The Golden Fish - An Adventure in the Forgotten Realms

Howdy folks! My name is Joe Dyer, and most of you know me from my columns This Week in Legacy and Vintage 101. However, this time around I am doing something a little different here, in that this is a slightly Magic-adjacent thing and more of a Dungeons & Dragons thing!

I'm a big fan of various fantasy properties, and many years ago I had gotten into Dungeons & Dragons via a local friend group who were playing a campaign in the Eberron Campaign Setting during the era of D&D 3.5e. This was my first real introduction to D&D, and during this time it sparked my desire to create. I created plenty of pieces of homebrew content for D&D, even at one point publishing those via a now defunct website with a friend. As the local friend group drifted apart and our campaigns stopped, I moved to playing a few online campaigns but eventually fell back out of the game.

I have always been a fan of D&D however, most especially the lore aspects of various campaign settings. When I found out that Magic was going to D&D with a D&D set based in the Forgotten Realms, I was very excited. And then I got to thinking, I have always liked to create... what if I could create something for this set release that would be fun and unique?

I settled on the idea of creating the quintessential piece of a D&D game: the dungeon crawl. The idea blossomed as I began to write, immersing myself in the D&D 5e rules and trying to ensure that I was handling the rules appropriately. The idea took further shape as being inspired by this amazing website that has given me the ability to give my thoughts on Magic and the formats I love, but also to stretch myself a little and put out content based on Lore and other things. I reached out to my good friends Scott Campbell and Eric Searfos-Miller, as well as getting to work with Tomer as well as Seth on getting both creative feedback and game balance feedback. The idea became realized when we found that we could garner the amazing art talent of Adriano Kitani (who does all of the thumbnail work for MTGGoldfish), and when I had pieced it all together I found that we had something truly amazing and unique.

And so, I give to you all: The Golden Fish.

You might just recognize some of these folks on the cover art here. An early idea we had for the cover for this was to have each of the primary content creators on the site take a position as the adventuring party, as a sort of homage to older adventures that showed off the adventurers in the adventure itself.

Our party here consists of:

• Lower right - Hey that's me! I'm a Human Ranger
• Lower left - Seth "Probably Better Known as SaffronOlive" as a Dwarven Bard (because beards!)
• Upper left - Crim as a Human Frost Mage
• Upper right - Tomer as a Half-Elf Paladin
• In the Back - Oh hey that's Richard! He's clearly enamored with that Golden Fish.

The other thing that you might notice here is the presence of the Dungeon Master's Guild logo! That's because we are publishing this adventure via DMs Guild, which is a program supported in partnership with Wizards of the Coast allowing community content creators to utilize Wizards of the Coast intellectual properties (in our case, use of the Forgotten Realms).

Also, I can't wrap this up without giving a real shoutout to the minds behind the tools on D&D Beyond. The tools on this website really helped a lot with encounter building, basic rule information, and great stuff such as monster/NPC building. These are all tools I wish existed when I was originally writing 3.5e content back in the day, and I definitely recommend their usage especially for homebrew content.

So, Where Can I Get This?

You can download The Golden Fish: An Adventure in the Forgotten Realms right over here at DMsGuild! This title is "Pay What You Want," which means you can download this for as low as $0, but you can choose to pay for this content as well if you want to help support the work we've put into it!

Wrapping Up

I sincerely hope you all enjoy this little adventure. This was truly a real labor of love and I really am looking forward to hearing your thoughts on it. I personally had a lot of fun working on and crafting this adventure and appreciate everyone who was involved in helping to make it happen. This is such a crazy and incredibly unique thing that I'm so excited to see it finally to completion.

Until next time folks, keep on adventuring and keep playing!