We return for another year of Extra Life, playing games to raise money for Children's Miracle Network Hospitals and the families who depend on them! This year's theme? Dungeons & Dragons!
If you thought I had given up on Extra Life because of the whirlwind that was 2025, you were sadly mistaken! While it was certainly my worst year in regards to funds raised and time spent advocating for the cause, that didn't mean I wasn't always thinking about it and wishing I could be devoting energy to it. When you're in your 40's and dealing with ongoing health issues and important life obligations, you have to make tough choices. For me, that meant letting the fundraising shift to the back burner. If I don't take care of my own life and obligations, then what good am I to the charity? I have taken the time to carefully craft my theme and incentive structure this year to be minimally demanding for this reason, while still providing fun rewards for the whole Gamer Reverie community. Are you in?
Roll for initiative!
That's right. This year's theme is Dungeons & Dragons! While some people stream their tabletop sessions, timing is a hungry dire bear the rogue just had to poke. So instead of finding hapless friends to aimlessly coordinate with, I decided to delve into my GOG library and focus on true D&D classics every month. I have titles spanning from 1988 TSR's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons era to 2004's ARPG in the Forgotten Realms and 2005's RTS in Eberron--for better or worse, every critical fail and epic triumph!
With that said, allow me to walk you through my campaign's incentives and introduce you to the concept of the cross-realm, Faebriar.
This year, every donation unlocks content to be added to a unique D&D campaign that we will build together, bit by bit. The depth and diversity of the campaign depends entirely upon the donations themselves. If we don't reach the fundraising goal, the individual unlocks will simply be posted here in the blog afterwards. If we DO reach the goal? We'll have completed a neat little PDF that anyone can use for their next tabletop session.
The setting is a realm called Faebriar which was stricken with a magical blight several centuries ago. As the name implies, it used to be a secretive and wild land of the fae. The blight wiped out most of its inhabitants, and those who survived were twisted alongside the land, the flora, the fauna, and the elements themselves. Forget what you know about the natural world, for this is a wild cross-realm where the unexpected is all you can expect to find! Beyond that information, the Extra Life fundraising will determine any further details...
Individual donors can earn Adventurer Ranks and add content to the Compendium with each donation. Everything from having their name added to the public Loyalty Ledger to receiving a physical loot bag in the mail at the end of the year, the donation options add content to the PDF Compendium like item tables, location profiles, and creature stat blocks.
With the aid of all of these generous adventurers, the community can add whole sections of content to the Compendium! Every $100 raised will unlock sections like: creature stat blocks, legendary locations, random tables, puzzles & riddles, legendary creatures, NPCs, adventure hooks, factions, and magic artifacts. When we reach $1000, the fundraising goal for the year, all of it will be compiled into the PDF Compendium for the whole community to download.
But do we really want to stop there? Of course not! The more we can raise to help the kids and their families, the better! So naturally I have to offer some extra incentives if we attain greater heights! Stretch goals are slotted for every $500 past the fundraiser goal, taking us all the way to $5000 ...which I have never managed to raise in my past 13 years of participation. Rewards here span from additional content for the Compendium (familiars, creature stat blocks, a unique location profile with Wayfinder discovery story, official Campaign Starter, and maps) to special things like signed monster artwork, dice raffles, and additional items in loot bags.
While I might have thrown together the idea of the cross-realm, I want to let the Gamer Reverie community construct the finer details of Faebriar! To do this, every $100 raised will also come with Worldbuilding Milestones. When we reach one, the Discord community will have a chance to throw out a variety of prompts for the campaign element and we'll let some dice do the rest. The results will shape the campaign setting into something wonderful and wild!
There will be additional one-shot events to collect XP, tame monsters, discover landmarks, rescue NPCs, and collect loot, so I hope you'll jump into the Discord if you haven't already!
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