RPGBOT.News – Jonathan G. Nelson of AAW Games

Show Notes

In this episode of RPGBOT.News, we talk to Jonathan G. Nelson of AAWGames (formerly Adventure A Week). We discuss AAW’s massive catalog of adventures, their full-length published campaign, Rise of the Drow, and Jonathan announces some exciting, previously unannounced projects.

Jonathan gave us some exciting news during the podcast, and he’ll mail the first 5 people who can answer a question about it a free scratch and dent (meaning minor cosmetic damage) physical copy of Rise of the Drow for 5e.

US Only, please. Answers must be given in the AAW Games Discord channel.

Question: “AAW Games is bringing Rise of the Drow to virtual tabletops. Which ones?”

Materials Referenced in this Episode

Transcript

Randall 

Welcome the RPGBOT.news. I’m Randall James and with me is Tyler Kamstra.

Tyler 

Hi, everybody.

Randall 

And tonight we have a special guest, Jonathan G. Nelson of AAW games.

Demonic Voice 

[incoherent demonic rambling]

Randall 

Perfect. John, tell us a bit about yourself.

Jonathan 

Yeah, my name is Jonathan G. Nelson. I started AAW games. Originally, Adventure A Week, hence the name. Yeah, short version about myself. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a chef, an author, and a musician. And so in my life I become- I did a sous-, I became a sous chef at one point. I was in a rock band that got signed to a label on the East Coast and toured a whole bunch. So I did that. And then after that, I decided that I want to get into writing. So I had started- I started DMing back when I was eight years old, really young. Before we even knew what that we’re doing. Had all these cool, colorful, polyhedral dice and wanted to experiment and try to try to figure out what the heck all these numbers were in everything in the original books. And over time, we finally started to have a grasp on the rules, and I played D&D, basically my entire life. There were a few hiatuses that here and there you know, it’s kind of hard to play when you’re out touring with a rock band, but I kept playing and always tried to keep a tight you know, group of friends go in a gaming group. I finally wanted to get into more of the professional design. And so my friend Todd Gamble and I (he had worked at Wizards of the Coast, was one of the lead cartographers there for many years)… Him and I started the company adventureaweek.com, and we are pretty insane. We’re actually producing one adventure every week, typically 32 to 64 page adventures that were complete everything art, layout, the full deal. We were cranking out these PDFs one a week, and I would basically work my day job and then lock myself into a closet with a computer and/or typewriter to work away to be able to produce- produce these adventures. We call it R- we called it RPG bootcamp. And so that’s kind of how we got started. We just dove in headfirst and just went for it. That’s that’s kind of how adventure a week and AAW games came about

Randall 

Like it’s a whole adventure a week. Yeah, that’s insane. 32-64 pages with art. Were you doing the art?

Jonathan 

We a lot of the art in the early days, we were doing stock art and things like that, just because we were just getting started, right? So our budget was zero. You know, it was whatever, whatever you can scrounge up to get up and off the grounds, right. So it’s like we plug in little investments here and there and buying stock art and everything. But as we went on, we started to get a following you know, and we start- actually, at first, we weren’t even doing PDFs, but people start demanding them. Like, “hey, we want to own our content.” We could- Because originally designed it so you could play all the games online, you wouldn’t have to actually have a PDF, you wouldn’t have to have a print book, you could just use your iPad. I created JavaScript boxes, you can click to open and close. They were sorted by statblocks. When we started it was D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder first edition. And so you could scroll through and if you were playing 3.5, and you had a stat block of some devil, you would click on the stat block, you know, on your tablet or on your computer, and it would open up and when you’re done, you could click it, it would close and you could keep going with the adventure. We had different boxes for magic items, we had audio sound effects, you could play audio: music or sound effects like here’s a dragon breathing fire, and you could click play. So originally, we started like that. But we found that most people weren’t ready for something that advanced at that time. So then we started doing PDFs, then people really liked our stuff and demanded that we started doing print books. And by then we had gained a pretty good team of people that actually, believe it or not, a lot of them were beta testers on the original site. And they were just so passionate, so driven, that they got into it. One of the guys originally was a butcher, but he had had a heart attack, and he couldn’t work anymore. And he was disabled. And he was really in deep depression. Instead of giving up he decided that he wanted to learn how to do layout. And so he became our main layout guy and worked with us for many years. And he was even the inspiration for Rise of the Drow and helped us push it to Kickstarter. And he was able to hold the hardcover books in his hands before he- his heart finally gave out and he actually did pass away. But he fulfilled a lifelong dream of his and we’re able to do that with a lot of different people we worked with, so everybody that was on the team is just like… we all did it because we loved it. You know, because we love the game. It wasn’t about like, “oh, how much money can we make? Or any you know, how far can we get? Or how popular can we get?” It’s more about like, “this is what we do, because we love it.” Yeah, so that’s where that all came about. And we’ve come a long way since then. I… You know, I wouldn’t say we’re a professional company, because I don’t like to be too professional. I like to have a good time.

Randall 

Yeah

Jonathan 

You know, and I’m just I’m just, I’m just I’m a dude that likes to make games. I just have fun. But I’d say I’d say we have come a long ways and learned a lot over the years and I’ve got a lot more experience under my belt both as a player and a DM at this point.

Randall 

No, that makes perfect sense. Before we hop into AAW Games I have to ask the question.So you said you’ve been playing D&D Since you were eight years old.

Jonathan 

Yeah.

Randall 

What was your first edition?

Jonathan 

The first edition was the good old red box. And yes, came from an uncle and an aunt. Yeah, we had a friend- We were actually living on 90 acres of forest out in North Bend, Washington. Our friend’s dad, it’s a long story, he had been forced to do something he refused to do. Pull a- pull a weapon on someone when he was a Green Beret. And he ended up going AWOL and became a horse trader in Afghanistan, and eventually came back and settled on this land. And so our families ended up there. And at one point, an aunt and uncle came and brought us this, this red bgok- box of Dungeons and Dragons. I was always like, the really like, kind of, kind of more like anal kid, like, I’m like, Oh, I don’t want to get my hands too dirty. I’m gonna always wash my hands. And my friends. My friends always like playing with knives and getting scars and going down hills and things and we will go rock climbing with no equipment in the woods fighting with sticks and things we used to pretend that we’re fighting. And so when the aunt and uncle came and brought us the red box, I think it was all falling apart and all that was left were the books and dice. We saw Larry Elmore’s art on the on the cover and flipped it open. We were just sold. We were like “”this game is looks amazing!” And everything changed. Our whole lives changed at that point.

Randall 

Okay, for one thing, he doesn’t get to hit you at sticks anymore. He just rolled dice. That’s a lot easier.

Jonathan 

He’s- I bet you he sometimes wishes that he could hit me with sticks.

Randall 

And you could have invented LARPing. Like, however many years ago before LARPing really became a major thing.

Jonathan 

I think I think it’s always been around. You know, I think it’s been around since the early days.

Randall 

You used to just call it life right?

Jonathan 

Yeah.

Randall 

Cool. So let’s, let’s hop into it. AAW games. So you gave us a little bit of walkthrough of it. How long ago did adventure week start?

Jonathan 

The original… Actually the kind of conception date of adventure a week started on (I know the exact date) December 13 2010. A light bulb appeared above my head (an imaginary light bulb, of course) and I grabbed it down and pulled it pulled it down and turned it on, I want to see what’s inside this light bulb idea. And so I popped it open. That was the idea of you know, having a website where you could get all your adventures and you could click to open and close to JavaScript, where you could have the maps, you could have everything. Because I was going to this gaming group in Bellevue and I lived out here in like Snoqualmie area, and I would have to get my hiking pack and load it up. It was so insane, I’d have all these books, I think we were playing 3.5. And then we started moving to Pathfinder at the time. And I just would have to haul all these books back and forth. And I was getting so tired of it. So I thought, “You know what, I’m going to start writing my adventures in an online format.” And at first it was like, just for me, you know, for my gaming group. And then I’m like, “hey, if I polish this up a little bit, we could do something with it.” So yeah, and called Todd Gamble, him and I were friends. He had been- he worked with Rob labs already at Wizards of the Coast, him and Rob had worked on a lot of the 3.5 stuff. And then stuff for paizo publishing, when they start taking over Dragon and Dungeon magazine. He did lots of work for those guys. And he did lots of work for various novels, like a lot of Forgotten Realms novels, released around the time. If you look in the front, he did those maps. And he did all the math for the D&D 3.5 core books. So he had a lot of experience under his belt with that sort of thing. And him and I and he’s a very incredibly creative individual him and I will come up with ideas and just go off on tangents. He’s no longer with the company, but we’re still really good friends. And we still get together and go to coffee or once a while, go walk around talk. We’re both kind of dreamers, you know, so come up with wild concepts and ideas. But yeah, so him and I worked on it together, I would handle a lot of the writing and the story side of things, as well as the statblocks and all that. And then Todd would create all the beautiful maps, as well as some of the illustrations as well. He’s really good at like delving into cultures and creating unique accoutrements and things that the culture might use, so you can see their different weapons and daily items and what have you.

Randall 

Okay. And then adventure a week, in the beginning, like you said, you were putting out an adventure every week, like, kind of go into a day job, you know, at a point when this wasn’t fully paying the bills, you do the day job, then you come home and you do your night job, which is actually your passion. You work, work work, and you finally get this thing out.

Jonathan 

Yep. And and I had and wife and kids too, so

Randall 

Okay, wow

Jonathan 

I was not sleeping much. But I wouldn’t be able to do that. At this age. Honestly, like, I’m kind of slowing down a little bit. I’m like, Damn, I’m glad I did that was a little younger.

Randall 

Does AAW games still do a weekly release, like a weekly adventure release?

Jonathan 

We do. But we’ve toned it down a lot. What I’ve actually realized and learned with experience is that quality is much more important than quantity. It’s really easy to crank stuff out. And the thing is that some of the stuff we cranked out, we cranked out in a week guess what five star reviews from from Endzeitgeist, who’s the number one reviewer of tabletop role playing games on the planet? He’s reviewed? Like something like 4000 or 5000 books at this point?

Tyler 

Wow

Jonathan 

Yeah, some of the reviews would he would write five star review and we’re like, holy crap, we got five stars. And then you know, the next week, we come up with something he reads that that one and guys this is you know, 2 stars and this thing sucks. And here’s why. You know, we you know, it’s like hit or miss. And I didn’t like that, you know, over time. I learned it’s way better to take your time with something and really make it shine and part of that Quality is also having the chance to play test things. Because yeah, you can crank out adventure, but there’s no way you could crank out an adventure in a week and play test the whole thing. Unless that’s all you’re doing. And let’s, you know, let’s face it, we all have other things going on life, you can’t just do that.

Randall 

Okay, so I take from that you transition to like you’re working in multiple stories at a time you’re releasing an adventure a week, but you’re actually working them for much longer before you finally get them out.

Jonathan 

Not only that, but what we switched to was a format of mini-dungeons, which is essentially like a two page flip side where you get a map, a short, little mini adventure that should last like maybe two to four hours, and then you know, some different monsters or what have you in it. Like I said, back in the day, we’re going 30 to 64 page adventures move from that to basically a double sided adventure. Granted, on top of that, we do have other releases that we come out with which are much longer such as Rise of the Drow.

Tyler 

Yeah, I’ve been looking at a lot of the mini dungeons for the past couple of weeks. Some of them were really exciting. And it looks like there’s like a rotating set of them that are free at any given time. So yeah, I picked up a few I paid for a few I downloaded the free ones like look through a bunch of them. They look like really good self contained one shots.

Jonathan 

Yeah.

Tyler 

And they run like a pretty wide level range. I think the highest I saw was like nine or 10. But I wasn’t looking very hard for the the upper level cap. But yeah, these look like awesome adventures that you could just drop into any ongoing game if you need to fill a session.

Jonathan 

Yeah, definitely. They’re easy grab and go. And that’s like a whole point of this are supposed to be like grab and go plug and play whatever you want to call it there for on the fly for whenever you need them whether the adventuring group goes completely off the rails, and in my game, I like to have a sandbox, but there are times where the group does something I really didn’t expect, or I just need something that’s like, dang, they went off into those mountains. Okay, and now they’re gonna go in this cave, and I just don’t have anything and you could look, you can actually do a search, you can even do a search on our site right now like by you could filter it down and go, I want a fifth edition mini dungeon and I need it to be this level. And it’ll actually filter them all out and you’ll be able to grab that one. Download it and just you could roll with it from right then hey, look, guys, take a 10 minute break. Read this real quick. Okay, okay, so you go in the cave. And you know, and then you have a map and everything else you get throw it in VTT and all their stuff, our downloads come with all the maps to like, you download it, you get the PDF, and you get the GM map, the player map, the VTT map. AAW games was the very first company to set that as kind of standard. I don’t know if you guys have seen like a lot of products now come with that. We were actually the first ones to do that where we every single adventure we’d say that comes with all the maps you need. It has one as DM with all the tags, one that is player that shows you like maybe the name of the town and some information and stuff, usually without maybe without a grid or something like that. It’s more like to look at and then there’s the VTT version, which comes with no grid, no tags, no nothing. So you can drop into whatever VT VTT you use. And I should point out to the mini dungeons we’ve been releasing lately, I said the on the 99 cents that we were charging me for I said screw it, let’s just give them to people and have people enjoy them. So from here on out, when you go to adventureaweek.com, you’ll see we release a new adventure every week. And it doesn’t cost anything, you can just grab it, you can just go and download it in and enjoy it. So

Randall 

yeah, that’s awesome. And I do want to say like it’s a fantastic standard to have like these different resources available because you do need that right like as a GM you need to be able to see it you need to know what’s coming. But it’s such a spoiler to like lay that down and reveal it or to have to play like the paper games where I’m partially covering the things you’re not supposed to know yet, right? Yeah. It’s pretty awesome.

Tyler 

Paizo doesn’t even do the like…. Because paizo sells their adventures as PDFs, wizards doesn’t. But Paizo doesn’t do the like player map GM map thing. And yeah, they’re They’re notorious for the grids on their maps never fitting on a virtual tabletop no matter what, there is something about the way that they reformat the pictures to fit into the books, the grids never quite line up. So the fact that your adventures are virtual tabletop ready is super awesome. Especially now when almost everyone is playing entirely digitally.

Jonathan 

Exactly right? Or during COVID It’s, uh, everything’s changed you know, so and even I prefer in person I really do and I still have one in person group right now. But my three groups I play and it’s like, you know, two of them are online and it’s fun but it’s just not the same you need to see people’s faces you know, it’s um, and that’s one thing I encourage people that you do VTT is Try putting your you know, try putting putting in you know, the cameras the camera image of everybody turn the cameras on have it up in the corner so you can see people’s reactions because you’re missing one of the best parts of the game especially as a dungeon master see people’s reactions when you throw something crazy. I was really WOAH.

Randall 

yeah, I’ll say like for the game that Tyler and I play in so we we span three different states and four time zones. We play in roll20. But we actually use discords video and chat so we can see each other and hear each other because it’s way more reliable than what’s in roll20 Yeah, and 100% like it’s perfect to be able to like look at each other and even do you know it isn’t the same as being in person but being able to do a bit of the RP where it kind of feels like you’re you’re in the same space is is pretty awesome.

Jonathan 

Yeah, totally. I mean, we definitely do live in a in a pretty cool time being able to use the internet to play D&D Because man growing up it was like hardly anybody played and you’d be like, Hey, man, do you play D&D? Shut up, and then you get punched in the face and slammed into the locker. you play Dungeons and Dragons? We’re gonna kill you.

Tyler 

Times are better.

Jonathan 

“You’re satanic!” like, I just want to play a game with my friends.

Randall 

I want to do basic statistics, it’s gonna be fine. Like it’s a little bit odd. It’s like, yeah, you ace probability and stats, and now we’re trying to do geometry and you’re falling on your face. What’s wrong? Yeah.

Tyler  

Just need to spend some more time on the flight episode of the podcast learn to do trig. So you can figure out how far away you are from everything while flying.

Randall 

Perfect. Then you can pass anything. I do want to say we’re talking about playing over virtual tabletops. I have this secret wish. So I bought Tabletop Simulator in steam.

Jonathan 

Oh, yeah, I’ve got it too, just in case,

Randall 

There’s a VR hook into Tabletop Simulator. So you can put on your VR headset. At some point, I want to attempt to play a tabletop game, using Tabletop Simulator in VR, so that you’re actually moving your pieces around, and maybe rolling dice.

Jonathan 

Dude, get a hold of me when you do that, because I’m totally down.

Randall 

Because it’s almost as good as like, is it going to be worse? The is it gonna be worse than roll20? Or is it gonna be like, you know, like, a B movie, it’s so awful that it’s actually fantastic. I don’t know yet. But one day, this is coming. I do want to ask the question. So for AAW games, we talked about that we can go and we can buy adventures, like the most recent adventure is gonna be free. I can go and I can search older adventures, and I can purchase those.

Jonathan 

Yep.

Randall 

Do you also have a subscription model?

Jonathan 

Yeah, the subscription model is basically you pay $10 a month, you immediately get $10, back in store credit. And then you get 10% off everything on the website. We’re basically you’re giving us your money, and we’re just handing your money right back to you. So you can go shopping, it’s kind of like you know, we’re changing into AAW cash.

Randall 

That’s awesome.

Jonathan 

And then you can go shopping and you get 10% off everything. So it’s like it’s basically an incentive to come back and keep buying from AAW, right? I don’t know, as I’ve gotten older, I’m like, I’m less about like, trying to figure out like, what’s the maximum amount of profit I can make off this? You know, it’s like, yeah, I think I think if we make good games, and we make games that we love, I think other people will love them too. And so that’s kind of what I’m thinking with a lot of this. Also with the free stuff, like play it, enjoy it. And if you like it, then know that we’ve got other books for sale. Like we’ve got Rise to the Drow. We’ve got Underworld Races and Classes. We’ve got Survivors Guide to Spelunking, you know, we’ve got some of these books. And not only that, but you know, they’re in VTT, they’re in PDF, and they’re in hardcovers.

Randall 

That makes perfect sense. And I think that’s an awesome model. And my take on it like my, my take on this hobby, is that people are willing to put their money towards good content.

Jonathan 

Yeah.

Randall 

And if you’re a group, and you’re out there, and you’re making great content, people want to contribute. And so having that subscription model, I think, is really interesting. You know, folks, go check out a mini dungeon. Like they said, it’s free, go grab it. And if you enjoy it, yeah, why not keep going. Why not keep playing them?

Jonathan 

Yeah, yeah. And one more thing I mentioned, too, is in the subscription model, it’s not just, you know, the 10% off and everything I told you and the 10, $10 a month and all that. But you also get access to an audio sound board that has a bunch of different sound effects that you can just loop. Sounds of people in a tavern or sounds of like I said before a dragon breathing fire, sounds a massive comb- massive battle with magic going off, um, things like that you can you can stream those when you’re playing. And in addition, we have a flip book catalog, which has a lot of our older releases, and has it for fifth edition, Pathfinder, savage worlds and star finder. And you can go in there and you can grab any of those and just click them. And it’s basically like PDF flip books that are online. So as long as you have a working internet internet connection, you click on it, the book pops up, and you can just flip through the pages and then flip flip down, it goes back on the bookshelf, and you can scroll through and click a different books. So you also get as your subscriber, you can log in and get access to all of those and you don’t even have to download them. They’re just on there and ready to go. That’s really nice.

Randall 

That’s awesome. You want something you said a bit ago and what you just had, again, kind of cues a question.

Jonathan 

Yeah.

Randall 

What is support like for let’s say, like 5e versus Pathfinder one versus Pathfinder two

Jonathan 

support as in continued support for for customers that may purchase something that’s older?

Randall 

Well, or let you know, forget one, let’s just say Pathfinder two and 5e. You like are mini dungeons coming out for both on a regular basis?

Jonathan 

Yeah. So we’ve got D&D, Fifth Edition. Those are coming out every week. We’re not currently doing a weekly release for Pathfinder. But I will announce here and I don’t think I’ve told anyone else this. I’ve got two announcements actually tonight for you guys. It’ll be the first time I announce and so the first one is, we’re actually converting, we’ve been converting the Mini-Dungeon Tome over to Pathfinder second edition. We’re actually done with that. We’ve gone through the editing phase, and now we’re in layout. We’re not that far away from a release. And again, I haven’t even announced it to anybody, but we’ll be converting and putting up the path- the Mini-Dungeon Tome for Pathfinder, so it’d be like 140 adv- ready to go you know, adventures you can plug and play in pathfinder second edition. Granted, we probably will do some kind of little mini fundraiser just because to get the money necessary to see like, hey, how many people are actually interested in having this thing printed? Let’s get it off to the press. Because we have a printer, everything’s geared up to go, we just got to like, get that those initial funds to print the book, and then send it out to everybody. And which, by the way, me and my family send out all of the books, except for our worldwide distribution stuff. We took that over because again, quality, not quantity. And a lot of books were getting damaged and orders were getting screwed up when we worked with other companies. And I thought, well, we need to put the care into our books from beginning to finish. So I hand pack my own books and ship them out, even though I have to dedicate, like, parts of weekends and things like that. I do that. And if anything’s screwed up and there’s a dent? Return to Sender, and I’ll send you the book right away, I’m not screwing around. I provide good customer service, I treat others the same way I want to be treated. Buy their books and you have a problem. Reach out to me, and you’ll be talking to me and I’ll pack the books. I’m serious.

Randall 

No, no, that’s, that’s awesome. And I will say I think we have a pretty healthy like Pathfinder 2 following. So when you get to the point where you’re trying to raise, I think people want more Pathfinder to adventures, they want more content. So let us know. And we’ll, we’ll talk.

Jonathan 

And I’ll tell you one more thing about that too, with the mini dungeon tome, Pathfinder, Second Edition, the lead project developer on that to redo it and get it out for Pathfinder second edition is Thilo Grof, which earlier I’d mentioned endzeitgeist who’s the number one reviewer of tabletop role playing games, AAW games actually hired him about a year and a half, two years ago. And so he’s one of our core team members now. He and he’s actually written some adventure paths for Paizo. He just recently wrote an adventure path for Pathfinder second edition. He definitely knows what he’s doing. And so you’re in good hands.

Randall 

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome.

Tyler 

Quite a pedigree.

Jonathan 

Yeah.

Tyler 

So you mentioned there’s there’s over 100 adventures in the the mini dungeon tome that are being that are being converted to PF2. Adventure a week’s been running for 10 plus years at this point-

Jonathan 

We launched in 2012 actually. 2010 is we started building up, before we went live with it. We wanted to build up some adventure, so we didn’t go live and then have a problem.

Tyler 

Okay, so how many adventures have you published at this point?

Jonathan 

Oh, my gosh. That is that is a question that I may not have the answer to off the top of my head. But I can tell you this going on on my site. Right now we’ve released 421 products for fifth edition on our website.

Tyler 

Jeeze

Jonathan 

340 for Pathfinder. 133 different maps you can download that doesn’t count the mini dungeon, the ones that come with mini dungeons. And then we’ve got some other stuff too. We’ve got 14 products for savage worlds, 30 for starfinder. And then we’ve got like 22, miscellaneous products like things like shirts, hats, a zine that we did for a while, stuff like that.

Tyler 

So you’ve got over 1000 things on your site.

Jonathan 

Like I said, RPG boot camp, we were insane.

Tyler 

Oh, my gosh, yeah, that’s amazing. I don’t think a single group could play everything you’ve written in a lifetime.

Jonathan 

I think you’re probably right.

Randall 

Well, I mean, we could try though. We could try.

Tyler 

Yeah, I do it.

Jonathan 

I’ll challenge you, give you full access to all our content and you guys see- see what percentage you can finish. You know, we got 62% One of our players died at age 98.

Tyler 

If you want to.

Randall 

That’s like that. That’s the stream that we have to just set up like 24 hours a day. We’ll have a rotating cast. That’d be great.

Jonathan 

Yeah, rotating players and DM like the DM- one of the DMS just falls asleep. Okay, now we’re switching to you know, Thiel over in Norway and he’s gonna run the rest of the game.

Randall 

Get in the backup get in the backup. Awesome. Cool. So we talked about a little bit but let’s actually dive into it. So Rise of the Drow. Tell us about it.

Jonathan 

Yeah, Rise of the Drow is probably our second most insane decision ever. Because the first most insane was coming up with adventure every week. This one was basically we said hey, we let’s let’s write an adventure about about Drow in the Underdark. We love the Underdark, you know, who doesn’t? At the time it was us and our original crew. And we’d already released quite a few adventures people were we had a lot of subscribers, people getting excited about our content in the site, and that we were doing stuff finally in PDF. And so we did, we came up with Rise of the Drow. We and we started we started writing, it was a myself I was and my friend Stephen Yeardley. He’s co author not to say that I was lead author, Steve and I went hand in hand and tackled this thing from different angles. And there were a whole cast of other people involved as well. A lot of artists and cartographers and a whole cast of people. I mean, there’s no way we could have done a book like this. It’s over 550 pages. It’s it’s a massive, it’s got basically adventures, an entire campaign setting in the underworld. We call it the underworld, not the Underdark. But it’s interchangeable, right?

Randall 

Yeah.

Jonathan 

And then a bestiary that is just massive. So this book alone you could you could skip the adventure entirely and just use it as a source book for the underworld. But yeah, so Stephen Yeardley and I wrote it the original version, all the cartography is by Todd Gamble. The new version has been since been revised and the cartography is by Tommi Salama and Sean MacDonald. We’ve had all kinds of different artists work with us from Mates Laurentiu. To Kerem Beyit. He, Karem did the cover. He does a lot of work for Wizards of the Coast actually. He’s done a lot of magic cards and things like that. And yeah, and even I some people might know Satine Phoenix. Before she was big and doing all stuff for D&D. She was doing her monster maidens art and so she did some artwork for this book as well. Lots of great people that worked on this thing.

Randall 

Awesome.

Tyler 

Yeah, it honestly shows the art in this thing is gorgeous. The back of the book has like 200+ pages of monsters. A lot of them are original. There are a few from the SRD but as far as I could tell all the ones from the SRD also got really nice new art.

Randall 

Yep.

Tyler 

Yeah, the bestiary in this thing is amazing. Every encounter I’ve looked at has a map for it. And the maps, the maps are honestly gorgeous.

Jonathan 

Thank you!

Tyler 

It’s thorough. It’s good. You have everything you need to run the adventure in the adventure. Like all the monsters from the SRD that are in the monster are also in the bestiary. So you don’t even need to own the monster manual. You can just like, Player’s Handbook, this, and you can run a campaign for years. It’s-

Jonathan 

Exactly! Exactly. And, and I did skip over one little thing. And that was that this originally was like, just on the website. And then it was PDFs, and it was like it was a trilogy. And then people wanted a Kickstarter. So we did the Pathfinder first edition Kickstarter that created a hardcover which is now so collectible people are selling for like $300 to $500 apiece, because we only made like 900 of them or something, then we redid it everything. And I have to mention Thomas Baumbach, he was the developer of this and also did layout. He completely, you know, basically took apart the original books and reconstructed it into this one, right, deconstructed and reconstructed and pieced it together. So the first few chapters, the first bunch of chapters are, here’s all your adventure. And then yeah, and then next, you come up, here’s all your campaign setting. And then you go, Okay, here’s, you know, new spells and all that. And here’s your bestiary. So it’s all neatly organized by the section. So you can use it the way you want to whether you’re just playing the adventurer, and jumping into the campaign setting as needed. There’s hundreds of locations to visit in a dwarven city. There’s hundreds of locations visit in the Drow city. I mean, there’s so many things, there’s so many nooks and crannies, that we that and then there’s other places unexplored underworld that goes off. And those are touched upon in some of our mini dungeons. Or you might hear certain rumors in survivalists guide to spelunking, or applied and aggregate spelunking our follow up book to that, like there’s all these little locations and other things taking place while these events are transpiring. There’s all these other events, there’s a whole trilogy, there’s the stonehome trilogy, our youth series, that stuff’s taking place around the same time. But the stonehome dwarves, they’re off and they’re isolationists. They’re not helping out with what’s going on in the Underdark. They don’t care that the Drow are attacking the other dwarves because no one’s coming in or out of their city. And no one’s been in, in, in or out of here for a long, long time. They all live back in in their own little their own little pocket their own little world. But eventually war is going to come to their doorstep as well. So yeah, there’s there’s a lot of different angles to play from here.

Randall 

And you can play that adventure, too. I do. I feel like we haven’t mentioned what I expect is probably Tyler’s favorite part of the entire story.

Tyler 

The spiders?

Randall 

Absolutely the spiders.

Jonathan 

You hate spiders, Tyler?

Tyler 

I hate spiders. As we’ve discussed many times on this podcast, I’m the kind of person that installed that Skyrim mod where all the spiders are inexplicably bears. So…

Randall 

I’m the person who snuck in and turned all the monsters back to spiders.

Jonathan 

My girlfriend hates spiders, too, so I know there’s a certain scream I hear. And I know, I know. It’s my my time to go out there. And then I have PTSD from step– not really PTSD. I have a bit of PTSD from a restaurant that I worked in at one point in regards to rats and other rodents. So I take care and we’ve got cats so they’re always bringing them in the house and stuff. So I take care of the spiders, she takes care of the rodents. We’ve got a deal and there’s no questions asked. If I was in this podcast right now and hear screaming like, “Okay, guys, sorry. Even if this live, I gotta go take care of a spider. I’ll be back in a little bit.”

Randall 

Like, talk amongst yourselves. We’ll get it together. Like, literally, that’s what partnership is about, though.

Tyler 

Yes.

Jonathan 

Yeah, exactly. That’s how it all works. Right?

Randall 

[unintelligible] infestation.

Tyler 

So I have to say I like I’ve been through this thing cover to cover. Surprisingly, like, I don’t want to say small quantity of spiders. But the amount and detail on the spiders was not so spooky that I couldn’t handle it.

Jonathan 

That’s good.

Tyler 

It was an acceptable quantity of spiders in my opinion.

Randall 

If you’re sitting at home thinking, I don’t know is there gonna be too many spiders. It has Tyler’s approval. It’s fine. It’s fine.

Jonathan 

Yeah. And of course, I always encourage people to make it your own. So like, you know, let’s say if Randall was running it for Tyler, of course Randall, you’re welcome to put in more spiders. You know, you could always decrease the amount of Gooblins and throw in a few more spiders.

Randall  

Absolutely. Yeah.

Tyler 

I was really hoping you were gonna encourage people to use bears. Oh, no phase bears!

Randall 

Hey, if you run the game: phase bears. Party on. Awesome. I do have a question. Can you lay out for folks? Kind of the one minute, like, what is the story? What’s happening? You’ve given us an idea of kind of the setting. We see kind of what’s gonna be happening. But yeah, what’s what’s the story that’s gonna unfold maybe without spoiling, you know, a ton of the material.

Jonathan 

Yeah, yeah, the story, the story in rise of the drow is one one that a lot of us actually know. And in a way, kind of expect but it comes at a slightly different angle. The Drow are expanding. They’ve been expanding already in the Underdark. And that’s starting to impact other communities in the Underdark. Specifically, the dwarves- or in our world of Aventyr the dwarves that live in- there’s four subtypes of dwarves but the dwarves that live at the most surface level are Dweorg and a lot of our dwarven names are based on ancient mythology of ancient mythology from our world, right so so the dweorg have started to come to look for help on the surface and they’re trying to prevent a massive war. Their city is mostly is a trading a trade city. And they have, you know, everything to lose by the Drow trying to move in and starting to starting to manipulate other areas around them and starting to take over different trade routes and things like that. So that so that the dwarves are on at least one dwarf in particular is on his way to the village of Rybalka, which sits on Serpent Lake and Rybalka itself is a community where it’s a merging of two cultures. You basically got the Klavekians you can think of as like Czarist Russia and then you’ve got the Vicmordere who are a mash up of Native Americans and Vikings. And so the Vicmordere worship the ancestor spirit, they believe that that the ancestor spirit is a combination of all the wisdom of their ancestors and nature itself, that continues to speak to them and guide them. The Klavekians are all about expansion and exploitation of resources. And so they’ve moved into the region to go after specific resources and fought some wars with the Vicmordere. This is where you start out, you start out in the village Rybalka, the snow is falling, it’s starting to get dark, and you’re being summoned off to the cathedral. There’s some kind of ceremony. There’s the ceremony of light is taking place tonight. So you start heading off to the cathedral, and a series of events unfold there. And I won’t, I won’t give a lot of way as to what exactly happens, because I don’t want to spoil anything. But there’s a lot of different role playing opportunities, opportunities for players to kind of get into their characters and experience the different cultures that exist here. And then some action breaks out, right? And something, something is happening. The Drow have arrived. And no, you know, most people have no clue what these what these people are, you know, you’ve never seen these, these, these people. And they’re, they’re popping in and out. And they’re off with something important. They’re they’re off and fleeing from here, they’ve grabbed something of importance, and they’re running. And as they run, something happens. And there’s, there’s an eclipse, there’s an eclipse happening, and it’s dark out. And the eclipse is supposed to end but somehow it doesn’t, it’s you’re plunged into total darkness. And now, the eclipse is you’re trapped in this world in between worlds, basically. And you have to if you want to be the heroes that you’re meant to be, you have to have to chase these Drow down and retrieve something. And each each step starts revealing more and more clues about what’s been going on that the drought had been up here for a while, and they’ve taken slaves and things are happening, you know, they’re starting to actually change the landscape up here. And no one even knew they were here all along and, and one of the dwarves finally comes to the group and starts to tell them after, after they’ve been through this whole series of events, hey, please come down to Embla, we need your help. We need to go speak to the merchant circle of Embla and tell you what’s going on because if if we don’t get help stopping these drought, they’re not just going to be our problem, they’re going to be your problem as well. You know, we’re all in trouble. So then the adventurers go and start to delve into the into the Underdark, one of a couple of different ways to gain access. And, and from there, the story can unfold a number of different ways. Once they reach the city, the Dwarven city of Embla, some events transpire of which I can’t speak of at this time, but some events transpire and then multiple, it kind of opens up into a massive sandbox. So DM’s who aren’t great with sandboxes definitely want to be able to read ahead because there’s so much content, there’s so many places people can go. And I what I always recommend is ask your group, like, before the next session, where do you get where you guys thinking going next time? Okay, and what’s your backup plan? So you know, so that you know, kind of, okay, these are the sections I’m going to read about because there’s no way you can read a 550 page book and actually retain all of that, you know, over the course of all these sessions, so you’ll have to grab little tidbits. The book I should speak of, I didn’t tell you this is of extremely high quality. So it’s a soft touch cover. It’s got foil on the cover and the spine. It’s got purple head and tail bands, purple metallic endpapers. And then it also has a two ribbon bookmarks. One is purple, one is silver. And the reason for that is so you can mark your place where you are in the book as far as the adventure or campaign setting goes. And then also somewhere back, like if you need to mark a bestiary for an encounter something got somewhere the best year you can have that year marked as well. So because we knew, you know, people gonna be flipping back and forth a lot. So that helps out. And we use the highest quality of paper, ink, all of that stuff, you know, that the printer could provide to make this book because we want it to be something that’s really special to last on your shelf for a lot of years, and you get a lot of joy out of but that’s basically kind of the as much as I can tell without giving a lot of way. But there are so many locations to visit in the campaign setting section, so many things to do. I mean, it’s, it’s incredible, there’s, you can play it, you could probably play it five times, and each group will go to totally different places and tackle it in a completely different way. So.

Randall 

I got to say, and I hope you don’t hate the analogy. So I grew up in an era where like, the mind opening RPG that I played was Final Fantasy seven.

Jonathan 

Okay, yeah.

Randall 

Where, right. Like you’re stuck in Midgar. And you’re you have to do all this content and Midgar and like, it’s kind of da-da-da and then all of a sudden, the world opens up, and you’re out there and you’re like, Whoa, like, I can do anything! And kind of what you’re describing it almost, it gave me that same feeling of like, Okay, we’re gonna be a little bit on rails, you know, not to say completely, but a little bit, we’re gonna be chained to this. We’re gonna build up the story, we’re gonna get to the point where like, Okay, we know, we want to solve this. And then what you described, like just opening the world up and saying, now, what do you want to do? Where do you want to go? It’s up to you.

Jonathan 

No, I absolutely love that I think you’re spot on. And it’s just like any. It’s actually any really good storytellers. If you if you follow along stories, and even though many of us probably hated how Game of Thrones ended, and you know, no spoilers, some people are hanging on this and haven’t watched the end, but-

Randall 

Just leave it alone. Drop it.

Jonathan 

But still to in order to get you into the story, they have to kind of like, drop in, you drop in these characters bit by bit, you start to understand who they are and what their place is. And then here’s a new location. And here’s another new location. The next, you know, here’s another one. You don’t just give it all at once. If I just gave you all of the backstory to rise the Drow and tried to, like, prep the players, you’d be so overwhelmed with information. So yeah, it’s like, I think, you know, when you start out those lower levels, it does help to have like, here’s a bit of a railroad with some little like side tracks you can take. But once we get you guys up to speed, you know who you are, and you know your relation to everything else in the world, and how it might may or may not interact with you, you understand who the Dweorg are or who the Hoolians are, the bat creatures live in these caves, you know, or the Funglettes it’s in the fungi forest. If you start to understand those different creatures, and maybe their roles even politically in what’s transpiring, then you kind of can now be let loose and now you’re wandering around the Underdark doing whatever, right? Like, searching, searching for certain clues or taking a certain path or being stealthy and trying to maybe get into the drow city for additional information or raise, attempting to raise an army and attacking hold off the drow city outright. You know, I mean, you could come at it from a many different ways.

Tyler 

Now, I’ve really liked that bit of DM advice you gave a couple minutes ago. Asking players at the end of the session, where do you want to go next session? And then what’s your backup plan? Like that is solid advice for any sandbox that I hope people will follow. Huge adventure. 500 plus page book. What’s the level range on this thing?

Jonathan 

The level range for the adventures is levels one through 15 and if you go in exploring, continue to explore basically I would say that you’re going to get at least to level 20. So you could get a full levels one through 20 out of this book and continued adventures thereafter, right? So it’s it’s the real full deal all in one book.

Tyler  

So, so for people looking for that full one to 20 experience from a published adventure like we haven’t seen that from Wizards of the Coast yet and fifth edition so this might be a good place to look.

Jonathan 

I will warn people though that the the last part of this adventure originally it was a trilogy, right? So we had a trilogy and then we came up with a prologue and an epilogue and then that all got merged into one massive book. The epilogue is… not only is it for higher level characters, but it is not for for novice players. If… there are actually parts in it where if you get to a certain spot you will die. There are parts of it where you if you make the wrong choice you cannot go back. You’re, you know, and I can’t I don’t want to give any spoilers but it’s um… it’s basically it’s not, it’s not your typical Dungeons and Dragons encounter. It’s not your typical maps. It’s not your… you’re completely thrown to something where you must keep your wits about you probably no no drinking many a night. Yeah, exactly. You get to keep your wits about you. Because just because you’re high level doesn’t mean you’re necessarily going to survive it. So it’s it is very, very tough at the end.

Randall 

Alright, so I’m hearing 5e famously forgiving compared to previous editions, the epilogue of Rise of the Drow: less forgiving.

Jonathan 

Mm hmm, exactly. Yeah, pretty brutal.

Randall 

All right. Jonathan, do you have any other projects coming down the pike?

Jonathan 

Yeah, we’ve got a quite a few projects. Um, I don’t like to reveal everything. But I do have two, you know, the two things that I can drop here in this podcast is, and I haven’t told anyone else’s. Obviously, we’ve already announced about the Pathfinder, Second Edition conversion of the Mini-Dungeon Tome. And we’ll do some kind of fundraiser for that at some point to make that printed and reality and get out in people’s hands. But the really big one that I’m really excited about is my own full-on return to adventure writing, where this is an adventure strictly by myself, with a lot of help from Tilo Graf to help me refine it, and lots of hours of play testing, but also by myself, throughout COVID, and it is called Roltmork. And Roltmork is an adventure about duality. Everything in life has duality. Light and dark, life and death. And so this adventure steps into that, and it’s always hard to share adventures without giving too many spoilers, right? Because if I’m talking about adventure, and someone’s players are listening, they may go, oh, well, now I know all about what’s happening here. But but the short version is, is that Roltmork is an adventure that starts out around levels six to seven. And it takes place in the Aventir campaign setting in an area known as the disputed territories, specifically in Chonia and Baybonia. So if those two if people are interested in checking out any of the any of our blog posts, we have something called avontuur adventures, and some of those blog posts deal with and address some of these new locations kind of surrounding where this story’s all unfolding and taking place I haven’t shared any of the artwork or anything yet. Maybe, you know, I could send you guys a one image or something like that if you guys want to post it out there when you when you post this live or whatever, out to the world. But we’ve been working behind the scenes on on the story, the artwork, the statblocks all of this and we’ve introduced actually new mechanics so part of the new mechanic new mechanics are that creatures in this adventure, and again this is so hard because I want to tell you everything but I can’t get away, right? It’s this nacient, there’s an ancient culture the Grekian’s they were very advanced. And they had different locations throughout the realm that were of great significance and one place was at Fort Roltmork. Underneath fort Roltmork in this tall spire of stone that some legends said what were a great giant that was once turned a stone. This fort was built upon its head, and within within it a water clock of great design. Great Grekian ingenuity and engineering. And this this water clock would bring life back to this land, this land that was becoming very parched as the climate was changing, and people were starving and dying and dying of thirst. And this water clock was brought about by the Vasian’s the the in our world the the deity of water and specifically freshwater and life is the goddess known as Vasi. And so this water clock, and picture the Yin Yang symbol, right? This water clock was able to create water and create blessed water for this entire region and cleanse everything but something happened long ago. Something transpired and the place is now in ruins. It’s 1000 years later, and the adventurers are coming to this place. And they come upon some very strange things going on at the top of the ruins. And as they start to travel on they come upon different different people and different creatures and different things. But one of the one of the mechanics that we’re introducing in this for D&D Fifth Edition is that there are creatures that are in stagnation mode. And there are creatures that are in flow mode. And so think of stagnation as green and flow as in blue. And as they go through the adventure, they start to find things they every once awhile they find a token. A flow token or a stagnation token. It’s like little bits of almost, like, crystallized stagnant, stagnant water or crystallized clean pure fresh water. And they there are other things as well. Without giving away any spoilers. But anytime there are certain interactions you can, you could use a certain power to change it from stagnation to flow. So picture monster stat block, and certain abilities are in green. Other abilities are in blue, certain immunities or resistances or conditions think that you know condition immunities are, some of them are blue, and some of them are green. So depending on which mode the creature’s in, it changes completely. It changes the way it reacts, it changes the way it fights. And the characters have the ability to interact with these different aspects within here. So so there’s a duality to the adventure and I always like to play off of a lot of like, you may see this as evil, but from their perspective, they see you as evil, right? Like alignment is kind of in my brain kind of irrelevant because everyone thinks they’re good guys, so there’s there’s some duality and some of that, you know exploration both inner and outer. I will say that there’s a little bit, without without giving too much away, there’s a little hint about, there’s some information about the past. And there’s some mechanics and things that happen in this adventure which haven’t may not have happened in other published adventures before. So it’s been three, three years in the making. The original adventure, it was crazy. The only time that Tilo Graf ever came out here who’s been working with me on this project, we were actually playing that adventure when he came out. And so he got to play in person with us when he was out here on game night, which was kind of fun. And then now it’s years later, and we’re still working on it. And I’ve been running play tests on this adventure so much, like I said, I did Friday night, Saturday morning, Sunday morning, Monday night, and last night on Tuesday night, which obviously, this will be recorded and played later, what have you. But I’ve, I’ve put in so many hours behind the scenes, testing things out, tweaking things, changing things. And then after every session, and actually I’d recommend this for DM’s to do this not only for play tests, but just at your own table. After every session. I pull up my phone, I say, Okay, guys, I hit record. Do I have permission to record your voices? Yeah? Cool. Let’s go. And ask them what did you like? What did you dislike? What? What are the things you disliked? How would you like to see them changed? You know, did you feel like in this combat? Did you feel like your character had something engaging that they could be doing? Or are you just twiddling your thumbs being like, do that? When’s this comic gonna be over, you know? And so every single bit of feedback I got from every player and some of these players have been, you know, these guys played with like, they still one of the guys still plays with Peter Adkison all the time. These guys have all played with a lot of very experienced dungeon masters over the years, and I’ve gotten some incredible feedback. We’ve completely revised certain sections of the adventure and then rerun them again. It’s had a lot of refinement, and I really think it’s going to be incredible, and that people are really going to enjoy the adventure. So yeah, it’s called Roltmork.

Randall 

Yeah, I’m really excited about that. Like, that mechanic that you described, it seems amazing, because you could go through a place and you’re like, ah, I don’t care about these creatures, like, you know, they’re, they’re weak, this isn’t a big deal. We can walk through it, and all of a sudden, this scenario changes. And now like, wow, you know, what was fine is now no longer okay. And I have to get out of here.

Jonathan 

Yeah. And get this. So the artwork for this, every single creature that we have in stagnation mode, we also have the same creature redrawn in, in in flow mode. So every single creature in the book has two artworks to go with it.

Tyler 

Oh, that’s great.

Randall 

That’s pretty awesome. Yeah, that’s actually really, really awesome. Cool. So that’ll be exciting. I’ll say you have a couple of cool things going on. So one, the Mini-Dungeons Tome.

Jonathan 

Yes.

Randall 

Coming to Pathfinder 2. This project as well. I’ll say now, when you get to the point where those things a little more mature, you want to tell people about them again, Welcome back.

Jonathan 

Definitely.

Randall 

We’ll talk about it again.

Jonathan 

Rogue marks gonna have a Kickstarter coming up, for sure. I’m thinking probably around… probably probably April. So

Randall 

Awesome. Yeah, no, we would love to have you back. We’ll talk about it kind of keep people up to date. Let people know where to go find the Kickstarter whenever you have it ready.

Jonathan 

Perfect.

Randall 

Another thing we were curious about kind of looking at all the content across AAW games. Do you ever see a point where you start publishing modules on roll20 or other virtual tabletops?

Jonathan 

It’s funny you should mention that. So we have been publishing for Fantasy Grounds for so long that I actually know Doug and the guys like back when I first went to Gen Con ever. Somehow I ended up with them. They’re like, Hey, let’s go for beers, you know, and like, and I’d already been doing Fantasy Grounds because my friends CJ, he was my other friend that passed away. That was our DM. He was really into Fantasy Grounds. So that’s why I kind of like dug into them. But so yeah, I got to know the Fantasy Grounds guys really good back in the day. And actually, actually, I hooked up Jen Page up with her job there. Because Because I knew those guys so well. And then then there was, uh, roll20. When they first came out our adventure was the very first adventure you could get you just get for free, actually Crow’s Rest Island. Our first adventure we ever made was A1 Crypt of the Sun Lord, but we created an adventure called A0, that is happens before that. And that adventure is called crows rest Island. And that was the very first adventure that you could get a roll20. And it was just free. You would log in and say you create your own game where it says play this game. And we had it on there before there even was a marketplace. But funnily enough, funnily enough is like after it got going. We kind of… I don’t know, we were just busy, right? We were doing other things. We didn’t know how to do all the conversions, and we just frankly didn’t have the time, right? So we were mostly doing Fantas yGrounds. But now we’ve got someone that’s dedicated roll20 person and we got a couple of people are dedicated Fantasy Grounds. And now we also have Foundry as well, and Rise the Drow is actually going to be released on Foundry within the next probably week or two. And that one, the developer’s has been working on it for over a year like day and night. Pluging insane hours. It comes with it comes with tons of audio. It comes with like all the extras. I mean, it’s insane. It is like probably one of the biggest things that anyone’s put together for Foundry. But yes, we have plans to come to all of those and ther are already Roll20 modules are in the works right now, that will be released very soon. So just watch the marketplace for AAW games

Tyler 

Wow, that’s a lot.

Randall 

And then yeah, if when the continent when Rize of the Drow content comes out on Foundry, if you send it to us through the power of the internet, we’ll just stick that link in people won’t know that it wasn’t there when we first released the podcast.

Jonathan 

Oh, I should point out to roll20 is or Yeah, Rise of the Drow is also coming to roll20. That one’s been in the works for a while we were supposed to come out in quarter four of last year. But again, I think anybody that works on this thing kind of goes, Oh, yeah, I got it. I got it. And I get into like, oh, man, this is this is a beast. I’m still struggling through this thing. I got to make sure it’s perfect. And the guy working, is just like obsessed about every single thing being perfect. And so he’s still working through with a fine tooth comb. And he won’t give me a final ETA, but I’m thinking we’ll see it within the next probably two to three months in roll20 as well. So watch for it there. And when you guys are ready for that, let me know I can send you free links and all that so you can get it for free and check it out.

Randall 

Awesome, yeah.

Jonathan 

Not for all your listeners, but for you guys.

Tyler 

Well we have to review it and then you know promote it to all the people listening.

Randall 

Exactly, exactly. That’s the plan. That’s the plan. Do you have any, like, conferences, any shows you plan on attending soon?

Jonathan 

Yep, it’ll be at Gen Con 2022. And I will hopefully this will be like the end of COVID and walk it out there. And we’re gonna have an awesome party and play games. That’s the plan. So we’re actually… AAW games has been to Gen Con before but we share booths with other fans and friends and other companies. This is gonna be our first time where we have just a booth that’s all our own. And because of that they put us on Entrepreneurs Avenue, so check, check us out Entrepreneurs Avenue, and we’ll all be dressed as drow. I have plans, I don’t know if the  plans will pan out, but I have plans of converting my entire booth into a cave with like flickering candles and drow walking around with our tomes and drawing you in to trap you into our booth and you might disappear there, who knows. But that’s what’s going on there. We’re also running a ton of games, and we’re looking for dungeon masters. So if you want to run some D&D 5e games at Gen Con and get a free badge and some cool AAW swag. You can go on our website AdventureAWeek.com or AAWgames.com, they both go to the same place. And check out the blog post there we’ve Eric Roth on our Discord channel is the way to hook up. Oh, and our Discord community is the place to go. It’s just us and a bunch of cool people hanging out and talking about nerdy D&D stuff all the time. So if you can’t sleep, hop on, say, Hey, I can’t see what’s going on? Well, we’ll share some cool like miniatures we painted or something, you know.

Randall 

Nice. And I think you’ve mentioned a few different blog posts. Like, links that folks should follow. So folks at home, don’t worry, we’re gonna have links to all of that in the show notes so you’ll be able to follow it as as we go. All right, Jonathan, thank you so much for being with us tonight.

Jonathan 

Yeah, thanks for having me! This has been a lot of fun.

Randall 

Awesome.

Jonathan 

Oh, and if anyone else wants to check us out, check out AAWgames.com. Sell your soul to the corp– No, just kidding. Just come check us out. Come download some some free mini dungeons. Play ’em with your friends. Hit us up on Discord. I think it’s a bit.ly/AAWgames gets you over to our Discord or they’ll show the link in here as well. But honestly, I’m just excited to connect with other people that have creative minds and like to play D&D. I think the world would be a better place if we just convince everyone they need to play role playing games. So yeah, keep having fun.

Randall 

No, absolutely. 100%. All right. Thanks, folks. Have a good night. There’s no pressure to be funny right now, but if you could like right now that’d be really cool.

Jonathan 

I don’t know if you want to keep the sell your soul bit. That’s just like, some random thing I threw in there for no reason.

Randall 

I think it should be there.

3 Comments

  1. DMToolbox February 18, 2022
  2. Jenica Langdon February 18, 2022