Note: this is spoiler free. The only part that isn't has been hidden.

Running a pre-written module seemed like an obvious choice for me as a 1st time DM. I wanted to try being a DM, but didn't necessarily have a story to tell or a world to build. I've talked before about how I don't consider myself a creative person in that I can't make something from nothing, but can work within pre-defined guidelines and rules. I figured if I had a world already built and a story already laid out that it would free up my mental resources to focus on learning how to DM well. Maybe eventually I'd homebrew an adventure, but for now I needed to know how to play from the other side of the screen.

Waterdeep: Dragon Heist had just released, so it seemed like the safest bet for my group. Some of the players who had agreed to be guinea pigs were familiar with enough D&D that they likely had played other modules or knew enough about their stories that they would already sort of know the plot hooks. By virtue of being brand new, this would be a fresh experience for them, which would in turn give me a better playground for learning what to do.

I was...mistaken.

Now that my group has finally "finished" (I'll explain that in a minute), here's the short version of my overall impression of WDH: I would not recommend it for veteran players, and I think it is formatted in such a way that it would be far more successful as a video game than it is as a tabletop adventure.

When I first read through it, the format of the adventure seemed incredibly useful for a beginner. As the DM, you are presented with a few different tracks to choose from and send your players down. Your choices on this front end set up everything from your main baddie to the behavior of the city at large to environmental factors that could impact their missions. Villains you didn't choose can still be minor characters, possibly even allies to your players. You have a fully functional world already built with rules already established, important figures already named and titled, plots that connect and fill out a rich tapestry of realism...all the things that are daunting about homebrew are done, leaving you to focus on learning how to run the game.

This is a trap.

This rich tapestry of woven plots that make the world feel real and show that things persist beyond what choices the PCs make very quickly convolutes the story. This is why I say it'd work better as a video game, a place where you can have a quest log and if you miss something the first time you can probably get it to happen again. The threads are far too subtle and too numerous. Incorporating anything that is not directly tied to the storyline you've chosen may expand the world, but confuses the players. It is also much harder to draw attention to what does actually matter, and important details get lost in the mess.

The "side mission fatigue" is real, where chasing down conclusions to these numerous threads starts to feel like a slog and ultimately doesn't get them any closer to their end goal. Thanks to the subtlety with which the rest of the actual story is delivered, players start to fear not following this threads at the risk of not progressing their story.

The second problem is how tenuously these things are all tied together.

Scenarios are written with a good amount "if this, then that" info on how players might react to a situation. Did they intervene? This happens. Did they remain bystanders and stay out of it? This other thing happens. Sounds like a great framework for someone who has not run a game before and is concerned about reacting to what PCs choose.

This is also a trap.

Anyone with any ounce of D&D knowledge knows that the one constant is players have a knack for finding a course of action you did not consider. This is the moment you find that this tapestry is actually one of those really fragile fabrics where if you snag it even a little bit it royally effs up the rest of it and there's little you can do to repair it. Sure you can kind of smooth things out but the damage will always be visible to some degree.

Players do something unexpected? No problem, just roll with it and change a few things and now you're good. Except because everything is tied together in strange ways doing so has inevitably broken some other aspect of the game. Then you fix that, and find another hole that created. Rinse and repeat until you give up, slap some Flex Seal on the plot hole, and pretend none of that ever happened.

**I've hidden the next section because it does touch a little on the play style the module is built for if you consider that a spoiler, but no plot points or event details are discussed.**

We all still had fun and plenty of laughs, but it wasn't the game I think the writers intended it to be. Five sessions in I knew I had to abandon several elements or we would never finish, and I had to continue axing things as we went. There are plot threads that I dropped off into nowhere for the sake of just getting to the end. I'm sure there are chunks of the story that feel unsatisfying, unresolved, or like they had no impact as a result, but as a group no one seems to be that bothered by it. It took us twenty sessions of three to five hours a piece to get through, which is ABSURD by every measure considering it's only supposed to take you through level 5. And that's after cutting a bunch of stuff!

Am I glad I decided to start with a module as a first time DM? Yes. Knowing what I know now would I start with this particular one again? Absolutely not. Would I recommend playing it to anyone else? Eh, depends. I believe the best case scenario for running this is an experienced DM with brand new players. Regardless I learned a lot, both about DMing and what I don't like about running a story, so the experience will still serve me well as we move into homebrew shenanigans.

/end rant

I am a full blown dice goblin. Do I need 15 sets? No. Do I have 15 sets? Yes. Will I buy more? Absolutely.

Last fall I backed the Kraken kickstarter for some of their awesome looking ethereal dice. I hadn't ever purchased from them before but had heard good things, and despite most of the etheral pictures being renders (red flag number one, as those are not allowed per KS rules) they had released other sets of the same style that came out nicely. There was no reason to think the new sets wouldn't be the same.

This is the part where I tell you the short version is I sent my dice back, got a refund, and will never buy from them again. If you want the long version there is a super handy Twitter account called @DiceKraken that has been collecting all of the news from what has become a dumpster fire. Here's what I received (photographed under my studio lights, which honestly made them look better than they did in person) compared to what they advertised.

That's not the point of the story.

I'm a crafty person. If I see a thing that I like the idea of but not the execution, my immediate reaction is "can I make the thing?" These dice were no exception, but how do you make dice? This wasn't like other projects where I could look at it and dissect its pieces to figure out how to make it exactly or sub things in for good approximations. This was like looking at a baked cake and trying to figure out the recipe. So I did what any good millennial does and googled the every living hell out of it.

Making dice is one of those things that is easy to do but hard to be good at. Put a die in a cup, pour silicone on it, wait a while, pour resin in your new silicone mold you just made, wait a while, boom you just made your very own die. Maybe it has bubbles in it, or surface imperfections, or the exposed side of the die you didn't sand quite right, or the color you mixed in didn't behave the way you thought it would, so there are places to improve, but you made one.

And that's what I did.

I went full chemist on this and have a dedicated notebook full of my procedures, results, challenges, and next steps. I went from technically making something that counted as dice to creating sets that I was confident enough in to give to people in the space of about one month. I'm still experimenting, but happy with where I'm at and excited to have a new hobby.

I guess in the end I can take a little bit of sarcasm out of saying "thanks, Kraken!"

Did you hear? I'm trendy now because I embroider!

That's what I've heard anyways. Apparently embroidery and cross-stitch are making a comeback, so now I get to fulfill my dream of finally being a hipster and getting to say I was doing something before it was cool. 

Sometime early last year I made my own dice bags with The Adventure Zone inspired designs embroidered on the front. Did I need two bags? No. Could I not decide which design I wanted to do and rather than actually make a decision just do them both? Yes. It's not like I didn't know at the time I would eventually fill them both because I'm a dice hoarding goblin.

Since then I've been in many a D&D game and a few people have asked where I got these, then expressed interest in getting one of their own once I said I had made it. I didn't take that seriously for a while because I was too busy trying to remember to eat and not put my keys in the refrigerator. Now that I'm back on freelancing duty and not in a constant state of almost dying, I wanted to get back into hobbies that I found joy in. One of those is stabbing myself just a little bit repeatedly I guess.

That was an embroidery joke. If you've tried it before, you get it. If you haven't, I sound crazy. Which...I mean...you're still not wrong.

I opened up commissions of dice bags to Twitter as a test. The response has been great, and I've been able to make some really cool bags for people. I've had everything from very specific ideas to vague feelings people have wanted done, and so far everyone seems to be happy with their new dice homes.

I'm going to keep doing these for a while, though pretty casually as I just started a new production gig. Maybe even moving towards having a few I make and just list for sale (too many ideas, not enough dice). I'm really enjoying having an excuse to embroider without just ending up with an absurd number of hoops on display around the house. I'm sure LoLink appreciates it too! If you're at all interested in one yourself, for now I've got more info in a tweet. If this stays a thing I'll make a formal post with details and such. 

Now if you'll excuse me I have to go clean up all of the fabric and thread shards that are littering the house. Oops.

I started playing Dungeons and Dragons a while ago. I blame The Adventure Zone for sparking an interest in it and making it sound fun, and the confidence I gained through improv to make it seem not as wild of an idea to roleplay. I will admit I was completely in the "D&D is for nerds" camp for a while there, but through the persistence of the same person who got me to listen to TAZ I eventually caved and agreed to "try it just once."

Now I'm in two campaigns and running a third. So you could say I decided I liked it.

D&D is the literal definition of escapism and living out your fantasies that video games try to be. The difference being, of course, how much more finely you can control that in a tabletop setting. You aren't bound to set actions, map edges, and unbending rule sets. Your character and their actions exist completely as you want them to, within a world that is just as dynamic. It is truly an open world, which is amazing.

I have been having an absolute ball playing on both sides of the DM screen. It's incredibly interesting to me how the experience varies so much depending on who is running the game, and who else is participating. There is so much fluidity to the rules and play styles that no story would ever play the same way twice. I also love how accessible it is; you can play for free very easily, in person or online, with friends or with strangers. It's a heck of a game, and you can bet your butt there's going to be a lot of D&D related posts coming in the future.

Have you played D&D or another tabletop RPG? If you've thought about it but haven't tried it, what's holding you back?

Hi my name is Jenn and I'm an adult in my 30's who plays Pokemon GO.

I enjoyed playing Pokemon growing up. Between the two of us my sister and I played Red, Blue, Yellow, Gold, Silver, and Crystal. We spent absurd amounts of time in Pokemon Stadium, printed our Pokemon Snap stickers at Blockbuster, and desperately (and hilariously) tried to befriend one in Hey You Pikachu. I still have my binders of Pokemon cards, and there's a box in my craft room that contains a ready-to-go deck alongside the gym badges I had earned at the Books-a-Million Pokemon League.

It was a whole thing.

My interest waned into gen 3 and beyond, though I did try again with Black and White. It just never hooked me the way the first 250 did. So, Pokemon became a thing I didn't actively participate in but still appreciated the roots of. I had collectibles, I kept my cartridges and card, but my engagement became passive for adulthood. It wasn't a franchise geared towards me, and that was fine.

And then Pokemon GO was released.

The nostalgia part of my brain embodied the Kool-Aid Man and burst through the rational walls of being a responsible adult and let the kid who loved Eevee and Ponyta to an absurd degree climb on through. There was a single Pokestop at the back of our neighborhood about a 5 minute bike ride away, so Geoff and I would spend our evenings after dinner with our phones mounted to our handlebars riding loops between home and those baseball fields catching the few Pokémon that appeared and hatching eggs.

After moving to Austin, it took on a new life. There were stops and gyms close to us! Places to go walk around outside that had high densities of Pokémon! We met people to go raiding with! On afternoons where we just need a break we head to the Domain, grab an iced beverage, and just wander for 2 hours. On raid days we create 18 person caravans and pre-plan routes so we can hit at least 18 raids (our best day we did 30 but decided that was a little more intense than we wanted to be for future ones and scaled it back), and if someone misses out on a shiny variant people within this group are totally willing to trade their extras to make sure everyone is covered. I'VE MET SO MANY DOGS.

This year we went to the annual Pokémon GO Fest in Chicago. At first we felt like it was silly to essentially take a Pokémon-themed vacation, but judgment be damned it's something we genuinely enjoy. Since tickets are a lottery system we decided we'd apply for the lottery and let the universe decide. If we got in great, and if we didn't then cool we'd do something else with that time off. The great Pokémon gods saw fit for us to go nerd out and granted us tickets. So off to Chicago we went.

I wasn't sure what to expect going into it, but it was a really cool experience. The park was divided up into biomes where certain types of Pokémon would spawn, and the areas were decorated to each theme. The Fairy Garden had trellises covered in flowers and bubble machines. Buckingham Fountain served as the water zone and kept everyone cool with the water sprays. The Spooky Woods were straight out of the front yard of that one house in your neighborhood that does Halloween right. The Winter Forest had "snow" covered trees. We met a lot of people from all over the world, traded for some rare finds, won some exclusive merch, and caught an obnoxious number of Pokémon (including shinies!). It was an exhausting day (Fitbit clocked 42k steps for me), but wonderful. 

As an added bonus, there was increased Pokémon activity around the rest of the city too, so even on the other days we were there we could go hunting for more good stuff. We took advantage of that by spending time down on Navy Pier, and visited my penguin bros at the Shedd Aquarium (one of my favorite places on the planet). It was a short trip, but a unique way to wrap up a few busy weeks for us.

I would totally go to the event again if we can get tickets. Each day had its own set of problems (system went down for a while for us, rained out on another day, etc), but that's going to happen when you've got tens of thousands of people cramming into a small area outside. Overall it was all handled really well, and we had a great time.

Did any of you go? How did you do? What was your favorite part?