December 2019 Sly Flourish Patreon Newsletter

Hello friends and welcome to the December Sly Flourish Patreon newsletter!

Thanks to your support, I've put out the following bits of Sly Flourish content:

Articles

• Kitbashing Dungeons

• Running Ghosts of Saltmarsh Chapter 4, Salvage Operation

• Running Dragon of Icespire Peak from the D&D Essentials Kit

• The Flow of Trap Detection

Videos

I've started a new series of liveplay one-on-one D&D games with my friend Enrique Bertran, the Newbie DM. You can see his own Patreon page here. He and I have been playing through Dragon of Icespire Peak, the adventure included in the D&D Essentials Kit. I wanted to get first-hand experience running this adventure and running D&D one-on-one and this gave me the opportunity. You can watch the videos and discussions below:

• Dragon of Icespire Peak One-on-One Session 1: Dwarven Excavation

• Dragon of Icespire Peak One-on-One Session 2: Umbrage Hill and the Mountain's Toe Gold Mine

• Dragon of Icespire Peak One-on-One Session 3: Shrine of Savras

• Dragon of Icespire Peak One-on-One Session 4: Butter Skull Ranch

• Running Dragon of Icespire Peak, the D&D Essentials Kit Adventure

I've been continuing my Lazy DM Prep videos for Ghosts of Saltmarsh as well. You can see last month's videos here:

• Lazy D&D Prep: Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Isle of the Abbey Part 3

• Lazy D&D Prep: Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Isle of the Abbey Part 4

• Lazy D&D Prep: Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Final Enemy Part 1

I also had a great DM's Deep Dive episode with Dr. Megan Connell. You can watch the video below:

• DM's Deep Dive with Dr. Megan Connell on Recovering from a Bad Game

Top Tweets

Here are some of the top tweets I posted over the past month.

• Saw a comment lamenting the rising cost of #dnd. While there are certainly many avenues to spend money on this hobby (dice, trays, minis, terrain), none of these are required to have a great time playing D&D. You can go far with a dry-erase marker. https://slyflourish.com/playing_dnd_on_a_budget.html

• The more I think about it, I think 1st level #dnd should be its own tier and treated that way. Small focused adventures that turn adventurers into heroes. https://slyflourish.com/building_1st_level_encounters.html

• #dnd tip: Layer your cultists. What secret does the inner circle keep from the outer circle? What's dark secret lies below the four elemental cults?

• #dnd tip: You need little more than the core books, an adventure, and some dice to run a great D&D game.

Twitter Analysis

For the past five years I've been capturing and storing every tweet that uses the #dnd hashtag. It's hit 8.5 million so far. I put all of the tweets into a data analytics platform called ElasticSearch and Kibana to analyze it for all sorts of things. Your support on Patreon helps me pay for the servers to do this. Here are some interesting graphs I've pulled out from the data.

This first chart shows the topics of conversation as a percentage of all #dnd tweets.

This next chart shows the popularity of more recent D&D adventures.

Other Things On My Mind

We're on the tail end of Ruins of the Grendleroot. I have a draft of the full layout in hand and I can't wait to put it out there. I'm not sure if we'll make the end of the year but I hope so. It surely won't be long after that.

Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master also just hit the Adamantine Best Seller list on DriveThruRPG; the top award for a product. This puts it at .04% of products on the site; inside the top 50 products of all time. I couldn't be happier to see it there.

As you can see I've spent a lot of time pondering the D&D Essentials Kit. As a new entry ramp to D&D I think its important to understand it. Overall I like it a lot but many of the 1st level adventures are too hard. Warn your friends. A fellow Youtuber, Bob World Builder, has an excellent series on tips and liveplay videos of Dragon of Icespire Peak if you want to learn more about it.

I'll be off to PAX Unplugged later this week rolling dice and meeting friends. I hope to run into some of you there!

Eberron Rising from the Last War just came out and it looks great. I'll probably be running an Eberron game for my home group once we're done with Ghosts of Saltmarsh so you'll be hearing more about it from me.

Thank you all again for your outstanding support and have a great new year!

Mike