Future Friday: Dungeons and Dragons

With lock down effectively continuing for me, I've been looking at new things to entertain myself. As a surprise to me, I've started to really get into Dungeons and Dragons.

It started off with some old friends planning a Descent into Avernus campaign. This was a situation of both a setting campaign I've been interested in playing since it came out, and also a collection of excellent people I haven't role-played with in far too long, so I jumped at the chance.

Then I decided to watch some clips of Critical Role on Youtube. Specifically, I was playing a Kenku and wanted to see how Matt Mercer had run a Kenku NPC. I found that entertaining so watched a few more clips. Then I read the wiki a bit. Then I watched an episode.

Now I've watched several whole arcs, am watching the new episodes as they come up and have a favourite ship.

(If you are interested in getting into the current, second campaign of Critical Role, I'd recommend Episodes 1 - 4, then 26 - 30, 45, 80-87, 98 and finally 105 to present (currently episode 109). This does miss much of the Fjord-Ukatoa arc and some shenanigans in Xhorhas, but I just read the summaries of those so don't know which episodes to recommend.)

Because D&D Beyond gives me access to all active D&D material while I'm in the Descent into Avernus campaign, I got reminded of quite how much I love the Eberron setting, and how I've always meant to run a campaign where the PCs are a bunch of "monsters" from the nation of Droaam trying to get their nation political recognition from the more traditional nations.

As a result, I've been writing quite a lot of campaign notes, though I won't have time to run this until one of my existing commitments is complete, it's going to take a long while to get this all written up, so it's a good time to get going.

I also feel I should absolutely recommend Exploring Eberron at this point, an unofficial supplement written by Keith Baker, the creator of Eberron. It covers a lot of the stuff he's wanted to put into more detail before but never quite had the word count for.

From a blog and miniatures point of view, this is also absolutely the excuse to give a bit of a theme and purpose to the "random models I like" projects I've had sitting around for a while. Even if I end up running on Roll20 or another online forum, I'm likely to be able to utilise pictures of my painted models to help players visualise NPCs and monsters they encounter.

Also, if my readers have some interest, while I've been noodling around some of my campaign design ideas on my Facebook, I could put some of the more developed ideas up here as I get them finalised.

Still, at the very least, hopefully it'll be a motivation to get a few more figures done.