Immersion in your D&D game. It’s one of the most sought after and asked about topics in the whole DMing Multiverse. The real trick always lies in how well you can tie together all the seemingly disparate pieces of your group – characters, backstories, motivations, and adventures – into one cohesive, epic story. In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave answer a listener question about how to best tie their characters into their newest campaign, Tomb of Annihilation, following the finale of their Curse of Strahd campaign. Along the way, we brainstorm how to tie these two adventures together i ..read more

Greetings gamers from all systems, places and timelines! How challenging your campaign should be is one of those questions, like alignment, where if you asked ten seasoned DMs, you can expect to get ten entirely different answers. Odds are the players at your table will have vastly different gaming backgrounds and expectations. This can be tricky to balance between the player who really doesn’t understand the rules fully but wants to hang out and have a good time with their friends and the player who’s been gaming for twenty years and thinks Elden Ring isn’t difficult enough. The obvious solut ..read more

Our current zeitgeist in storytelling are epic, longform adventures that span entire book, television, and film series… think Avatar: The Last Airbender, Lord of the Rings, ACOTAR, and the MCU. And while these epic stories are incredibly engrossing, are they the best default for our gaming tables? In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave answer a listener question asking for our advice on running episodic adventures, which serves as our jumping off point to an excellent question by TTRPG influencer and Running the Game Dungeon MASTER, Matt Colville, of “How long should an adventure be?” If the p ..read more

Greetings, 3WD-verse! DM Chris here. Over the past several months, the folks over at WOTC have been releasing some of the changes being made to our beloved D&D 5th edition, culminating in the release of the 2024 Core Rulebooks. And as one would expect there have been a bunch of reviews published about the updates, both good and bad. People are resistant to change, and anytime you’re going to alter something that has evolved and grown into such a wide-ranging community, you’re going to ruffle some feathers. But for those of us who have seen years and fads pass by, change can be what you mak ..read more

Greetings, 3WD-verse! DM Chris here. In the long hours, weeks, months, and even years of your campaign, there will be portions of your carefully crafted story that will get lost in the flood of plotlines and twists. It’s inevitable. Don’t fret – it happens to writer’s as well. Remember, you spend a lot more time with the details than your players do. Top that off with the power that ideas can have. Once your players have had a “wrong” idea about the story, it can plant itself deep in their understanding and cause issues for you down the road. We recently experienced this in our current Shadow ..read more

As we learned from the AD&D release, Deities & Demigods, “If you stat it, players will kill it.” So, what do you do if you want to place an unbeatable Kaiju-type monster, like Godzilla, into your game world? Something way more fearsome than a Tarrasque. A complete force of nature that shapes the entire world and every adventure in it. Something that you can’t just “punch really hard.” In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave respond to a listener’s question, “have you ever put a monster in your campaign that cannot be defeated?” and enter into a real time brainstorming session as we disc ..read more

Greetings, 3WD-verse! DM Chris here. As you’ve no doubt picked up from some of our #MinisMonday posts on social media, me and the boys have recently picked up a mean Warhammer 40K habit. Credit to the Wizard Washburn, as Scott has assisted in our introduction to the wonderfully addictive wargame. Although it can get pricey (I think of it a lot like golf for geeks), the combination of modeling, painting and battling with your army is a rush that tugs at the heart-strings of gamers like us who love minis and combat. But what does that have to do with D&D, and more specifically how does that ..read more

We’ve done several episodes and articles about how to best onboard new DMs and GMs to the hobby, including episode 113: Just Do It, with DM Lenny, about running his first game ever. But what about all the Grognards and OG DMs that were playing it out of the White Boxes assembled by Gary Gygax in his own home? In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave sit down with our good friend, Scott Washburn of Paper Terrain, to discuss his recent return to the DM chair with his homebrewed campaign “World of the Five Gods.” True to form, Scott kitbashed together the original White Box D&D with some flair ..read more

He stood in the doorway, leaning on a worn oak staff and peered around the Inn. The tattered hood of his plain, gray robe was drawn over his head, its shadows obscuring the features of his face except for his hawkish, shining eyes. Dragons of Autumn Twilight And with that, we had our first introduction into one of the most beloved characters in the Dragonlance Chronicles… Fizban the Fabulous! Easily understood to be a Gandalf-type character – an :inciting incident” in human form – Fizban arrives at the Inn of the Last Home, rearranges the furniture (to Tika’s dismay), tells some stories to th ..read more

Greetings gamers from all systems, places and timelines! During a campaign, there are dozens of ways the game flow can begin feeling disjointed or muddled. Like if your particular game has a great deal of lore or subplots that have put the players on different pages. This isn’t always a problem, but when a good chunk of the party can’t remember key details of the plot then it definitely has become one.  If you find yourself in this spot at least you will be in good company, as this has happened to the best of DMs. Especially if you’re running a significant number of campaigns and you’re c ..read more