EN5ider Reactions Issues 1-4

Trinket art from EN5ider Issue 1, by EN Publishing

The first issue of EN5ider was published when 5e was still young, on 25 February 2015. This four page issue by Ryan Chaddock outlines how to describe and use mundane, non-magical trinkets more effectively in your campaigns. The article is brief and concise, but I think gets its points across well, emphasizing these items as a way to provide plot hooks and roleplay opportunities to your players without the mechanical baggage of a magic item. I particularly like Chaddock's suggestion to use trinkets as a way to convey the culture of a group of adversaries or allies, like the items carried by a group of raiders or the gifts of a group of elves (not all the gifts in Lothlorien were magic items, right?) Practical advice on creating and describing trinkets is also offered in a nice callout box.

I’m most struck by the lack of mechanical content in the article, but it remains relevant and helpful for a GM. I think this is because of the conversational voice and the specific advice on how to apply trinkets to enhance your game. It’s almost a “bite-size” product, giving the reading something brief to take away and think about. I appreciate the honesty of the conclusion too: "Ultimately the choice to supply your players with these kinds of items is a negotiation. If your players seem uninterested, maybe trinkets are not for your group. Finding ways to keep them interested is the real trick. The payout is a richer game world, which is well worth it."

The next article is titled 5 Campaign Lessons from the Hobbit Films by Eric Pierce. This is the part where I realize that the final Hobbit film was released in 2014 and am amazed at the passage of time. The article is refreshingly critical, with the first advice to avoid GMPCs to not steal your players' thunder. It also brings up the interesting point that at this time in 2015 many tables were probably using actual player characters for NPCs with the party, rather than perhaps an NPC stat block or the simpler sidekick stat blocks introduced in the Essentials Kit or Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. There's some good general GM advice here, but nothing truly groundbreaking or innovative for most folks running a game. I do appreciate the advice on attempting to have your players provide secret desires for their characters that you can use alongside their external desires as plot hooks.

Archery Contests is by Russ Morrissey, the owner and creator of EN World. The article features a chart with scaling values to simulate the advancing AC depending upon both the tier of the archery contest the player finds themself in, along with the venue and level of competition, from a small village to the extraplanar level. This level of detail and design really makes this article interesting and useable. I really like this article, and it provides a great drop in event for any setting or location that you can use if you have a player who has specialized in archery.

The final issue we are looking at in this post is Battlefield Events, also by Russ Morrissey. It provides random events to add complications during your encounters. A similar design is used to simulate the fray of larger battles around the characters in Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen. The options are generalized to be used in almost any scenario. I think it's hard to use this type of tool for every encounter, but the article provides a great place to go for inspiration on effects that you could use in a smaller table for a specific boss or crucial fight.

It's clear that the magazine is still finding itself in this stage, as the art and layout are less polished than they become in later issues. A bit of a mixed bag in terms of easily usable content for 5e, but I think there's generally been something of utility. Even if reading one of these articles forces you to reflect on your own GMing style then its probably of some utility.