D&D Yoga
World Premier, Brooklyn, NY, January 25, 2014
swi in collaboration with Sarah Dahnke and Eric Hagan

Round 2

Austin, Texas
March 8, 2014 during SXSW
swi in collaboration with Samantha Calvano and Brandon Hodge

D&D Yoga can be played in many ways. The varying flavors range from that of a guided narrative while people do yoga to a far more interactive experience where players are in conversation and play a more active role in the campaign. For the first trial, we thought it would be wise to veer closer to the guided narrative side of things. Players still made decisions and rolled dice to dictate a few directions that the story took but generally we wanted to see how the experiment would play out and then build from there. As we proceed into future events we are building more interactivity into the game.

For the premier in Brooklyn players occupied a single character. This maintained the togetherness that yoga classes offer as participants are following a guide each doing the same move. Further, embodying one character in the story simplified the identity in the D&D narrative. We talked a lot about how everyone would be their own characters and how that would work. And we might expriment with that in the future. But again, for the first experiment we wanted to test a baseline flavor of this mashup and then build from there. We used D10's (ten sided dice) to simplify the summations but this is somethng we will also continue to experiment with.

For Round 2 in Austin, we took what we learned from Brooklyn and made some tweaks. There were two yoga leads and when battle happened half the class embodied the opponent so the divided class fought each other. We used the more iconic D20 dice and there was a conscious effort to keep the whole thing light and fun. Brandon's character sheet that each player received was more involved and the adventure was inspired by an early D&D classic from his childhood, The Wooden Mouse by Roger Smith. Samantha created several new poses, a few favorites were Spell Pose and Potion Pose. Pose chart and audio from the Austin Session, here.

Suggestions for play:

Of course feel free to adopt the D&D Yoga postiions shared here, but find a yoga lead who is willing to learn and create new moves on the fly, someone who will enjoy it. Likewise, the Dungeon Master needs to be flexible in their approach as they will be compromising aspects of D&D that may seem sacreligious. Get those 2 people in the room together and hash out how you want to run the game. Then find someone to test your approach, make necessary improvements, and then find your party!

Round 3

Back in Brooklyn
March 22, 2014
swi in collaboration with Sarah Dahnke and Luke Crane

Every player had an indivualized character sheet as Luke and Sarah moved us through his adventure titled "Aeglaekir and the Tree of Ythunn." Through a forest, successfully parlayed with a troll, stumbled up a cliff, clumsily passed an ancient wall, evaded an angry cult, entered an abandoned dwarf dwelling in a mountain where we were of course confronted by not one but two...dragons. It took some lucky dice to sucessfully utilize a spell on the dragons and in the end, immersed within the refreshingly physiological workout led by Sarah, we all received one apple of youth from the Tree of Ythunn. Here are a few pics:

D&D Yoga press
abc news, Dungeon Master Meets Namaste
time, unleash your inner zen nerd
wired, downward dragon
cnet, stretch and storm the castle
ny times magazine, focus on your fire breathing
npr, wait wait don't tell me limerick at 3:30