play with your race and stats, as well as your background. Each guide gives you advice on which stats should be a priority, and which ones you can relegate as a dump stat, where you dump your lowest stat roll (hint: it’s almost never charisma if you’re starting out), and other helpful tidbits about the class. Click the character class to check out the guide for that class. We’ve grouped them generally, but with unique subclasses (like the Rogue’s Arcane Trickster, which bestows magical abilities to a Rogue) these categories are, like all things in D&D, generalizations rather than hard boundaries.

Magical Character Classes

Wizard

As a Wizard, the first place to start is by taking your highest attribute and putting it into your Intelligence. Intelligence is what you use to cast your spells so this must be the highest. For your lowest, unless you have a compelling backstory reason for it, pick Strength. We can wreak havoc with our minds, we don’t need to be able to do pull-ups (punch wizards, or wizards who cast punch, are a different class).

Druid

Druids are nature wizards. They have the same amount and breakdown of spell slots as a Wizard does, with the only exception being that wizards learn one additional cantrip and have a much larger pool of spells to choose. What do druids get? All of their magic is focused on nature and life.

Warlock

Warlocks are the magic users who cheated their way through Final exams. They’re a really cool class who have made a Pact with a powerful entity, for some greater purpose; be it their soul, influencing events in the mortal plane for their chosen patron, or even cookies.

Sorcerers

Sorcerers are like the slacker kid in high school who skipped most of the classes and still managed to get better grades than the Valedictorian. They gain their magic abilities due to their origins and have been magical their entire lives. This allows them to tweak spells in ways other classes can only dream of and creates some really cool roleplaying possibilities.

Combat Character Classes

Fighter

Fighters in D&D are the Swiss Army knife of combat characters. They are capable of anything and lend themselves to being soldiers or mercenaries. There isn’t a weapon that can be held in the hands of a fighter that cannot be mastered.

Barbarian

Barbarians are a really fun class in D&D. They forego armor and training and favor a much, much more direct approach. Hallmarks of a Barbarian are mountains of hit points and really big, heavy weapons.

Rogue

There’s nothing like playing the sneaky character who disappears into the shadows at the first sign of danger. This isn’t to say that Rogues aren’t brave and they’re trying to retreat; odds are, they are just trying to get behind the enemy and try to get a killing blow that finishes the fight before it even starts.

Monk

Monks in D&D focus on both unarmored and unarmed combat and they are very, very good at it. A monk’s spirituality is able to manifest itself through a calm, centered being and subsequently they have abilities which function similarly to magic but are directly the result of a disciplined mind.

Hybrid Character Classes

Bard

Bards are incredibly fun to play and are able to offer support to your entire party. That’s the first thing to keep in mind when playing a Bard; you are not dealing a huge amount of combat damage but you are making sure the rest of your party is.

Ranger

Rangers are the elusive forest ninjas of D&D. Don’t mistake Rangers for only being bow users (although they are some of the best in the game with a bow), because they have the option of taking fighting styles that can really push their melee damage up as well. Rangers are a great class who marry a useful group of combat abilities with incredible deep roleplay opportunities.

Cleric

Clerics are the embodiment of their deity’s blessings. They wield magic and travel the land in the name of their god, looking pretty cool while they do it. Because Clerics are in the service of a deity, their individual play styles will represent the type of deity they worship.

Paladin

Sometimes faith in your Deity isn’t enough to keep you and your loved ones safe while adventuring. For those times, a strong sword arm and encasing yourself in armor is the key to success. Paladins in D&D marry the best elements of being a Cleric with the best elements of being a Fighter.

There is, of course, more to a character than their skills and stats, so if you need help creating a backstory, personality, and motivations for your character, we’ve also got a guide for that too.

Originally published on September 29, 2017.

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It’s been nearly 23 years since the last time a feature-length adaptation of Wizards of the Coast’s much-loved fantasy roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons made its way to the big screen. After spending half a decade in production hell, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein’s long-awaited D&D reboot Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves finally hits theaters this weekend. Though the wait may have been long, I dare say it’s well worth it. Honor Among Thieves boasts a winning combination of classic adventure, witty dialogue, and well-choreographed action sequences. And Chris Pine’s charismatic turn ties all of this together.

Starring Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Justice Smith, Sophia Lillis, Hugh Grant, and Rege-Jean Page, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves follows bard Edgin (Pine) and barbarian Holga (Rodriguez). The pair are best friends and thieves who raise Edgin’s daughter Kira together in the wake of his wife’s death. When Edgin’s thieving ways get the better of him, rogue Forge (Grant) stabs Holga and Edgin in the back, taking a bounty of riches and custody of Kira for himself. Together, Edgin and Holga set out along with a gathered party of unlikely heroes including wizard Simon (Smith) and shapeshifting druid Doric (Lillis) to stage a heist on Forge’s vault and take back what’s rightfully theirs. 

Admittedly, Honor Among Thieves is a monster (pun intended) of a film. With a runtime ten minutes shy of two and a half hours, this lengthy fantasy-adventure asks quite a bit of its audience, in terms of both story and worldbuilding. Though the specifics of this fantasy world aren’t by any means new, the film takes great pains to honor the game and its avid fanbase of tabletop players. This means taking the time to nod to game mechanics, locations, and creatures wherever possible. Honor Among Thieves‘ attention to detail gives it a welcome earnestness and sort of credibility often lacking in gaming adaptions; however, it does make for an at times arduous watch if you’re not actively keeping an eye out for Easter eggs.

The story itself does tend to wind and amble. It has a strange pace for what on paper could’ve been a relatively straightforward heist flick. But the departures and side quests do end up serving as some of the film’s most memorable sequences. This is especially true of Rege-Jean Page as Xenk Yendar, a noble (achingly handsome) Paladin whom we meet nearly halfway through the film. Then, he exits almost as swiftly as he enters it. For those 20 minutes he’s onscreen, though, Page chews scenery and dominates his scenes. He boasts a startling charisma and undeniable charm that work in tandem with a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor. 

Page is so good, one can’t help but wonder about the film’s determination to seemingly write him out after he serves his narrative function. Why not just keep him around for the rest of the adventure? It’s a shame he doesn’t have more screen time; however, the door is wide open for Xenk to return in the future. And, of course, absence only makes the heart grow fonder. The other major scene-stealer is Hugh Grant as backstabbing rogue Forge. It’s a role he was seemingly born to play, channeling grating charm and camp to the nth degree. 

Forge and Page’s performances feel very much in line with the tone Chris Pine sets as leading man Edgin: charming, committed, and more than willing to make a fool of himself where appropriate. It’s gratifying to see a cast so aware of the tone of the movie they’re in, fully realizing the potential of Daley, Goldstein, and Gilio’s script. Admittedly, though, not all characters are created equal. Though nobody is “bad,” Sophia Lillis as Doric does tend to get the short end of the narrative stick. Every other member of the party (including one-and-done Xenk) gets a chunk of time towards their backstory. But Doric is repeatedly underutilized, and mostly relegated to an arbitrary, uninspired romantic subplot with Simon.

The subplot of Simon pursuing Doric and wearing her down despite her previous rejections feels remarkably reductive for a film whose other major male/female relationship sees Edgin and Holga platonically living together and co-parenting Kira as best friends, partners, and nothing more. Though of all the performances, Rodriguez’s is likely the weakest. Holga’s personality lends itself to stilted dialogue and gruff delivery, and the shortcomings of her performance are for the most part salved by the fact that she shares most scenes with Pine.

Still, even with a relatively choppy structure and some frustrating subplots, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is an undeniable crowd-pleaser. It’s the type of unabashedly joyful action-adventure flick that feels like a remnant of a bygone age. Though it may struggle with pacing and an arbitrary villain, a trio of endlessly charming and deliciously ridiculous performances from Grant, Pine, and Page make Honor Among Thieves a worthy holder of the Dungeons & Dragons name.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves hits theaters on March 31.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves ⭐ (3.5 of 5)

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Player resurrection in the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition typically comes in the form of a few spells. Revivify, Resurrection, and Raise Dead are just some of the options for bringing a fallen player character back to life. These spells, however, cost money and components to cast. As players advance, many adventurers find death doesn’t hold the same fear or meaning when there are quick spells to bring them back to life. Critical Role does something different with resurrection.

Critical Role Dungeon Master Matthew Mercer modified 5th Edition’s basic spells with optional and adjustable rules to give death more meaning in the narrative. With these modified rules, a player’s allies play a much more important role in bringing them back from the afterlife. There’s even a chance their efforts may be unsuccessful. And for each successful return to life, the DC (difficulty class) for subsequent resurrections increases by 1.

You can increase the DC in the rules below by 2 instead of just 1 for every successful attempt if you want to add even more challenge to your campaign. But, Mercer warned on Reddit, an increase of 2 may punish low level players. “With many games involving death often at lower levels, it could easily become too daunting,” says Mercer.

Here are the additional Critical Role resurrection rules, written in full by Matthew Mercer, for use in your own Dungeons & Dragons or other roleplaying campaign.

The Fading Spirit – Alternative Resurrection Rules

Character death can often prove to become a minor inconvenience in some campaigns once the adventuring party reaches a certain level, with spells being available to return fallen comrades from the afterlife with temporary setbacks, robbing a small element of danger, and threat to future conflicts and challenges within the story. If you wish to elevate the gravity of character death, you can introduce this optional rule.

If a character is dead, and a resurrection is attempted by a spell or spell effect with longer than a 1 action casting time, a Resurrection Challenge is initiated. Up to three members of the adventuring party can offer to contribute to the ritual via a Contribution Skill Check. The DM asks them each to make a skill check based on their form of contribution, with the DC of the check adjusting to how helpful/impactful the DM feels the contribution would be.

For example, praying to the god of the devout, fallen character may require an Intelligence (Religion) check at an easy to medium difficulty, where loudly demanding the soul of the fallen to return from the aether may require a Charisma (Intimidation) check at a very hard or nearly impossible difficulty. Advantage and disadvantage can apply here based on how perfect, or off base, the contribution offered is.

After all contributions are completed, the DM then rolls a single, final Resurrection success check with no modifier. The base DC for the final resurrection check is 10, increasing by 1 for each previous successful resurrection the character has undergone (signifying the slow erosion of the soul’s connection to this world). For each successful contribution skill check, this DC is decreased by 3, whereas each failed contribution skill check increases the DC by 1.

Upon a successful resurrection check, the player’s soul (should it be willing) will be returned to the body, and the ritual succeeded. On a failed check, the soul does not return and the character is lost.

Only the strongest of magical incantations can bypass this resurrection challenge, in the form of the True Resurrection or Wish spells. These spells can also restore a character to life who was lost due to a failed resurrection ritual.

If a spell with a casting time of 1 action is used to attempt to restore life (via the Revivify spell or similar effects), no contribution skill checks are allowed. The character casting the spell makes a Rapid Resurrection check, rolling a d20 and adding their spellcasting ability modifier. The DC is 10, increasing by 1 for each previous successful resurrection the character has undergone. On a failure, the character’s soul is not lost, but the resurrection fails and increases any future Resurrection checks’ DC by 1. No further attempts can be made to restore this character to life until a resurrection spell with a casting time higher than 1 action is attempted.

Originally published on February 1, 2017.

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Some parts of making a Dungeons & Dragons character go beyond filling in a character sheet and doing the math. For some players, coming up with a backstory is the hardest part of the puzzle to put together. A character’s history is where a Dungeon Master finds the hooks to pull a character into their campaign beyond the promise of treasure. Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition helped players by giving backgrounds some mechanical weight. This part of the character can explain why a fighter might know a thing or two about a temple or how a wizard has shady underworld connections. A good background outlines a good direction for a character’s story in between the clever traps, last-second escapes, and hard-hitting combat at the table. We’ve collected some of the best tips on giving your Dungeons & Dragons character a compelling backstory that isn’t overwhelming.

Keep It Sketchy

Good screenwriters will say that it’s best to keep a character’s history flexible when first starting out a TV series. It’s good to have strong hooks and immediately compelling points. However, it’s also important to leave open space for the player and the Dungeon Master to connect the story back to a character’s personal history. D&D is a game of exploration, and some of that includes character exploration. Players might decide a character’s trajectory is far more interesting than what they originally had in mind. Dungeon Masters would be wise to talk about that direction with players outside of game.

Become Part of the World

Characters didn’t grow up in a vacuum. They had families, lived in towns, worked in cities and formed connections to the heroes and villains of the world before the story began. This is often reflected in the Bond that can be tapped for inspiration in 5th Edition, but players and Dungeon Masters should work together to connect to these elements. Some Dungeon Masters might already have, for example, a thieves’ guild in mind when building a world that will connect to a rogue. Other Dungeon Masters might let the player create the guild and look for ways to feature it during the campaign. The player doesn’t need to upload a resume; even one such connection can be plenty to start.

Connect to Another PC

One of the most difficult parts a Dungeon Master has in an early campaign is justifying why a group of strangers decides to team up and plunder a dungeon together. The players can ease this burden by deciding how their relationships connect. Groups that want high intrigue and drama might draw a web connecting each character. Or a simple option is defining a relationship with another PC with one or two words like sibling, rival or lover. It’s one thing to meet a shadowy figure in a tavern to go on an adventure. It’s entirely something else because a character’s fool brother claims he’s a wizard and that character wants to make sure the so-called wizard comes back home alive.

Consider a Signature Item

The idea of a signature item often centers around a sweet magic weapon or another powerful item. But other, more mundane things can mean more to a character. Every character uses some sort of tool, be it a fighter’s weapon or a cleric’s holy symbol. What’s the history of that tool? What was the first thing that sword ever killed? Who gave that holy symbol to the cleric? Or the first song the bard ever played on their instrument? The answers to these questions can tell a player a lot about their character in surprising ways.

Originally published on January 11, 2018.

Rob Wieland is an author, game designer and professional nerd. He’s worked on dozens of different tabletop games ranging from Star Wars and Firefly all the way down to his own creations like CAMELOT Trigger. His Twitter is here. His meat body can be found in scenic Milwaukee, WI.

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Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves will arrive in theaters on March 31. However, you don’t have to wait until then to learn more about the movie’s adventurers. Prequel novels for Honor Among Thieves will get you ready for the movie before you sit down to watch it. The Road to Neverwinter by Jaleigh Johnson focuses on Edgin Darvis (Chris Pine plays him in the movie). Nerdist has an exclusive excerpt from the D&D prequel novel, and guess what? Edgin has a daughter—a daughter who works alongside him on heists. It’s a solid family business.

Before you meet Kira in the below excerpt, here’s the synopsis for The Road to Neverwinter:

Edgin Darvis’ life is a mess. All that he has left are his lute, his dashing good looks, and…not much else. After a chance encounter with badass bruiser Holga, Edgin is forced to take a hard look at his bad choices. But the road to redemption is long, and paved with unforeseen expenses. Fortunately, the world is full of rich fools begging to be parted from their money.
 
And so Edgin and Holga do what any sensible entrepreneurs would do—they form a crew.
 
Joined by a charming rogue, Forge Fitzwilliam, and Simon, a sorcerer with an intense inferiority complex, the team sets out to line their pockets with both well-earned and ill-gotten gold. Together, Edgin’s crew battles monsters across the realms: gnoll raiders, fey witches, and more fall beneath their sharp weapons and sharper wit. But when they encounter a new, more sophisticated villain, keen blades and piercing blue eyes may not be enough.
 
Their target? Torlinn Shrake, a wealthy eccentric known for abusing his servants and hosting lavish parties.
 
The plan? Play dress-up, sneak into the Shrake estate, and fill their pockets with as much loot as they can carry.
 
The catch? Shrake is hiding a terrible secret: one that could endanger the lives of everyone Edgin has come to care for—even if the loot is too good to pass up.

“We’ll all be murdered by the faceless dead!”

It was definitely a challenge to pick a lock while the lord and lady of the house were screaming their heads off downstairs, but Edgin was a professional.

“Set the scene for me, Holga,” he said, glancing over his shoulder. “What’s Kira doing?”

Standing watch at the door to Lord Bantakent’s study, Holga was shaking her head in pure admiration. “Told you that invisibility pendant would pay off, Ed. She’s a master.”

The lock clicked open. Edgin threw back the lid of the chest and buried his hands in a pile of gold and gems. Sweet victory. He scooped the loot into a bag and tossed it over his shoulder before joining Holga at the door.

Downstairs, the Lord and Lady Bantakent, one of the most un­scrupulous merchant power couples in the city of Neverwinter, were huddled together in their nightclothes in the center of their grand foyer, while a pair of what looked like priceless vases floated around their heads. The rest of the room was a shambles. All the paintings had been turned upside down or pulled off the walls, tables and chairs were knocked over, and through it all, a high-pitched, disem­bodied voice intoned, “Yooooouuuu shall join me in the emptiness of the beyoooooond!”

“She improvised that line,” Edgin said, nudging Holga.

The servants had all fled as soon as Kira started throwing plates and dinnerware against the dining room walls and howling in a voice of ghostly despair. Lord and Lady Bantakent had retreated to the foyer, where an invisible Kira had cornered them to continue the haunting while Edgin and Holga cleaned out the upstairs.

“Miffles!” Lady Bantakent wailed. “No, not my baby!”

“Oh, that’s a nice touch,” Edgin said, “using the dog.”

He watched Lord and Lady Bantakent quail before the sight of Miffles the terrier sailing through the air, dipping up and down, his pink tongue lolling out the side of his mouth, to all appearances hav­ing the time of his doggy life.

“Time to go,” Holga said, pulling Edgin toward the half-open window and the rope they’d left hanging there.

The three of them met up at the rendezvous point in an alley a few streets away, Kira appearing in front of Edgin with a huge grin on her face. “Did you see me, Dad? Did you see?”

“Fantastic job, kid,” Edgin said. “That was a one-in-a-million haunting.”

“Profitable too,” Holga said.

It was well after midnight by the time they got back to the cot­tage.

“It’s time to admit the truth,” Edgin said with a sigh as he, Holga, and Kira sorted the loot at the kitchen table. “I’m a damn good thief.”

Holga snorted. “Ought to be, after nine years of practice.”

“Well, I’ve always known it, of course, but I’m a humble man,” Edgin said.

Kira laughed as she sorted the coins from the small pile of gems. Edgin did a double take every time he looked at her these days. She’d grown from a squalling newborn to a nightmare of a toddler and was now all skinned knees, skinny arms, and dark curly hair at nine years old. The change from baby to person had seemed to hap­pen in an eyeblink.

Of course, as soon as she was old enough to understand what they did for a living, Kira had insisted on joining him and Holga on their heists. Edgin had been unsure at first, but she’d quickly become invaluable. The rest of the time . . .

Edgin had hoped that when she was able to walk, dress herself, and take care of the basics of being a person, to speak and tell him exactly what she needed, things would get easier when it came to raising Kira.

Oh, what a sweet, innocent, naïve man he’d been.

Being able to walk meant that she could run. With sharp objects. Toward horses or deep bodies of water.

Being able to speak meant that she had opinions. Suggestions about when her bedtime should be, or critiques of his cooking.

After nine years, he still had no idea what he was doing.

Reprinted from Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: The Road to Neverwinter by Jaleigh Johnson. © 2023 Wizards of the Coast LLC. © 2023 Paramount Pictures Corporation. Published by Random House Worlds, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: The Road to Neverwinter hits shelves on February 28, about a month before the film. You can place a pre-order now.

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Sometimes the 20-sided die just doesn’t roll your way. And on occasion the best laid plans of mages and men blow up in your face. But the one thing you can always control during a session of Dungeons & Dragons is who you play with. So long as your campaign features a collection of people you like spending time with, any play through will be a magical night. That’s also true of movies. Good characters always make for a good time. And that’s what the newest trailer for Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is promising. It focuses on the personalities of its party, and the dynamics of the group should make for one entertaining campaign.

And it also doesn’t hurt that the movie features an army of the undead, a myriad of monsters, and plenty of D&D Easter eggs for longtime fans to hunt down.

This Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves trailer is exactly what all of our own sessions are like. An impossibly handsome human leads our party of engaging and well-developed characters through an incredible story of intrigue and chaos. Okay, well maybe not all of our sessions are like this. But we try!

As for the film, it’ll see its party trying to find something it never should have taken in the first place. Here’s the official synopsis from Paramount Pictures:

A charming thief and a band of unlikely adventurers undertake an epic heist to retrieve a lost relic, but things go dangerously awry when they run afoul of the wrong people.  Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves brings the rich world and playful spirit of the legendary roleplaying game to the big screen in a hilarious and action-packed adventure.

Directed by Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley (who also wrote the screenplay with Michael Gilio), the film stars: Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Justice Smith, Sophia Lillis, Chloe Coleman, Daisy Head, and Hugh Grant. It comes to theaters on March 31, 2023.

Well, that’s assuming they don’t have to reschedule. If they really want an authentic D&D experience someone will need to cancel the day before. But hey, that’s okay so long as it eventually happens. Well, so long as it happens with people you like. Or, in this case, who’s in the movie.

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Dungeons & Dragons and LEGO seem like such a natural mashup. So it is amazing that these brands haven’t teamed up before now. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of D&D coming up in 2024, the teams at LEGO Ideas and Wizards of the Coast kicked off a contest to find the best fan-built crossover. Hundreds of entries were narrowed down to only five, and, of course, one prevailed in the end. Here is the winner of the Dungeons & Dragons LEGO set competition. You can look forward to buying this build in stores next year. 

The winning set is titled Dragon’s Keep: Journey’s End. Its official description reads: “The all-round 360 experience of this model, the level of detail and dynamic composition really brings all the iconic aspects of Dungeons & Dragons to life.”

This fan-build will be made as part of LEGO’s 50 years of Dungeons & Dragons celebrations, but there is no specific release date available yet. The final set may look a bit different to the fan-entry.

Click To View Gallery

Although LEGO will only create one Dungeons & Dragons set from this contest, we love looking at all its entries. Rounding out the final five contenders were plenty of monsters, including the dreaded Gelatinous Cube. You could even use the separate builds within the Monster Manual set in your D&D games. Or build a treasure chest with a series of ingenious hinges that transform it into a toothy Mimic. Most of the sets were more than just display pieces. For example, you could use the five-headed dragon Tiamat’s tower to roll your dice. The bookshelf in the Xanathar set is also a dice tower.

For even more, you can go ahead and check out all 381 entries on the LEGO Ideas site and lament what could have been. Or roll dexterity and try to build your favorite ones using just the pictures. A three-dimensional version of the iconic Dungeons & Dragons red box and a d20 that folds out into a playable battle map (both pictured above) are among the amazing options that didn’t make the final five.

Other fun D&D mashups to check out include a version of Monopoly and some gorgeous character jewelry. Roll a critical success, and check out our holiday gift guide for the tabletop gamer in your life for even more ideas. It may not be Christmas anymore, but gifts are good at any time.

Originally published on November 30, 2022.

Melissa is Nerdist’s science & technology staff writer. She also moderates “science of” panels at conventions and co-hosts Star Warsologies, a podcast about science and Star Wars. Follow her on Twitter @melissatruth.

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Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves kicked off a weekend of Hall H panels at San Diego Comic-Con on Thursday. Cast members Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Sophia Lillis, and Hugh Grant joined directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley and producer Jeremy Latcham to share the first details about the upcoming movie. We also got our first look at Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves with a trailer. The film looks like a rip-roaring adventure worthy of the beloved roleplaying game.

The trailer came after a panel that saw the cast talk about their history with Dungeons & Dragons. Pine joked that though it took him a while to come to the game, he’s now ready to spread the gospel of D&D because of how it brings everyone together. While Page joked he grew up as Eddie Munson of Stranger Things. He was made fun of, and he played loud and angry music. Meanwhile, Lillis has been a devoted fan of the roleplaying game and watches Critical Role. Grant teased he’s been an enthusiastic Dungeon Master.

Here’s who everyone is playing, including their D&D classes. They’re a ragtag group of misfits.

• Chris Pine: Edgin, a bard
• Michelle Rodriguez: Holga, a barbarian
• Regé-Jean Page: Xenk, a paladin
• Sophia Lillis: (Character name unknown), a druid
• Hugh Grant: Forge, a rogue
• Justice Smith: Symon (though we need to confirm this spelling), a sorcerer

A behind-the-scenes sizzle reel showed off a bit of the characters, costumes, and monsters. They shot the film in Northern Ireland and the landscapes are made for Dungeons & Dragons. An unfinished clip from the film showed the group questing for the Helmet of Destruction. The search in this scene included a classic D&D mission: digging up corpses to ask them questions. As the group questions several corpses, we saw some of the film’s humor—especially from Pine’s Edgin. Grant noted the movie has real Monty Python vibes.

Goldstein and Francis Daley are both huge Dungeons & Dragons fans. They each started playing at young ages. But like Francis Daley noted, it’s not just the story of D&D that’s key. It’s about the feeling you get when you play. And they wanted to incorporate all of that into the movie: family, camaraderie, and coming together as a group to face obstacles you don’t expect. We love a found family story.

The directors and producers wouldn’t share too many details about the plot. Latcham said the team has a lot of questing; they’re searching for something that will probably solve the issue they’re facing. The trailer showed they helped the wrong person steal the wrong thing and unleashed the greatest evil in the world. Oops.

Francis Daley said Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves has dozens of monsters and creatures in this movie and dozens of spells. Another clip showed off a displacer beast and the gelatinous cube. The directors also noted the worked closely with Wizards of the Coast to get the lore right. And, the film will have at least one cameo from a well known D&D player.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves will now arrive in theaters on March 31, 2023.

Originally published on July 21, 2022.

Amy Ratcliffe is the Editor-in-Chief for Nerdist and the author of Star Wars: Women of the Galaxy, The Art of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, The Jedi Mind, and more Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

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Board games and tabletop games continue to rise to new heights of popularity, so there’s no better time to get that special someone on your holiday gift list a new game for their collection! Below you’ll find the world’s greatest role-playing game, small indie TTRPGs, easy-to-learn board games inspired by beloved franchises, and much more. And best of all, any gift on this list will make your next game night with friends even better.

Animal Adventures

A Persian cat warlock? A Labrador fighter? What else do we have to say? Animal Adventures from Steamforged Games is a 5e supplement that’s ideal for kids or casual players new to Dungeons & Dragons. The box set comes complete with a full adventure and filled-out character sheets, and affordable miniature box sets can even get your recipient on the road to painting their first minis.

Arcadia

MCDM Productions knocks it out of the park every month with the digital magazine Arcadia. MCDM invites some of the TTRPG community’s best and brightest talent to contribute. The cover art alone is worth every penny. Inside you’ll find D&D 5e adventures, subclasses, NPCs, and more incredible campaign content that you won’t find anywhere else. If you’re looking for a last-minute gift for your Dungeon Master, send them a digital gift card and they can pick up the issues that will fit right into your campaign.

Campaign Case: Terrain

Another great gift to get you on your Dungeon Master’s good side is the Campaign Case: Terrain from Wizards of the Coast. If your DM isn’t the crafty type, or they can’t carry around large pieces of map terrain, these official terrain tokens will do the job on the go. (The Campaign Case: Creatures is just as handy.) It includes a double-sided adventure grid, 30 interlocking terrain tiles, and reusable stickers for the tiles to make dungeons, campsites, tombs, and more.

Crescendo of Violence

Swords and magic? Sure. But if your friend’s favorite movies include Blade Runner and John Wick, the indie TTRPG Crescendo of Violence from Osprey Games can make a seriously cool stocking stuffer. The setting is neon-noir, which is different from cyberpunk but set in the same futuristic neon-lit cities. (Think gun fu, femme fatales, and rainy nights.) The system uses 10-sided dice, so throw some of those in the stocking as well to complete the experience.

Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set: Dragons of Stormwreck Isle

The newest Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set has everything the lucky recipient needs to get the adventuring party started. The one-stop box contains all the rules, character sheets, and even dice they’ll need to begin their very first campaign. All they need to find is more players. If you have a friend who is intrigued by the game but isn’t ready to pick up the rulebooks quite yet, this is the perfect gift.

Dungeons & Dragons: How to Be More D&D

Perform an insight check on yourself? It’s possible with How to Be More D&D by Kat Kruger! Whether you’re buying this handy tome for yourself, your friend, or your Secret Santa, every kind of reader can benefit from adding more adventure to their lives. Personality quizzes based on character classes, advice for navigating the difficult terrain of real life, gorgeous art, and more make this book one to pick up again and again.

Eye and Hand of Vecna

Whether that friend on your gift list is a D&D aficionado or a Stranger Things fan—or better yet, both—they’ll be delighted when they unwrap this eye-catching collectible from WizKids. The Eye and Hand of Vecna are famous artifacts that go all the way back to the early days of Dungeons & Dragons. The ghoulish hand and eye are encased in glass and rest upon a wooden platform. Will the lucky recipient laugh or shriek when they open this present? Part of the fun is finding out.

Marvel Dice Throne

Superhero fans will love to take on the mantle of their favorite Marvel characters in one of this year’s biggest tabletop games. Marvel Dice Throne pits hero against hero. Players use their hero’s special abilities and dice to whittle down their opponent’s hit points. Components are colorful and chock full of useful info; the game even provides a helpful FAQ for those times when a question about the rules arises. Marvel fans and board game enthusiasts will both find a lot to love in this ultimate “who would win in a fight.”

Phantom Ink

Phantom Ink is a party game perfect for that one friend who always keeps a Ouija board in the closet. (You know the one.) The beautifully thematic deduction game is for four to eight players divided into two teams. One player is the spirit, and the others are mediums; the spirit shares clues about a secret object to the mediums in the hopes that one will guess it. Use as few letters as possible to discover the secret object, and your team wins!

RockLove x Dungeons & Dragons Jewelry

Ready to splurge on the D&D player in your life? RockLove Jewelry’s D&D collaboration is guaranteed to elicit a gasp when the recipient opens the box. The intricately detailed silver rings and pendants range from monstrous beholders to delicate daggers. There’s even a bejeweled spellbook necklace that opens to reveal mystical text inside. You’ll be tempted to get a piece for yourself when browsing this one-of-a-kind jewelry collection.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars – A Pandemic System Game

Veteran board gamers on your gift list have likely played Pandemic, so they’ll be thrilled to see the iconic co-op strategy game combined with Star Wars. The sprawling tabletop game takes Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, Yoda, and more to key locations in the Clone Wars conflict. They’ll face your favorite prequel villains in battles to reclaim the planet from their control. Missions are named after iconic episodes of The Clone Wars, a delightful detail for longtime fans of the animated series.

ZWEIHÄNDER Fantasy Horror RPG: Starter Kit

Indie horror role-playing game Zweihänder may not scream “joyful holiday season” to you, but this new kit makes it easier than ever to get a new player started in the medieval fantasy world. That sword-and-sorcery buff you know will be delighted to open this one. The RPG is darker and more ruthless than most high fantasy TTRPGs, but that doesn’t mean it’s difficult to play. Rulebooks, dice, a game master screen, pre-gen characters, and a detailed map are all included to get a new player going on their first supernatural adventure.

Kelly Knox is a pop culture and entertainment writer in the Seattle area. She’s the author of Star Wars: Be More Obi-Wan and co-author of Star Wars Everyday. Follow her on Twitter at @kelly_knox to talk Star Wars, pop culture, and bad dad jokes.

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Dungeons & Dragons arrived in the world in 1974. That means, I’m sorry to report, that the popular roleplaying game approaches its 50th anniversary. With that milestone on the horizon, it’s the ideal time to look back at the creation of the epic tabletop franchise. Happily, an official Dungeons & Dragons documentary is in the works. Joe Manganiello and Kyle Newman will co-direct (we first spotted the news at Deadline). Its release aligns with the 2024 anniversary of the game. The directors are both avid Dungeons & Dragons players, with Manganiello being an official ambassador for the game.

The Dungeons & Dragons documentary comes from Hasbro’s entertainment studio, Entertainment One. According to Deadline, the documentary uses “400 hours of archived, never-before-seen footage.” The Manganiellos (Joe’s brother Nick is a co-producer), Newman, and Adam F. Goldberg have exclusive rights to this content. And since Hasbro’s studio is involved, that means the group has access to D&D gamemaker Wizards of the Coast.

Manganiello seems like the perfect candidate to take on a Dungeons & Dragons documentary. He runs a D&D game of his own and recently kickstarted the tabletop RPG augmented reality app ARcana. And Newman has worked on Heroes Feast: The Official Dungeons & Dragons Cookbook and Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana.

In a statement, Manganiello said:

I couldn’t be more proud and excited to get back behind the camera for another documentary, this time with the D&D dream team of Jon, Kyle, and my brother and producing partner Nick. I lived through the rise and fall and rise again of this legacy brand that has not only meant so much to me but has served as the fountainhead of creativity for an entire generation of writers, artists, and creative minds, influencing so much of our culture.

Amy Ratcliffe is the Editor-in-Chief for Nerdist and the author of Star Wars: Women of the Galaxy, The Art of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, The Jedi Mind, and more. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

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Dungeons & Dragons is the latest franchise to get the RockLove jewelry treatment. The jewelry company has made beautiful silver necklaces for a handful of character classes. And if you don’t see your favorite class yet, don’t worry. They have more on the way. With RockLove’s Dungeons & Dragon jewelry, you can now represent your favorite character class through more than just role playing. The cleric, bard, wizard, warlock, rogue, and fighter jewelry are all for sale. Prices range from $135-199.  

Click To View Gallery

Two of the necklaces even have detachable parts. The cleric vial has a removable stopper that dangles from a silver chain so you don’t lose the small piece. The fighter shield comes with a broadsword that unsheathes. For the wizard, there’s an intricate spell book with jewels on its cover. It hinges opens to reveal diagrams and other scribbles one would likely find in such a tome.

Rounding out the Dungeons & Dragons jewelry collection (for now) is a rogue’s dagger and mask, the bard’s lute, and a warlock medallion. Along with symbols of the occult, the latter includes crystals representing the four elements of air, earth, water, and fire. 

The company announced the D&D necklaces in a blog post that also mentions more are in the works. Druids, monks, rangers, and the others will have to wait their turn to buy a necklace. All necklaces come in a box made to look like a D&D book, iconic red lettering and all.  

Other licensed collections from RockLove include Studio Ghibli favorites like Spirited Away and a range of colorful Star Wars kyber crystals. There’s also a Pokémon collection. And Black Widow jewelry, among other MCU characters, Disney movies, and Pixar favorites. Whatever your fandom, you’re likely to find a piece that calls to you.

Melissa is Nerdist’s science & technology staff writer. She also moderates “science of” panels at conventions and co-hosts Star Warsologies, a podcast about science and Star Wars. Follow her on Twitter @melissatruth. 

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In the ’70s/’80s heyday of Dungeons & Dragons, there wasn’t ever an official soundtrack. No one thought to make soundtracks to tabletop games back then. Nerdy kids just had to have bands like Rush or Asia on in the background during their campaigns. But these days, the D&D folks are a little bit savvier. Via Polygon, we’ve learned that in conjunction with Wizards of the Coast’s recently released Spelljammer: Adventures in Space, they’ve also released a full-length soundtrack album called Spelljams to go with it. And it is free to stream and download.

The new campaign was partially inspired by the 1980 sci-fi film Flash Gordon. Yes, the one with the awesome theme song by Queen. Spelljammer is an over-the-top space opera where the players have to fight to save their home planet from an evil Elven Empire that wishes to destroy it. Just like the Queen score was crucial to Flash Gordon, the Spelljammer: Adventures in Space soundtrack is just as crucial to the game.

Chris Perkins, the story architect, worked with The Decemberists’ guitarist Chris Funk, who curated the album. The different artists were tasked with coming up with music and themes for things such as space clowns, space vampires, and space whales. Who could say no to that? If a 1970s van with airbrushed art of a warrior maiden on a pegasus had a sound, it would be one just like this.

“Arena of Blood” in particular sounds like a track that Stranger Things’ Eddie Munson would rock out to during a Hellfire Club get-together. The album will also be available in a vinyl collectors’ edition. The coolest part? It will have a triple gatefold LP cover that will also function as a Dungeon Masters’ screen. You can pre-order the vinyl edition right here. And you can check out the full tracklist below.

1. “Seeds Of Destruction” — Magic Sword
2. “Arena Of Blood” — Osees
3. “Space Is A Place” — Reggie Watts
4. “Visible Lights” — TEKE::TEKE
5. “Far” — Black Marble
6. “Left Hand Path” — Mikaela Davis
7. “Love is the disaster” — Lucius
8. “Xedalli” — Penny & Sparrow
9. “Moon Dancer” — Y La Bamba
10. “Light of Xaryxis” — Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith
11. “Spacefighters” — MonoNeon
12. “Crystalline Climbers” — Cardioid & pink paint
13. “Me and The Moon” — Devon Gilfillian
14. “Endless Sea” — Red Fang
15. “Ghost Of The Nautiloid” — Nolan Potter’s Nightmare Band
16. “Forgotten Land” — Deru, Arooj Aftab
17. “Topolah’s Song” — Wizard of Waz
18. “chaotic.evil.astral.elves” — Califone
19. “The Door To Endlessness” — Shabazz Palaces

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Your adventuring party has faced dungeons, dragons, and maybe even this gross-looking dude named Vecna. What’s left for your Dungeons & Dragons group to conquer? Space! Wizards of the Coast releases Spelljammer: Adventures in Space on August 16. The book promises to take D&D players where no adventuring party has gone before. Well, unless, you played the original AD&D Spelljammer in the late ’80s. Whether you’ve ventured into Wildspace years ago, or this is your first time traversing the astral plane, Spelljammer: Adventures in Space will seamlessly integrate into any story for the campaign of a lifetime.

Unlike most D&D campaign books, this guide contains three different volumes. The Astral Adventurer’s Guide, the setting, is a separate book that players can safely flip through without spoiling a monster stat block or the next plot point in the included adventure. Monsters hide inside Boo’s Astral Menagerie, and an adventure for levels 5-8 awaits in Light of Xaryxis. The three books are packed along with a map and Dungeon Master’s Screen in one astronomically cool package.

Chris Perkins, Lead Designer for Spelljammer: Adventures in Space, revealed a few tantalizing details at a recent press preview. “The vast ocean that is Wildspace is an exciting place for adventure,” he said. “If nothing else, it’s a way to get from one world to another.” 

Players who make their way through Wildspace can travel between settings; for example, the party can leave the Forgotten Realms and arrive in Greyhawk. Spelljammer is all about the journey. Along the way the adventurers experience “fast and fluid” encounters with everything from space eels, to space whales, to space clowns.

Yeah. Space clowns.

Spelljammer embraces the core concepts of Dungeons & Dragons, Perkins said, which include fantasy, horror, and whimsy—emphasis on the whimsy. You might not expect a setting in space to mesh well with your established sword-wielding characters and fantasy setting, but making Spelljammer inclusive for any and all campaigns was a goal of the creative team. The Rock of Bral, for example, is a city on an asteroid that can serve as the backdrop of a fantasy, sci-fi, or any other kind of story.

Still thinking about those space clowns? So are we. They’re an homage to Killer Klowns from Outer Space. In fact, you’ll find homages to other classic sci-fi stories and franchises in this setting. There are also new playable races, spells and items, monsters, and so much more waiting to be discovered.

If you’re ready to jump into Wildspace, you and your party can get ready for your journey to the Astral Sea right now! Take a look at Spelljammer Academy now on D&D Beyond for four free adventures; Roll20 has some of the nitty-gritty details for Dungeon Masters preparing for space combat.

Spelljammer: Adventures in Space will be available digitally and at your favorite local game store on August 16, 2022 (and September 13, 2022 in Europe).

Featured Image: Shawn Wood/Wizards of the Coast

Kelly Knox is a pop culture and entertainment writer in the Seattle area. She’s the author of Star Wars: Be More Obi-Wan and a co-author on the upcoming book Star Wars Everyday. Follow her on Twitter at @kelly_knox to talk Star Wars, pop culture, and bad dad jokes.

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Do you remember the first time you set foot in the world of Krynn? Maybe you binge-read the classic Dragonlance novels when you were a kid. Or maybe you explored the harrowing modules in your D&D game during the ’80s. Basically, if you’re a Dungeons & Dragons fan, chances are good that you’re also a Dragonlance fan. Authors Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman began the story in 1984 with Dragons of Autumn Twilight. And, almost 40 years later, they have returned to those beloved characters in Dragons of Deceit.

Weis and Hickman sat down with Nerdist to chat about the new Dragonlance trilogy, what their journey has been like, and navigating their own River of Time.

The Dawn of Time

Dragons of Deceit is the first book in some time to bring Weis and Hickman back to the world they created. (Over the years, 190 books have taken place in the world of Dragonlance, written by a variety of authors.) The new novel follows the adventures of Destina Rosethorn. She’s the daughter of a Knight of Solamnia and on an ill-advised quest to save her father from an untimely death during the War of the Lance. Along the way she crosses paths with wizards and gods, a dragon, and a certain irrepressible kender.

“This series that we’re doing is very much a love letter from us to our fans,” Tracy Hickman tells Nerdist. “When we first wrote Dragonlance, when we first wrote Dragons of Autumn Twilight, I don’t know, back in the dawn of time, we honestly had no idea that there would be anybody out there. The company didn’t have any expectations about a novel going out there.”

Hickman recalls the Gen Con of 1984 where they staged a dramatic reading to promote the very first Dragonlance novel. Weis sent her 8-year-old daughter around the convention floor with a sign to encourage curious attendees to make their way to that evening’s performance. “We didn’t know if anyone would come!” says Hickman. “Although we did have a huge crowd that showed up that night. It was a lot of fun.”

Welcome Back to Krynn

Dragonlance fans have followed the adventures of the Heroes of the Lance and the setting of Krynn ever since. It’s been years since Hickman and Weis revisited the world they created; however, they were determined to make the trip again for Dragons of Deceit. 

“A lot of the locations we visit in these [new] books are based on the modules,” says Weis, “so we went back to those to look at maps and diagrams, and Karen Wynn Fonstad’s Atlas of the Dragonlance World. We used that extensively.”

They also have a real-life Dragonlance wizard to call on. “It was a challenge [to write Dragons of Deceit] because it’s been a long time, and many worlds in between,” Weis says with a laugh. “We enlisted the help of Shivam Bhatt, who is a Dragonlance expert. Whenever we had questions about any of the background or any of the things we had written previously in the core books, we asked Shivam. He was a big help.”

“He’s helped add a unique voice to what we’ve written here, and I very much appreciate that,” agrees Hickman. Weis didn’t need help recalling one of her favorite characters to write, the delightful kender Tasslehoff Burrfoot, who returns in Dragons of Deceit. “I really, really have fun with Tasslehoff!” she says.

“People always asked me who I identified with as a character,” Hickman says, “and I would tell them that Sturm was very much who I wanted to be. And that Tanis is probably closer to who I actually am, but I come across as Fizban.”

Hello Destina Rosethorn, a Formidable New Heroine

The protagonist, Destina Rosethorn, is a new character. And she’s next in a long lineage of Dragonlance women who are more than capable of holding their own, Hickman says.

“We’ve always written strong women in our works,” Hickman affirms. “In Dragonlance, we have portrayed women in very positive and very proactive roles. That’s been a conscious decision on our part to do so. In some ways, I think Destina is a descendent of that ancestral line of strong and interesting women.”

“I think Destina is almost too strong for her own good,” adds Weis. “When we first meet her in the book, she’s a teenager. And like any teenager, she knows all the answers, she’s much smarter than her parents, if they’d just listen to her! Then, as life carries her along, she finds out she doesn’t have all the answers, that she has a lot of life lessons to learn along the way. That to me is what makes her very interesting. And a lot of fun.”

A Tremendous Life

Destina sets off to find the magical Device of Time Journeying to change her father’s fate. In Dragonlance, humans traveling through the River of Time can only make small ripples in the past. If Weis had the chance to navigate through our world’s history, she says, she’d enjoy a nice cup of tea with Jane Austen or Charles Dickens. Hickman remembers being invited to visit the Johnson Space Center in Houston after a convention years ago. He toured the facility, and when he stepped into the Apollo Mission Control Center, it actually felt like traveling through time. He counts it as one of many opportunities he and Weis owe to their loyal readers.  

“One of the wonderful things about this tremendous life that our fans have granted us is that we’ve been able to go places, meet people, and see things that otherwise we may not have ever done,” Hickman says.

“We landed on an aircraft carrier!” adds Weis.

“We did,” Hickman replies with a grin. “There are many people and places in history I’d love to visit, and all kinds of places we could go, but we have done so many amazing things in this life that it’s hard to wish for something more.”

Dragons of Deceit hits bookstore shelves on August 2, 2022. And Wizards of the Coast is currently playtesting new Dragonlance-based character options if you’re ready to dive back into Krynn yourself!

Kelly Knox is a pop culture and entertainment writer in the Seattle area. She’s the author of Star Wars: Be More Obi-Wan and a co-author on the upcoming book Star Wars Everyday. Follow her on Twitter at @kelly_knox to talk Star Wars, pop culture, and bad dad jokes.

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Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves will bring the roleplaying game back to the big screen in 2023. And of course, the release of a new movie means toys. Look to none other than Hasbro for your Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves action figure fix. It’s the first contemporary toy line from Hasbro for D&D. You’re going to want to add this collection to your traveling party. Nerdist has an exclusive first look at one of the items in Hasbro’s Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves collection. Take a look at the Gelatinous Cube!

This is one of the items that will launch Hasbro’s Dungeons & Dragons toy line. Please note you can put a figure into the Gelatinous Cube. The cube is a monster in D&D; it can absorb and digest organic matter. In other words, though a Gelatinous Cube may look silly, you do not want to cross one.

Bringing the world of D&D to toys is no small task. Hasbro senior manager of product design, Kevin Evans, told Nerdist, “I’m so honored that I get to speak on behalf of a wide range of amazing, passionate team members at Hasbro, including our friends at Wizards. The D&D team is made up lifelong D&D fans that have poured their heart and soul into this adventure. At its core, D&D is a cooperative storytelling game told by a bunch of friends. The journey of making this toy line was very similar in that we all came together to tell this story through toys and figures. We are so proud of what we’ve made, and we think fans are really going to like how it turned out.”

When it comes to developing the ominous Gelatinous Cube into a toy, Evans explained, “If there was ever going to be an ideal D&D monster that was tailor-made to interact with our 6-inch scale Golden Archive figure line, the Gelatinous Cube was it. From the instant we started work on this brand, we wanted this to not only be an amazing monster that core and movie fans would love but also a cool display piece for collectors to show off their figures.”

Evans noted it was a challenge to design something that has been in people’s imaginations for many years. The team worked to make the Gelatinous Cube interactive while also meeting fans’ aesthetic expectations. He added, “Another challenge was getting a 6” figure to balance inside the cube and appear as though it was suspended in goo. The team came up with a cool solution to bring this pivotal moment of the film to life. It’s going to look awesome on shelves, and as an added bonus we got to talk to a lot about the physics of goo.”

Click To View Gallery

You’ll notice the Gelatinous Cube has 14 objects stuck in its sticky substance. Evans pointed out the accessories capture storytelling old and new. He said, “We paid homage to the legacy of D&D with our selections of the accessories. The variety of 14 accessories bring to life some of the key weapons and magical objects from the movie but also as a nod to nearly 50 years of brand legacy. “

The team also got to discuss exploring a fantasy world. “Hasbro’s typical wheelhouse is sci-fi and spandex. No one does it better,” Evans said. “This was our first foray into a medieval style fantasy realm with the garb to go with it. We understand every decision made by a movie costume designer is an integral part of storytelling and what’s core to the character. Our job is to bring those intricate movie details to life as accurately as possible and make these characters transcend the screen for collector shelves. This also highlights the wonderful collaboration between our partners at eOne and Paramount who gave us unparalleled access to screen reference to make sure these figures were as screen accurate as possible. We can’t wait to reveal the movie figures someday very soon.”

The Gelatinous Cube will be available in spring 2023. Its 6-inch scale makes it compatible with 6-inch figures that can posed inside with an “invisible” stand. The 14 accessories snap into the Cube. You can pre-order the Gelatinous Cube from Hasbro Pulse and retailers such as Entertainment Earth beginning today at 5:00 p.m. ET.

Amy Ratcliffe is the Editor-in-Chief for Nerdist and the author of Star Wars: Women of the Galaxy, The Art of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, The Jedi Mind, and more Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

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Stranger Things season four is officially over. The arrival of Volume 2 brought us tragedy, unforgivable deaths, and more secrets about the mysteries of Hawkins. But we’re here today to talk about something even more important: which Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) class would your favorite Stranger Things character be in? Since the very first episode, D&D has played a huge part in the lore and narrative of Stranger Things. From the Demogorgon to the roles each of our leads play, the tabletop role-playing game has had a massive impact. So after the events of this season we’re here to suggest some D&D classes, subclasses, and even a couple of homebrews for some of the Stranger Things kids. 

Mike Wheeler – Paladin

We’re going with the show canon for this one, though we have to say Mike hasn’t been leading the kids in the for a long time. When Stranger Things first began, however, it made a lot of sense for Mike’s D&D class to be the Paladin. Whether fighting to find Will or standing by Eleven as she struggled to find her place in Hawkins, he has for a long time been pushing for truth and justice. The question going forward is whether he’ll continue to do that as life gets more complicated. 

Lucas Sinclair – Ranger: Hunter Conclave 

Lucas is established as the group’s Ranger early on. But his skill with different weapons like his slingshot, ax, and even hand-to-hand combat made us go more specific when it comes to his Stranger Things D&D class. Like a Hunter Conclave, Lucas is unafraid to find the best tool possible in order to protect his friends and the whole of Hawkins from the dangers of the Upside Down. He’s a skilled planner and has always been one of the most thoughtful and cautious of the group, but when it comes down to it he always fights for what’s right. 

Will Byers – Wizard

From the very first episode of Stranger Things, Will has been established as the Party’s Wizard. It’s an interesting choice because it aligns him with Eleven, who’s the group’s Mage. It actually makes a lot of sense when we look at Will’s supernatural connection to the Upside Down. While Will has never truly been able to wield the magic that once controlled him, the end of season four hints that next season we could finally take on his true destiny as a real Wizard. We’re hoping this is the case, because his designation as a Wizard always seemed almost like a joke at Will’s expense—it’s portrayed as the nerdiest, silliest role in the show—so to see him become powerful in his own right and use his magic to save the world would be a wonderful twist.

Dustin Henderson – Artificer: Master Inventor

While Dustin was originally the group’s bard, over the seasons he’s become their inventor. After attending Camp Know Where prior to season three, he began crafting multiple items. It was Cerebro that would have the most impact, though. The Ham Radio became a major plot point, as Dustin was using it when he picked up a Russian transmission from Starcourt Mall. In season four, we see that again with his use of the Lite Bright. As an Artificer, his intelligence and innovation is his power, but after this season he may take on a Paladin-style leadership role too. 

Eleven – Mage

Eleven has always been designated as a generic Magic-User in the world of D&D in Stranger Things. But just as Mike suspected, we actually think she’s more of a Mage (which replaced the Magic-User term in later versions of D&D). Seeing as Eleven is a talented and powerful hero with supernatural powers that connect her to an underworld, and allow her to save or destroy the world, she’s the only pick to hold the mantle of magical Mage in the Stranger Things universe. No other D&D class would fit this Stranger Things hero.

Erica Sinclair – Rogue 

Lady Applejack, a level-14, chaotic good half-elf rogue, has got to be one of the coolest in-universe D&D characters ever. Erica’s passion for D&D surprises everyone and her canon choice as a rogue makes a lot of sense for her in the show too. Her resourcefulness, independence, and versatility are all tenets of a great rogue. She’s never afraid to do what needs to be done and is usually the smartest person in the room. The Party is lucky to have her and hopefully, season five will see her greatly expand her role.

Max Mayfield – Speedster

In Stranger Things 3, Max suggested that she be a “Zoomer” in the group’s D&D campaign. That was met with derision as it wasn’t a class. But there actually is a D&D homebrew Speedster class and Stranger Things’ Max fits it pretty well. Not only does she travel on her skateboard—as she rightfully points out—but the most memorable moment she has this season is her running from Vecna’s curse. Max is speedy, sometimes dangerously so, and she can use it to her advantage. Let’s hope she’s got quick-healing powers too.

Nancy Wheeler – Fighter

Nancy might not be at the center of the action in Hawkins but she’s always there when she’s needed. And more often than not when it comes down to the final battle, she’ll be there with a homemade weapon and a ton of righteous anger. As a journalist, her truth-telling skills almost push her into prophet territory, but ultimately Fighter feels right. She fights for herself, her friends, and for the town where she grew up no matter what the cost. We’re excited to see where that instinct takes her in season five.

Robin Buckley – Bard 

Robin is a musician at heart. She’s always been true to herself and used her words for good. These qualities make her a great Bard. Although she didn’t get to truly shine in Stranger Things 4, we’re hoping that we get to explore more of her musical prowess and hopefully her personal life in the next season, especially after where we leave her. And who knows, maybe she’ll take after our next Bard and use her skills as a musician to save the world when season five comes calling. 

Eddie Munson – Bard

Sure, we have two bards in a row but both of these musical heroes deserve it. At first, we all thought Eddie was unquestionably a Ranger when it came to his Stranger Things D&D class. But in the epic and devastating final episodes, the kind-hearted outsider proved himself to be a Bard of the highest order. Eddie uses his music to save his friends, playing an outrageously awesome Metallica guitar solo in order to draw the attention of the maniacal Demobats. While we’re very much in the #JusticeForEddie camp, the moment cements him as an impactful Bard, shaping the very universe with his song. 

Steve Harrington – Babysitter 

Steve is so special in Stranger Things that we had to create our own homebrew D&D class just for him: Babysitter. It’s essentially the leadership and righteousness of a Paladin with the inspirational powers of a Cleric sprinkled with that special Steve magic. His love for the kids of Hawkins makes him stand apart and has likely saved the world multiple times. The responsibilities he takes on, and respect for Nancy’s boundaries he shows this season make him a unique pseudo-parental figure in the realm of Hawkins. Now just let him have his co-parent Eddie back, please.

Featured Image: Netflix

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We’re getting closer to the premiere of Stranger Things season 4! We know that the new season, debuting May 27, brings a new Big Bad from the Upside Down to Hawkins. And, following the footsteps of the Demogorgon who stalked our young heroes in the first season, this creature shares a name with a classic villain from Dungeons & Dragons: Vecna.

The Whispered One. The Undying King. The Lord of the Rotted Tower. (That last one really brings to mind the Upside Down, doesn’t it?) Vecna goes by many names. The archmage turned lich turned lesser god is not someone you want to face, even with an adventuring party at your side. What’s the history of the Vecna, the lich lord in D&D, and what might it mean for the heroes of Stranger Things?

The History of Vecna in Dungeons & Dragons Lore

Vecna has been terrorizing D&D parties since the first edition of the game and has appeared in every edition since. Well, more accurately, his body parts have. The Eye of Vecna and the Hand of Vecna are the only artifacts—unique magic items—that have been in each edition’s Dungeon Master’s Guide. To wield these cursed but powerful objects, the character must sacrifice their own hand or eye and replace it with Vecna’s withered body part. Respect.

After his appearance in the early editions of Dungeons & Dragons, the lich lord went on to star in his very own AD&D modules in the 1990s in the Greyhawk campaign setting: Vecna Lives!, Vecna Reborn, and Die Vecna Die! (You can still buy, read, and play these second edition adventures thanks to the Dungeon Masters Guild.)

In the current fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons, the Hand and Eye of Vecna again appear in the Dungeon Masters’ Guide as wondrous items, along with a few details about their erstwhile owner:

Orcus, the demon prince of undeath, taught Vecna a ritual that would allow him to live on as a lich. Beyond death, he became the greatest of all liches. Even though his body gradually withered and decayed, Vecna continued to expand his evil dominion. So formidable and hideous was his temper that his subjects feared to speak his name…

Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount expands more on the lich lord’s dominion as a lesser god. He’s the god of necromancy and undeath in the official Critical Role adventure setting. At the end of Critical Role’s first campaign, the renowned Vox Machina defeated the Whispered One, although his hand and eye ere taken in a twist of betrayal.

The Vecna of Stranger Things 4

So, what could this all foreshadow for the creature named Vecna in Stranger Things? While Vecna of the Upside Down might not necessarily a god, he definitely has the air of undeath around him. Stranger Things’ Vecna, like the rest of the Upside Down, is shadowy and… gooey. Rather than a skeletal, ethereal lich like his namesake, this Vecna appears solid and subterranean, covered in soggy plant and organic matter. He’s also unquestionably human-shaped, unlike the monstrous creatures that have attacked the heroes of Hawkins thus far. (Vecna was almost completely created using practical effects rather than CGI.)

Vecna is related to the new Stranger Things 4 character played by Robert Englund, Victor Creel, although details are scarce. Creel’s story is “pivotal” to Hawkins and its inhabitants, co-creator Ross Duffer said in an Entertainment Weekly interview. And when Will and friends finally encounter this big bad, chances are it will be on his home turf. “[We] spend more time in the Upside Down than any other season. It’s not even close,” Duffer told IGN.

Additionally, IGN notes that Vecna is “a sentient villain that they [the Duffer Brothers] call their version of a Pennywise, Pinhead, or Freddy Krueger.” Of course, the aforementioned Victor Creel is played by Robert Englund who also played Freddy Krueger, making the comparison especially interesting.

Executive producer Shawn Levy also shares with the publication, “Season 4 required a villain unlike any before. And it needed to be more than a creature, more than an evil cloud of particulate. It needed to be a humanoid villain with more depth, more dimension, and far more evil. That’s what Vecna is.”

So, is the Stranger Things version of Vecna undead? Was he once human, like Vecna of D&D, until he was twisted into a monster? Stranger Things season 4 asks these questions and more and seems poised to deliver some big answers. Find out May 27 when the new season premieres on Netflix.

Kelly Knox is a pop culture and entertainment writer in the Seattle area. Her next book, Be More Obi-Wan, says “hello there” in July 2022. Follow her on Twitter at @kelly_knox to talk Star Wars, pop culture, and bad dad jokes.

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When last we heard about Robert Wardhaugh, his Dungeons & Dragons campaign had been running for about 35 years. But now, Wardhaugh’s D&D game has hit the 40 year milestone. Wired recently visited with Wardhaugh to see how he keeps the game interesting. He and his friends started playing in secret many years ago. And now, well, the video notes the game “takes up much of Wardhaugh’s life and most of his house.”

When he’s not in the role of Dungeon Master, or DM, Wardhaugh works as a history professor for the University of Western Ontario. And that career plays into his game. The unique world he constructed for his game is an alternative fantasy version of historical Earth. He started with D&D rulebooks but evolved to a more homebrew style over the years.

Wardhaugh has around 30,000 hand painted figures and custom terrain to play with. He hosts the D&D game for dozens of players. Those players have made over 500 characters for the game over the years. Wardhaugh estimates he runs a 10-hour session weekly. After doing the math, he calculates he’s spent over 20,000 hours of his life playing Dungeons & Dragons.

That’s commitment. Wardhaugh tells Wired he makes some pretty major life decisions in service of continuing the game. For example, when he purchased his house, he knew he needed an area for gaming. He utilizes the whole basement as his gaming space. Just the storage of tabletop minis alone takes up storage, let alone all the custom terrains and actual playing surfaces. Basically, Wardhaugh wants to have everything and prepare as much as possible. He’s the kind of DM who makes every option available to his players.

We’re quite impressed with Wardhaugh’s dedication and how he’s created a place for so many people to escape into. He doesn’t plan to end his game anytime soon. You can read more about this epic Dungeons & Dragons campaign at this website.

Amy Ratcliffe is the Managing Editor for Nerdist and the author of A Kid’s Guide to Fandom, available now. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

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Stranger Things 4 is almost here! It’s been a while (in our universe, anyway) since the events at Starcourt Mall led to Hopper going MIA, Eleven and the Byers family moving to California, and the group growing up and apart. There’s certainly room for some theorizing, especially since Stranger Things 4 is coming in two parts with the first one dropping May 27. There nine Stranger Things 4 episodes to look forward to and several of the titles raise curiosity about what to expect.

Let’s take a look at each title and see what’s going on in this universe.

“The Hellfire Club”

We’ve known the Stranger Things 4 premiere title for a while. And, of course, we have an extensive post about the Hellfire Club in X-Men comics, too. But, to recap, The Hellfire Club is a nefarious organization with mutant members during the Phoenix saga. There’s no doubt that Eleven shares some similarities to Jean Grey. And, X-Men comics have played a role in Stranger Things before, specifically the first season where Will refers to X-Men #134, which kicks off the Phoenix saga. It is the name of Hawkins High School’s D&D club. And we see Mike and Dustin proudly sporting their club shirts in the season four trailer. But it’s likely more than that, hinting that there are more people with powers working to do something evil in the world.

“Vecna’s Curse”

Who the hell is Vecna? It’s a name that Dungeons & Dragons players will recognize. He’s one of the game’s biggest villains, a wizard who is now an undead creature (known in that world as a lich). He seeks immortality and is maimed, his remaining hand and left eye becoming magical artifacts. Vecna has connections to secrets and necromancy, which is interesting considering another Stranger Things 4 episode title refers to a deceased character.

And, there’s always some weirdness with Will, someone who did, um, come back from the dead in a sense. A Will and Vecna connection, maybe? Vecna could have something to do with them going to the Creel House. Or the character might provide a piece of knowledge that will help the crew figure things out. In 1986, a lot of Vecna D&D lore didn’t exist yet so we will see how it fits in.

“The Monster and the Superhero”

This Stranger Things 4 episode title is more ambiguous. The superhero is likely Eleven, considering she’s been the proverbial hero in this series. But, we don’t know what’s going on with her powers. It’s possible that she will have them restored in this episode as she goes up against an antagonist. This might happen in California or maybe when she inevitably ends up back in Hawkins. Or the hero in question could be Hopper as he fights his way out of a Russian detention center. It does seem far too early for Hopper to make a great escape, though, so we will assume this hero is his daughter.

“Dear Billy”

Billy died saving Eleven’s life in the season three finale. And we really didn’t get to see a lot of Max processing her loss. Yes, he sucked as a human but he was still her stepbrother who died in a traumatic way. The Stranger Things 4 trailer shows Max speaking to Billy at his grave and discovering a creepy clock in a wall. Oh, and she also levitates which is very not-normal behavior.

We can assume this episode will take a wild turn to prep us for a cliffhanger in the fifth and final episode of part one. We think Stranger Things 4 might have time travel and, if so, perhaps there’s a way that the crew goes back to see Billy again. That is, if he isn’t under the control of Vecna, who might bring him back to life. The real question is… do we want Billy back? If y’all gonna go back, then save my homegirl Barb. Or Bob.

“The Nina Project”

Ahh, now this is where the history nerds among us will thrive. There isn’t a character on Stranger Things named Nina (not yet, anyway) but we can make some connections to a real-life person named Nina Kulagina. We know the Russians are trying to access the Upside Down, so it wouldn’t be shocking if they are also conducting their own Brenner-style experiments on people. And Hopper is obviously being held at some detention center over there.

It’s possible that Hopper will meet Nina, a woman who claimed to have psychokinetic powers like Eleven’s. She was the willing subject of USSR experiments during the 1970s and 1980s, with one test involving her stopping a frog’s heart with her mind. Kulagina died in 1990 but was still participating in experiments in the late ‘80s. She might be a figure that Hopper knows or someone that the show references and uses to uncover deeper, darker secrets.

“The Dive”

Ummm, okay. Dive into what? We saw Dad Steve in some water in a previous clip so maybe something is lurking beneath the surface. Perhaps it’s a dive into the Upside Down for more information about whatever evil is lurking next. The Creel House is also a major location this season and we see most of our young crew investigating there. Or maybe this dive isn’t about going physically into anything but digging deep into a new revelation from part one to discover something profound. At this point, the season will be full steam ahead so who knows what will happen?

“The Massacre at Hawkins Lab”

Ahh good ole Hawkins lab, where all this mess began for us and the crew. It’s been shut down since the end of season two, so what kind of massacre is taking place? This could be a flashback to a massacre that took place decades prior when a younger Brenner was around or when Eleven was still there. We do see her looking bloody with her shaved head in the trailer. Or maybe there’s something going on there now that leads to a massacre. Do the Russians break through and cause a ruckus? This is going to be a bloody one.

“Papa”

Yes, we know we will see Brenner again. And, considering the previous episode title, these two episodes might go hand in hand. His status and whereabouts are rather ambiguous at this time so we need answers about him. If he’s alive right now, what is he doing? Did he find a new place to conduct experiments? Did he take his talents to Russia? There might be a final standoff between Eleven and Brenner in this episode.

“The Piggyback”

Who knows what this means? Maybe the test subjects’ powers piggyback off each other? Or Eleven rides piggyback on Mike’s back off into the sunset? It’s too hard to tell what this could mean, especially with it being the finale episode.

Of course, we won’t really know what will happen until it goes down. But, bringing in a powerful villain, possible time travel and necromancy, and connecting to real-life strange things is all we need to be on board.

Originally published on November 8, 2021.

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Stephen Colbert and the Critical Role cast headed on another adventure together. The Late Show host joined the show for a special Red Nose Day Dungeons & Dragons campaign; Red Nose Day is a campaign fighting child poverty. The one-shot is titled Choose Stephen Colbert’s Adventure… Again. The talk show host previously joined Dungeon Master Matt Mercer for a one-on-one adventure back in 2019. That, too, for Red Nose Day. But for their latest campaign, other Critical Role cast members will join Colbert and Mercer. And like the last time Colbert and Critical Role united in the name of charity, donors picked various aspects of the adventure.

While the one-shot debuted on April 28 on Critical Role‘s Twitch channel, the full thing is available to watch on YouTube.

The newest one-shot, called Dignity, saw Ashley Johnson, Marisha Ray, and Sam Riegel join Mercer and Colbert. Throughout the last week of March, fans donating to Critical Role‘s Red Nose Day fundraiser answered poll questions. The winning answer from each poll question dictated an aspect of the one-shot, like Colbert’s familiar, a magical item, and even a spell that might help him out of a tricky situation.

Colbert’s first foray into the world of Critical Role for the previous Red Nose Day was a delight. During the nearly hour-long adventure, Mercer guided Colbert through the Menagerie Coast in Wildemount. Mercer and Colbert reminisced about their Dungeons & Dragons journeys along the way. And it was a bit of a coming home for Colbert, who shared that he hadn’t played in decades but played regularly through his teens and early twenties. In fact, he embarked on his first campaign back in 1977.

We love seeing Colbert boast about his D&D cred. After all, he is a D&D OG. He attended Gen Con when The Dungeon Master’s Guide released in 1979 and walked away with a Gary Gygax-signed copy. (Which he may have stolen from a friend.) Given how much fun it was seeing Colbert play with Mercer the first time, we loved seeing him with even more of the Critical Role crew. Here’s hoping this isn’t their last adventure.

As of this posting, the Critical Role Foundation’s Red Nose Day campaign has raised $191,000. You can donate here.

Originally published on March 23, 2022.

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The first ever D&D Direct took place Thursday morning, and the event showcased the updates ahead for Dungeons & Dragons. While Wizards of the Coast has some epic new campaigns in the works (players will be able to play as Plasmoids, essentially slime, soon), the company also brought an update for the Dungeons & Dragons movie. Directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein participated in the event, and they shared the Dungeons & Dragons movie title and release date. Paramount Pictures confirmed the cast.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves will arrive next year. The directors noted the movie would take place in the Forgotten Realms and specifically mentioned the Sword Coast. This region in the western Faerûn is situated next to the Sea of Swords. It’s pure wilderness with a ton of monstrous creatures, though the Sword Coast does also feature some cities. In short: it’s a region sure to provide some sweeping vistas and cool storytelling opportunities.

And as for the cast? Basically everyone rumored for the Dungeons & Dragons movie is aboard. Paramount Pictures confirmed Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Justice Smith, Sophia Lillis, Chloe Coleman, and Hugh Grant. We don’t have specifics about their roles, but sources have said Grant will play the film’s villain. Will he appear in a recognizable form or as one of D&D‘s many monsters?

Paramount Pictures didn’t share any information about the movie’s plot yet. Daley and Goldstein mentioned they were leaning into the fun and surprise that comes with Dungeons & Dragons. Part of me hopes that means they roll for attacks and damages as they’re filming, impractical as that would be. But perhaps they incorporated the chance that comes with rolling dice while creating the script.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves will premiere on March 3, 2023.

Amy Ratcliffe is the Managing Editor for Nerdist and the author of A Kid’s Guide to Fandom, available now. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

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Resurrect the dodo, Carolina parakeet, Yangtze river dolphin, and more—no diamonds needed. (Yes, that’s a very nerdy spell component joke. No regrets.) The Book of Extinction, an unofficial fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons supplement from Mage Hand Press, will hold more than 70 creatures inspired by extinct animals from our material plane within its pages. The book gives these fascinating creatures comprehensive game statistics and lore for use in your D&D game. Real-world facts and history about the animals that inspired the creatures accompany the gameplay information.

The first three creatures are available in a pay-what-you-want preview now. (The rest will follow after a crowdfunding campaign later this year.) The preview includes:

The thylacine, Tasmania’s marsupial wolf, becomes an incorporeal ghost tiger. The great auk, a giant penguin from the most inaccessible reaches of Iceland, becomes a magic-casting celestial beast. And the passenger pigeon, once North America’s most numerous bird, becomes a gargantuan swarm reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

All proceeds go toward conservation organizations working to preserve endangered species. Mage Hand Press is also producing a companion podcast called Making a Monster: Extinction to expand on the  animals’ real-world stories.

The creatures in The Book of Extinction are inspired by animals that went extinct specifically by human interaction. But why use Dungeons & Dragons to bring awareness? “Natural history is already present in heroic fantasy games like D&D,” says Mage Hand Press, “from the histories and myths that inspired famous monsters to illustrated field guides from John James Audubon that inspired the game’s Monster Manual.”

Follow Mage Hand Press on social media for more information about The Book of Extinction Kickstarter campaign for a full compendium of creatures.

Kelly Knox is a pop culture and entertainment writer in the Seattle area. Her next book, Be More Obi-Wan, says “hello there” in July 2022. Follow her on Twitter at @kelly_knox to talk Star Wars, pop culture, and bad dad jokes.

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