Yesterday was a very busy day for me, so today is the first post for 2025 in which I am writing about more than one day’s die in the same post.

In which we return to DnD Adventure Club and helping one of our local farmers leads to adventure in The Nimbus Trilogy.

Story

Trish, Sasha, and Grumpy were walking by Haley’s farm when they heard her cry out for help. They saw 5 thugs in her barn trying to shake her down and tearing the place apart looking for something. Once the team showed up 3 of the thugs attacked the players while 2 others kept Haley restrained. The adventures made quick work of those three. The other two tried to set fire to the barn, but Triss brought the water trough over and put it out.

Day 07

We bounce back to the charcoal set for today’s die.

Day 06

After yesterday’s curveball, we’re back to one of the main sets for this year’s Advent Calendar!

Day 05

Dice Envy has thrown us a curveball today! Today’s die does not match with any of the other sets AND it’s a pretty unique die.

Day 04

We’re back to the charcoal dice, so I’m guessing we’re going to at least get a charcoal set. Based on last year it’s looking like one charcoal set and one bloody metal set. But it could be a misdirect! (After all, we’re dealing with Krampus here!) Maybe one or both of these are in the random dice camp. Odds are low of that, but we’re too early in the calendar to know for sure. Let’s look at today’s die!

Day 03

What’s always fun about the early days in the Dice Envy Advent Calendar is that I don’t yet know which dice are part of sets and which dice are standalone dice. Looking back at last year’s calendar there was one Dice Envy Special (meaning chonky d20, chonky d6, and infinity d4), one 8-piece set, 6 random dice (including 3 d12s - so it turns out to be easy to do a Daggerhart hope/fear with those), and a Wee Lads set. So as I opened up today’s flap, I was curious to see what I would get.

Day 02

Krampus seems to be tied to a purple theme. I’m not sure I’d consider purple to be the opposite of red, but who knows? Maybe it’s an inversion of purple being a royal color? As far as I can remember, this isn’t just a Dice Envy thing - I’ve seen Krampus associated with purple elsewhere. All this to say, I expected purple dice and I was not disappointed.

I wasn’t sure I was going to get Dice Envy’s 2025 Dice Advent Calendar. I had a blast opening each day last year, but, as you can see, I don’t really need any more dice:

But then Dice Envy went and got creative by releasing both a Krampus and a Santa box. I was very curious what interpretation Dice Envy might have a for an “evil” Christmas dice advent calendar. After all, last year had lots of Christmas-y dice like the ones I called Elsa Blue or the 12 days of Christmas d12. Enough preamble, let’s go!

For people who are new to TTRPGs (especially d20 games like D&D, Pathfinder, or Tales of the Valiant), it’s hard to know how long a story, or campaign, should be. Newbies only have two examples: Actual Plays on YouTube and Twitch or the campaign books published by Wizards of the Coast, Paizo, and Kobold Press. Campaigns published for 5e tend to be (in my experience) 8-12 adventures long. The time required for any given tale to finish a campaign depends on how long each session is. (At the fastest - one session per adventure you’re looking at about a year to finish the campaign) Alternatively, looking to Critical Role as an example finds the gang playing campaigns (Vox Machina, Mighty Nein, Bells Hells) that are years long each. This is why I subtitled the post “A Different Kind of Mercer Effect” (in reference to the original Mercer effect - where inexperienced GMs try to mimic his voices, accents, and GM style) I do know that there are other campaigns that go for a long time - including the GRRM campaign that led to Wild Cards, but most new TTRPG players and GMs will have more of a chance of having come to the game after having seen Critical Role vs those other examples.