The Time Warp – Mastering the Strange Way Time Flows in Your D&D Campaign

Play through an adventure and you’ll realize how strangely time can move in your D&D campaign. Longtime friend of the show, Dr. DM (Jason) returns with a question about his ocean-based campaign that we discussed in Episode 148. His question revolves around how quickly leveling can affect the passage of time in the adventure. In … Read more

A Knight’s Tale: Make D&D Alignment Work For You and Elevate Your Dragonlance Campaign

One of the players is planning on playing an evil wizard wearing the Black Robes. Is this doable in the campaign seeing that the group is going to face off against some Black Robes, or is this really hard to uphold in a further good aligned party? Our Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen campaign … Read more

Welcome to the Jungle: 5 Simple Tips for Starting a Tomb of Annihilation D&D Campaign

Greetings, 3WD-verse! DM Chris here. Along with Curse of Strahd, Tomb of Annihilation occupies a revered status as one of the “must-play” adventures in D&D. It has grown from the original Tomb of Horrors module into a complete setting, with the aforementioned Tomb lurking deep in the dangerous and vast Chultan jungle. Death and glory … Read more

Unlock Adventure: The 4 Essential Steps To Running Mini-Sessions

Greetings, 3WD-verse! DM Chis here. In our latest Return to the Further session last Wednesday night, the players valiantly battled a Dragonborn Mummy Lord and his Green Dragon protector to remove the evil taint that had claimed the ancient elven city of Ennama. All that in two hours on a Wednesday night. Mini-session campaigns can … Read more

Signed, Sealed, Delivered – Revolutionize Your D&D Games With Digital Tools

Running the adventure outside of the game session? Yes, that’s right. Starting back in DM Dave’s Curse of Strahd campaign, we began to develop characters and backstories with narrative side quests via text, email, and online documents (like Google Docs). In our Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen campaign, we have utilized them from the … Read more

Shipping Up To Boston – Uncovering The Secrets To Running An Epic Pirate D&D Campaign

Pirates. It doesn’t take long for a D&D group to want to play as pirates, swashbucklers, privateers, and sailors. In our modern day, we can blame Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean. But how do you approach running a seafaring adventure? Is it just a fancy travel mechanic? Is it … Read more

A Whole New World: DM Chris’ Top 3 Tips for Turning TTRPG Sourcebooks Into D&D Campaigns

Greetings, 3WD-verse! DM Chris here. As I begin my preparation for our upcoming Lord of the Rings Roleplaying campaign, I thought it would be a cool exercise to talk about what I’m doing to get it ready. When you are operating from a sourcebook versus a published adventure, there can be the additional stress of … Read more

It’s the End of the World: 3 Wise DMs Pro Tips to Ending Your D&D Campaign the Right Way

The 3 Wise DMs are all approaching campaign finales: DM Tony’s Journey to Ragnarok, DM Chris’ “Wednesday-Nighters” campaign in our homebrewed world of The Further, and DM Dave’s Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen campaign. Just like the start of a campaign, the end only comes along once. So what should you focus on when … Read more

The Ties That Bind – Tying Together Characters, Backstories, And Adventures To Create The Most Immersive D&D Game Ever

Immersion in your D&D game. It’s one of the most sought after and asked about topics in the whole DMing Multiverse. The real trick always lies in how well you can tie together all the seemingly disparate pieces of your group – characters, backstories, motivations, and adventures – into one cohesive, epic story. In this … Read more

Chill, Till The Next Episode – 3WD Answers The Question Of How Long An Adventure Should Be And How To Build Episodic Adventures For Your D&D Game.

Our current zeitgeist in storytelling are epic, longform adventures that span entire book, television, and film series… think Avatar: The Last Airbender, Lord of the Rings, ACOTAR, and the MCU. And while these epic stories are incredibly engrossing, are they the best default for our gaming tables?

In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave answer a listener question asking for our advice on running episodic adventures, which serves as our jumping off point to an excellent question by TTRPG influencer and Running the Game Dungeon MASTER, Matt Colville, of “How long should an adventure be?”