With a hearty huzzah, the Dungeons & Toast guild welcomes back our verbal joust champions who have returned victorious from our lord’s area verbal joust tournaments this Masters of Toast year!

Thank you to Hovey and David for attending the tournaments on March 12 to support our champions, Arbind who triumphed and won a in the Evaluation verbal joust tournament, and Andrew who prevailed and won the in the International verbal joust tournament for our guild!

Although she competed for a different guild in a different tournament, guild member Kelly succeeded and won a for said guild in the International verbal joust tournament!

Guild member Beth won a in the Evaluation verbal joust tournament for a different guild in a different verbal joust tournament.

Guild members Cliff and Yanini earned recognition for organizing area verbal joust tournaments last Saturday for our lord’s verbal joust tournament.

Congratulations champions one and all!

Come out on March 26 and support Andrew (in Division G) and Kelly (in Division L) as they progress to the next level in their quests at our lord’s division verbal joust tournaments.

On Friday night we hosted a belated St. Patrick’s Day celebration, themed “Luck o’ the Irish.” Member and Recruitment Master (VPM) Andrew delivered the first of two social speeches from the Visionary Communication Pathway’s elective selection, entitled “A Dungeons & Toast, Toast” in the style of an Irish Blessing (full text below):

Fellow guildmembers and esteemed guests, please… raise your tankards, glencairns, snifters, steins, boots, or whatever drinking receptacles you have chosen to use on this fine evening.

Friends, may the chests in your dungeons never be mimics,

And if they be mimics, may they stay in the secret shadows, undiscovered by your party,

And may your party be filled with creative roleplayers, not murderous hobos, but if you must play with murderous hobos, I pray they be the kind that will share only the finest food and drink with you in real life so as to distract from any shortcomings you may experience in your campaign,

I hope your checks never fail and you never fail to hit, but should you deign to fail, I implore you not do so on your final death save,

And speaking of failure, may your creative ideas only bring wealth and victory to your party, but should your idea fail, may it fail so spectacularly, you earn inspiration and a retcon because really, who “shoots the hostage?”

My friends. Never shoot the hostage.

Finally, may your glasses be filled with only the most enjoyable of libations, but not so enjoyable that one forgets that the most delicious of drink, is the one that is consumed in fine company, like the company we see here today.

Slainte Mhath!

I was honored to serve as Table Topics Master which I did while doing my best leprechaun impression. Participants included Matthew K, Beth G, Stephanie H, Cynthia Z, and Andrew B.

Thanks to all who joined us, and I look forward to seeing you all again for our next regular meeting on April 1st when I’m sure there will be no shortage of shenanigans to be had.

Dungeons & Toast hosted a special open house event featuring author and game creator Sean K. Reynolds on February 21st. Sean spoke specifically about his work on the 3rd edition Forgotten Realms campaign setting and the deliberate approach taken to avoid interfering with gamemaster’s long-standing plans for specific NPCs.

You can follow Sean on Twitter here.

In an impressive display, led by Quest Master (Vice President Education) Greg S., the Dungeons & Toast Toastmasters club achieved ten out of ten Distinguished Club Program goals on February 11, 2022! This is just shy of 7.5 months into the 12 month Toastmasters International year! Congratulations, Greg, on a job well done! Thou art truly a master of your craft! Congratulations to the Dungeons & Toast Toastmasters club–and a hearty thank you to all of the club members–for the accomplishment of this supreme feat in such a short amount of time! Huzzah!

Hello fellow Dungeons & Toast guild members. I hope that you have seen the awesome news that we’ve got Sean K. Reynolds visiting our Open House and delivering the keynote for the evening. We’d love to fill the room with guests and wanted to share some easy ways for you to do so. You can share the image on your social media and we’ve even taken the liberty of drafting up some generic text you can use for the post:

My Toastmasters club, Dungeons & Toast, is having an Open House on February 11. We have an exciting guest speaker, Sean K. Reynolds (an amazing game designer) who will be giving the keynote of the evening. If you like gaming or just want to enjoy a fun night of storytelling and creative speaking, please visit! Sign up at www.dungeonsandtoast.com and click “Visit.” #D100

Would you prefer/be willing to send a personal email, well we’ve got you covered there too!

Hey <Name>-

I wanted to invite you to an Open House for a club I’m a part of, Dungeons & Toast. It’s been a wonderful experience for me and has helped me become  not only a better speaker but also a more creative person in general. I feel like it’s something you’d enjoy and we’ve got Sean K. Reynolds speaking who has a lot of experience with game design.

It’d be great if you would be willing to come check it out.

Don’t worry, you won’t have to speak if you don’t want to. And there is no pressure to join. I just thought you might enjoy it – it’s a lot of fun!

If you’d like to attend the Open House, you can register at www.DungeonsandToast.com and click “Visit.” I hope you’ll be able to make it!

<Signature>

Please share with your friends, family, colleagues… It’s always more fun to game with other people. 🙂

Good morning, good day, and good evening! It’s that time again – your friendly reminder that we’ve got another Dungeons & Toast meeting coming up on the morrow. We hope that you will be in attendance.

If you needed any motivation to attend, we’ve got a lineup of experienced speakers set to captivate and regale us tomorrow night. Our very own Club Mentor, Ryan K., will start the evening off. Everyone’s favorite GM, Greg S., will take the meat part of the speech sandwich and closing us out will be the always engaging David E.. You know he’s got his vocal variety ready to snap you back to attention if you think you have time to multi-task.

For our table topics, Matthew K. will be on creative duty. He’s always got something up his sleeve when it comes to the impromptu discussion, so we will be in for a good time.

See you all tomorrow!

If you’ve ever stumbled across a YouTube video that you thought would make the perfect backdrop for an in-character speech but didn’t know how to go about setting it up, great news! I’ve just posted a tutorial on how you can download any YouTube video for use later over at my new blog, Loni, the Witch, & the Wardrobe. I use this technique all the time, perhaps most notably during our costume contest to have an animated haunted house behind me:

I look forward to seeing what backdrops you choose to use in future meetings!

Whether as a player or as a Dungeon Master (DM), I’m sure you may have favorite monsters that you love to include or encounter in your Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), or other game system adventures, yes?! Perhaps you love to hate said monsters. Perhaps you love to encounter them as a player or throw them at your players if you’re a DM in order to provide them with encounters that challenge them.

Here are some of my favorite D&D monsters. Please note that I’m pulling this list of monsters from first and second editions of D&D in terms of their powers and abilities even though they’re probably in later editions of D&D as well, because I prefer to stay on the player facing side of fifth edition D&D so as to keep from spoiling the mystery . . . and the fun!

First off, the majestic, the iconic, dragons. Even the red dragons are enough to send icy shivers of fear through your veins and running down your spine!

Faerie Dragons are fun. They provide nice, local color, pun intended, to a world, and they can provide a more lighthearted encounter for your players.

Beholders are nice too! Although they aren’t nice per se, as monsters go, they are a nice, terrible monster to throw at your players as a DM.

And then we have the classic Orcs and Goblins, meanies and baddies of the worst sort.

Gelatinous Cubes are fun, as are molds, puddings, and oozes. Any monster or encounter that presents a challenge to the players, gives them pause and makes them think Do I really want to do this? And if so, how do I want to do this? Or worse, or better, depending upon your point of view, How am I going to get out of this situation!? If an encounter makes players get creative and puts more on the line than just character hit points, such as their equipment, is good in my book.

Want to throw some confusion into the ranks of your party? Introduce a Doppelganger and watch the chaos begin!

Does every encounter with a monster have to end in combat and bloodshed? No. Any well designed encounter with thought put into it by the DM will present a challenge the players. When I DM, I like to challenge my players with monsters that make them think and poses a challenge to them, rather than just monsters thrown in for the purpose of mindless hack and slash. (Although, for variety, a straightforward pure combat encounter is good at times too and also serves to keep the players on their toes in other encounters with monsters so they’re never sure what type of encounter it will be.) And monsters should have morale and play smart, and never just fight endlessly to the death, except for some mindless undead, that is, which presents a terror all its own.

I know that many wonderful new monsters, monster combinations, and iterations of these monsters have, in all probability, occurred over the years. Search online if you want creative ideas to build challenging encounters for your players. If you’re players are ho-hum about your encounters with monsters they encounter because they’ve encountered them before or they are already well established in the cultural lexicon, pull in monsters from other game systems and convert them to D&D.

Other fun monster options are to run a horror adventure or role-playing game, change up the stats and abilities of monsters, put a twist on the monsters—maybe that tribe of Goblins is benevolent or is on a pilgrimage to a sacred shrine of their peaceful deity—do a monster mash-up with unusual and different combinations of monsters paired up in the same encounter. (This might require some thought on the part of the DM to come up with reasons why the monsters are working together.) Another option is to get in there and flesh out those monsters, maybe the one-eyed Orc tribe is so deadly and fearsome because they follow a Cyclops, and a clever one at that if it leads a tribe of Orcs, or have a Beholder as their leader, all of which is unbeknownst to the player characters, of course.

If all else fails, let your imagination run wild and make your own D&D monster! That ought to scare the living daylights out of your players, or yourself if your DM pulls this on you! Now that I’ve shared some of my favorite monsters with you, I’d like to hear what some of your favorite monsters are and why.