Clara Daly
Appearances
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Thanks for having me. It's great to be chatting with both of you again.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Yeah, so Horizons Magazine is a new TTRPG game magazine for fifth edition and other systems with four articles every quarter full of cool stuff to use in your games. We also have an op-ed every issue, which is a nerdy deep dive from the desk of many thoughts.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
First one is by me and my co-founder, and we have a bunch of other cool folks in the works to write about their nerdy ideas, thoughts, passions, rants, and a lot of other game designers and amazing illustrators lined up. But first, let's talk about the issue that just came out.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Sorry, I jumped ahead right there. So eager to get into it. So I am a game designer and editor and sometime art director and wearer of many hats, as many of us in this industry are. I've been working in TTRPGs for about, oh God, like six years now, which feels like, which isn't that long in the grand 50 year history of D&D, but sure feels like it's gone by fast.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And I've worked with both of you in the past on Wizards of the Coast products, on DMs Guild add-up stuff back when that was a thing. I worked with Critical Role on a number of their books, including as the co-lead designer and the managing editor of Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting Reborn. on also Explorer's Guide to Wildemeyer and Call of the Netherdeep.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And I was the managing editor at MCDM Productions for a while leading a magazine called Arcadia, which is the precursor to what we are doing now with Horizons at my publishing company, Wildemeyer Press.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Yeah, so Clara I met as an illustrator for Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting Reborn. So Clara is a fantastic woman and creator of many talents, which is many talents and many creative and nerdy hobbies, which is one of the things we bonded over and became friends. But we met when she was brought on to do some illustration for Tal'Dorei Reborn. We needed some item illustration.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And there are a lot of fan artists out there who do amazing character art. A lot of fan artists out there do scenes and landscapes. And we needed somebody who was really strong in illustrating stuff and illustrating items and spot art. And that kind of thing is... Sometimes a little less flashy, but requires just as much skill and knowledge.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And I looked at Clara's fan art and looked at her website and said, oh, she's a graphic designer. She is doing this really cool fan art with these still lives. She seems really cool. I think she'll be great for this. And
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
We loved working with her so much that we had her do some more extra pieces of art and I connected her with the folks on the main Critical Role streaming side and she's had a fantastic time working with them doing key art for Critical Role Campaign 3 of the beginning setting there, the key art for Exandria Unlimited Calamity, the key art for Downfall.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
So she's done a bunch of art with them and worked on some things with me on Arcadia. She tries out a whole bunch of different styles as an illustrator. So she does painterly fantasy, she does art nouveau, she does travel posters. She just
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
is always down to experiment and try new things uh artistically and then we've also become friends and like i said bonded over having many many hobbies um for her that's everything from abandoned building photography to crochet uh to playing games to gardening um and
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
I came to her earlier this year and said, hey, you've got this cool day job where she is a director of interactive strategy, does PR, web design, communications, graphic design, all of this at her cool real person day job. I said, you've got this cool real person day job. You've got a ton of hobbies. Would you be interested in co-leading a magazine and founding a company with me?
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
I'm going to ask on the off chance, but I know you're probably busy." And she said, wait, hell yeah, I would be. That sounds great. I love collaborating with you. Let's do it. And I said, wait, whoa, really? Okay, let's do it. Because I'd had this idea percolating.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
I was at MCDM and they were moving away from 5e and moving away from regular release subscription-based content and didn't want to do Arcadia anymore. And the fans and community were really sad about that. And as a creator, I'd really enjoyed working on that and leading it. And there was a gap in the industry for something like that.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And I wanted to continue on, do something Arcadia-like, continue that legacy, make it my own, be able to expand and experiment and try new things. But I didn't want to do it by myself, right? You guys know you guys have been freelancers for a long time. It can be really lonely. And...
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
the endeavor of starting something new and starting a company that carries with a lot of responsibility and stress. And that's just not something I wanted to do if it was just me at the helm. So I
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
was and continue to be incredibly overjoyed and grateful that Clara came on and has been such a big part of this as co-founder, bringing her marketing and branding knowledge, her graphic design, our logo, the Horizons title, our website, the layout. That's all her. It's, you know, it's a collaborative process back and forth, right? I have opinions. I weigh in.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
She lets me get there and fiddle with things sometimes. But that is all her skills and knowledge and hard work and time that she brings to bear with all of that. And it's just been a, yeah, obviously it's been a really fantastic collaboration. It's really special to get to do this.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
We've enjoyed learning from each other, too. So. Like I mentioned, I'd fallen sideways into art directing for Tal'Dorei Reborn, which is how I met Clara. But I am not an illustrator by trade and experience, and she is.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
So collaborating on art directing for Horizons with her has been really fun because I get to show her, okay, well, this is the process I have used, and this is how I set up art briefs.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
and contact the artists and you know this is what I'm thinking about when I pick out an artist and here's about the amount of time we give them and some considerations and then she writes some art briefs for the first time and it's like wow this really does take a long time to write our briefs and I'm like I know right
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
But then we get to look at the works in progress, the thumbs, the sketches, which is one of my favorite parts of art directing. It's just amazing to get to see that and discuss. And sometimes when I'm not sure what feedback to give, she actually, whenever I'm not sure what feedback to give, she really knows what...
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
direction or what notes we want to provide to the artist because she has a different insight into the process than I do. So yeah, it's been really fun learning from each other. I have a software development background, but she's the one doing all the coding for the website. So just a lot of Venn diagram overlap and synergy and learning.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
I guess I just filled my anxiety quota with everything else.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
But I spent a lot of time as a freelance editor not getting to see the art for products. And then the book would come out with art in it or maps in it. I'd be like, well, that doesn't match the text. Why did nobody notice that that doesn't match the text? Or I would... be in the middle of editing something and then they would send over a map and I'd be like, well, that doesn't match.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Are we still allowed to change this map? Can you change the labels? Like one of these things has got to change or the GM and the players are going to have a bad experience. So even though it is a lot of work and time, I enjoy being able to have my fingers in those pies and really let art and design inform each other. Yeah.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
The thing I love most about creating for tabletop games, this is no exaggeration, this is over much creative soul search I have determined. The thing I love most about working on tabletop games is that I am creating things people then use in their games in completely transformative and unexpected ways.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And it's really like no other genre there, the level of collaboration between quote unquote creator and quote unquote audience. And...
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
magazines things like horizons to me are the epitome of that because i am providing chunks of game content that have been really thoroughly designed developed play tested edited to be able to be used as easily as possible in the form they're presented in so it can just be You know, you get this stat block, you get this location, you can drop it right into your game tonight.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
You know, this can be the next location your players go to. You can put that quest hook in. You can run a one-shot with this. You can use these monsters and, you know, kind of be reading their abilities at the table if you gotta because we want to make it as, you know, smooth of an experience as possible. But also at the same time,
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
There is a complete awareness that a large percentage of people, maybe even the majority of the people reading and using this content, aren't going to use it as is. And that's cool and fine and perfect too. That you're going to take inspiration from this, you're going to chop it up, you're going to re-flavor it, you're going to...
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
take this cloud city and say, well, I like this idea, but my players are in the underground, so I'm going to make it an underground city and change up the flavor. You're going to take this stat block and make it look different. You're going to give the abilities different names. You're going to use it in an entirely different game system. Any and all of that is intended.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And I really love that, and I love hearing people's stories of the things they do with stuff I work on. I mean, it just comes down to that. And A magazine is the perfect vehicle for that. And it also lets me work with a lot of really cool different people because we have so many different chunks of content from different authors.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And I can work with folks I have collaborated with a lot in the past and bring them back and say, pitch me some new stuff. Say, hey, that thing you pitched me a couple of years ago, I'd really like to make this happen now. And also try out new people. and work with new creators and artists and editors and constantly be introducing new collaborators into our community.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
One of the biggest things I learned from Arcadia and from MCDM is playtesting. They absolutely set a standard in the tabletop industry as a whole for playtesting and what playtesting should look like and how it can be really powerful and valuable. So we're using a similar two-phase playtesting process.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
So everything that is in Horizons and everything that we'll publish goes through development with the lead designer or managing editor, which in the case of Horizons is me, the editor-in-chief. And then it goes to a first set of alpha testers who are folks that we have essentially as permanent contractors who are reviewing all of the content for the systems they're familiar with.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
So Horizons is not only 5e, and we could talk about that more, but they go to the alpha testers who are folks on contract.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
uh who review these articles and use them in games and read them through and give us a bunch of notes and feedback on and then it goes back to me and i read through all of that feedback talk to the author make some suggestions and requests the author does a round of revisions and then we do that all all over again another play test more feedback more revisions
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
tweaks, and then it goes to another editor. So in the case of this first issue of Horizons, that 5E editor is the incredible Sadie Lowery, Aon, who is also an amazing designer in her own right. And for the Pathfinder article, that is Simone D. Saleh, who is a staff editor at Paizo working on Pathfinder there.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And they bring in a completely fresh set of eyes, their own expertise, really polish everything up. and make it sound and look beautiful and the mechanics all be smooth. Any last things that need to be ironed out to go to layout. At the same time, we're also getting art made for it. So...
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
So yeah, one of the big things I learned from Arcadia and from the folks at MCDM and in particular James Intricasso, who is the lead game designer there, was that playtest process and using both gathering and using that feedback from testers to continue to develop and improve.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
I've worked on products that get a lot of playtest feedback, but the feedback itself isn't necessarily of the type that we really solicit and look for, especially from our alpha testers, where these are people who are not game designers usually, but who are extremely familiar with the rules, extremely familiar with the rules
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
game mechanically and from a just player community level and can give specific feedback on, okay, this is what happened, this is what the issue is. Not saying, well, I think X should be Y, right? I think this is bad and you should fix it by changing it to this because this is good. But saying, this was what the experience was and here's why it landed or didn't land.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
and making it really clear and relatively easy for us as developers and designers to say, okay, I see that these things were issues. So here are some ways that I could suggest that we might fix these issues. And then I would bring those to the designer. If we have a like separate designer for that article, that's not me, which is most of the articles in Horizons and say,
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
So the testers pointed this out. I'm thinking that we should do X, Y, Z. What do you think? And sometimes the designer will say, yeah, let's do X. That makes total sense. Here, I'm gonna go implement it. Sometimes the designer will say, Actually, I don't think this was as much of a problem as a preference. And then we discuss and we say, well, maybe it's the way it was presented.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Let's mitigate this by doing something different. Or they come up with an even better idea than any of the ones I've suggested. So yeah, like you said, it's a very involved, time-consuming process, but an intensely collaborative one, which is one of the really fun parts of it.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Yeah, so as a creator and as a RPG player, my roots are in 5e, as you guys both know. And so it's a system I've been playing for a long time. It's how I got started creating in the industry. I still really love creating for and playing it. And it's also a very popular system that a lot of people are still playing. The 2024 books so far are seeing great success. And
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
I think folks are going to keep playing it. And so I like creating for it. I didn't want to stop creating for it just because of Twitter drama. But also there are a lot of other cool RPGs out there. And I felt, if you'll pardon the pun, that this could be a great opportunity for me to expand my horizons as a creator. I see what you did there. And the...
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
The collaborative, transformative nature of the content that I mentioned before, where people can use it in whatever way they like, I felt makes it very natural to say, well, yeah, we're going to present some articles that have 5e in mind. Maybe they have a lot of 5e mechanics. Maybe they don't. Maybe they're more world building focused. It's going to be a variety, right?
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
But we're going to present some articles that are designed with 5e in mind. But then let's present another article highlighting another featured system so we can have some variety and we can show off different kinds of mechanics and different genres. And it's just an extension of the variety of types of content that are in the 5e articles, right?
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
It's just another dimension to that is, well, let's also do different systems. And one of the things that I found from my experience with Arcadia was that a lot of people just read Arcadia for the inspiration. They weren't using the content wholesale, maybe even at all. Maybe they weren't even actively running the game, but they liked reading it for the inspiration.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And maybe they weren't running 5E games, even though Arcadia was very much a 5E magazine. And so it's like, well, people are using this for inspiration in their own stuff anyway, then let's expand that. Let's provide stuff that's for inspiration, regardless of what system you play and say, hey, that's cool. You can read this Pathfinder article and try out Pathfinder second edition.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Or you can just use that stuff in your D&D game. You can try out Candela Obscura, or maybe you just see these cool archetypes that we're going to present in issue two for Candela Obscura player characters, and you say, hey, I like this investigative horror vibe. Let's make these some NPCs in my D&D game. I personally as a creator have no agenda there.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
I just want to make cool stuff that people can use in cool ways. And this was a natural extension of the variety nature of the magazine.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Well, that's a huge compliment coming from you, an academic and writer. So that means a lot to me. I had a lot of fun writing that.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
That's what it's for, you know, is that I... Yeah, so the Desk of Many Thoughts is our fifth article, if you will, our column, which is for writing that is not game content, a nerdy op-ed, a prose essay. There's fewer and fewer...
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
game focused journalism outlets in this industry and there are a lot of articles on outlets and blogs that are like these people publish this product and here's what's in it and i like it or don't like it and i
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
really wanted a place for more prose writing about games and to do with games and to do with nerdy stuff related in some way to fantasy, tabletop, role-playing, gaming, dice, what have you, that wasn't a press release and wasn't a purely academic paper. Because the stuff happening in the academic side, and Sean, you and I have talked about this a little, is super cool.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And some of it is very focused on actual play, which is also super cool. But I also feel like, oh yeah, I want to comment on this and I want to be part of this research. And then it's like, Well, actually, I'm kind of at the periphery of the actual play world. They're not researching exactly what I'm creating. Anyway, that's a tangent. But yeah, the Desk of Many Thoughts is our op-ed article.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
But in this first issue, it comes from me and my co-founder, Clara Daly. And we do a very nerdy deep dive into liminal spaces and why horizons and indulge in many footnotes.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
You can go to wildmagepress.com. to subscribe or purchase a single issue. You can also subscribe on Patreon, patreon.com slash wildmagepress. There are free preview PDFs both on our website, wildmagepress.com, and on DriveThruRPG. That is Horizons Issue 1 free preview, and that contains the
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
beautiful cover, the first four pages of each article, and a stat block for the protostellar Wyrmling Star Dragon, which is very cool. And Teos, you made that your desktop picture, is that right? The art of these protostellar Wyrmlings?
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
We prefer whatever is easiest for you, the listener, the audience, the subscriber. Whatever is easiest for you is going to be best for us. We get a little more through the website. We also, through the website, offer an annual subscription that's 10% off. So you can save a little that way. And the subscription subscribers also get a bunch of bonus content between issues.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
So this is a quarterly magazine. The first issue just came out now in early October. The second issue will be coming out towards the beginning of January. And between then we have a Between now and then, we have a big slate of bonus content of behind-the-scenes art process posts, tokens, bonus magic items, some collabs with other creators, maybe some handouts related to what's in the issue.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
A whole bunch of fun stuff that's just... Subscribers are going to continue getting regular bonus content between issues. Sweet.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Yeah, so issue one, we've touched on the Desk of Many Thoughts, and then the articles that you can use in your games begin with Next Stop Adventure, which is fantasy transportation for your fantasy setting. That's by Aaron Roberts, who is an amazing designer and also a professor at University of Austin, Texas. University of Texas, Austin? One of those university orders.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Anyway, she presents two new types of fantasy conveyances, the rune-powered scrawlers for traveling across countryside, town, dungeon, to locales both known and unknown. And one of the folks in our community messaged me and was like, wow, I was not expecting to start my day reading about fantasy Ubers. This is so cool. And I was like, okay, but first of all, this is slander.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Uber is a for-profit company. These scrollers are provided by a group of ex-adventurers who create them and they are extremely affordable. Also, sometimes you can get a ride for free if you offer some services to the operator or some protection from experienced adventurers might be needed.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
But yeah, there are a bunch of different types of scrawlers, including the stone steed horses and the phantom scrawlers that have no operator. And so you have to have your token to get them to stop, or you can, if you want to board illegally, try to jump on them as they're moving. And player characters can also learn the runes that power these scrawlers.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
There's like a motion rune that keeps them moving forward. There's a repelling rune that can create a blast to drive away would-be robbers or predators. There is a protection rune for inclement weather to keep the drizzle off. And there's just a bunch of cool lore and world building. tied into all of it.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And then, yeah, mechanics where player characters can learn these ruins and inscribe them on their own gear and equipment.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Yeah. And then on the other side, there's urban transportation. The Lore Riders are these big metal capsules that travel above crowded city streets on ethereal legs that phase in and out of existence. And the Lore Riders transport... city commuters and tourists alike for the price of a good and 100% honest story.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And depending on the magnitude and quality of your story, your ticket might last anywhere from a day to a year. But it is acquired by going to one of these ethereal posts marking the color-coded lore writer stops and accessing the ticket exchange demiplane and telling your story.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Well, and the Star Dragons, too, are... Oh, yeah, that's true. And actually, so the third article, maybe we'll skip around a bit, the third article, Draco Ex Asteris, is about these Star Dragons, and the author of that, Imogen Gengel, is...
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
not only a longtime Eberron author, she and Keith Baker co-authors on the latest Exploring Eberron release, but she is a real life space plasma physicist, astronomy researcher. And she pitched this article about star dragons based on the astronomy of the life cycle of a star.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Yeah, so they go from the CR7 protostellar wormlings to the adult sequenced star dragons who take their place in a variety of organizations devoted to upholding their ideals or principles in the cosmos to the venerable giant star worms, which will eventually explode in a supernova.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
That's the Cerulean Dwarf Painter, and that art is by Veronica O'Neill, who is fantastic. And... Yeah, she gave us a bunch of different sketches of different cerulean dwarf artisans in this sky city of Kukulan. And we really love this one of the painter because they're sitting on a little stool made of cloud stuff.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Their easel is made of cloud stuff, which is this solid cloud that has been shaped and worked. into implements, the stool, the easel, probably the paintbrush, but also the architecture of this city, the ground of it, everything here being built and shaped from this cloud stuff. And the Cerulean Dwarves are one of the denizens of the town of Kukulan.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
There are, there are puns that run so deep. I didn't catch, I didn't, didn't notice them until like version seven. It was like, Oh, clean air, plain air, the rock. Open-air painting, plein air, anyway. Yeah. Yeah, it's so... I mean, it's so atmospheric.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Yeah. Willy's a fantastic designer and so fun to collaborate with him. And I think it was like... pretty late in the process when the article was in edit and we were going over some stuff with the editor and we were like, well, there's a rumor board mentioned here. Maybe we should put in a couple rumors.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And I was like, Willie, hey, could you put a couple rumors that are on this rumor board to fill this out? And she comes up with some cool stuff. And it's very hard working with Willie for both of us to restrain ourselves and not have a lot of scope creep. Yeah. But yeah, that article is a lot of fun.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
There is also the terrible crane, who is just the worst and will follow you around everywhere and annoy you, but also probably be extremely important to your quest. And I don't know how to express how much I love this terrible, horrible, wonderful bird.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Yeah. So I... I reached out to authors to pitch these articles, and I reached out to Ru Dickey, who is on the marketing team at Paizo, but also a freelance designer for Pathfinder, for D&D, for a bunch of different game systems. And they pitched this article about a cool elemental mage.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And that turned into Atraxis, who is very much a plane-touched orc living in this settlement where there's a rift where the material world meets the plane of Earth. And... There is a lot of earth elemental energy there. There is the Institute of Higher Learning, the Hall of Light and Stone, where a lot of planar and arcane study happens. And Atraxis is this young prodigy mage who
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
goes to do their research at the Hall of Light and Stone and is blazing ahead of their peers with their affinity for speaking with earth elementals for transforming the stone and rock around them. And then they go to present their fantasy PhD thesis and their
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
showing how they use the resonance of of these crystals to transform them into into other things and the staid traditionalists of the administration are horrified and appalled by this um and atraxis basically runs away into the mountain caves and goes into self-imposed exile um And they live with the elementals for a while.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And then they come back thinking that, you know, expecting that there's going to be like a bit of a hullabaloo about them reappearing, that people might have been looking for them, that the university is going to be surprised they're back. And instead, they find that pretty much everyone except their moms just kind of forgot about them and moved on with their life.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And yeah, so poor Atraxis has, you know, is a boy with a pretty traumatic backstory. And they've got their stuff. And we wanted them to be an NPC where they can be a really powerful enemy. Their home abode or lair is this pellucid palace, this crystalline place attuned to their thoughts and emotions.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
So combat with them there has a hazard that per Pathfinder mechanics acts on its own initiative and takes its own turns and has its whole routine and actions and responses. And so it's a very dynamic, challenging combat that would happen there. But also they can be an ally. They have a lot of abilities that would make them a very useful ally. The players might need to seek them out as an ally.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Maybe they have a quest of their own that prompts them to travel with the party for a while. We know RPG parties love adopting NPCs with a traumatic backstory. Especially when they are stylish mages with a extremely striking aesthetic. So yeah, then Atraxis also has a magic item, the fork of earthly tuning and ritual.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And those are things that player characters can engage with and learn or use or acquire in their own ways.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Yeah, so we have a lot of things lined up for the next few issues. We have some very cool things coming up in issue two for our featured system is Candela Obscura. Carlos Sisko, who has done a lot of 5e design and also wrote on Candela Obscura itself, this investigative horror TTRPG from Darrington Press. is writing new archetypes.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
These are three new player character archetypes that all tie into the world in the everyday life of this 1910s alternate reality and The D&D articles include a paired set of articles from designers Sadie Lowry and Amber Litke, who've written a lot for MCDM Productions or on the record-breaking Cosmere RPG. Sadie's done a lot of work with Wizards of the Coast and Critical Role.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
They're both editors on Daggerheart. Anyway, I could go off about a all the contributors credits for a long time, but they are, they are fantastic. And some of my favorite folks to collaborate with, and they are writing a, uh, two articles that can be, that are interwoven and can be used together, uh, or separately. But there is a pair of really cool, uh, this is the villainous couple.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Um, they're, they're, Certainly could be antagonists, but they could also be patrons to the party. They could also be... Allies might be a little bit of a stronghold. They could be allies. They could be allies in that they might give you things if you work for them.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
So they're kind of the parallel questlines presented there with them, and they wield forbidden magics that are presented in Amber's article on... I won't go through all the titles of these yet, but they wield forbidden magics that are present in Amber's article, which is a set of three kinds of new spells that all have their unique cool little mechanics and complications.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And the testers have been having a lot of fun with those. And then longtime 5e designer Brandis Stoddard, who I've been collaborating with on stuff for Worlds Beyond Number and having an amazing time working with him over there, is presenting a Paladin questline where this is a storyline that the GM can weave into an ongoing campaign with a Paladin player where they
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
acquire a sword that was once a holy avenger sword and go on quests to uncover a mystery of what happened to it and restore it to its former glory.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's really fun. And if we hit the mark with it, we'd love to do it for other kinds of... It's very suited to paladin, but can have these for any class, any character. Certainly, there's a lot in there that can be woven into other parts of a campaign and things that are very much involving the entire party. We're very explicit.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
This is a storyline for the paladin player character. They are not meant to be the only protagonist and have the other player characters as supporting the cast. But yeah, it's a lot of fun.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Thank you so much. I'm so glad you're enjoying it. Look forward to seeing folks in our Discord and continuing all of the nerdy chatter.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
We will continue to sell previews and copies.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
Yeah, you can follow Wild Mage Press on, I wouldn't say all the socials, there are a lot of them. On many of the main socials, you can follow Wild Mage Press on Twitter, on Blue Sky, on Instagram, and on TikTok, actually. I don't run that one, but we do have a TikTok. I feel so modern. And you can follow me at WildRoseMage on Twitter, BlueSky, and Instagram. Clara is at EldritchBlep.
Mastering Dungeons
Horizons Magazine with Hannah Rose! (MD 211)
And it's pretty easy to find all of that percolating out from our website, WildMagePress.com. Perfect.