Preface - Explorer's Guide to Wildemount

Preface. Imagination is a strange & wonderful thing Imagination drives innovation and inspires communal creation. For this geeky theater kid, imagination was my solace. Since before my granny began reading me to sleep with The Lord of the Rings and Piers Anthony at the age of seven, I found myself simultaneously lost in, and empowered by, imagination. From playing make-believe with my brother in our rainy, Florida yard as children, to mowing through video game RPG after RPG, I found myself drawn into stories, especially those I could shape alongside my friends. It wasn't until I was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons during my freshman year of high school that I found an experience that entwined everything I loved about storytelling, collaboration, theater, and creativity. I began building worlds for my friends to play in and filling notebooks with strange ideas, quirky NPCs, and mediocre story threads (hey, everyone has to start somewhere). I had found my favorite pastime, one that continues to lift me up and shape who I am today. All these years later, through a magical series of circumstances, a group of gaming friends and I began streaming our home game of D&D on the internet under the name Critical Role, expecting little to no interest after spending nearly a decade in web media being told anything longer than five minutes has little value to the "ADHD generation." These myths were rapidly proven wrong, and our home game swelled into a community, then into an unanticipated phenomenon that has become something so deeply wonderful and important to me, and it seems, many others across the world. It is through the original campaign following the exploits of the adventuring party Vox Machina, with myself helming the narrative as the Dungeon Master, that I began crafting the continent of Tal'Dorei and the world of Exandria for my friends to explore. Expanding this world with each heroic venture my friends took on, each unique facet of their characters' stories enric...