16 D&D Carnival Games

Here are some carnival games you can put into your campaign between adventures or when the characters find a town that happens to be having a festival of some kind. The prizes should be mechanically worthless souvenirs that the party will enjoy roleplaying with but won't really gain any advantage with. This set of rules comes with a bonus rule on getting drunk!

D&D Homebrew: My 10 Favorite Homebrew Rules

Ever since I discovered Critical Role, I've been obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons 5e. No other medium or pastime has fully captured all of the aspects of creativity that I enjoy: worldbuilding, epic combat, monstrous creatures, and amazing unexpected story paths. Since then, I've compiled a myriad of lists of homebrew rules, riddles, magic items, custom spells, and random generators to help me with my preferred method of enjoying D&D: Dungeon Mastering.

I figured now that my YouTube channel, while more active than ever, isn't being focused on in Pretzel Lectern, I should use it to post more D&D content like other D&D blogs I've seen, my most favorite of which are theangrygm.com and blogofholding.com. Today I'll be looking at a few homebrew rules that enhance the D&D experience for me.

Poem: Time Never Ceases

I already published this poem on this blog under a different name, but I realized I had an updated version I revised in my creative writing class that made it more... poetic, I guess. It was kind of dumb in the original version for just being about food. This one adds some emotion into it by moving up the ladder of abstraction every once in a while and eliminating clichés.

Time Never Ceases

Drinks get warm

Food gets cold

Crackers get stale

Friends get annoying

Bread gets hard

Cereal gets soggy

Soda gets flat

Clothes tighten

Fruit spoils

Vegetables wilt

Ice cream melts

Children grow up

Gravy lumps

Cheese molds

Eyesight blurs

Milk sours

Hair grays

Meat rots 

Pets die

Time never ceases.

Poem: Craving

I made this in a creative writing class my second year of college, back when I was still having withdrawals from Brazil. Not a huge fan of it because it don't rhyme none, but from what I can tell from other free-verse poetry, I think it's not half-bad the way it talks about simplicity and nostalgia vs. fanciness.

Craving

I have tasted succulent steaks,

Seasoned with pepper and sauce and cooked just a little bit pink.

Sandwiches and hamburgers,

Some so tall you have to pin them together with a toothpick.

Salads so fresh,

Every half-moon of lettuce, cucumber, and celery would crunch.

Breadsticks dripping with butter—

Literally dripping. And all rough and salty with garlic on top.

I have sampled soups and broths,

Whose robust aroma warms the kitchen for half the evening.

Restaurants have their specialties, and the melting pot of America

Also happens to be bubbling with a dozen different cultural sauces.

But oh, how I long for a simple Brazilian coxinha,

Golden and fried, made from a common chicken

Cooked in a plywood stall, by a tattered gentleman

Feeding strangers so his family can eat.

Poem: Dragon Eggs

So here's the story about this poem that I dug up this past weekend at my parents' house: In fifth grade there was a city poetry contest put on by the chamber of commerce or something... one of the chambers. Anyway, it covered all the school districts and age groups in Madison county. I decided to enter this poem, and I ended up winning an honorable mention and got to recite it in front of a lot people at a city presentation at the Rexburg Tabernacle. It's nonsensical and really kind of cheesy and pretentious in a childlike, innocent way, but I do have to admire my rhyming meter and syllabification. I've always had an amazing ear for making poetry sound perfectly organized. It goes with my editor nature, of course, but it's kind of interesting that I had that gift even twenty years ago just leaving elementary school.

I have no idea what a two-decker egg is or what an egg does when it's "crooking," but my rhymes were on point, at least—thinking about the odd topic I chose for this poem, I'd bet anything the first line just popped into my head one day and I just kept repeating it to myself till it was polished, long beyond the point of having any sense to it anymore. It's also noteworthy that the poem can be sung to a pirate song on an old Felix the Cat cartoon called "The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg." As much as I was tempted to fix the grammar and punctuation, I decided to just preserve it.

Dragon Eggs

Oh, the eggs in my wagon are those of a Dragon,

they're different. Yes, it is true.

For there's green ones and black ones and small, slightly cracked ones,

there's even some shades of bright blue.

There're eggs with spots and eggs with dots and eggs with red-and-white checkers.

Some eggs are weird-looking like ones that are crooking,

and bumpy and, strangely, two-decker!

So, if you see me pulling eggs and you see

that the eggs in the cart are real funny,

Then don't forget that the eggs that sit

in my wagon are worth lots of money.

The eggs in my wagon are those of a Dragon,

they're wonderful...

Yes, it is true.

Streaming

I decided I'm going to start streaming! My friend ClassicJoog has given me some pointers, and provided I can get my internet to be a bit faster, it may be a fun supplemental thing to do when it comes to gaming and making Warcraft content. Mainly I'm doing this out of necessity, since a perk I promised my YouTube members involves a monthly stream, but I'm gonna do it right, with custom borders and badges and whatnot. Here's my first creation: a gif that appears when I get a new subscriber or donation!

Warcraft 3 Easter Eggs: Spells and Icons, Part 2:

Due to the volume of videos I've made on my channel, I've decided to make this my last video I share on this blog. If you want to see the rest, follow my channel. This is a good one to end on, too, since it basically closes up the entire series I've worked on up to this point, and it's my longest video to date.

I CAN NOT believe how big the channel has gotten. As of this writing, I have almost 10,000 subscribers, 10 members or patrons, 91 videos, and I've made about $500 off of ad revenue! I can't believe this! It's incredible that I happened to stumble on these secrets almost exactly three years ago, and turn them into an amazing way for me to share my love of Warcraft to the internet. I met a Blizzard developer, I get most of my viewers from Recommended videos on YouTube, and now I'm going to get into streaming! It's a dream come true. My only hope now is that someday I'll run into someone in real life who says "Hey! You're Abelhawk!"