Hello to all of my whopping (checks notes) 18 subscribers. They say you need 2500 subscribers to make any money with one of these things, so I’m a little ways off to say the least. But that’s how it goes with new ventures. Growth is generally flat until very suddenly it’s not. Hopefully, the “very suddenly it’s not” part will kick in soon.

Anyway, this week I’m doing a special Dungeons & Dragons edition of THREE NEW THINGS. When I was a kid, D&D was not the cultural phenomenon that it is today. In fact, it was seen primarily as something played by weird kids who were into Satan. A young Tom Hanks, in fact, even got in on the early 1980s D&D panic.

Today, D&D is HUGE. Celebrities host games and broadcast them on YouTube. There are books, shows, movies, and video games based on the property. In fact, D&D now generates more than a BILLION dollars in sales yearly.

So, in this THREE NEW THINGS, I thought I’d take a look at some of the Dungeons & Dragons-related properties out there and what makes them worth spending time with.

The Mighty Nein is the latest show from Critical Role, who seem to be taking over the D&D world. Critical Role started out as a group of voice actors who started playing Dungeons & Dragons together. With their voice abilities, they were really able to craft unique and memorable characters and soon started to post their games on YouTube, where they caught on in a big way.

When their first Dungeons & Dragons campaign came to a conclusion, they turned it into an animated show called The Legend of Vox Machina (“vox machina” being Latin for “voice machine”). The Legend of Vox Machina plays like a D&D game with all your wildest and filthiest friends. It’s very adult and a lot of fun.

The Mighty Nein, based on Critical Role’s SECOND Dungeons & Dragons campaign, ups the stakes with a show that’s even darker and more adult than The Legend of Vox Machina. Currently, the show has a 100% critics score and a 94% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, which is about as good as it gets.

Are the animation and voicework on the level of something like Arcane? It is not. But Arcane is kind of a special case in that it’s trying to take animation, character development, and voicework to an entirely new level (and I’ll cover it in a future Three New Things). The Mighty Nein is more of a cartoon. I don’t say that with any disrespect. Cartoons are fun! And cartoons can be adult. But the Mighty Nein, from a tone and animation standpoint, has more in common with a show like Invincible (also a great show worth checking out) than it does Arcane or Scavenger’s Reign or Common Side Effects. All in all, it’s just a really fun time set in the D&D universe.

Dungeons & Dragons is one of those movies that SHOULD have been a hit, but wasn’t. Great movies bomb from time to time for myriad reasons. The Shawshank Redemption (I think the title was the problem with that one). Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (so innovative and idiosyncratic people didn’t know what to think of it). The Iron Giant (made by Warner Brothers back when animation was dominated by Disney/Pixar and Dreamworks). Judge Dredd (which couldn’t overcome the stink of the Sylvester Stallone original). Sometimes great movies just don’t click with audiences initially.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves had a fun script, a great cast, and a thrilling story. Everyone who’s caught it on streaming loves it. But at the box office? Crickets. It may have had a “Judge Dredd problem” in that the original D&D movie with Jeremy Irons was legitimately terrible. Personally, I prefer it when bad movies get remade over good movies. Bad movies are the ones we SHOULD be remaking. But that can make it a tough sell at the box office.

Dungeons & Dragons is written and directed by John Francis Daley and his partner Jonathan Goldstein. Daley was one of the geeks on Freaks & Geeks who went on to be a cast member of the show Bones. But it’s as a writer and director where he’s really shined, penning scripts such as Game Night, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Dungeons & Dragons, and, next, the new Star Trek movie set to come out in a few years.

It’s hard really to describe just how much fun the D&D movie is, so I’ll let this scene do the talking for me.

I was going to save Baldur’s Gate 3 for a later date when the subscriber count for this newsletter had picked up significantly because it is… drumroll please… my favorite game of ALL TIME. But since this is a special D&D issue, I’ll just go ahead and cover today, perhaps coming back to it again at a later date.

Because I want to keep this tight, I can’t possibly go into everything that makes Baldur’s Gate 3 such a one-of-a-kind experience. But it starts with a company - Larien - that understands games and understands gamers. In a world of loot boxes (gambling), extra downloadable content, and microtransactions - all designed to milk fans of a game out of even more of their money - Baldur’s Gate 3 has NONE of that. Just a great game, at a reasonable price, that you pay ONCE for and get hundreds of hours of enjoyment from.

What truly makes the game special, however, is a truly unprecedented level of freedom. How the developers of BG3 made it so you could go through the story and its various encounters virtually ANY way you wished is mind-boggling. If you can THINK of it, there’s a good chance the game will let you do it. A lot of game developers will patch an “exploit” once some clever gamer figures out a workaround. Larien’s approach to Baldur’s Gate 3 is, “Go ahead, break our game.” If you’re smart enough to figure something out that the game makers hadn’t intended, the game lets you do it.

I think the other key feature is that you don’t play as someone else, but you play as your own unique creation. Red Dead Redemption 2 is a masterpiece, but you HAVE to play as Arthur Morgan. In Baldur’s Gate 3, YOU decide who you play - class, species, backstory, powers, name, good or evil… it’s ALL up to you. You put yourself into the game (or whatever version of yourself you choose to come up with), and the game reacts to YOU.

Dungeons & Dragons is all about the power of collaborative storytelling. In Baldur’s Gate 3, you’ll be collaborating with a colorful cast of characters who you can team up with, fight with, have sex with, shove off a cliff… it’s all up to you and how you choose to play. There will be consequences for your actions - as there should be - but no restrictions. You’re truly plopped down into a magical world and allowed to work your way through that world absolutely any way you please. It’s the ultimate game of freedom and choice and the most fun I’ve ever had playing anything ever.

Okay, so this section of THREE NEW THINGS isn’t Dungeons & Dragons related. But since Spotify Wrapped came out this week, I thought I’d share my top 5 most listened-to songs of 2025. A couple of these, I’ve already featured in previous issues of this newsletter, which makes sense since I’m sharing my favorite things.

I’m probably dating myself here, but once upon a time, there was a game called Zork. It was the original D&D computer game and was entirely text-based. Well, thanks to LLMs (large language models) like ChatGPT, you can play Zork on steroids.

The most challenging part of Dungeons & Dragons has always been getting a group together and then meeting on a regular basis. Playing with ChatGPT eliminated that issue. So, how do you play? It’s easy. Just hop onto ChatGPT, go to the GPTs section, and choose the one called “dungeons and dragons DND.” It’s been trained on the 5e rules (the latest set).

Then, just tell ChatGPT that you want to play a game. It should ask you a series of questions about the setting you want, tone, type of character you want to play, etc. If it doesn’t, you can simply type everything in that you want it to know. Once you’re all set, it will begin the adventure, which plays out like a fantasy novel that you’re the star of.

If there’s a flaw with ChatGPT D&D, it’s that it can be a little too eager to make you the hero of the story, with characters praising your bravery and intellect at every turn, and dropping powerful magical items a little too frequently. You can account for this some by telling ChatGPT that you don’t want such special treatment.

Below is a snippet of how one of my adventures played out. Essentially, ChatGPT D&D is a story that you and AI write together, so the more detail you put into it, the more the LLM has to bounce off of. It rewards detailed choices and dialog, so don’t be afraid to really dig in and write, even if you’re not a writer. You may surprise yourself!

That brings us to the end of Issue #007, our special D&D edition (although in retrospect maybe it should have been a James Bond edition). Check back next week when I’ll talk about the show Fallout (season 2 debuts in late December), the music of BRKN LOVE, and 2025 Game of the Year Nominee Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2.