How D and D Can Help with Environmental Education Through Immersive Learning

1:00:00 How do we learn about science? How do we learn about our natural world, our planet, our environment? Environmental literacy is at, I feel like it's at an all time low. It is something that you see on political posts, you see on Facebook, you see on Instagram, anytime you put up anything that has to do with the environment, you see a lot of ignorant comments and comments that people just don't know about the environment, they don't know how the natural environment works. And education is really important. We're gonna talk about that on today's episode of tools that we can use. In this case, Dungeons and Dragons games, where people can learn, it's almost like that immersive experiential learning of the natural world. Dr. Andrew Thaler joins us again today, one of my favorite guests, because he comes back all the time with all these great stories and these great projects, is here today to talk about his foray into the educational aspect of Dungeons and Dragons for teachers and for students, you know, around the US, around the world, and that people can use all the time.

1:01:14 He's an experienced Dungeons and Dragons master. I believe this is what it's called. I'm not familiar with the game. On today's episode, we have a special, special episode for you today. We are going to be talking about Dungeons and Dragons. You're probably like, Andrew, why are we talking about Dungeons and Dragons on an ocean podcast? Well, we got to talk about it because we've got to learn ways and tools to get not only children but different generations in on learning about the environment, beefing up our environmental literacy around the world. And Dungeons and Dragons is a game that is played by hundreds of millions of people around the world to be able to tell stories as a community and to understand what adventures are like in storytelling by adaptation, by changing it up and by improvisation.

1:02:03 Right? And it's a very fun way of doing it. I've tried to play it once. We talk a little bit about what happened when I tried to play it. It was definitely out of my comfort zone, did in front of a crowd, but it's, I have a such a respect for the game and such respect for the people who come up with these stories and are able to put this all together for people, especially Andrew, who's worked on this for over a year to be able to provide educational tools around the games and how students and teachers can play these games and really understand in the environment without learning about the environment. It's a great way and a great tool to discuss it. And I can't wait for Andrew to tell you all about it. So here's the interview with Dr. Andrew Taylor talking about Dungeons and Dragons for forest ecology.

1:02:45 Enjoy. And I'll talk to you after. Hey, Andrew. Welcome back to another great episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Are you ready to talk about Dungeons and Dragons? Absolutely, I am. Right. Now, this is going to be a different episode than what we normally do, but it's definitely pertinent to I feel like what's going on in society today. We are talking about environmental education in general. We're going to be going away a little bit from the ocean because the subject matter of the Dungeons and Dragons is about forests. Right. And so we're going to be talking all about that. But the importance of this as a tool to get people interested in learning about the environment and learning about just how nature works and being able to conjure up some stories in a very fast paced environment and be able to say, hey, this is a lot of fun.

1:03:36 But I'm also learning and I get into it to nature. So I can't wait to do that. Andrew, you've been on the podcast a number of times, but I get a new listeners and listen, new listeners. So why don't you just remind the people of who you are and what you do? Sure thing. So I am Dr. Andrew Thaler. I am a deep sea ecologist, a conservation technologist and an ocean educator. I do a lot of work on deep sea mining. I do a lot of work on developing oceanographic instruments. I do a bunch of policy work. I yell at mining companies. I do all those fun things. But today I want to take you on an adventure. And that adventure goes all the way back to New Year's 2023. And what was amazing about New Year's 2023 is that the actual holiday fell in such a way that we had like a five day weekend.

1:04:25 And so I being the insane person that I am decided to call up a bunch of my friends and say, hey, we had this long five day weekend. It's cold. It's it's snowy. It's dark out. I live in a log cabin with a giant vaulted ceiling that looks like a Viking long house. Why don't we all get together and just spend five days playing Dungeons and Dragons? That sounds kind of cool. It was a lot of fun. And so I designed a campaign just for just for that that New Year's holiday. And because I can't escape being an educator, the campaign I designed was built around the idea of for succession.

1:05:10 So as my players explored this wilderness, they were noticing changes in the forest and the changes in the forest were dictating where the plot progressed and where the adventure went. And so as they were and obviously all my friends are our scientists of various stripes. So as they're making observations about the forest, these adventures growing around them about what caused these changes and why and how and what they can do about it. And what are all the different aspects that are shaping this landscape? So there is a there's an endangered species that is missing from the forest. There is a dam that was built that is causing a swamp to retreat.

1:05:51 There are all of these environmental factors that are kind of reshaping the landscape. And at the end of the adventure, I'll try not to give too much away right off the bat in case anyone wants to actually play it. But at the end of the adventure, you know, we sat down and they said, hey, you know, this would actually make a really good classroom exercise. This could be, you know, with a little bit of work like teachers could use this to teach things about succession and forest ecology and especially a fire dominated ecosystems. So over the next year, this has kind of been a passion project of mine to take the adventure is called The Last Hunt for the Jabberwalk. OK, it is it is set in the Feywild, which is kind of this like whimsical fairy world within Dungeons and Dragons that is centered on puns and kind of joyfully whimsical tricksy kinds of things.

1:06:42 OK, not super serious, you know, not like big high fantasy, more like ridiculous whimsy. So there's there's a colony of rabbits and they're all talking in rabbit puns and there's there's a city of frogs who are worshiping a giant frog that turns out not to actually be a deity, but just a really big frog that keeps eating them. So things like that. Yeah. But what I did is I took this adventure. I kind of distilled it down to the core lessons we wanted to teach. We wanted to teach about how fire dominated forest ecosystems work. We want to teach about the consequences of building dams and what that means for environment and then the consequences of tearing a dam down and what that would mean for an environment and for communities that live around those dams.

1:07:34 We want to talk about invasive species. And we want to talk about like building resilient communities in the face of changing ecosystems, changing environments, changing climates. And so, you know, after this first dry run, I kind of spent a year rebuilding the adventure from the ground ground up around these kinds of educational themes and in the process also developing lesson plans to go along with them. So the idea behind and things like. Yeah. And so the idea behind the last time for the Jabberwock is that a teacher could pick this up and it's like a 12 hour to 20 hour campaign, depending on how they want to run it. And they can build it around an environmental education course and they can run their students through the adventure and they can have their students discover the ecological processes that are shaping this forest in a way that you can't do if you're just doing a lecture.

1:08:27 So there's there's a mystery and there's there's puzzles to be solved and there's like access to histories that they have to uncover and figure out why things have changed and how they've changed. And they all relate back to real world examples. And then it also ends in like kind of an ecological debate about what are we going to do to fix things? It's a fire dominated ecosystem and the fire is driven by a keystone species that's no longer there. And as they bring it's called last hunt for the Jabberwock. So you can kind of figure that one out if they bring the keystone species back, the forest begins to recover. But then there's a new predator and you know, the communities that are living in the forest now have to deal with the predator.

1:09:10 There's a dam and they can debate whether or not they need to tear the dam down or let it stay. And that has implications for the animals that live upstream and the animals that live downstream and the communities built around it. And so you really get an opportunity to talk about these kind of big environmental questions that really dictate how we think about making resilient communities in the face of environmental change. And because it's couched in D&D because it's couched in this kind of whimsical forest world that's not directly related to the real world, you can have those conversations without kind of bringing up a lot of the political baggage that comes along with that. Without bringing up a lot of like the real world emotions so you can have those talks and you can you can look at the world without having to think about the real world at the same time.

1:10:00 And then you can see the outcome. You can see the consequences. So in the game, they'll do those things. They'll make those decisions and then they'll see how those decisions reshape things and they'll get to actually experience what those changes mean. Right. So it took me about a year to spin this up into something that I felt was a functional thing for educators to use. We did a lot of test runs with with local teachers with some local D&D groups as well. And at the end of December of this of last year, we published it on it's called Dungeons Masters Guild. It's kind of like a clearinghouse for D&D adventures. It's licensed with Wizards of the Coast. So it's all like official D&D stuff, which is really, really fun.

1:10:42 And we've made it available for teachers to download and try on their own and test things out. This is phenomenal. I love this. I love this. And I know, you know, D&D has become very popular with a lot of a lot of different groups now. I wanted you to talk about D&D a little bit because and just sort of what it is for the people who don't know because like when I was a kid in the 80s, I grew up like Catholic. We weren't allowed to play D&D. It was about demons and dragons. And that was that was a faux pas in my household. Like we were not allowed. It was like that was like a Ouija board. You weren't allowed to mess with the Ouija board. Of course we did. But that you know, when I was a teenager and stuff.

1:11:27 But that's how I think they're my friend. I know. But that's you know, sort of that's what what like a lot of I feel like a lot of people went through when when they were kids and like parents just didn't understand what this D&D is. You know, and as I grew up and started to hear more about it more and more and more people playing it, there was a little bit of a dry one that I got to take part that launched a podcast for for oceans called do goings and see dragons. And a great a great a great podcast has been running. What I think he said, like between 600 and 700 episodes. It's a lot of it has been running since 2018. Yeah, so yeah, once a week. And I think it's phenomenal. And we know, you know, people use it as an educational tool. But can you just talk about what, like, just for the audience who aren't familiar with it, what D&D is and how it's really grown over the last like few decades.

1:12:20 So at its core, D&D is really two things. One is it's a set of rules. And it's a set of rules that allows you to get a group together and participate in collaborative storytelling, in which you can introduce random elements into that story by rolling dice. So functionally, what you're doing is you're sitting around the table with your friends, and you're telling a folktale. And instead of just deciding where you want the plot to go, you add dice rolls into it that dictate how things progress, that change the outcome of events that create random elements into the story. And then you have to adapt and respond to that story. So you are role playing a folktale of your own creation, in which you are not in complete control of the outcome.

1:13:05 I think that's that's really interesting with the with the dice roll, because it's almost like risk in the game, the board game risk, where it's like, you think you know what you're going to do, you're going to take over a country, and then all of a sudden, the dice tell you different. And I think that's the same way with with Dungeons and Dragons, right? Like, you think you're going to win a battle or or pick something and venture the dice a differently and you have to you have to switch up. Yeah, and so dnd actually evolved from those tabletop war games. So, oh, really risk and dnd share a lot of the same bloodline that they've diverged quite a bit. And, you know, combat, it doesn't have to be central to dnd and we've actually designed the last hunt for the Jabberwock adventure, so that you can complete the entire adventure without getting into any fights without using violence.

1:13:49 That's cool. You can you can use cunning and you can be clever and you can solve riddles instead. So that like it's not doesn't have to be necessarily combat focused because there is there is a violent element to dnd. And, you know, I love that a lot of people love that it's a great part of the gameplay. But if you're an educator, maybe that's not the direction you want to go if you're doing it with students. For sure. That makes sense. So that's that's the one half of dnd. The one half of it is a set of rules. The other half of dnd is the lore because dnd is a thing that has existed for 50 years and it has its own internal worlds and its own internal stories and its own internal IP, its own internal intellectual property. So things like beholders is big floating multi eyed monsters that are terrifying to dnd players and and Al bears, which is a monster that's half an owl and half a bear, which is my daughter's favorite monster of all time.

1:14:42 And you know, characters like Vecna, which are in stranger things now and it kind of have transcended like just the dnd world to be something that people are more conscious and aware of. So there's lore that goes around along with that. And so that has, you know, the beauty of working in a fictional world that's already been created is that you don't have to do all the world building for it on your own. Like there's already this creative pool that you can draw from in order to tell new stories without having to retell the entire origin story of a world. And that's why like you have for for your story, you have like a structure already built and you can go on to this site. And is it just like a downloadable thing? Is that what it is? Is it like now with with websites and stuff? You just download like a PDF and then you can print it off or use a computer or whatever you like to do.

1:15:32 Yeah. So if you go to Dungeon Master Guild and look for last time of the Jabber walk, you can you pay for the PDF and you download the PDF. There is a there is a sales threshold or once you hit that threshold, they will allow you to start making hard copies, which is really nice. We hit the first bestseller threshold earlier this month. So we are now a copper bestseller. It's all by metal badges. So, so, so it's pretty exciting. People are people are really getting into the adventure and taking a look at it. And I've already been in touch with several teachers who have started campaigns in their classrooms and their kids are really starting to enjoy them. One of the things we also did is we keyed all the lesson plans to the actual like next generation science standards and common core standards so that if you are a teacher, you can look those up in the background and see how you can plug those into your existing lesson plans as well.

1:16:23 And that's that's where it really counts when you're talking about, you know, putting them into schools is making sure that you're following the right guidelines, following the make sure that they're hitting what they need to hit for their core success with the first thing I assume a teacher would ask is like, does this fit within our curriculum? Yes, and we've put a I say we it's I put a lot of effort into making it as easy as possible for a teacher who hasn't really done a lot of D&D before to pick it up and run it. So there's a bunch of guidance in the back on how to run it as a teacher, how to integrate the lesson plans into the adventure where to slot different things if they want to. I will say if you're not, you know, if you're not a student or a teacher, you can still play the adventure. It's a really fun adventure. You don't have to use the lesson plans if you don't want to. You can just run the campaign on its own as a free freestanding thing.

1:17:14 But, you know, I really think the lesson plans and the lesson plans are all about we have one big lesson plan that dives deep into into fire dominated forest ecology that looks at things like the Mount Diablo fire in California, which I really love as an example for fire dominated ecosystems because it's one of the big California wildfires that didn't didn't result in any property damage or loss of life. It was a pure natural area wildfire. And so like you get to study the actual succession without, you know, all of the human tragedy that comes with that as well. Yeah, definitely. There's lessons on on building and removing dams. And then, of course, because it's last hunt for the Jabber walk and obviously has something to lose Carol. There's a bit on the Lewis Carroll poem as well. So you can you can share the adventure with an English teacher, too. It doesn't have to just be environmental science.

1:18:04 And then one of the one of the things I've done is we snuck smaller lessons in there as well. Okay, so depending on how deep you want to go, there's a whole bunch of side quests that the students can run depending on time limitations or how excited about different things. And so there's a little lesson on invasive species. There's one on displacing communities when dams are built. There's an adventure in soap making where the students are going to spend a little bit of the adventure trying to brew a potion and slowly as they do it, they're going to learn that they're actually learning just the real way to make soap out of lie and tallow.

1:18:45 Okay, I like that. I feel like those those like like the side story. Yes, would be a great like assignment after you do the real one and be like, hey, you know, you take some students you take you do this side story you do this side story. And then you're like, you're like, you're like, you pick a group and do it. Exactly. I can get used to that. I love that idea of this. Now, as you start to when you start to post this and you start to see teachers grab on to it, you know, dragons still can be controversial and certain circles that don't understand the game and what it's really about. Right. You just see the monsters and demons and things like that. I mean, less so now than it was when we were children, certainly, you know, we I run I run a campaign with our local public library.

1:19:32 So we've had for two years now have been running the library D&D group. And that's a family group. So we have kids and their parents come in. Originally, the idea was it would be parents and kids playing together the whole time. But you're a parent. I'm a parent. You know exactly what's about to happen. Parents hear that and they're like, I can drop my kid off for three hours and go get dinner on my own. So we have we have a I'll be I'll be at the bar. I'll be at the pub. You guys you guys enjoy. So we have a few parents that show up for the game for the most part. It's kids and you know, the age range is seven to 15, which is perfect. And some older. We've had a couple college kids come in during the summer and just want to play. And so it's great to have like multi generational groups playing. Yes.

1:20:15 Because then you really get an opportunity because how often do seven year olds get to like play a game with college kids in a way that they're they're both just part of it in at the same level. Yeah. Or in the case of our seven year old children. Yeah, exactly. They're working together. They're working together to survive this this adventure to learn about this adventure. And I honestly I think every serious campaign needs at least one seven year old to just just throw a wrench at everything. Throw a wrench at everything. Come up with just the funnest stuff. The weirdest things. Yeah. We had you know, one of my favorite moments of any D and D adventures. We had a seven year old. He was playing a wizard and he was just really into like finding any potion you could.

1:20:58 And pouring it all over his weapons to make a new weapon. And so he eventually he eventually turns his wizard staff into a giant rod of tungsten. And of course, at that point, he's going to be like, well, what's tungsten? And I happen to I keep a tungsten cube in my car in case I ever see a cyber truck. And I want to be like, hey, can I throw a rocket to see if it did? With consent. I'm not encouraging you to throw things at cyber trucks, but like, you know, if you ever get a get someone bragging about how tough it is, you pull out your tungsten cube and be like, hey, can I lob this at it? Yeah, let's see how it looks.

1:21:38 Yeah, tough it is. So I haven't had my lucky tungsten cube with me. I'm like, all right, well, here's here's this. And we talk about like, metals intensity and all that stuff, which is really cool. Because one of the other kids at the table, his dad's a black guy. And he's like, I'm a blacksmith. Like a real blacksmith, not a fantasy blacksmith. And so we got to like, really get into like, big ideas about metals and what they really are and how they function. Which, you know, that's the kind of thing that comes out when you just you let the kids go wild and you have a very mixed table. I feel like there's such a good place for this in classroom. Yes, because like, you know, I've got two teenage daughters, they're 15 and 17. And the biggest thing that they come home with is, I go to school. What do you think the response is? Fine.

1:22:23 No, boring. No, it was boring. Because they just, you know, it's a lecture. Yeah, it's essentially a lecture. You're listening to one person talk about a subject you may or may not be interested in. Like, I remember biology, like, I was not interested in human biology when I went to high school, all my projects were on animals, right? On some kind like dolphin or whale or shark or something like that. I had to get special permission to do those. But you know, like if you do it, like a D and D type of exercise, you're including the kids in it. Right. They're they have to know the story. They have to know the stuff and questions are going to come in.

1:23:04 and questions are going to come up. Well, they're not just knowing the story, they're driving the story. They're driving the story. So functionally it's experiential education. Like the approach I take to building a D&D adventure is the same approach I take to designing like an educational hiking experience or designing like the hands-on workshops I do with ocean sensor systems and going out in the field on boats. Like it is at its heart, it's all that same experiential education policy. It's just, you know, with D&D, you don't have to organize a field trip. Right. It's like the cheap way of doing things. Yeah, so they can get that experience, they get self-confidence, they get to drive the lesson and they get to do the discovery, which is the real point of experiential education is that like, you know, I can tell you how a fire dominated ecosystem works, but it's way more fun to walk through one and see how things change as you get away from the fire scars and see like figure out, like as you explore, what caused different aspects of the forest to change and make that discovery, you know, discovery as play is a really great way to teach big environmental concepts as well.

1:24:16 Yeah, I love this idea, I really do. So when teachers started to pick up, like were the teachers that picked it up familiar with D&D already? Cause you said it's like a beginner can do it. Like if I was a teacher and I just picked it up, or even if I just picked it up and didn't for a bunch of students, I would be able to kind of follow it and learn it and be able to do it. I may not be as good as somebody who's experienced, but the teachers who picked it up at first, they were familiar with D&D, they're already familiar with the site and how it all plays out and they've probably run a couple of games or been a part of a couple of games. Yeah, so one of the consequences of doing it as a D&D property and like, because Dungeons and Dragons is so recognizable, that is a very compelling playground to work in.

1:24:59 Yeah. But one of the consequences of that is that you have to publish through Dungeon Masters Guild, which has a, actually one of the best content sharing royalty arrangements I've ever seen for, in a established IP. It's 50%. Wow, that's huge. Which is, I mean, that's unheard of. And you get to use assets from Dungeons and Dragons. And, you know, a 50% royalty is unbelievable for something where they give you access to the IP like that. But because of that, you have to publish through that specific venue. And like, if you're not already familiar with Dungeons and Dragons and probably not already a Dungeon Master, you don't know what Dungeon Master's Guild is. Like, that's not something that is... It'll take a little while. It takes a little. So absolutely, the first teachers in engaging it are very familiar with Dungeons and Dragons to begin with.

1:25:44 Yeah. And are looking for ways to integrate it. And in some cases, they've already found ways to integrate other kinds of D&D lessons into their classrooms. So we're starting from there. You know, unfortunately, I won't be able to make it available anywhere else because of that IP sharing arrangement. Yeah, of course. Of course. But we're hoping that other people pick it up and give it a try. And people who aren't familiar with D&D pick it up and give it a try. Well, I feel like now it's going to be like once the people who do pick it up start using, they've already started to use it. Now you're starting to get feedback. Yes. You know, on the sort of the like evaluation of how well it works. You know, how do the kids respond to it? You know, how do the teachers respond to the kids responding to it? You know, did they learn that the material more?

1:26:27 Did they enjoy it? Do they want to do more? Then I think they'll start to talk to other teachers in their school like, what are you doing? What is this? The educational start of just like what this is all about. And then the idea is that that'll start to spread through through word of mouth. I assume is that is sort of the goal? Is that it? Yeah, I ultimately that's the goal, word of mouth. And of course, Southern Fried Science, which is, you know, my venue for spreading everything. A little site, a little site that provides some information. A lesser known ocean science website. I think we have reclaimed our title as the most widely read ocean science blog in the English language. I'll tell you. It's the end. You know, I think that's from attrition, not from any success on our end.

1:27:07 Well, I'll tell you, though, but the quality of articles that come out of there. I'm always happy reading those articles. I always put them in my newsletter every time I pop them in, you know, and it's like, I'm like, this is a good one. So yeah, so they're always great. They're always informative. They've driven a lot of podcasts before. I'm happy to help. Whether you're on it or not. Sometimes I'm like, oh, this is a good way. I got to talk about this. But then you also have like guest writers and stuff like that. That also put like, Angelo's been on it. And obviously who's like, Angelo is not a guest writer. He is. He's an official writer. Full on now. Full on. Yeah. OK. I love it. Yeah, I really like what the last article that David Shiffman and Brett Favaro are doing, which is they had a, you know, they had a paper that they were having trouble getting published in a scientific journal or finally like, you know what?

1:27:57 We're done. We're done trying to get this into a journal. We're just going to publish it as a blog post. And I can guarantee you more people have read it now than would have ever read it in a scientific journal. 100%. Especially it's on science communication. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And it's a what? A four? It's a four part series. Yeah. And yeah, I've already started to read it. And it's, I mean, it's so informative. You know, these are two people who have had a lot of very different communication styles and different topics to draw some information from. And they have a lot of, they know a lot of people that can inform them on different aspects, too. So I think those are going to be really great. We'll link to that as well as the Dungeons and Dungeons Masters Guild in there, too, so people can get access to it.

1:28:43 So, yeah, so obviously Southern Fried Science, we'll be able to get some information on that. Like, are you planning on publishing an article, whether it be on Southern Fried Science or elsewhere, on sort of the, like, are you following and keeping in touch with the people who have downloaded it to kind of get feedback on what's working, what's not, that kind of stuff? Oh, yeah, absolutely. So we've published a couple of articles already, kind of the initial sort of launch of the project and sort of lessons learned from that. And I'm keeping, you know, it's a 12 to 20 hour campaign means it's probably going to take a semester of finding the time to run it. And so we're getting feedback as it goes in.

1:29:24 I'm sure there'll be a second edition with lots of changes and corrections to help people out and get feedback. And, you know, I'm hoping long term that we can, you know, do this as a regular thing. Every so often publish new adventures, you know, get some more marine science in there next time. Maybe adventure to the abyssal plane. I love it. It's basically like Meg three. Do a DC Mining campaign. You never know. There you go. Oh, I like that. Yeah. I like that. No, that's amazing. And even like not even just in classrooms, I feel like a lot of the eco clubs could be doing this too. Yeah. Probably get through more of the stories because they can spend, you know, every day of a week to just do like a campaign or something like that or a couple of weeks.

1:30:09 Well, I'll tell you, I mean, my daughter, every summer she does a camp at the local Audubon Society. And after lunch, every single day of camp, they have a little mini D&D session where they talk about. It's part of the camp. Part of the camp. Talk about the animals they've encountered and, you know, talk about a little bit of ecology. I think last year they were fighting a croc that stole crocs because people kept losing their shoes in the in the marsh. Croc made of crocs. It was a giant croc, but it wasn't like a giant the shoe croc. Oh, that is so it had to eat crocs to be exactly. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, and like integrated into the camp and like part of their experience.

1:30:51 And it's wonderful to see because like, you know, that opportunity to like still be engaged, but it's like, you know, you're not hiking through the woods, maybe a little tired after lunch, but it's a chance to continue to talk about the topic in a different way and in a new way. And I also feel like it just, it helps you develop that creativity. Absolutely. Right? Like D&D just in general helps you develop that creativity. That's the one thing I really respect of this is because you have to adapt so quickly in a story. It really makes you think. It really makes you open up your mind. It's almost like improv. It is improv. Yeah. Oh, my improv skills have gotten so much better since I got back into DMing about three years ago. Yeah, yeah, I can imagine. And so I think it's really great for kids who, you know, in a world dominated by phones, you know, especially teenagers and tweens where they're just looking at phones all the time.

1:31:40 This is a great way to really get them to interact, get them off their phones, get them into something creative, you know, and learn about themselves in terms of how they can actually, you know, build on storytelling and which we're going to need in any kind of job that you do. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. You have to have good storytelling skills. That's awesome. You know, one of the tremendous things to see is that because, you know, Dungeons and Dragons is 50 years old this year. Yeah, it's crazy. So we have kids that are sharing adventures with their parents and their grandparents. Wow. And so there's this beautiful little chain of connection going across generations now. That's phenomenal. That's just amazing. And you know what? It's been 50 years and it still takes 20 minutes to open a door.

1:32:26 You got to figure out something that goes on. But like, so, so is this something like, like, I know you have, you, you are one of the guys that I know who, you know, when you have an idea, you go full fledged and you develop the idea over time and it, and it, it obviously gets better and better as it goes along. I hope so. OpenCTD has done your projects, you know, through the, like, through Patreon, even like following through Patreon and documenting that process on here as well. The, the deep sea mining, obviously that's something that you're an expert in, but you've continued to kind of really creatively, like, get into different aspects of it.

1:33:07 You know, with the magazine and stuff and coming on the podcast and your articles and things with this project, you know, obviously you're, you're going to develop it even more through feedback. And you're talking about doing maybe different scenarios, different, different story lines and stuff like that. Like, how much time are you ready to dedicate to this, to this type of project? So that is an interesting question. And, you know, in addition to the kinds of projects I do, I always have to do like an ROI analysis of things to figure out like where I need to invest my time because in addition to being like a very silly whimsical man, I also have a mortgage.

1:33:52 So this was, you know, this was a nights and weekends kind of project for the last, for the last year. And, you know, I'd like to see, I'd like to see it break even before, before I really focus on the next big project that's kind of D&D focused. I commissioned a lot of art for, for the actual campaign so that, you know, there's, there's visual aids to kind of capture the spirit of the adventure. Because I like commissioning artists and paying artists to do good work. Of course. So there's no, no AI art in it at all. It's all original art from Aaron Anderson. Yes. We designed a lot of maps. So that was mostly me, but building maps is very time intensive.

1:34:35 So once I hit the break even point, I'll have a better idea of like what I can do pushing forward in terms of like actually generating these pretty consistently. Like I'm always like I run a D&D campaign at my library. I want run one with my family and I have the podcast as well. So like I'm steeped in it all the time. I've got a million notes, but, but really getting, you know, the, the hard part was not the D&D campaign. The hard part was making it work as an educational tool. Yeah, of course. And building out the lesson plans and making sure that the adventure match what we were trying to teach and was, you know, adding to that lesson rather than kind of distracting from it.

1:35:17 Yeah, no doubt. So, you know, that takes a lot of work and, you know, I think I probably committed about a month of my time full time to just doing the copy editing and getting all the layout and everything and doing some of the testing and making sure it all made sense. So it's not a small chunk of time. No, for sure. And it's obviously like it's, you know, labor. The problem with labors of love is that labors of love don't pay the bills. I mean, is this something that like do people who publish these, these manuals on the guild is it, can it be a business? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Like a revenue generator for you, you think over time?

1:35:59 You know, I think the niche I'm working in is so small that it probably won't ever be a serious revenue generator. If it breaks even, that'd be amazing. Gotcha. Because, you know, if I can predictably have these projects break even, then I can commission new art and invest the time into making the next one without worrying too much. For sure. There are absolutely people who make a living just publishing D&D modules. You know, there are professional dungeon masters who their entire career is running D&D campaigns. And that sounds like an awful lot of fun. I wouldn't mind doing that. Wouldn't that be great? I mean, you write them already. It's like, let's just make a business out of it. Yeah. I mean, it is a lot of work. Like those guys are full on creatives in a way that like I, I mean, you've described my workload. It's I'm not a, I'm not consistently focused on any one thing long enough, I think, to pull something like that off.

1:36:49 But there are some great people out there that are putting together some amazing campaigns. And, you know, some of the other guys on the podcast, on the DooGongs and Sea Dragon podcast have published other educational supplements. So there is a scientific secrets of the salt marsh where they've turned real ocean animals into D&D monsters with stat blocks and little like lessons about their behavior and ecology around that scientific secrets of ice wind Dale, which is all Arctic animals. So there are, you know, there are other ways to do it as well. And there's some great resources out there. That's amazing. Like, can you send me some of those links? We'll put absolutely show notes so that people can get access to them because I want people to really understand, you know, the value of what's been put in, but also like the value of the education tool that can be whether you're a teacher or not, you know, you just want to play with your family or something or your friends or your kids friends like that, like that, I think is a great is a great idea.

1:37:47 Let's let's switch to the educational aspect of an just like environmental literacy in general. This is a great tool and it may not work for everybody. Obviously, it's it's it's a niche where people who play the games, which probably we're talking like millions of people play Dungeons and Dragons, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, it's the most popular tabletop role playing game in the world. Yeah, probably I wouldn't be afraid to say probably hundreds of millions at this point. Right. Right. So there's there's a lot of people to do this. And like, I feel as though over especially those last decade, we've really seen just the lack of environmental literacy from people in general. Right. And that's had some serious consequences politically from a policy standpoint.

1:38:34 We've discussed it a number of times through the number every time I think you're on we kind of discuss it. Where do you see, you know, people like yourself people like me, David Shiffman and everybody else who's involved people who have podcasts and YouTube channels and, you know, Dungeons and Dragons games and, you know, everybody is trying to do their their education in their own kind of circles and in their own kind of networks, whether it be on. Online, whether it be locally. What do you think we need to do as a collective to really start to nail down this this literacy for people? Yeah, so I think the broader issue that we're all kind of touching on is this idea of nature deficit disorder, which is, you know, and I hate doing the kids these days thing because it's obviously not the kids fault. Right. We have built a society in certain parts of the world, certainly certain parts of the developed world where children don't have the same access to wild spaces that even we did growing up, you know, dare I say 40 years ago.

1:39:48 Um, you know, I live in a very rural area. I live in the wood. I'm like, if we're doing video here, I'm in an actual log cabin in the middle of the woods right now. Like, you know, my daughter, her made a wood. My daughter raises chickens. Right. And I grew up in Baltimore City and I still remember having much more access to large, like, state parts, large green spaces that I, you know, even out here. I don't think my daughter has nearly the same access to because she can't just hop on a bike and ride 20 miles away the way we used to. You know, the roads are less friendly. They're not designed with pedestrians in mind.

1:40:30 Um, you know, we've, we've stretched kids out into the suburbs in a way that like suburbs are kind of like, like the graveyard of green spaces because they not only do they deprive people of green spaces by overbuilding and developing on them, but then they also make it much harder to get to the existing green spaces because they sprawled you out in these kinds of, you know, massive housing complexes of private property. Someone as someone who's worked, I've worked as a private consultant for quite a number of years and the amount of fight that we had to do with developers on keeping green spaces. Oh, yeah. And making them large and just like on a just a tree, like just a tree, keep a tree in this one area. Yeah. But then we can make so much more money if we take this tree down. Like, it's, it's unreal. The battles that you have to do in these suburbs, suburban areas. Yeah. Well, and you know, you know, something like Dungeons and Dragons adventure is not a replacement for access to the woods, but it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a activity. It means it means it means multiple living spaces, which meant that it meant lots of living spaces, but it is, it is in its own way a green space that they always have access to. So it is it. This provides a different tool for engaging with nature. And, you know, you know, one of the kind of tragic thoughts that occurs to me every couple of months is that like you know, Rachel Carson came out with Silent Spring about d Verizon.

1:41:45 in the decline of brand populations. Her, the central thesis was that we don't hear bird songs as much as we used to anymore. Uh, and that, that struck such a powerful cords thatmathis And that struck such a powerful chord that it fundamentally created the environmental movement. And I think about today, if you told kids we were hearing less birdsongs, would they, and not just kids, adults, even more so adults, if adults today heard, "Oh, we're hearing less birdsongs in the spring," would that be something that has the same level of emotional resonance, or are we so disconnected just from the idea that we should be hearing nature all the time, that it wouldn't like hit the way that Silent Spring hit in the 60s?

1:42:26 Yeah, no, it's true. I mean, there's that sort of point of reference that we have. You know, there was a paper that was written a number of years ago where they talked about the people who saw coral reefs back in the 60s have a different idea of what coral, the people now have a different idea of corals compared to the people that they saw in the 60s. And, but we don't know, it's the frame of reference, we just don't know what it looked like, even our our generations changed since since then. So if you play if you play Last Time for the Jabberwock, shifting basslines is in there. And it's not in there in an explicit way, it's there in an implicit way. As you meet different characters, they've experienced the forest through different time frames. And so some people will say that the forest is amazing and doing great right now. And some people will talk about how great it was 20 years ago. And you know, it's D&D, you can have thousand year old characters, they'll talk about, you know, what it looks like 1000 years ago, and the players have to piece together like, what was the natural state of this forest, because the baseline has shifted depending on who the observer is.

1:43:27 It's amazing. It's such a such a good tool. It's such a fun, it sounds like such a fun idea. It's awesome. I've only played it once. I wasn't comfortable playing it took me out of my comfort zone. I remember that we kind of we kind of hacked a game of cyberpunk into it at the same time, because we were texting back and forth while you were playing on stage. But it was it but it's it's one of those things I have a lot of respect for the for it, because it's it's it it does it puts you in that creative mode. And if you're not ready for it, you're not ready for it. Right. But I think as you play it more and more, and just kind of make sure that you can like for me is like, you got to be a, you got to be and obviously, this was in front of a stage of people. So it's a little bit more.

1:44:08 Yeah, you got thrown into the deep end. You didn't just play a game of Dungeons and Dragons. You played a game of Dungeons and Dragons in public on a stage, having heard about it an hour and a half ago. It was a little, it was a little bit quick. But now with that said, with that said, what you did is continuing on today. Like true. You laid a foundation that has has transcended. I mean, it's it's a D&D podcast has been running for six years now. Yeah, yeah. And I like it was fun. I had a good time. But I should say that Melissa Marquez learned just as fast as I did. And she kicked butt in the storytelling compared to what what I was doing. It was it was she got into it. And she was she was great. We were joking about it. But she did a phenomenal, phenomenal job.

1:44:55 So she's a natural born storyteller. I mean, her the children's book, she's been putting out her excellent. My kids got all of them. Yeah, yeah, it's it's unreal. It's there. They're there. They're a lot of fun. I love this, this aspect. So this is something that's going to continue on for a little bit. This story is already up there. People can download it. We're going to put the links in the show notes that people can get access to it. Andrew, it's always a pleasure to have you on, you know, he's like, Hey, do you want to talk about D&D on the podcast? Like, yes, I think what I actually said is please for the love of what of whichever D&D you believe in. Can we talk about something not American politics? Yes, I just want to talk about something different. Yes, let's put on a positive stage. And to be honest, I've been talking a lot about it on the podcast. Oh, yeah, political. And so now it's nice to just be like, Hey, look, there's, there's a need for different educational tools to really increase our environmental literacy. This is a great way of doing it. Obviously, hundreds of millions of people are playing it around the world. And this is something that we can tap into.

1:45:55 And so I highly recommend that people support not only Andrews efforts in this, but also the ability to, you know, grow environmental literacy through this D&D game. So he just said the title one more time. So the title is the last hunt for the Jabber walk, a Feywild adventure and ecological succession. There's also a map pack if you want full size maps for the players to play on if you do playing D&D with miniatures. And I'll give you a link with a discount code in it too. So you can go to D&D.com. Get a little bit, little bit off the price. Take care of the absolutely. This is awesome. Alright, Andrew, thank you so much for joining us. It's always a pleasure. And can't wait to talk to you next time. I'm looking forward to it. All right. All right, thank you. Thank you, Andrew, for joining us on this episode of the how to protect the ocean. It's always great to have you come on because you always do these creative projects that, you know, are not like regular projects that we see around the world. You bring them to us every single time. And it's always unique. It's always fun. And they're always like, I gotta say like genius. They're brilliant in terms of getting people to understand and make yourself aware of the environment and beefing up our environmental literacy for people which we know is really low right now. And so I love the fact that you're using Dungeons and Dragons as a game, not only with your family, but not only at your local library, but you use it, you know, on a podcast and that gets published to like a lot of different listeners for anybody who wants it. We'll put that link to the Dungeons and Dragons game and the podcast. And

1:47:25 you know, now you do it for teachers so that they can pick it up and grab it. So I highly recommend that people go and grab if you're interested in playing Dungeons and Dragons. And if you've played Dungeons and Dragons before, you know where to go. But I'm going to put the link in the show notes below this episode. If you're on YouTube or if you're on Spotify, this can be in the show notes. If you're listening to this on any kind of podcast app, or you can go to speakupforblue.com and the link to the show on our website is on the show notes. So you can go right there and you can download it. This is a fun way to learn about the environment. It could be expanded. It's a great way to learn and I think it's just a fun way to enjoy it. So go to the show notes, download it, try it out. I'd love to hear what you think and so would Andrew. Let me know in the comments below. And also if you want to get a hold of me, you can do so at Instagram. The handle is at how to protect the ocean. So you can go just DM me on Instagram.

1:48:25 I love to hear your thoughts on this. And don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hit that notification bell so you get every episode Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And as well, you can go subscribe to your favorite podcast app or go to speakupforblue.com forward slash podcast to see every episode or watch every episode and listen to every episode of this how to protect the ocean podcast. Thank you so much for joining me on today's episode. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and have a conservation.