Enhance Your Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) Adventures

Discover my techniques for generating creative ideas.  You can try my approach to develop your own creative ideas - or copy any of my suggestions directly into your next adventure.

Let's discuss campaign/adventure plot lines: getting inspiration, managing complexity, and avoiding pitfalls!

October 2020 UPDATE:  Downloadable resources added!  Factions are like-minded individuals bonded together for a purpose.  What is each group motivated by, what do they like, and what do they hate?  Now mix the groups together and what will happen?  The possibilities are endless!  This is great plot inspiration and if you're familiar with 'The Game of Thrones' I submit that as a prime example of a faction-based story.

If you can't open a PSD (Photoshop) file you can still see the factions in the downloadable ZIP file which contains JPG images that will show you the same content.

Looking for some specific plot examples?  Without knowing the world you're playing in I've added a few plots that may prove useful (as a downloadable PDF).

Discover approaches to find artwork for use in your games.  Uses such as item creation, handout creation, or battlemap tokens.  Students will learn how to find art that will be help visually enhance their adventures..

January 2020 UPDATE:  Downloadable resources added!  By popular demand I'm including the hundreds of tokens I created for one of my campaigns.  They're available as downloadable resources (in PSD and PNG format).  Assuming some of these tokens work for you it may save you a ton of time searching, downloading, resizing, and cropping.

If you cannot open PSD files I recommend downloading the ZIP files which contain PNG images (with transparent backgrounds).  Then you can import the tokens into whatever image editing program you may like to use.

Discover how can we prepare the fantasy artwork we just found for later use in a battle map.  Follow along as we mask each layer and quickly add a style to that layer to make our finished "token."

What can we do with our tokens?  Using patterns we'll create a very basic map to see how our we might benefit from visualizing an encounter.

This is not a full battle map (with a grid) but we'll cover that in a later section.

Learn about excellent musical sources available to students that can fit a variety of campaigns and situations.  The student will have a number of approaches for finding music after watching this course.

If you use Spotify consider the attached resource of D&D playlists!

Background music can add another dimension to your games but there are some pitfalls to be aware of.  Let's discuss the good and the bad as we explore including music!

An overview of how After Effects can be used to create a small but impactful video.  The student will be able to use a few simple techniques to create engaging videos for their campaigns.

Photoshop actions are discussed.  The student will be able to create an action to save time when using Photoshop, which should prove useful when preparing and running a future game.

More in-depth Photoshop actions are discussed.  The student will be able to execute even more useful actions after studying this video.

Visually engrossing player items are created with Photoshop.  The student will be able to leverage a few simple techniques to make customized player items for their campaign.

Downloadable resources provide examples that may be useful in your campaign or act as a launching point for creating your own ideas.

January 2020 UPDATE:  Added PSDs loaded with example items from a custom campaign run by the author.

Unique handouts of all sorts are shown and dissected for the enhancement of a campaign.  The student will gain many ideas for campaign handouts and will be able to create their own handouts using the approaches discussed.

Downloadable resources provide examples!

Battle maps are created in Photoshop.  The student will understand how to create a battle grid which will be critical to running D&D encounters on the battle map.

Battle map objects are discovered, imported, and manipulated.  The student will be able to get their own battle map objects and know a few simple ways to manipulate them.

Dundjinni map-maker artwork is discussed and imported.  The student will learn how to more quickly create battle maps by leveraging premade Dundjinni maps and map content.

Time to reenact a successful encounter from one of my campaigns.  Learning from this I hope you will be able to make your own encounters more impactful in your future games.

A recap of all the techniques we've covered using the battle map including some extra options which have not yet been covered, and how to leverage them in an encounter.  The student will be able to have full customization of how they use the battle maps in their campaigns: visualizing AoE and AoO, visualizing damage, going fullscreen, using actions, moving tokens, and more.

January 2020 UPDATE:  Downloadable resources added!  I'm including zipped map packs for 5 different environments that I made maps for in a large scale campaign.  These may be directly useful to you, or act as guides or launching points for your own maps.

Discover how a real-life challenging scenario can inspire an in-game physical challenge. 

This challenge will be flexible:  what is "too loud" or "very quiet?"  Does the dragon get a listen check with bonus based on how loud the players seem to be?  If successful, what support will the dwarven ghosts provide?  How much treasure can they take?  Do die rolls impact this too? 

I'll determined all that as the game progresses and rewarded appropriately.  I bet the players will have fun debating the best way to approach this, and their attempt may be clever & impressive, or a glorious failure...let the game begin!

A variety of miscellaneous (though related) topics are covered.  The student will be able to apply additional strategies in running their campaign after watching this lecture.

A recap of the materials presented with final thoughts.  The student will be able to better grasp the course material that was covered after watching this video.

January 2020 UPDATE:  Speaking of recaps, I'm adding a downloadable resource of a constantly growing recap document that I supplied my players in one of my campaigns.  It took some effort to produce but kept everyone on the same page as to what happened last session, which can be very useful when sessions are weeks apart.  The recap ended up being a pretty amusing/interesting retelling of some wild adventures.  Including images helps a lot too!

Footage from some of my physical challenges in the past - filmed as they happened!  Explanatory text (which you can pause to read if needed) is included to describe the clips.  The text is large to be easy to read but also give players some anonymity.  Despite the large text covering some of the clips you should still clearly be able to tell what is going on.  You'll see some of my setups (projecting my laptop to a TV or theater screen), and a sample of the variety of players I've run games for, how players react to challenges and how some of the challenges went.

Typically I'm not filming my games but there are great moments here.  You may find filming your games is fun for remembering the moments and I think it's enjoyable however worrying about camera angles when you've got multiple people talking to you as you try to juggle movies, music, dice, hitpoints, and play all the NPCs is quite a challenge!  Filming physical challenges may be easier although you're still probably juggling the questions of - and monitoring - multiple players while you do so.  Setting up a static camera and forgetting about it may be the simplest approach.  Good luck!

COURSE COMPLETE!

Need help with your adventure?  Want to brainstorm some creative ideas?  I love this stuff, and I'm happy to help!

Thank you for watching, and I welcome your questions.

A quick look at the D&D courses I've created in case you - or someone you know - may be interested!