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Thursday, May 21, 2020

D&D Tab Revision

I edited and updated the blog's D&D Tab this morning.  I wanted to get everything collected in one place and organized at least somewhat logically.  It's all on one page now with the following sections:
  • General Storytelling 
  • Play Reports
  • Wanderhaven: Our Campaign & Story Setting
  • The Kingdom of the Western Isles
  • Mythology, Religion, and the Known World
  • The Wanderhaven Sourcebook
  • Wanderhaven Adventures & Adventure Articles
  • Travelogue
  • Forgotten Realms Book Reviews
  • D&D Next and the Playtest Process
I realized as I went through this that there's easily enough unpublished fiction here to put out a new short story collection for the Kindle, so that's my next project.  I may also (finally) collect a PDF of material for the so-called Wanderhaven Source Book, but that's kind of a longer undertaking.  Alas, half of these ideas have been overcome by officially published material.

Anyway, material from the reconfigured tab is reprinted below.  Let me know what you think!

I like D&D. I don’t get to play as much as I used to, but I enjoy the game, like many of the novels that Wizards of the Coast (WotC) puts out, and make an effort to keep up with what’s new. I like fantasy fiction and roleplaying games, but I also find the business of RPGs interesting as well, perhaps because I used to own a (very) small press comic book company and did many of the projects for my MBA on pop-culture-type topics. It’s a tough world out there, but the RPG crowd is an intelligent and welcoming group, and geek culture has lately taken over the world. Watching this develop has been fun as a fan, but as an expert in business and finance, it’s been fascinating.

In the world of pop culture, D&D is a legendary sea monster. Yes, it’s often hidden below the surface, but it’s much, much bigger than you’d think, and it’s the basis of many of the stories that are told around campfires even to this day.

It’s that big. If anything, it’s even bigger than that.




Most of this is for D&D's 5th Edition or for the playtest material that was written during the run-up to 5e's release. The blog also has a tab for Wanderhaven, my homebrew campaign setting, and another for the single-player campaign I wrote for 4e several years ago called "The Sellswords of Luskan: Winter Ambush".  According to blogger, more than nine thousand people have played through "Winter Ambush" and another four thousand have been through "The Mystery of Malvern Manor"!

If every one of those folks would also buy my book, I'd be a happy, happy man.

Questions or comments? Drop ‘em below!

General Storytelling


Play Reports



Wanderhaven: Our Campaign & Story Setting

Wanderhaven is Dungeons and Dragons campaign setting that I occasionally run at home for my kids.  D&D is fundamentally a game of “let’s play make-believe,” and my kids are tireless make-believers, so the game has been a perfect fit for us.  They like it when I tell them stories, and I’ve always thought of D&D as more of a cooperative storytelling exercise than as an actual game with rules and winners and all of that.
2nd book: Crown of Pluto.
The idea of Wanderhaven was born in December 2012, when I wrote a short story for my girls as a Christmas present using the characters they’d created for one of our recent sessions.  My older daughter Hannah really bonded with her character, the halfling thief Sneakatara Boatman, "Sneax" to her friends, and I wanted to come up with a way to make that character—and the experience of playing her—more memorable.  That first story, "Sneax and Elaina Emboo versus the Fire Elf," was a huge hit, both at home and in my office, and I've been writing stories set in the world of Wanderhaven ever since.
There are now two full-sized Sneax books, Sneakatara Boatman & the Priest of Loki, which everyone likes, and Sneakatara Boatman and the Crown of Pluto, which has tended to be a little more popular with my friends who are combat veterans than it has been with the general populace.  There is also a short story, "Heroes," that finds an adult Sneax in a spot of trouble following one of her adult adventures and a completely unrelated short story called "Wolfgang & Salamatu" that introduces a whole new set of characters in Wanderhaven's Royal Court. 

The short novel The Order of the Blackened Glaive expands a bit on the idea of The Legion of the Red Lord and co-stars an adult Elaina Emboo alongside the dark paladin Drakar.

The would-be third full-sized Sneax novel, Sneakatara Boatman and the Mystery of Mordecai's Monster, is sitting half-finished on my hard-drive.  I know how it ends, but getting into the third act has been really tricky.  No idea if I'll ever actually get that it out to the world. 

I've also got exactly one piece of Cahokiantep short story, "The Bounty Hunter".

Finally, we made mini-figures for Sneax, Wolfgang, Maleeka, and Victoria D'Artagnan, the drow paladin of Hades, via Hero Forge.  Check those out if you want to see what these guys all look like.

The Kingdom of the Western Isles

The city of Wanderhaven is the capital of the mythical Kingdom of the Western Isles, a major nation-state located on a subcontinental archipelago off the northeastern coast of the Continent of Sentralia, which represents the majority of the Known World.  Wanderhaven is a large, cosmopolitan port city, a cross between fifteenth century Paris, modern day New York, and the ancient Greek city-state of Troy.  It’s the kind of place where even good girls can get into trouble if they’re not careful.  The people of Wanderhaven mostly concern themselves with trade and with the fashion crazes of the King's Court, but the Kingdom is at odds politically with the Empire of Holy Sentralia and its dread Legion of the Red Lord, so cloak-and-dagger type espionage is not at all unusual inside.

The Kingdom of the Western Isles is a big place.  It is at least as large as the real world nations of Iceland, Greenland, and Great Britain put together, and it is only partially settled.  Wanderhaven itself is located close to the southern end of the Kingdom, but the Kingdom's territories extend much further north, all the way up to the polar region, known as the Great Northern Ice.  The northernmost settlement is the Duchy of Charlesford, an area in and around the Charlesford Gulf that includes the town of Breakwater Bay, located on the Isle de Mont Deserette, and a tiny logging village called Ellesberg.  This area is loosely based on the part of Maine where my family and I vacation in the summers -- in and around Mount Desert Isle and Acadia National Park.

    Mythology, Religion, and the Known World

    Every fantasy realm needs a Cosmology.  But though religion and mythology are an integral part of D&D, they present something of a challenge to my home game.  To keep things simple, we use Roman mythology as our base because my kids are already at least somewhat familiar with it, simplifying and abstracting details as necessary.

    Both the Kingdom and the Continent worship the Twelve Gods, but each country's view of the gods is different.  To the people of the Kingdom, the gods are called Olympians, and they go by the ancient Greek names, using the Greek personifications.  The Sentralians call the gods the Dii Consentes and use the Roman names and personifications. The difference is most pronounced in the way the cultures conceive of Area (Mars), who is either the dread god of war or the bringer of civilization through righteous conquest.


    The Wanderhaven Sourcebook

    Most of these are homebrew designs for use in our home game.  There's a lot here, mostly developed to help us do something in the game that we do in our real lives.  For example, may daughter takes ballet, so we developed an in-world Bard College of Ballet.

    Priests of Misfortune (with link to EN5ider article)

    Wanderhaven Adventures & Adventure Articles

    Travelogue

    Forgotten Realms Book Reviews

    D&D Next and the Playtest Process
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