Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The Joy of GMing - with Special Guest Nathan Bruha!
49 Plays11 months ago
Welcome to the sister-series to Anywhere But Now— our Doctor Who Actual Play Podcast! Our special guest today is Nathan Bruha, aka the Amethyst Dragon!
Join us for a great talk about Nathan's *incredible* bounty of home-brewed work for D&D 5e, catch some on-the-fly creativity as he whips up a brand-new item, and join us as we talk about the ins and outs of TTRPG making!
We’ll cover some making-of and behind the scenes tidbits of our mods as well, so do stick around, with host Casey Jones!
Learn more at our Discord! Be sure to subscribe and leave a comment, and follow us on BluSky and Twitter for more updates. Don’t forget to send your questions & fan art to [email protected]!
And catch the Amethyst Dragon on Blusky, Reddit, Twitter, and Instagram!
Music by Tabletop Audio
Theme by RJ Pirchinello
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to The Joy of GMing
00:00:34
Speaker
Whether you're at a game table, in your comfiest chair, reading a book, or listening at home, there's nothing like a great adventure story. But they don't happen by accident.
00:00:45
Speaker
Welcome to the joy of GMing, a special interview series on the craft of great gaming. There's just something magic about sitting down to a good table with great friends, isn't there? If you're a lifelong gamer or a newbie rolling up your first character sheet, if you're a DM or GM or just can't get enough tabletop talk in your day, this is the show for you.
00:01:09
Speaker
Each episode will bring you amazing guest speakers to talk about writing games and running them, building fantastic worlds and compelling story arcs, and oh, so useful tricks of the trade. Here's some amazing stories. Get inspired for your next game and join us for an hour and a half or so of lively conversation.
Meet the Creators: Casey Jones & Nathan Bruja
00:01:30
Speaker
This sister series to anywhere but now, our Doctor Who actual play podcast, will be released between mods or episodes with our ongoing serialized show. We cover some making up and behind the scenes tidbits of our latest mod as well, so do stick around.
00:01:46
Speaker
I'm Casey Jones. Over the last dozen years, I've written and produced screenplays, children's animation for TV and film, graphic novels, stage plays, murder mysteries, and audio adventures. I've also been writing and running tabletop games for over 10 years.
00:02:02
Speaker
Join me as we dive deep into tabletop with experts in the field. Experts like our special guest today, Nathan Bruja of the Amethyst Dragon. Nathan Bruja is a longtime player, dungeon master, and custom homebrew content creator for Dungeons and Dragons. He uses anything and everything as inspiration to create usable content for the world's most popular tabletop RPG. Nathan is in the process of writing a large content sourcebook for the game
00:02:31
Speaker
with plans to finish and publish in 2024, with a Kickstarter campaign for the book in mid-spring. Nathan, thank you so much for joining us today.
00:02:41
Speaker
Hello and greetings. Hello and greetings. I have to say, no two ways about it. You are a phenomenon. With over 1,400 items home brewed, we could spend the entire show on the sheer tonnage of ammo, amulets, armor, belts, bows, books, bracers, capes, clothes, clothing, clubs, containers, crowns, daggers.
00:03:03
Speaker
Flails, food, footwear, glaives, greataxes, halberds and handaxes, headwear, hammers, light sources, longswords, maces, masks and malls, pikes, potions, quarter stabs, rings, rods and scimitars, shields, shortswords, spears, stabs and sword canes, tridents, vehicles, wands and warhammers. That you've made.
00:03:20
Speaker
Good God. Which doesn't include the races, subraces, backgrounds, subclasses, class features, feats, conditions, special foes, monsters, plants, places, POIs, rulesets, VTTs, or virtual tabletops, spells, theme spells, and more spells. Good Lord. Where's it all come from?
Nathan's D&D Inspirations and Beginnings
00:03:39
Speaker
It is it's my creative outlet and it just it just comes I get an idea and I either have to make it right away if it's something I feel I just have to make or it goes on to my list of ideas my to-do list.
00:03:54
Speaker
Which, if I took just that to-do list and made something every other day, it would be a year or two's worth of content. That stuff I haven't made yet. That's just the stuff on your to-do list. It's incredible.
00:04:09
Speaker
My imaginary hat is off to you because between all the things mentioned, the cantrips, treasures, and non-magical gear you've also assembled, you've been nothing less than utterly prolific. I have to ask, I have an inkling of where the
00:04:28
Speaker
Itch begins of, I need to make something of my own in this larger system, but I want to know from you, and I'm sure our listeners do as well, what inspired you to start homebrewing in the first place and the late 90s, I understand? And why have you stuck with it so faithfully? Well, when I was in seventh grade.
00:04:46
Speaker
My best friend was given like first edition D&D books, A D&D books by an uncle or something. And we had been reading some of the Forgotten Realms novels, the Time of Troubles things. I was always into like swords and magic and that sort of stuff just as an interest. So we started this D&D thing and he was the DM. He had absolutely no clue what he was doing, but we had fun and I was hooked. That's wonderful.
00:05:10
Speaker
Well, I started, you know, making up my own stuff because I was, you know, got into high school. I was a poor teenager. I had next to no money and I certainly didn't have spare money to spend on like Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk books. And I think Dragonlance was out at the time and those were pretty much the only ones. So I did what a lot of others do and I made up my own world.
00:05:29
Speaker
It started with a piece of paper and colored pencils. There you go. Surprisingly, I still have that first sheet of paper out of 11 that I made for the map. That's wonderful. It is in a folder and I'm hanging on to that. That's at least 30 years old.
00:05:45
Speaker
Well, so I didn't have all the money to buy the source books for the campaigns. And even then I was imaginative and I'm like, I have this idea. I want to make it for D&D. I would love my character to have this. My characters never got to use them. And a lot of the stuff, other characters didn't get to use them because I didn't run games all the time. Turns out, looking back on them, some of these things are really bad. But not all going to be pearls. They can't all be gold. Fun ideas, horrible execution.
00:06:13
Speaker
But then again, I was you know, a teenager that didn't know a lot and but eventually I DMed in high school a little bit I DMed in college Second edition the whole way kept up with second edition after college Had a group Weekly group third edition came out. I bought the players handbook at Gen Con that year and it sat on a shelf for a year
00:06:37
Speaker
unread. Because I'm like, I got so much stuff, I don't want to change it over. And then one day, one night, I just sat down and I read it. By the end of that night, I was like, fine, you know what, this is so much smoother. I'm changing all my stuff to third edition. Oh, third edition, it was a lot easier to balance things and compare them to publish things and things other people made.
Neverwinter Nights Era and Burnout
00:07:01
Speaker
Also, there's this thing called the internet.
00:07:03
Speaker
by this time. And Wizards of the Coast had bought TSR by then because, you know, that's why we had a third edition. And they had great online forums for people to log into and bring ideas and compare them and give feedback on them. That section of the Internet is dead. It is gone.
00:07:21
Speaker
Wizards of the Coast killed it, probably when they got bought by Hasbro, I think. Like a little bit after fourth edition came out. In 2002, there was this game called Neverwinter Nights that came out. It's basically Dungeons and Dragons on the computer. It came with the software to lay out areas and create monsters and give them stats and abilities and code things for behavior that wasn't already in the game. Fascinating.
00:07:51
Speaker
And they included the option to add new content, like new 3D models, new terrains, new spells and feats. And the people at BioWare were amazing. This game was so, the graphics weren't the greatest, but the game itself was ahead of its time. And I dove into that.
00:08:09
Speaker
once I got a computer that could actually run it. It's like now my nine-year-old laptop here I'm not even gonna try Baldur's Gate 3. I know it's not gonna work but I dove into that and that was third edition so I'm like hey I got the rules set here and
00:08:24
Speaker
I have this world I've been running personally, so I started building it in Neverwinter Nights and running it 24-7 on the server in my basement for a little longer. So I made a bunch of stuff for that, new ideas constantly. Players would give me ideas just in mentioning things or I just have, hey, I got this area, I want something, so I need stuff to put in it. So that was part of the building process of more and more and more. Eventually, the computer just died and I burned out on Neverwinter Nights so bad I literally didn't
00:08:55
Speaker
Think about it for six months. I was overly prolific in that, too, in making stuff. Yeah, I can I can get the impression and as a creator myself, like when you spend so much time on something and put so much work into it, say the draft of a book or an ongoing campaign, things of that magnitude. And we do mean magnitude. And if your computer dies, if
00:09:22
Speaker
If a book series ends poorly, if something happens that you suddenly lose all taste for the thing, like it leaves a bitter aftertaste in your mouth for, like you say, a good six months or so, I understand that feeling.
Creative Experimentation with Clay and Wordplay
00:09:38
Speaker
I understand that need to clear the air and move on to a new project, at least for the short term.
00:09:45
Speaker
Yeah, it wasn't even like distaste for it. It was just, I literally just didn't think about it because I had my player base had like gone down, like one person would log in a day and I was doing 3d models for this game. Hundreds, thousands of them I made. Um, and that's, that's for things that were simply visual and not part of the story had helped with immersion and the players loved it. I had a discord channel even back then.
00:10:10
Speaker
And it's still there and people come by, you know, years later and say, Oh man, I miss Aenea. Is that the name of your, is that the name of your realm? Yeah, it was A E N E A. Okay. When I was making it up, I was trying to think of a name for it, something that would sound semi magical, but easy to say. And it just happened to be a, uh, palindrome, the same backwards as forwards. That's the one race car.
00:10:35
Speaker
it is spelled exactly the same way back and forth there's no reason for it but it happened to to work for me so i'm amused by simple things like that i can see that and i say that having gone over your lexicon and i do mean lexicon of
00:10:52
Speaker
things that you've home brewed because they are alphabetized, because there is wordplay in the mix. You have entire months themed around pun titles for various giveaways that month. And I love, I absolutely love wordplay as part of the creative process because as much as this is work, which requires focus and dedication and time commitment and practicing of your craft,
00:11:20
Speaker
If we're going to be spending this kind of time, hours upon hours, which add up to weeks, months, years of our lives, doing something we're so passionate about, it should be fun. Oh, yeah, it's a game.
00:11:34
Speaker
It is a game and I'm delighted by how much wordplay and how much you've clearly even enjoyed coming up with the names for things and the titles of things like the Owl Cow was one that made me chuckle. Because words, in addition to conveying meaning, can also just be fun to say. They are. And a lot of my stuff, I'm not an artist as far as like visual things go. And I know that, you know, people like
00:12:04
Speaker
You know, the the fancy artwork and that draws attention, which probably, you know, reduces my audience considerably from, you know, from a lot of the more popular creators. But I've actually taken up illustration myself, but it's pencil sketches. And you do wonderful pencil work. You do really nice shading work on the on the images I've seen. I especially loved bag of bees.
00:12:26
Speaker
excellent shading and the hex and the hex pattern of the honeycomb it's sitting on. Really nice, really, really nice bag of bees. The bag was freehand. The honeycomb, I'm like, I'm not gonna be able to get this right. So I downloaded a just a simple hex pattern and then use my GIMP, the image editor I use, it's free. And did the tilting and twisting to get the perspective I wanted, printed out, nice, traced it against a window.
00:12:55
Speaker
Whatever works. I mean, I, good Lord, like tracing paper is one of the all time great tools for beginners. I remember using some of my not so hard earned allowance as a kid, buying comic books that I wanted to learn how to draw, like artists that I admired and the tracing paper to just try and get familiar with just like the muscle memory of what they were doing. And of course I went around it, went about it completely backwards.
00:13:23
Speaker
you know i should have been starting with the foundational shapes and the underpinnings of everything oh i haven't started with that either we come to it how and where we come to it is the point yeah it would probably be a better artist if i went back and like took like a drawing class or something but i haven't that's just i wish i could take the things i see in my head and just put them right on paper it doesn't quite work out which is why like you see a lot of like
00:13:49
Speaker
the stuff I have illustrated is items because they don't have to be show motion or they don't have to be entirely like... You don't have to look alive. Yeah, look alive. I've started on a couple of creatures. The one I started, did, and finished mostly, I'm kind of letting it fade off to the side, is the Vogel Dratch. And it is this ugly mix of like bird and dragon parts. Lovely name. And it is supposed to be ugly and nasty looking. So I started with that one.
00:14:16
Speaker
Making monsters is such a wonderful practice for creativity. I discovered Sculpey in college as the clay stuff. Exactly. The clay that comes in all the colors of the rainbow and then some that you bake and can turn into a flower pot or what have you or a monster. And I
00:14:40
Speaker
was a huge fan of Vampire the Masquerade in high school and into college. And one of the clans was known as the Zenitsi. And they had these monsters that they would craft out of flesh, molding it like clay and using it just as potters work with clay. And I found that an interesting way to make some monsters and then learn how to put a glaze on them afterwards so it looked like they were a little slimy or covered in it.
00:15:10
Speaker
You know, sweat, you know? But monsters are such a wonderful, because there's no, there's no rules to break. Monsters look like a mishmash of different pieces jammed together, like a sphinx, or a harpy, or a griffin. Or a vehicle drive. I'm not sure. I took the words. Okay, there's this website I use called In Different Languages.
00:15:32
Speaker
And a lot of times when I'm naming things, I'll take a concept or a descriptive term and I'll go there and I'll look up that word in different languages. That's really good. Wugaldrach happened to be central Europe, not German, Luxembourgish for both bird and dragon.
00:15:47
Speaker
And I just put them together. That's wonderful. Experimentation is such a wonderful tool for not only the creating of monsters, but also the creating of words. And you're absolutely right about being able to tap other languages and look up concepts, themes, even nouns, simple things like, what if Bird and Dragon were jammed together in different languages or a different language from what we're currently speaking?
00:16:13
Speaker
to find things, whether it's just a syllable or the part of a word or the whole thing in one go, that we get to play with. Like, not quite Lego bricks, seeing how they snap together and whatnot. But this is the practice of experimentation, of seeing how things come together. Yeah, I could have just called it, hey, it's a bird dragon. But I'm like, ah.
00:16:35
Speaker
There's so many other languages, so many different words, and D&D is from the beginning has pulled from all different types of cultures and mythologies and stuff like that. So I figure why not use words from different languages for
00:16:48
Speaker
concepts we can describe in English, certainly. But, you know, since I'm not an artist, I try to describe them with words, try to get descriptive. And like, you know, the Vougal Dretsch is this nasty, disgusting mix of like bird and dragon parts. It's got the bill of a goose on a dragon's head, like its back legs are like misshapen chicken legs. And it's got like this nasty, like a peacock's tail, but it's all nasty and gnarled.
00:17:11
Speaker
The thing even like moves unnaturally like jerky and twisting and makes weird sounds and it has a breath weapon that is just gross and that's it. If it's got the beak of a goose I can't imagine it sounds friendly. That includes the goose's tongue. The doom honk. That includes a goose's tongue that seems to have teeth on the edges of it.
00:17:34
Speaker
Fantastic. But yeah, languages are a wonderful place to start playing with words.
Monsters and Storytelling
00:17:41
Speaker
And we'll circle back to the monsters. There was a reporter that showed up in one of our games, Troubled Waters. And he's just this not quite a tabloid level journalist, you know, they're doing paid marketing, essentially kind of thing.
00:17:56
Speaker
And so I started looking through different words in different languages for this guy and came up with Grack-Clatch as his name because of the nice flat A sounds in there like someone who's just laid down in life and has given up like, ah, his name's Grack. Clatch is the German word for gossip.
00:18:29
Speaker
The only name for a creature that I've used that players have really picked up on in my- I run a weekly game.
00:18:36
Speaker
The only one that any of the players almost immediately picked up was this hag, and her name was Babusia Sosna, which is Austrian, I think. But I have a player in Poland, and it is a close language. So she recognized that it was Grandmother Pine. Someone figures out the details. I love it.
00:18:59
Speaker
I made it a close language on purpose that time because it was related to that character's backstory. And so when they encountered this eight foot old woman like unnatural like proportions and freak them out and and just you know them being able to that person being able to recognize what the name means is was fun.
00:19:19
Speaker
gives them that extra little bit of shiver down the spine when they have a little bit of extra context. That's wonderful. One of the things I love about monsters in general is how it can be freeform and freestyle with exaggeration. Because if it's a monster, the suspension of disbelief around it is loose enough
00:19:41
Speaker
that it can accommodate for things like oh yes of course it has a peacock's tail and a goose's beak and goose's tongue and its feet are these giant ungainly things as it waddles towards you and it's nine feet tall. Changing something as simple as the size of a creature to make it monstrous is a
00:20:00
Speaker
beautiful place to brainstorm and begin because one of the points of this show for the joy of GMing is not only to discover and explore talented artists like yourself and we're going to come back around to art as well because you say you're not an artist but
00:20:18
Speaker
Having worked behind and on the scenes, I can assure you, you are in fact an artist. Part of the point of this show is to encourage and to just dip our toes in the fun that can be had breaking these rules, discovering how these rules can bend and warp and come up with new discoveries and new creations. Fun is the point.
00:20:41
Speaker
fun is the point thank you could not have put it simpler myself i was at a lecture given by the designers behind the first adaptation the animated adaptation of how to train your dragon and the
00:20:56
Speaker
art designers talked about all the different choices they made and things they had to consider when they were putting all of these creatures together in different sizes with different features and half of them the names imply what sort of details they're gonna be behind them and whatnot and I was surprised but not I don't know if there's a word for when you're first surprised at something and then when you think about it for even just a second like no that makes perfect sense I'm sure there is a German
00:21:28
Speaker
Not quite Schadenfreude, but the collection of noises to like the, oh, of course. The central dragon in that series, Toothless, is largely modeled after a cat. That makes sense. Both in terms of its behavior, but also how sleek it is and its attitudes and everything. And like just even the anatomical shape of its skull and the bones have a largely feline characteristic to them. And once they
00:21:57
Speaker
clicked on that realization of like, oh, of course, he's a big cat. A lot of other smaller pieces came together. And when you're making up monsters at home, whether they are cobbling together of bird parts, or dragon pieces, or both in some sort of wonderful Frankenstein's mishmash on the island of Dr. Moreau, there are no rules for what you can and cannot piece together. Exactly.
00:22:23
Speaker
I would love to hear more about how you have adapted your creations as different editions of the D&D rule book have come out.
Transitioning Through D&D Editions
00:22:34
Speaker
You've talked so far about starting with first and second edition and then transitioning to third. What was it like bringing them through to 3.5 and fourth and fifth edition? What have you noticed has changed making up magical creatures from there? I think
00:22:48
Speaker
One of the things that has changed, things have become both more standardized and more open because it's easy to introduce new mechanics, especially with 5th edition. Interesting. So yeah, I got up to 3rd edition, pen and paper, went into Neverwinter Nights was 3rd edition, I skipped 3.5, I skipped 4 because I was still using 3rd for Neverwinter Nights. By the time I ended my involvement with that game, Beamdog was coming out with the new
00:23:13
Speaker
updates finally and fifth edition was out and had been for like three years by that point. So I just moved right to fifth. I read a copy of the player's handbook. I'm like, you know what, as much as third edition was a change from second and made it so much nicer. Fifth is nicer still. I love advantage and disadvantage. This is so simple to use as a DM. You know, I remember stacking bonuses in third edition. How many little bonuses can I add? Now I got to add them all up all the time.
00:23:38
Speaker
simplified. But with like monsters and stuff, they've got specified terms and abilities and having the systems reference document available to use for creation, the SRD.
00:23:49
Speaker
Sometimes some creature has, you know, I'd like it to have a feature like this really similar to this. So I'm just going to copy the wording, change what I need to. And people seeing this will recognize, Oh, that's how it works. Yeah, totally. Yeah. I mean, people complain a lot of times about how some things aren't very clear and up to DM interpretation, but also some things are very clear and the wording has just been used and standardized and we can look at it and go, yeah, this'll work.
00:24:14
Speaker
And that also serves as a guide for me on making totally new features. I've made a lot of the stuff, so I kind of get the wording on things. I changed my wording sometimes from like earlier editions. I'm like.
00:24:26
Speaker
Well, it does this many points of this type of damage. Fifth edition just does this many points of this damage. It doesn't say points of damage. It's just damage of that type. A lot of people that start in like fifth edition won't realize that, you know, there's little wording changes like that, but it'll catch your attention if it doesn't quite fit the fifth edition wording. Hmm. Right. If it's not quite right. So that's, that's some of my adaptations, uh, changing damage types, you know, instead of positive energy, now it's radiant damage.
00:24:53
Speaker
So negative energy, now it's necrotic. So there's updates like that. There's balancing things. You know, I want this to be, this is going to be for around fifth level characters to fight, you know, a group of four against one of these. Well, fifth edition characters, they have a harder time dying, but armor classes aren't as high and damage doesn't get as crazy. Mostly it's the armor classes.
00:25:17
Speaker
So there's there's a mindset adjustment when I'm bringing these things from older editions into fifth edition. Some of the stuff I make is stuff that I had made previously in earlier editions and I'm just updating to fifth edition. A lot of the stuff I'm making is just new ideas. So it's fifth edition stuff right away. Where do your ideas come from? Where does inspiration strike? Everywhere and everything. Quite literally, I have a crossbow that is inspired by the fact that Kat's vision is attracted by motion.
00:25:47
Speaker
That crossbow, if you're wielding it, you're attuned to it. If you see something move at least 10 feet, you have advantage to hit it with the crossbow. Nice. Is that called the cat's eye crossbow? Cat's pounce. Cat's pounce. Oh, that's that's fantastic. There's one guy, one of my Patreon patrons, certain levels that can request commissioned things. And he asked for a couple of things that he had a character in his game that was obsessed with potatoes. So he wanted this spell that was
00:26:14
Speaker
like hot mashed potatoes that could hurt things or heal them if it was eaten. So that was, uh, German's like divine potatoes or something like that. That's like a second level spell. And he didn't have any ideas for his, his item that he qualified to get for me. So I made a potato. It's a magic potato. Once a day, you can have a cast alarm because potatoes have eyes and they're watchful. Slow clap, slow clap.
00:26:40
Speaker
And that one is only good for about a month. But if you bury it and let it grow for like a week, you can dig it back up and use it again. Inspired. If you happen to, you know, eat it, your body is going to sprout a bunch of different eyes for a day and you'll be able to see in every direction, which is very disorienting. I get inspired by pop culture stuff. There's a Parker's pack of fun. I happen to be a big fan of the TV series Leverage.
00:27:06
Speaker
And there's a thief in there and her name is Parker and she does like second story work and like crazy stunts and stuff. So I made a thief's pack with all those different things that Parker could do, but it's in a magic item. That's wonderful. I brought in the rodent of unusual size as a monster.
00:27:24
Speaker
I don't believe they exist. Exactly. Those I had fun with because they're very sneaky and they have almost magical timing. Like if someone mentions them and they're nearby, that's when they make themselves known.
00:27:38
Speaker
And they have an unhealthy attraction to areas where there's fire. That's inspired. They get burned easily, but that's where they live. Yeah, just anything. Anything is inspiration. I sometimes take, I'll ask people for random words. Do this on my Discord. I've done it on like Facebook and stuff.
00:27:55
Speaker
like three totally random words, and I will somehow take those three words and make something that is useful in D&D. I believe it. I absolutely believe it. And I suspect we're going to see a demonstration of that later in today's episode. I do like to do that live.
00:28:13
Speaker
Haha, wonderful. Takes me maybe a minute or two. That's the joy of improv. You get a handful of suggestions and then suddenly you're just cobbling together a word salad into something and finding meaning in it. And that's absolutely beautiful. I love, love, love the creative process, especially for things like tabletop games.
00:28:37
Speaker
I did want to ask you, with all of these myriad things that you've created and crafted, including countless spells and cantrips, have you or your players that have used your materials ever reported pushback from their DMs? Have they said that something wasn't quite cricket? Have you had any kind of experience with people pushing back on your products?
00:29:03
Speaker
After it's actually used? No. I have gotten, you know, useful ideas. I've changed and updated some things myself, you know, two years later, like that's a little overpowered for its level. I'm just going to change that a little bit and bring it down. Or sometimes things are unimpressive and I add a little bit to it.
00:29:18
Speaker
Most of the feedback of that is like when I occasionally post a Reddit. I don't do that as often because they have this, a lot of the subreddits have this rule against posting too often. And most of them are like, you know, once a week. I'm like, I make stuff like every other day or every three days or whatever. And also most of them, they want it to be completely free when you post it there.
00:29:42
Speaker
I'd say a quarter to a third of the stuff of mine ends up free. I do have a Patreon. So, you know, patrons get access to more stuff. So I can't really share all of the good stuff on, you know, like Reddit and stuff like that. Reddit, Facebook.
00:29:56
Speaker
Well, that's okay though. I agree. I got to a point where I was making, I had probably a couple hundred things already at that. Well, no, probably a hundred or so home brews at one point in 2019. And I'm like, for fifth edition. And I'm like, I put a lot of time into this and there's other people who have Patreons for this stuff. I'm going to put, you know, some of my stuff
00:30:17
Speaker
I'm gonna put it all on Patreon. Some of it will be available for free and some will be for just for patrons. And I started really cheap. Like $1 was my lowest tier. And then two years later I moved it up $3 is my lowest tier. Now I'm like, I got so much stuff, $5 is now my lowest tier. All the way up to $50 is ludicrous level.
00:30:36
Speaker
Most of them are named after like, you know, that's what the little picture on that, that category tier is too. I'm a huge space balls fan. It is one of the greatest movies of all time. Thank you. Mel Brooks as a nerdy geeky sci-fi person.
00:30:52
Speaker
that movie is absolutely amazing and that's part of my sense of humor is like wordplay jokes absolutely why not i'm about to date myself i saw spaceballs at the drive-in nice a double feature spaceballs and willow oh when both were actually out for the first time also another amazing movie
00:31:16
Speaker
If you want like a relatively low level D&D movie, that's Willow. Yeah. Also, homebrew creators out there, you can be petty. You can be rude. You can create a monster just like they do in Willow and name it after people you don't like.
00:31:35
Speaker
For those of you who have seen the original Willow, there is at one point a giant two-headed dragon magicked up by a wayward spell. And even though it's never actually mentioned in the movie proper, according to the novelization, this giant two-headed dragon was called an Ebersysk.
00:31:54
Speaker
a completely unveiled dig at Cisco and Ebert because the writer had had some bad experiences with them in the past and was like, fine, we'll put together a fearsome two-headed dragon. These things happen, these things are created, these things are just out in the world and it's a beautiful thing.
00:32:14
Speaker
haven't done that because I haven't had like problems with people good it's healthy not to be petty but it's an option but I do make fun of things like people who misspell rogue online and they always write it as Rouge they move the you mm-hmm so I made a rogue subclass called the Rouge rager
00:32:33
Speaker
It is the Rouge Rogue. That's fantastic. So I, so I make fun of things like that. That's beautiful. Yeah. So some of my, some of my creations are, you know, could be serious fantasy. Some of it is just totally silly.
00:32:47
Speaker
like that one or the path of the vegetarian. It's the vegetarian barbarian, and the whole thing on their features is vegetables are good for you, better than meat and stuff, and they'll let you know about it. Vegan the barbarian. I love it. Oh my. I do want to circle back though, because it's, number one, can you tell us more about SRDs?
00:33:12
Speaker
Sure. Okay, so TSR, back when it owned Dungeons and Dragons, it was sometimes referred to as they sue regularly. They would sue people for like anything like that they were making and putting online like that might be
00:33:28
Speaker
even mildly construed as infringing on their intellectual property. Wizards of the Coast came along, bought them up, and when they came up with 3rd edition, they published this document called the Systems Reference Document. And it lays out the mechanic stuff of 3rd edition D&D, but it strips out intellectual property like
00:33:49
Speaker
character names and very recognizable monsters that TSR and Wizards of the Coast made up that aren't based on mythology, that aren't based on folklore, that weren't like brought in from somewhere else. Basically, they put all the stuff in there that they wouldn't be able to sue over. Just the bare blueprints with none of the personality, none of the intellectual property, but just the framework that someone could build around. And it blew up.
00:34:17
Speaker
If you were around for third edition, there was dozens and dozens of companies that were making books for this D20 system is what it was called. Basically, if you use the SRD, you use these mechanics, you put this little D20 logo on your stuff and you could sell it and market it and make a living off of it, build a company around it.
00:34:39
Speaker
And it was just amazing for the growth of D&D because it wasn't just Wizards putting out stuff, it was anyone who could put out content. Well, I think there's something not only smart there, but also very communal.
00:34:57
Speaker
because they gave away so much of the underpinning exactly just like the bare stage and here are the blueprints so you can put on your own show yeah and by giving that away by saying we want you to have that we want you
00:35:14
Speaker
to use these things bask in the creativity see what you come up with because they knew at the same time as they were giving away most like half the store it must have felt like they were also setting up all of these wonderful
00:35:30
Speaker
fans of like, hey, this system really works. Yeah. What else is running on this system? Yep. And so you get like settings and games, different genres completely. So there's like a D20 Star Wars and and all these other. Yeah. Yeah. Other systems and things, but they're all built on the D20 system, which if people are familiar with that from these other systems also makes them able to play drop right into a Dungeons and Dragons game and be vaguely familiar with it because the mechanics are there. How do you like that? Yeah.
Impact of OGL on D&D's Growth
00:35:58
Speaker
built, I'd say it built a huge amount of goodwill for Wizards of the Coast in the D&D community because suddenly people weren't like hesitant about sharing their stuff online or publishing things. And it was so good for the growth of D&D and Wizards of the Coast. I'm not exactly sure when Hasbro bought them.
00:36:17
Speaker
But between that and Magic the Gathering Hasbro snapped them up at some point. And then that was great. And fourth edition came along. Well, they had 3.5, which is like a revised some improvements and things, some changes, a lot of extra stuff that I never really looked into because I didn't use it. Fourth edition came along and their system reference stocking for that was super limited. It basically stifled most of the community outside creation of content.
00:36:44
Speaker
That might be part of the reason you hear people badmouthing 4th edition, besides, you know, like the playstyle totally changed. My general impression as a late to D&D arrival was, we don't talk about 4th E. Yeah.
00:36:57
Speaker
I don't talk about it much because I simply didn't use it. I skipped that edition and the timing didn't work out for me to even really get a good look at it. Then 5th edition came out and they went, well, we would like to make this more popular than 4th edition. What worked really well? System reference document. Guess what? 5th edition system reference document? Just like the 3rd edition one, except for the 5th edition mechanics.
00:37:20
Speaker
Same terms and everything, and basically their terms were like, if you use any of this, here's this text to put in your document that you make that says you have the legal right to use this, this, this, this, and this. It was one page long. That was the- Boiler plate. OGL, the something gaming license, open gaming license or something like that. Original, open, yeah.
00:37:39
Speaker
So you'd have to include that in anything you published with based on the SRD. And then so it was great for fifth edition creators again. The community exploded again with new content, new creators, new publishers, new everything again. And it was wonderful for the growth of the game. And then you get things like actual plays online, exposing more people to gaming. And well, of course, D&D is the most popular one. It's going to be the one that's used the most often.
00:38:07
Speaker
And so that brings more attention to the game and more sales of the game and everything was wonderful. But that came out in 2014. We're rolling up on 10 years here and Hasbro's like, we need some more money out of this. It's a big cash cow right now, but we would need more.
00:38:23
Speaker
So, are you anticipating that they're going to do another update of the edition? They were planning on it. It was, well, it was going, they were calling it one D&D in the playtest and it was supposed to basically take fifth edition and turn it into like a forever edition where they could, but they, the plan is next year, they're going to publish a new player's handbook with some changes. Well, you know, that's like 60 bucks a book and, and tie it all into D&D and beyond.
00:38:48
Speaker
Because they bought D&D Beyond a couple years ago or whatever. You know, do all this stuff. They're going to build their own virtual tabletop in D&D Beyond. They want it all centralized and, you know, owned by them. So if you're playing instead of doing Roll20 or Foundry or whatever online, you do it on D&D Beyond, you know. And if you want to access all these books and be able to just like click and drag stuff into your character sheet, well, you're going to have to buy those books on D&D Beyond and have a digital version of them there.
00:39:11
Speaker
I don't use that site. I put a couple of homebrew items just to test it out on there in their their homebrew section. And I was dissatisfied because I can't control the look of how it's laid out. And once I share something online, cannot change it or delete it. Like if you have a major spelling error, you can't fix it.
00:39:30
Speaker
If you change mechanics, it's overpowered, it's unbalanced, you can't fix it. Wow. So you can't even update the file of something if you find a misspelling or something like that? No, it's not a file, it's just text on the site. Ah, gotcha. And then if you do update it, you can upload a new version of it, but you can't do anything to that bad version of it, that outdated one. So I have maybe half a dozen things on there from four years ago maybe.
00:39:56
Speaker
So I just don't use it and I do so much homebrew in my own campaign that I don't see TV on like homebrew classes and races and stuff my players use them all the time and it's easier for me to just Copy and paste text than it is to put it into D&D beyond
00:40:11
Speaker
have them open a D&D Beyond account, make their character there, and then pull it out of there? For you, some other... Because I use Roll20. It was the simple one at the time, and my players are used to it, and so we're just not changing. But that's their whole thing. And then, so with Wizards and D&D Beyond, and then, so last end of December-ish,
00:40:32
Speaker
It leaked out that with 1D, indeed, there's going to be a new systems reference document, specifically with a new OGL, the Open Gaming with a new license that would basically let the company take anything you made and publish it themselves.
00:40:47
Speaker
and they wouldn't have to pay you anything. Wasn't there a lot of controversy about this and didn't they immediately backpedal this? There was a lot of controversy about it. It took about a month for them to backpedal and go, okay, we get it. This upset you guys. Guess what? The whole system of reference document for 5th edition now is now Creative Commons. Go ahead, use it. We won't do anything. You can go with this version or when 1 D&D comes out, you can go with the 1 D&D version of it with the new OGL and the terms won't be as bad.
00:41:16
Speaker
They're still more limited than what they currently are for us. And so that smoothed a few things over. And then for me, as a person who was actively writing a book, going, Oh crap, am I going to even be able to sell this book? Do I need to put any more work into it? Or should I just like scrap the whole thing? I'll wait and see, but I'm going to keep working on the book. And then January 27th, Wizard said, Oh, you know what? This is all under Creative Commons as of right now. And now the whole credit I need is like,
00:41:43
Speaker
three lines instead of a whole page. Well, that's got to be a relief. I don't even have to put the open gaming license in there now because all I have to reference is the Creative Commons entry. That does have to be a relief. It's nice. I mean, that's a that's a page out of my book that I don't have to fill with with like legal jargon. You're working on a couple of books. I understand you've also released a book of player quotes from games at your table. Can you tell us about that? Can you tell our listeners?
00:42:10
Speaker
I have it is a book that I call words of wisdom or not. So I've been running the same online game campaign with the same group of people since September of 2020. We're almost at three years. And a year and a half two years ago, I'd say about two years ago, I started they entertain me so much with just how they act and what they say. I started taking notes of what they said.
00:42:35
Speaker
like actual quotes. And then a week later, two weeks later, two months later, I'll pull some of these quotes and I'll drop them in the Discord chat. No context whatsoever. And they enjoy that so much. And one night, probably about two months ago now, they're like, you know, you've probably got enough to make a book out of these. You should make a book. I'm like, yeah, yeah, sure. And then by the next morning, I'm like,
00:42:55
Speaker
Oh, by the way, I'm doing it. And like two days later, it was done because they basically wrote the book for me. It is a 50 page PDF filled with direct quotes from my players with absolutely no context. That is the entire book. Are we talking about like one quote per page? How many quotes are on each of these 50 pages?
00:43:16
Speaker
I don't know, but it is standard text size for like a D&D book, like D&D source book. Oh, so they're Chaka block. They are filled with quotes. Okay. Wow. It is crazy. How many? I didn't count.
Nathan's Homebrew Compilation and Sourcebook
00:43:28
Speaker
I just finished and there was like, there was like almost 50 pages. I'm like, I have to put in a couple of graphics that we used in the virtual tabletop. That will mean nothing to anybody except my players.
00:43:42
Speaker
So there's like a picture of like something with blue scales and then just like this big red eye and there's like a hand-drawn badly hand-drawn map. There's a
00:43:51
Speaker
picture of part of my game world map with just like the name of a village that's all that's on there okay my players will get what it is and that's for them private jokes they're like yeah go ahead and I'm like you know what do you guys think if I put this online cuz I just gave it to them for someone what do you guys think if I put this online for people to buy they're like go ahead I'm like okay and if I get any proceeds from it they'll go towards my source book they're like yeah awesome
00:44:16
Speaker
Now the source book you're talking about and this is the project that's been mounting and building for next year. You're planning to publish this next year. Can you tell us more about the source book? So I make a little bit of content for D&D. People who have seen it and like my wife is coming and you should turn this into a book and sell it. Like eventually I was
00:44:41
Speaker
Okay, I've laid out book pages before. Many, many, many, many years ago when I was in high school, I was on the yearbook staff. So I used it for like a year or two. Page layout, simple stuff relatively until you get into it. But so I went looking online and everything was like hundreds of dollars for the page layout software. Especially the most popular stuff. Either hundreds of dollars or you're paying a monthly subscription. We use Canva for a lot of our laying out.
00:45:09
Speaker
I'm like, I do not pay monthly for software. I just refuse. I will pay a one-time thing for the software so that I can use it three times this month, not at all the month after. I can go six months without using it. I don't feel bad about it because I'm not paying for it. But then years later, I can still open my projects that I made, which is why I use GIMP now for graphics instead of Photoshop, because Photoshop went to a monthly subscription. What is the name of the program you use now?
00:45:36
Speaker
The one I use now for graphics is GIMP, or The GIMP. Okay. The Generic Image Manipulation Program, I think. It's basically Photoshop, but it's free. And I have supported the creator's Patreon for a few months, too. So I made sure some money did go their way. Okay.
00:45:55
Speaker
And for the page layout, I use what's called Affinity Publisher. It's got all the features I want and it was 50 bucks. Beautiful. One time. I use that for my PDFs now for my individual things that I make every once in a while. And Affinity helps you with your PDFs in terms of accessibility. So for instance, the PDF can be scanned, voice readers can read from your finished PDFs, things like that.
00:46:20
Speaker
It's just a standard PDF. So sure. Yeah, I haven't tried it because I don't have those tools on my system because I don't need them. You know, I do things like when I post on Twitter and Facebook and stuff, I do put stuff in the alt text to describe the images that I post. A lot of the text I put into my book is of course descriptive because I'm not a great artist to draw all this stuff. So I draw, I describe the things in words first and then I might draw them later or I'll
00:46:45
Speaker
It takes my stuff that's years old and finally draw it and maybe update the description to match the image that I drew. Like I did that with the, uh, there's a magic staff called fairies limit. Originally it had like this, uh, a cage with a little pixie trapped inside of it.
00:46:59
Speaker
Well, when I drew it, I was like, I don't really want to do the cage. What if I did like a glass sphere? So now it's a sphere with a pixie in it. So I just, I changed, I updated the wording to match the illustration. But affinity basically lets me do, well, you'd make it, use it for books and magazines and posters and all that stuff that you would send off to a printer. You can do the layout for that. So.
00:47:23
Speaker
the text, the graphics, and then it lets me output as various formats, uh, PNGs, JPEGs, PDFs, SVGs. There's like a dozen different formats that'll put stuff out for so that you could send it to a printer or whatever you wanted, however you wanted to do it.
00:47:39
Speaker
But since it'll do PDFs, I can release individual things as PDFs. And I use that for the the quotes book. I use that same software since I already had it. Wonderful. I do have a sticking point. You say you're not much of an artist and yet I dabble.
00:47:57
Speaker
I dabble, I don't do it seriously. There's been like, even since I took up illustration, there's one time I went six months without drawing anything. Fair, but I would argue that there are more types of art than what can simply be drawn. True. You have created art with your words. You are creating art with your books, plural.
00:48:19
Speaker
I could argue that your entire library, your expansive library of materials both on Patreon and the Amethyst Dragon could be called a work of art.
00:48:33
Speaker
Okay, I'll take it. I'll take it. Now that list on my website that you love so much being, you know, having it organized, that came about because when I first started moving my stuff over to Patreon, Patreon's feed as it fills out on like your homepage or whatever, it's dynamically loaded. Oh, nice. And it is slow.
00:48:54
Speaker
And as my, my stuff expanded, I'm like, nobody's going to use this. If the, if I'm just directing them to my Patreon site, because it loads so slow and you can't find everything because it'll only load so much content. And then I'll say, do you want to load more? Like, yeah, now then you got to wait for that to load. You want to load more than you got to wait for that to load. So I just took, I've been making web pages. Personally, since 1996, January of 1996, to be precise, when I got a geocities account and I taught myself HTML.
00:49:24
Speaker
And so that's still how I make my web pages is in Notepad. Oh, wow. Okay. So I hand code those. And so I basically built that site, built that page and it's going to be links. I'm going to categorize it. Here's the direct link to the thing on Patreon. Here's the direct link to the thing on Patreon. It all loads at once. I also appreciate that they open in a new tab rather than leaving the page. Thank you for that. Thank you.
00:49:48
Speaker
I hate having to hit the back button to go back to where I was at if it's multiple things I might want to be looking at. Multiple links I might be following. Yeah, every single one of them is a new tab. Chudos. Chudos. Much appreciated.
00:50:03
Speaker
But more to the point on the artistic side of things, I want to encourage our listeners from getting away from those internalized narratives of, well, I'm not an artist. Well, I can't draw very well, therefore I must not be very creative or must not be very artistic.
00:50:20
Speaker
That's
00:50:43
Speaker
try things out and even if it doesn't quote-unquote look great at first, I would encourage you to keep trying new things. Is it fun? Is it enjoyable? Is it fulfilling? Is it working towards something?
00:51:00
Speaker
In my own work, one of the things that we have to deal with internally is the frustration of, well, I want to make something like an entire book of home-brewed materials, but number one, I'm not there yet. Number two, do I have the right clay to be working with, et cetera.
00:51:20
Speaker
Try. Try again and again and again. Frustration does not mean stop. Frustration means how do I push through. Oh yeah. And obviously there are things in our lives that, you know, where the answer is not push through, keep trying harder and harder, but try something else. Try something differently. Try hiring a freelancer.
00:51:44
Speaker
There you go, that's one of the things I'm gonna be like. People like art in a D&D book. I'm gonna have probably well over 400 pages by the time I'm done in this book. I'm at at least 350 right now and I have not added any artwork. There's none in my document at the moment and I have not formatted things to push like an item description that spans over page break to the next page. I haven't pushed it down to the next page. I haven't made space for that. So it's gonna be well over 400 pages by the time I'm done.
00:52:12
Speaker
my visual arts with the pencil drawings, I really like it. So when I go out and I'm going to be looking for freelance artists, I'm not looking for the people who do like the full color, epic paintings and stuff. I'm going to be looking for people who do pencil art. There is a certain aesthetic, you know? Because I like it. So I'm like, that's going to be what's in the interior of this book.
00:52:35
Speaker
I have like color borders and stuff, but the art I'm going to be doing is the pencil drawings. That's wonderful. I don't know what I'm going to do with the cover yet, but those. Okay. We'll call them beginner artists like myself who aren't necessarily formally trained, but you can draw with a pencil. That's what I'm going to be looking for.
00:52:53
Speaker
A lot of the stuff is going to be mine because I don't have a huge budget to work with. And that's actually what when I do do the Kickstarter, a good chunk of, you know, like the stretch goals will be paying for more art. And especially one of the wonderful things about making up homebrew stuff is
00:53:08
Speaker
This stuff doesn't exist before. I've described it with words. Let's see somebody put it into a visual. What do they see in their head from the words that I, I start with an image in my head. I put it into words. Those words can have a different thing in somebody else's head. Yes. Those same exact words, which is why I don't have a problem making items and monsters and stuff and not including pictures with them normally. That's great. Because it
00:53:31
Speaker
D&D, role-playing games, all of them, like magic, or not magic, but like your Vampire the Masquerade and stuff. It's a game of, these are games of imagination. Theater of the Mind. And a lot of it is, yes. We have battle maps and minis and stuff, but it is Theater of the Mind. You're imagining this stuff.
00:53:49
Speaker
And even when it comes to like visual arts, like drawing and sculpting and stuff, that is just one person's interpretation brought into like a physical form. Just words can be different. Absolutely. So there's a lot of stuff in my book that will not have illustrations because I had it with words just like my D&D games. It's all vocal. Yes. It's all literary.
00:54:09
Speaker
Yeah. Words can be magnificently effective at creating a mood, and not just spoken word either. One of my favorite books of all time, or at least one of the ones that stayed with me the most, was House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski.
00:54:29
Speaker
wrote House of Leaves, a book within a book within a book of this labyrinth of three different stories wrapped around each other like a nesting doll that involves a journey inside a house that is bigger on the inside into some sort of subterranean, just keeps getting darker and deeper and more dangerous.
00:54:53
Speaker
And that's just the core story. Wrapped around that is the person that found those tapes of this story that is already over, and that person went crazy just trying to make a catalog of the second person's accounting when they found the trunk full of recordings of the second guy's story. It's bonkers, it is engrossing, it is horrifying, and there is not one illustration in the entire bloody book.
00:55:19
Speaker
Yeah, you look at all these popular novels and stuff. You know what they all have in common? Words. Absolutely. This is not to discourage our artists. This is not to discourage those people out there listening who want to draw. Please, by all means, keep illustrating, keep drawing, because the words you come up with to capture the image in the theater of your mind can be fleshed out with illustration down the road. Oh, yeah.
00:55:48
Speaker
But right now, just inside the quiet little space in your head, you're the one that gets to decide what it looks like, what it sounds like, what it smells like. And you're the one that gets to dictate the experience that people have at your table. When you explain it, when you describe it, when you paint a picture with your words. And it starts with just that image in your head.
00:56:15
Speaker
Yeah, I like kind of related to different views of things, especially when it comes to art. I listen to Critical Role, one of the most popular actual plays for a long time. I'm not a serious fan. I don't listen to it every week. I usually go like six months or so and then I'll binge on it. But one of the hate spoilers, so I don't follow them online. But one of the things that I always loved about the community around that one is the people who do fan art and all the different styles and things.
00:56:45
Speaker
that they do and it's all based on what they heard people describe things as and it's their own vision of in their head and they put it down in a visual medium.
00:56:55
Speaker
And there's all these different interpretations and all these different drawings and different styles. And that's one of the things I love about, you know, visual artists is everybody's got their own take on things. Absolutely. Even when it is, it starts with the same words, it starts with the same sounds, but it's all interpreted differently. And with your role-playing games in the theater of your mind, it's the same way. Even people that are playing the game.
00:57:18
Speaker
They don't draw, they don't paint, they don't sculpt or whatever their interpretation of it. And when you have a group of people, like I have five players, that is six different mental images that are all interacting at the same time with the same concepts. And then there's a story made out of it. And it's great.
00:57:38
Speaker
natural disasters for our listeners at home. This is our first experience with time travel in an interview. We had a doozy of a rainstorm on the west coast recently and lost power the next day, which truncated our lovely interview with Nathan the first time around. And thanks to the power of flexible schedules, here we are.
00:58:03
Speaker
And it's like, no time has passed at all. So Nathan, good Lord, you have done so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so many homebrews. And it doesn't look like you're going to stop anytime soon. I did want to pick your brain a little bit. The Amethyst Dragon is such a great name for your sight. How did that come around? How did that come into existence?
00:58:30
Speaker
That came about back in January of 1996. I was in college and this thing called the World Wide Web was kind of starting up. I think I've heard of that. I decided I wanted to make a website and there was this the site called Geocities.
00:58:49
Speaker
and you could get a free website and I needed a name for it. And so I'm like, okay, let's see. Well, what do I like? I like dragons. Those are cool. But what kind of dragon? Let's, you know what? My favorite color is a deep, dark purple of a large amethyst geode. So it was the amethyst dragon and became the layer of the amethyst dragon was my first really bad website.
00:59:16
Speaker
But I've been using the name online ever since. So it's been 27 years. What do we have? 27 years. 27 years. 27 and a half that I've been using that name. So I've used it for basically every website I've been on. So when I was making a Reddit account and Twitter and everything else, I still kept using the Amethyst Dragon. Nice. And so that's the name I use. That's the name I post under.
00:59:41
Speaker
Have you ever made an amethyst dragon as one of your homebrews or dragons, period? I have not made an amethyst dragon before. They already existed, although I don't really picture, you know, myself as something that like hacks up a a lozenge that explodes. That is a pretty cool breath weapon, though.
01:00:00
Speaker
But I have made, I have made other dragons in the past. I think in my folder I've actually got my little printouts from high school on dot matrix paper. Wow. That's the type of printer we had at home. And it's like a diamond one and a ruby one and a few other ones. Nice.
01:00:17
Speaker
Now, I understand you enjoy demonstrating your talents at convention panels. Taking something as simple as a word grab salad and turning completely unrelated words into brand new spells, brand new devices and gadgets, possibly even a monster.
01:00:37
Speaker
I would love for you to walk our listeners through that process and I'd be more than happy to chuck a couple of random words at you to make the magic go. Oh yeah, definitely. It's something that kind of started online doing like a Secret Santa thing on Reddit for people who do Homebrews. And then I just kind of continued it from there.
01:01:02
Speaker
Yeah, it's something I'll do. It takes, uh, anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes to have an idea, and then maybe between five minutes and an hour to actually, like, make a formalized thing with the right 5e wording and stuff like that. So it's functional stuff in game. Everything I make is functional in the game.
01:01:20
Speaker
I would hope it would be. I mean, it's nice to have bells and whistles that don't do anything more than ring or tweet, but like I would hope that when we're talking about home brewed devices and creatures and classes and feats and features and everything else, there are things that could actually be used.
01:01:39
Speaker
Versus something that is just strictly for show strictly for ambiance and has absolutely no practical application like that We don't have we don't we don't have time for that singing sword Terry Pratchett nonsense Here I will ask you though. What are you in the mood for? Do you feel like creating a fancy weapon a chalice with particular properties a wand that knows a particular spell maybe a new class of
01:02:06
Speaker
Marauder, I don't know. I am grasping at the four winds to see what catches. Oh, here's the thing. When I do this thing with random words, I don't start out with an idea. Ah, I see. Okay. So I'm trying to put the cart before the horse. Or a thing I'm going to make. I take the words and I use those to inspire whatever is going to be created.
01:02:29
Speaker
Gotcha. Then we are going to just put together some words for you and we will continue this stream of nonsense words until you have found enough of them that something latches on. Sure. Awesome. Pistachio. Okay. Guardrail. Enchanted. A little slow. I'm going to go with three words here. And enchanted. Okay.
01:02:53
Speaker
So pistachio, guardrail, and enchanted. Yeah, it challenged me here. I mean, it could be a color of something. It could be the smell that associates with it. Like, why is this armor smell like pistachios?
01:03:09
Speaker
Actually, it is going to be a magical wagon that is used by pistachio farmers. Nice! It's designed to always move on its own along a set path that is marked by magical guardrails. Ooh, fun! Magic maglev, almost. Sure, yeah.
01:03:26
Speaker
Sure. Okay, so pistachio farmers have an enchanted wagon that uses magical guardrails to steer back and forth on its designated pistachio route. This raises the question, do the pistachio farmers expect to run into trouble on their delivery route? What is the armor class on an enchanted pistachio wagon? I'm curious.
01:03:52
Speaker
Well, I'd say it's probably made out of wood, so we'll give it like a 12. A decent amount of hit points just because it's solidly built, it's designed to haul weight. But I wouldn't expect them to be expecting a lot of trouble. You know what? Maybe we'll make it self-repairing. So that if it does get attacked and broken or something, they don't have to go back to the original creator to have it rebuilt and shell out a bunch of money. They just have to wait.
01:04:20
Speaker
In fact, maybe it'll consume pistachio shells as a rebuilding material. I was thinking about something similar, like if the wagon is made of pistachio wood or walnut wood or something like that, then it can draw on the stores.
01:04:36
Speaker
available on the wagon to repair and mend. That's delightful. Sure. Not the nuts themselves, just the shells. Just the shells. Fair. Yeah, because the nuts would be pretty soft and mealy, wouldn't they? They wouldn't... That'd be a very low armor class. Very cool. So yeah, now we've got our very own enchanted pistachio wagon, which did not exist before this interview.
01:05:01
Speaker
A new thing exists! You have created! Huzzah! That is how I do the things with the random words. It's some mild train of thought. Some words are a lot more difficult, especially like if I'm not familiar with that word. Or I'm not familiar with the meaning of that word, like when I did one with anti-disestablishmentarianism. Oh dear.
01:05:24
Speaker
I didn't know the source of the word. I had heard it for years as a difficult word. But then I was doing one of these things on Facebook, had different people give me different words. And that was one of the words. So I had to look up the source of it and then use the actual source of the word. Oh, dear.
01:05:41
Speaker
as part of the inspiration for the thing and it was like part of a plot hook I think I ended up making. Nice, very nice. So research online is often a part of these random word things or even just home brewing in general when like I want to have something related to a thing like walnut farming. One time during an adventure I had the players, all the squirrels in the city just left over the wall and the players started following and I'm like, where are they going?
01:06:09
Speaker
Oh, you know what? We'll have a farmer that once a year gets help from all these squirrels to harvest the walnuts. Nice. Because they were friends with a druid in the past.
01:06:19
Speaker
What does a walnut farm look like? So I started looking stuff up online and what are they used for and what do they look like before they're harvested. So I ended up with like a whole little encounter on this farm. And I also now know that the walnuts have like a green rind or skin on the outside of them when they grow. And as they ripen that splits and starts to pull apart. Well, that skin can also be used to make ink. Oh neat. Because it darkens and like turns black.
01:06:45
Speaker
See, since you started talking about the squirrels coming to help, I picture a new crafted item, a little animal whistle that is actually in the shape of a squirrel that is carved out of walnut wood that the farmer has been enchanted with druidic sigils and everything.
01:07:07
Speaker
That's similar. There was actually like a four foot squirrel statue carved out of wood, and that was what had the magic bound into it that he could use once a year. And then the squirrels would help him for a day, do the whole harvest, and each squirrel could leave with however many walnuts they could carry. That's fantastic. And I imagine that despite the squirrel spillage, the farmer still had a quality day of farming that day.
01:07:32
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Whole harvest one day. Yeah, that's incredible. So Nathan, what can you tell us about this exciting book you have coming out in 2024? Well, I have made, you know, a fair amount of home brews and a couple of people online and my wife have suggested, you know, I should write a book. So little under a year ago, I started writing a book. Congratulations.
01:07:58
Speaker
putting everything together. I bought the software to build it to lay it out and design all the pages so that I eventually I can send it to an actual printer and have a physical book made. At the moment today I have the thing open at the moment because I'm working on poisons.
01:08:15
Speaker
It is up to exactly 400 pages in the file. There's no artwork in it yet. You know, I haven't formatted for spacing so that, you know, one description doesn't span two whole pages. So it'll be more than that. And I haven't added any, except for the poisons and diseases, I haven't added any of the material I've made this year to it. Is there a reason for that? When it gets to the end of the year, that's going to be my mark of, you know, maybe even the end of November, I'm not sure.
01:08:43
Speaker
My markup, this is my cutoff for what I'm putting into the book. Any hombres I make after that will just be on the website. And then I have all these in these big long text files because all the descriptions because I format my stuff for my online things as a webpage.
01:08:59
Speaker
Okay. With HTML, in notepad, raw code because, you know, I started on Geocities. They didn't have editing programs and stuff that would do all the work for you. And I still have the most control that way. But then I can go ahead and do a find and replace, strip out all the code and leave just the text so I can copy it right into the book. Brilliant.
01:09:20
Speaker
Yeah, no, formatting is so tricky. I've been going through similar straights myself getting my first middle grade reader ready for submission for querying and making sure that
01:09:37
Speaker
writing it in one program and then uploading it to another for formatting and then realizing oh they're going to want it as all as one document so we're going to take it back and put it into pages now and just make sure that it all still fits and everything is lightly challenging
01:09:52
Speaker
but also ultimately worth it because I believe in the book and I want it to I don't want it to have any obstacles to being seen and obstacles like formatting flubs obstacles like typos obstacles like things being off center when we can make them on center you know any excuse
01:10:16
Speaker
that not only a potential publisher might have, but also readers or listeners of future audio things. We want to remove as many excuses and reasons for them to lose interest as possible. And I feel like there is potentially a lot of overlap with the book that you're formatting now. It's basically going to be a source book. So it's got classes and monsters and magic items and spells. It's going to have everything for players and DMs.
01:10:43
Speaker
nice because that's what I make also it's gonna have blurbs after a few a few a bunch of the entries the hombres that I've made you know saying here's what my inspiration was behind it here's why how I thought this up just kind of a behind the scenes thing instead of oh like Tasha's and Santa's books have little blurbs from the the title character on a couple of pages to fill space mine is more
01:11:05
Speaker
Not so much to fill space as to provide a look behind the scenes and to maybe give other people ideas on how they can turn anything into content for the game. Yeah. Ideas can come from anywhere. Ideas for content, whether it's an object, whether it's a plot device or a MacGuffin or a new type of creature or class or feature or feat. Inspiration is all around us.
01:11:34
Speaker
Like my own personal method, I keep a recorder app on my phone so that if I'm on a walk or puttering around the apartment or things like that, if I get an idea for something, I'll just take a pause, hit record, and then walk through the idea that I've just had. Well, that's a good idea. Yeah.
01:11:55
Speaker
And even just the act of recording it helps me lock it in for later because it's like another person is listening, which is always useful for brainstorming. But sometimes if you just want to rifle an idea off and save it for later, then that's a decent way of going about it. It is. Yeah, I tend to write things. I have this this notepad program open 24 seven because I find especially like when I'm doing the book, as the book has got longer,
01:12:24
Speaker
The program slowed down a little bit. It does really good if I just copy and paste text into it. It's faster to do that than to type in the layout software itself. So I'll make corrections and stuff in there and do all the formatting.
01:12:37
Speaker
For the actual just raw text, I copy and paste in raw text. It catches my typos, which are nice. Most programs do these days. They give you that little red zigzaggy line underneath the word, which I don't imagine is helpful for when you're making up your own words. True. But I can teach it, you know, hey, this is how this word is supposed to be spelled. Exactly. And I can add it to the local dictionary for it. But yeah, I have anything and everything is inspiration for content.
01:13:04
Speaker
very nice i have a list that i keep in another program of just like beginning ideas for things like a name for something and just the basic idea for it i've got stuff on that list that's probably three years old now the list doesn't really get any smaller i use stuff from it and i add more stuff to it well at this point it's just a whole booyah base you can just ladle into and scoop out into a bowl and be like okay this is what we'll play with today i remember writing that down
01:13:31
Speaker
Yeah, I've probably got like 20 or 30 subclass ideas and like spells and items and so much. I'll get to it eventually. If there's a day when I don't have an idea, I go back to my list and go, okay, I'll take this one. Smart. Like the creative process, there is no beaten path. There is no tried and true map for one person that will seamlessly, perfectly apply to the next. Oh, exactly.
01:13:57
Speaker
it can happen where you'll get an idea for for instance a creature and write it down and think about it and like yeah I could see that being thematically important in season two and put it there and put a pin in it for later and then get back to work on the things on your already full plate and months will go by and you will blink
01:14:23
Speaker
And like, oh, right. The monster that I came up with for that thing in season two. Yeah, let's take a look at that. Because now you've got the spoons, now you've got the mental wherewithal, now you've got the ram available. My God, we are just keeping metaphors on metaphors.
01:14:41
Speaker
Yeah, there's times too when you're thinking of stuff and sometimes, at least for me, sometimes I'll be working on one thing and then I'll get an idea for something that I have to make based on stuff I'm already doing. Like I had the people in my Discord give me individual random words that I would use each word for inspiration for a poison. Nice. And I got four different words. I came up with four different poisons and
01:15:04
Speaker
Something was bugging me about those words for like two or three days. And it turns out two of the words, first one I got was tremulous. And the last one I got was tender. Two of those words happened to be in a song that I sung in choir about 30 years ago.
01:15:20
Speaker
That song wouldn't be Music of the Night from Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera, would it? That's exactly what it was. The words tremulous and tender in that... well, three words there. And so I ended up having a... I made a spell that could force lots and lots and lots and lots of people to just
01:15:37
Speaker
sing everything they would ordinarily say. Oh, I love it. For 24 hours. Oh, man. And then I named the spell after an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where everybody sung. It was turned into a musical. So it's a spell called
01:15:53
Speaker
once more with feeling. That's the name of the spell I came up with. So I had to stop making poisons to make that spell and then go back to poisons. There you go. The important thing is that it still hurts the target. That's the important thing. We're trying to inflict pain and suffering on fictional characters who have done nothing to us. Yeah.
01:16:13
Speaker
Exactly. Or get uncomfortable truths out of them. I mean, you would scarcely be the first person to take inspiration from Phantom of the Opera and turn it into something for another story entirely. It's been around a while. It's been around a while, absolutely.
01:16:34
Speaker
I actually just watched it for the first time last night. The movie version. Gotcha. But I'm like, I'm going to watch this because the song is like half a week later, the song was still stuck in my head. I'm like, I got to watch this and get it over with.
01:16:49
Speaker
It's still in my head today. I mean, a lot of Lloyd Webber's earworms are earworms, so that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, no, I was obsessed with Phantom of the Opera when I was in high school. And when it came to the Kennedy Center, my family went to see it. We got tickets in box six, not box five. Oh, OK. Did they leave box five in? They should have, but they clearly didn't. Who's going to leave seats open? You know, the Phantom's on stage. It can't be two places at once. Oh, can he?
01:17:18
Speaker
The Phantom of the Opera even made an appearance, well not the Phantom directly, but the Phantom did inspire elements from the talons of Wang Chiang, one of the more problematic 70s Philip Hinchcliffe era of Tom Baker's Doctor Who. There are some wonderful things in that episode, but also some things that have aged
01:17:37
Speaker
dreadfully, not the least of which is yellow face, which was even, I think, surprising in the 70s of like they're still using this. Wow. But the Phantom of the Opera was a major ingredient in the villain who was hunkered down underneath of a theater, dragging poor women off the streets or having someone drag them off for him because he was too weak to move.
01:18:01
Speaker
and, you know, have their precious life essence drained from them through cheap sci-fi means.
01:18:09
Speaker
And yeah, there's definitely elements of the phantom there, you know, the specter hanging around backstage and above the ropes and everything. A hidden figure. Mm-hmm.
Pop Culture Inspirations in Gaming
01:18:19
Speaker
The point of that, though, is that our listeners should not be discouraged from lifting ingredients from the pantry of something if it hooks you, if it resonates with you, just as the way Nathan, tremulous and tender, struck a chord with you, ha-ha, from the Lloyd Webber musical.
01:18:38
Speaker
Yeah, it's in my memory. I pull things from memory at random, too. And that's just the way my brain works. And but yeah, if you have fun, if you can think of something fun or interesting with it, use it. Yes. I do so much like stuff pulled from pop culture. I just made a poison gas and I pulled it right from the triple X movie called Silent Night. OK. But instead of just killing people, it also makes them unable to talk.
01:19:06
Speaker
Oh nice. So they die and their corpses cannot be reanimated for answering of the five questions with the right talisman or the right spell.
01:19:16
Speaker
Oh no, uh, that could still happen because once they're dead, they're not poisoned anymore. Um, but while they're poisoned and still alive, they can't make us, they can't vocalize. Fair. So they can't call for help or anything. Ah, yeah. No. Okay. Now I see what your thank you that clarifies. So I'm pulling the silent part from actually silencing someone rather than just them being dead. Fair. They end up, they'd probably end up dead anyway, but you know, more pop culture inspiration. There you go.
01:19:44
Speaker
So Nathan, how can our listeners get in touch with you? Well, since we last talked, I've added a blue sky account. Oh, congrats. That one is, I should probably check because I don't remember the exact user name. I've only had it for like a couple of weeks. I know it's the end of this dragon, but I don't remember if there's any punctuation in that. Well, as long as you share a link tree with me, I will make sure that that is the updated link tree and the doobly doo that our listeners can click on when they see the details of this episode.
01:20:13
Speaker
Yeah, the amethystdragon.besky.social. Nice. It lets me use enough characters to actually add the word the.
01:20:20
Speaker
at the beginning of it. It is impressive. On Twitter, I'm just at Amethyst Dragon. I'm on Facebook. I don't spend too much time on there. Reddit, I am the Amethyst Dragon. It's like I keep using that name over and over and over for some reason. It's almost as if it's your brand and you've been consistently sticking with that brand for the last three decades. I know, right? It's so weird. It's so wacky.
01:20:46
Speaker
And then, of course, there's my website, amethyst-dragon.com. Very nice. That's the one that lists all of my homebrews, as well as a bunch of stuff that's in the book that's on the list as well, because people were interested in what was coming up. So I added that to the list as well. Nice. Links to my Discord, links to all of my social medias. It's all there. I'm getting a flash in my head of an entire D&D campaign that is nothing but homebrewed materials.
01:21:15
Speaker
Like, welcome to the kingdom of Hombrow. Well, I have a homebrewed world. You do? Aenea. Yep. A-E-N-E-A, because it sounded slightly magical and it's spelled both ways, spelled the same both ways. And I run my games in that half for the last three decades. And there's a lot of homebrew that makes it in there because I make it. Yeah, no, absolutely. I just make too much of it to put in my own game.
Encouragement for Creative Role-Playing
01:21:43
Speaker
Well, we are moving slowly but surely into the world of D&D ourselves. I would love to discuss with you in the future the opportunity to bring more homebrewed ingredients in front of players so they can see not only what they do, but learn where they come from so they can get some of them for themselves.
01:22:04
Speaker
oh yeah it's always nice if people know where our material is and where they can find it for their own games there's a lot of people who aren't comfortable making new stuff for their game and they stick to just something stuff all other people have already done so there's a use for the stuff i make but i also encourage people even those who are new to the game to
01:22:24
Speaker
put their own ideas into the game. You don't just have to stick with what's published by Wizards of the Coast. That's kind of one of my pet peeves is people who don't vary at all from what's published can understand newer people not being comfortable with that. But it's a game of imagination. It is. And you can make mistakes and you can change things based on those mistakes and learn from them. Yeah.
01:22:47
Speaker
You make things really underpowered, really overpowered, but you'll remember it, you'll have fun with it, especially if you made it up. And it informs the next choices you make. Like, the word mistake used to have a lot more fear wrapped up around it for me personally than it does now. Now I see the mistake instead of an opportunity to look like a dum-dum, I see the mistake as an opportunity to learn and make something even better.
01:23:13
Speaker
We are early mistakes. It's going to happen. Yeah. And like, honestly, if you want like making mistakes at your own table in your own home where there are no larger consequences and you don't have to experience, you know, world ending shame or anything like that.
01:23:30
Speaker
Do it. Kick the tires. Try out some experimentation and some imagination because that is part of the process. It's how we make cool shit. Oh yeah. And if the party dies, um, well, uh, oops. I mean, there is the, oh, it was a dream sequence, but you know, also it's D and D characters die. It is D and D characters die.
01:23:55
Speaker
Some people get, you know, I understand getting really attached to a character, but that's not the end of D&D. If that character dies, there are millions of combinations of things that you can put together to make a new character that is also memorable. I have let characters die on purpose. Yeah. I have let characters die of my own as a player, let them die on purpose because I was like, this isn't working for me anymore. Let's get a new perspective on things.
01:24:23
Speaker
And that can actually lead to more creativity and more opportunities. There was a time, I want to say eight, ten years ago, somewhere in there, I was in a larp of changeling the lost. And after a fairly short amount of time playing this lightning elemental who was convinced he was the original Ben Franklin,
01:24:43
Speaker
I felt like the character had more or less achieved everything he was going to achieve personally and like had gotten as about as far as he was going to get. There wasn't a lot of room for character development in that realm of changeling, which was one of the reasons I started to lose interest. But I told the storytellers, listen, I am I'm starting to lose interest in this character. I'd like to try something else out for the game.
01:25:09
Speaker
if killing this character off would move the story forward for you please consider them a sacrificial lamb to impact the plot and then that's exactly what they did that character wound up uh they found him just laid out cold and some characters were significantly like impacted of like oh my god they actually got one of us and others were like oh he was so full of life
01:25:34
Speaker
And it's not like he hurt himself or anything like that. He just went exploring, followed a lead, left a note behind, and then that lead killed him. And a week later, I had the character, the backup character that I'd been starting to develop for a couple of weeks at that point, completely new, completely unrelated, had absolutely no idea who the guy was or what the world they were walking into from that perspective of. They had no idea who he was, completely unrelated.
01:26:01
Speaker
and continued playing for a long while after with a completely different character. Make mistakes, stub your toe, figure out what you like and what you dislike. This is how you find out. And more than anything else, for our listeners, I wish you enjoyment. I wish you inspiration and fulfillment. Exactly. This is a game, this is creativity, where there are ostensibly no real limits.
01:26:28
Speaker
Are you having fun? That's the big question. Are you having fun? Are you having fun? Are the people around you comfortable? Good. Let's keep going. It can be hard sometimes. There are certain mindsets where giving yourself permission to just relax and cut loose a little and have a little fun can be difficult, which is one of the reasons I'm such a big fan of role play and the alter ego effect.
01:26:56
Speaker
Take yourself out of yourself. Be someone else for a little while. Be someone else for a little while. I love it. That's very well put. It is a role playing game. The D&D and that among many others, they are role playing games. You're playing a role that there's a little bit of you in it. Yeah, but it's somebody else.
01:27:14
Speaker
Yeah, not that long ago, I was sitting for a game of 16 mice make soup. And it was just the four of us on this chopped style competitive cooking show, but we're all mice. And naturally the entire group gravitated towards cheese pun names. I named my mouse Granny Padano after a relative of the Parmesan family. Italian cheeses.
01:27:41
Speaker
and stayed in character for pretty much the entirety of the game this just this you know this two-hour session of talking like this and mistaking cranberries for raspberries and vice versa and like even as the game was going on like this it was just fun it was just a chance for improv but like other players were surprised by like oh they're they're just going for it they're just staying in character the whole time like why not dearie we're here to have fun
01:28:08
Speaker
So yeah, have fun with it. Try things out. Experiment. You may surprise yourself with what you're actually capable of, you know? Oh
Reflecting on Podcast Participation
01:28:17
Speaker
yeah. Nathan, I want to thank you again, not only for being on our show, but also making time to be on our show twice.
01:28:26
Speaker
Oh yeah, no problem. I enjoy coming on podcasts and streams gives me a chance to talk about not only my own stuff, but everything else. You know, I can push myself, my stuff, my stuff, my stuff, but I like to work with others ideas and get others perspective on things. And every single one of come on is different. And it's great. So this is something I enjoy doing. And I have no problem.
01:28:49
Speaker
Coming back to finish an episode that was interrupted by the weather from the day before. Flooding happens. Flooding happens. Yeah. Again, thank you from the bottom of my hearts. It has been a genuine treat talking to you. Same. And finally, to our listeners, another great big thank you for sharing your precious time with us. If you feel it's been well spent, please share the joy of GMing with your friends who are looking to enjoy themselves.
01:29:16
Speaker
You can email your questions for me and our future guests and send that lovely fanart to anywherebutnowpodcastatgmail.com. Reach out on startplaying.games, leave a review, rate the show, and follow us on Blue Sky, Twitter, and YouTube at anywherebutnow and wherever you get your podcasts.
01:29:35
Speaker
And don't forget to join our Discord. Links to everything for me and for Nathan down in the doobly-doo. From all of us, I'm Casey Jones. There's exciting things to come, my friends. I'm glad you're along for the ride. Thanks so much, and have a great day.