Time Scales and Elves

 It's a classic trope that sci-fi and fantasy writers have no sense of scale.

For example, space travel, specifically interstellar travel, would require an enormous amount of time without some sort of faster-than-light capabilities. The nearest star (other than the sun, of course) to us is, if I recall correctly, 4 light years away. Even getting to within a tenth of the speed of light (which would be a profoundly difficult thing to do) means it would take 40 years to get there. So you need a cheat of some sort.

In World of Warcraft, one of the really major events in Azeroth's past is the War of the Ancients. This took place 10,000 years ago. For context, human history on Earth is generally considered to be 6,000 years - dating back to the invention of writing. Certainly there were probably towns and even maybe cities before writing was invented, but basically everything prior to 6,000 years ago has to be reconstructed by archaeologists. But on Azeroth, there are individuals who were already alive at the time. Hell, many of the Draenei are over two and a half times as old - Velen looked about middle-aged when he left Argus 25,000 years ago, which would mean that the guy is probably over 50,000 years old.

I've been tooling around with the timeframe of my own homebrew D&D setting. The world has undergone many different major changes over a vast timescale. Its current era, which followed the catastrophic fall of the Parthalian civilization, has been going for about 19,000 years.

Now, there's a part of me that wants to retcon that and divide everything by ten. 1,900 years would put the era of the "Dragon Empires," which emerged after the "Reign of Madness" (the period of anarchy and cosmic horror that followed the fall of the Parthalians) at a distance that is comparable to the Roman Empire from our perspective.

Perhaps the scale is not quite right - I think the Dragon Empires ought to be more comparable to the Mesopotamian civilization, so perhaps they should have been 5000 years ago - dividing my timeline by a factor of four rather than ten.

The thing with fantasy worlds, though, is that the existence of long-lived races makes things tricky. I'm pretty confident no one on Earth could identify all their ancestors that lived 5000 years ago. But according to the Player's Handbook, elves take 100 years to be considered mature adults and can live up to 750 years. If we consider the current rough life expectancy for humans, which is 70 (remember that this is average - if you make it to age 10 you're a lot more likely to live longer,) 5000 years represents about 71 exclusive generations (by exclusive generations I mean generations that die off before the next, rather than just parent-to-child generations - the idea being that this would be a generation that won't personally know that previous one.) To an elf, though, it's only about 6 or 7. This effectively means that to an elf, 5000 years ago is the equivalent to the way we think of roughly 1560.

So, you know, certainly a long time ago but not beyond the mists of history.

You know, actually, I'm sort of talking myself into shrinking things by a factor of four. 5000 years is a lot of time for things to happen, and I actually think it's far enough back for the long-lived races that it doesn't feel like it would make the period feel insignificant to them.

And this has been my thought process!

Hey, so Let's Talk About The Latest Critical Role

 While my interaction with Critical Role is that of an audience member, and I kind of treat it like one of the shows I'm watching regularly, I figure it's still gaming based and thus works for this blog.

If you're not familiar, Critical Role is probably the most popular streamed D&D "real play" game on the internet. The cast is a bunch of voice actors who are fairly prominent in animation and video games. In fact, if you're a WoW fan, some of the biggest characters' voice actors are there: Rexxar DMs, and Jaina, Illidan, Turalyon, and Darion Mograine are all players (among a couple others.)

The group make it very entertaining to watch, really buying into their characters and giving us some really dramatic moments and arcs along with the usual action and typical TTRPG silliness. So I recommend it if you want a massive amount of content to watch through (it's also in podcast form - great for long walks or drives or if you can listen to podcasts at work.) Also, while the first campaign gets fantastic eventually, the early stretch is a bit rough, as the sound quality was terrible and the pacing was not super conducive to a game with an audience. So I'd say start with the second campaign - there's very little continuity in terms of narrative, so you won't be lost (it's even set on a different continent.)

Anyway, the show is known for its huge twists and turns, and this campaign has had a lot of really crazy moments, but maybe the biggest just hit. Follow me past the spoiler break.

Uro Banned

 Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath, has been a major party of the Standard metagame for a good long while now, before and after the standard rotation. It's the sort of card where if you're playing Green and Blue, you should probably put as many copies as you have in your deck. And if you're playing green without blue, you might want to toss in a couple dual lands to make sure you can play Uro.

So I can't say I'm shocked that the old drippy-chain-titan got banned in Standard today.

For those of you who maybe haven't been playing lately, here's how he works:

Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath is a 6/6 Legendary Elder Giant for 1UG. When he enters the battlefield or attacks, you draw a card, gain 3 life, and you can put a land from your hand onto the battlefield. When he enters the battlefield, sacrifice him if didn't escape.

Escape: UUGG: exile 5 cards from your graveyard to place Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath onto the battlefield.

So basically, in the vast majority of cases, you play him like a sorcery that gives you some life, a card, and potentially a little ramp. But if your graveyard gets full enough, you can pop him out for just four mana and he becomes a major threat - swinging in for 6 and healing you and potentially allowing you to ramp some more (though I think this element becomes less significant in the late game.)

I wouldn't say this is a case like Oko, Thief of Crowns which was just crazy broken on its own, but Uro is just such solid utility that it's a practical must-have in any deck that is even remotely capable of playing it.

I imagine this will shake up the metagame in interesting ways. I'm curious to see how my Nissa of Shattered Boughs deck shapes up thanks to this ban, as the huge thing here is that blue isn't going to be an inherently ramp-y color now.

Horror One-Shot and My First Player Character Kill

 With our usual DM feeling sick this weekend, I volunteered to run a one-shot I'd cooked up (intending to play it in October, but oh well) which was largely inspired by a particular "Haunt" in the game Betrayal at House on the Hill (whose Avalon Hill publisher is actually owned by WotC, so... there you go.)

Anyway, as the adventure begins, the players arrive at a charming inn within a town that's a day's travel from the imperial capital in my homebrew setting. When they fall asleep, though, they are magically transported to the Shadowlands - my version of the Shadowfell - into the "Cutter House."

Here's the conceit:

The characters arrive inside wooden boxes in the attic of the house. They're all wearing the same three-piece suit, and don't have any of their equipment.

The house gives off a very haunted-house vibe, with spooky magical effects and such. Worst of all, the party finds other groups of adventurers who have been gorily slaughtered, as well as a few mentions of Bloody Oleg. The party must use the exploration time in the house to gather equipment - usually sub-par stuff (Padded Armor, Greatclubs, etc.) - as well as spell components if they are casters. The moment anyone sets foot in the front hall, the grandfather clock on the second floor landing begins to chime (despite clearly being broken - there's a dead halfling stuffed inside) and after 13 chimes, Bloody Oleg, an undead dwarf berserker dripping with blood, walks in and attempts to carve the party to pieces.

The trick is that if they kill Oleg (and it's easy to do this the first time as he only starts with 10 health) he'll disappear after a few moments and once they go back to exploring the house, he'll arrive again, this time with 5 extra health (capping at 25.) The only way to permanently kill him is to do so on a circle of infernal runes in a secret room in the basement (the players can find this room without checks if they just go into the basement and look around, finding a secret door).

Only by killing Oleg permanently can they escape from the house.

Exploring the Cutter House, they can discover a strange and ultimately inconsistent story: Darion Cutter and his husband Samuel ran a shipping business about a hundred years ago. They had an argument, Darion worrying that Samuel had made some reckless decisions. The players can find letters that indicate this conflict, surrounding a ship called the Mary's Mercy, which Samuel purchased apparently in defiance of Darion's wishes. Eventually, the party can find the master bedroom, where a note from another sea captain claims that Samuel died when the Mary's Mercy sank, and in the master bathroom, they find a skeleton, presumably Darion, with sleeves rolled up, and there's a razor blade in the tub (well, if they look in the murky water.)

They also find references to Bloody Oleg, as well as some children's drawings in the nursery - presumably for the girl the couple intend to adopt, named Henrietta, though the drawings are by "Darion, Age 7."

The truth is that they are not in the material world, and instead in the Shadowlands, and as such, the house represents not an actual tragedy that took place, but instead the extreme worries that Darion held, which bled into the Shadowlands. In truth, he and his husband were perfectly successful, and lived long and happy lives, but the worst case scenario that played out in his head manifested in the Shadowlands. Furthermore, his childhood boogeyman, Bloody Oleg, also manifested here as a violent undead dwarf. At some point, the monster made a deal with a number of fiends exiled from Infernus (my version of the Nine Hells, which was conquered by the Angel of Death and literally froze over to become The Necropolis instead) in order to keep coming back - only he didn't actually fulfill his end of their bargain, so they manifested their trap to kill him once and for all.

All the while, the vampire Lord Valdarren has used the Cutter House as a sort of audition for adventurers he wishes to bring under his employment.

While my party were able to find the infernal shrine in the basement before facing Oleg the first time, the older human druid Velthe, who had kind of spearheaded the plan to lure him down to the basement, ultimately fell to Oleg's greataxe, and given that this monster lives to murder, he chopped off Velthe's head - literally the turn before he was destroyed.

Given that it was a one-shot and that it felt motivated by the monster, I didn't feel too bad about this, though in now five years of running D&D games, this is actually the first time I've killed off a player character.

I guess if it had to happen anywhere, a one-shot specifically in the horror genre is not a bad place to do it. At this point in my Ravnica campaign the characters have so much access to resurrection magic that it's not until I start throwing monsters that can cast Disintegrate that I think they're in any real danger (and there's always True Resurrection.)

(Oh, and there's one character who might summon a Nightwalker if they succeed on a Divine Intervention... so there's that.)

Anyway, the one-shot was a bit of a back-door pilot, as I've been thinking of running a campaign set in the Shadowlands, which certainly has spooky Shadowfell-feeling locations but is more of a broader fantasy "Dark World" akin to the Dark World from Zelda: A Link to the Past. I don't think this adventure would be the first session - we'd likely go about things differently, and maybe make an entirely different starting point for their entry into the Shadowlands (possibly even have it start in the material plane.)

While I think the risk of danger makes a game like D&D an interesting challenge, I also tend to focus on the group storytelling potential of it, and I want players to feel that they can invest in a character with a reasonable expectation that they can explore their story - basically, I like to give players an out should something befall them.

And yet, I've only really come within killing range of a character once before, and I sort of fudged things (letting someone do some mage-hand healing potion shenanigans that probably should have cost more in the action economy) in the players' favor.

What is Spelljammer?

Given the announcement that WotC is working on three new campaign setting books that are all based on classic D&D settings, I figured I'd go and do an overview of the various settings I think are most likely (or the ones that I'd most like) to see printed.

The big caveat here is that I am coming to this pretty green myself. Case in point: my only experience with the Spelljammer setting was a single one-shot in which I and a group of Adventurer's League players, having finished Descent into Avernus, decided to play in an all-Warforged (though one player missed this and brought a human) party - I resolved to make my character as non-AL legal as possible, making a Warforged Artificer with the Izzet Engineer background.

Anyway, that's beside the point. What is Spelljammer?

Spelljammer is a campaign setting for D&D that is built around pseudo-science-fantasy, primarily taking place on magical spaceships, of which the Spelljammer is the most legendary example (which is sort of the Flying Dutchman equivalent.) This, like Planescape, is something of a "meta-setting," which links other existing D&D worlds, so you can travel, say, from Toril of the Forgotten Realms setting to Krynn of the Dragonlance setting.

While the setting uses a lot of sci-fi imagery, the manner in which space truly works is quite different, and is actually based on medieval theories about the nature of the cosmos. In Spelljammer, each world exists within its own Crystal Sphere. These spheres are named after the various settings, so Toril is within Realmspace and Oerth, the world of the Greyhawk setting, is in Greyspace. The space within these spheres is referred to broadly as Wildspace, and looks a lot like ordinary outer space, except that gravity sometimes works a little differently - large flat objects will often have gravity simply pull things to its surface (so if you want a flat world, you can do that.)

The Spheres themselves separate Wildspace from the Phlogiston, an ocean of some sort of fifth element that can only exist outside of the crystal sphere, and it's along the currents in this vast space-ocean that Spelljammers can travel to other crystal spheres, and thus other worlds.

Even within the spheres, there are planets and asteroids and such beyond the main world, and so even with a ship that is unable to journey through the phlogiston, you can still do some planet-hopping.

Tonally, Spelljammer is famous or infamous for its silliness. For example, Gnomish ships in the setting are generally powered by Giant Space Hamsters, powering the ship by running on wheels within the ship's engines. While you have alien threats like the Neogi - a type of aberration with no concept of understanding others as anything but a slave or a master - or, of course, the Mind Flayers (whose Nautiloid ships can be seen in the Baldur's Gate III trailer,) the overall vibe of the setting is a parodic send-up of sci-fi.

Spelljammer didn't actually sell that well after it was first released in 1989, and so the setting hasn't been revisited since the 90s, apart from the occasional monster stat block.

Despite, or perhaps because of this, a lot of D&D fans have clamored for it to make a return. Personally, given that the Forgotten Realms already provides a pretty perfect standard-fantasy setting where most fantasy tropes are fair game, I'm much more interested in different takes on the genre, and space-faring science-fantasy would 100% be a different take.

Nissa Ramp Is Really Awesome When It Works

 I decided to burn some mythic wildcards and get four copies of Nissa of Shattered Boughs (which, by the way, is pronounced like you're bowing on stage, not shooting a bow... dear lord is English ambiguous in its pronunciation).

So, this Nissa of course replaces Nissa Who Shakes the World as the primary standard version of Zendikar's favorite elf planeswalker. The latter was profoundly powerful, could easily win games on its own and was a staple of practically any green deck.

Shattered Boughs Nissa is going to be harder to work with, as she's now in Golgari colors, and frankly, I don't think she's quite as powerful as the previous version.

That being said, she's still got some really powerful tools. So let's look:

She costs 2BG, which is a manageable cost. I see her as primarily showing up in green ramp decks with a dip into black (I don't know if it makes sense to pair her up with Garruk, Cursed Hunter, but I love that card and might see if I can manage that somehow.) She starts with 4 loyalty, which is nice as her only negative ability costs only 5.

The thing that makes her potentially insane is that she has Landfall: when a land comes into play under your control, put a loyalty counter on Nissa of Shattered Boughs.

This, of course, lets you build loyalty with relative ease, but where it gets insane is when you have a lot of land-placing ramp cards like Cultivate or Beanstalk Giant or what have you. Also, Ashaya, Soul of the Wild, is a very useful card in any landfall decks (it makes all nontoken creatures count as forests, and also as lands) and is a friendly pair with Nissa.

In my last game, I got her up to 11 Loyalty. It makes you feel free to spend her negative loyalty ability, which will actually help keep her alive.

The +1 Loyalty ability resembles her previous incarnation, though it's not quite as powerful. You untap a land, then you may (which is nice if you don't want to expose it to creature removal) turn it into a 3/3 elemental with haste and menace until end of turn. The until end of turn bit of course makes this not quite the army-animator that Who Shakes the World got us, but just being able to untap a land is pretty good, and getting an attacker who can often swing in and smack the opponent for 3 isn't too bad.

The final "ultimate" (though I'd recommend treating Nissa as a longterm permanent and try to keep her on the board) is her -5 ability. You can put a creature from your hand or your graveyard into play with two +1/+1 counters as long as its converted mana cost is less than or equal to the number of lands you have in play.

So, this isn't going to let you bring in some insanely expensive creature on turn 5, but what it does mean is that your opponent is going to have a rough time dealing with your biggest threats. In my recent game, my Ashaya came back multiple times, of courses triggering landfall each time and remaining a massive 14/14 monster the opponent ran out of ways to deal with.

Another good pairing with this is Grakmaw, Skyclave Ravager. This is a legendary hydra for 1BG, 0/0 but comes into play with three +1/+1 counters. When a creature that has a +1/+1 counter on it dies, you get to put one on Grakmaw (and you'll potentially have several of those with Nissa's negative ability.) Then, if Grakmaw dies, you put a token into play that's a hydra with power and toughness equal to Grakmaw's when it died.

So you basically get to copy the hydra, only with its power and toughness locked in the second time around. Bringing him out or back with Nissa gives you a 5/5 that then replaces itself with a 5/5 (or more) each time, which seems like a tough thing to deal with.

Anyway, I have yet to determine if this is going to be a format-defining card or just a cool one that works.

One of the downsides of Golgari colors right now is that there is no Pathway land for that combination - four "guilds" lost out, as I believe the current ones are based around the "RPG class" creature types (which are typically found in one of two colors) as well as two green ones (the RPG classes don't cross over with green, though there are some green cards that count as all four types, which should actually make green a really solid option for "party" decks.)

Still, I think they've more or less confirmed that the four missing Pathway lands are coming with Kaldheim early next year, so I think this is a card to keep an eye on.

Planar Rules and the Planescape Setting

 One of the most exciting possibilities for a possible new campaign setting book would be Planescape. Arguably, this already has some detail in even the core books, with the Dungeon Master's Guide giving descriptions of the various inner and outer planes.

The various "outsiders" found in the Monster Manual, and also found a lot in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, also gives us examples of monsters to use in these settings.

So the thing I wonder about, as a player who has played D&D for about... six years now? But one who has not been steeped in its lore since childhood like some others, is where the general understanding of the planes ends and where the Planescape setting itself begins.

I did buy on DM's Guild a 2nd Edition Planescape Campaign Setting book (published in I want to say 1994.)

The core focus of that book (I think the very first Planescape book came out in 1987 or so) was on the city of Sigil and the Outlands, which are the outer plane usually ignored in the "Great Wheel" charts given that it sits in the center, though not to be confused with the center that is occupied by the prime material plane.

Really, it helps to think of it as a 3D model rather than a 2D chart. You can think of the Outer Planes as existing above (or, if you prefer, below) the inner planes, with the Outlands at their center, and then the Inner Planes existing on a different vertical level, this time with the Prime Material Plane really at its center.

This cosmology has changed with different editions - 4th Edition really upended things and had the "elemental chaos" as the location for several planes including the Abyss, but 5E has generally held the four elemental planes (which are kinda sorta one big plane, with border regions that mix those elements) as separate, Inner Planes from the Outer ones.

The Planescape Book features a mostly familiar cosmology with the Great Wheel even illustrated quite dramatically as a kind of giant pie with the Outlands as a sort of circular piece in the middle and the city of Sigil orbiting (it's a ring-shaped city that only has an inner edge, and gravity basically goes "out") an impossibly tall spire coming out of its center.

My sense is that if you're talking about the Planescape setting, it primarily refers to Sigil and the Outlands. The extent to which Sigil is "in" the Outlands is sort of a matter of interpretation - the only way to reach Sigil is through magical portals; you can't go there traveling, you know, spatially.

The Outlands, beyond Sigil, are also really interesting. One of the premises of Planescape is that a region can literally become part of a different plane if enough people or activities embodying a different alignment congregate in that area. If the demons invading Avernus were to truly dominate the region and drive the devils back to a different layer, Avernus would become part of the Abyss (though dang, if that place isn't chaotic evil already...)

The Outlands are the True Neutral plane, shaped like a big disk. Around the plane, there are "Gate Towns" that allow passage into all the other outer planes. But given that, and the way that the planar mechanics work, each of these towns needs a perfect counterbalance. For example, Automata, the town granting access to Mechanus (which was also sometimes just called "Nirvana") is the super-rigidly structured, lawful neutral town you'd expect... until you find the crazy bacchanalian society that exists underground, which keeps Automata from simply becoming part of Mechanus and, you know, ceasing to serve its purpose (the Abyss gate town of Plage-Mort is apparently new because the old one got sucked into the Abyss.)

Culturally, the Planescape setting also has some interesting notions - particularly to the city of Sigil, which has its own very special and odd rules. For one, its ruler, the Lady of Pain, is basically infinitely powerful, at least inside the city, and she bars any and all gods from the city, and can erase a god and every one of its worshippers if they try to get in (also, do not, under any circumstances, try to worship her as a god. It will not go well for you.) The city is run by a number of "Factols," which are factions that are actually somewhat analogous to the guilds found in Ravnica, each with a fervently-followed and often strange philosophy.

People from Sigil are a bit like people from New York (caveat: I like New York and New Yorkers, and this is said more as a native Bostonian with a bit of a chip on his shoulder) in that they look down on anyone not from there. In particular, "Inners" from the Inner Planes and, above all, "Primes," meaning people from the Prime Material Plane, are seen as dumb hicks from the boondocks. Unlike my home city of Boston, Sigil can actually make a reasonable claim to be the hub of the universe (it's even shaped like a wheel!) so you can see where they'd get the inflated hometown ego, but still.

While the Outlands and Sigil are obviously really cool locations, what I'd argue is the biggest appeal to the setting is that all the planes are open to you. Really, the entire D&D cosmos is the setting, which could range anywhere from The Uphill Climb, the one operating tavern in Caer Dineval, Icewind Dale, to the palace of Everlost, in Thanatos, the Demon Lord Orcus' layer of the Abyss.

Actually, an interesting note: in the late 80s and the 90s, the rise of "moral guardians" (particularly the Christian right) singled out Dungeons & Dragons as a particularly dangerous practice for children, believing that its depiction of demons and devils would encourage satanism among kids (frankly, I think the vast majority of people who identify as satanists today do so because of the hypocrisies of the religious right, but that's not what I'm here to talk about.)

While for all I know this boosted sales of the game, TSR (which owned D&D before they were bought by Wizards of the Coast in the late 90s) decided to rebrand somewhat. The Nine Hells were renamed Baator, and devils were renamed "Baatezu." Demons were renamed "Tanar'ri," and daemons were renamed Yugoloths.

Once the Satanic Panic wound down, WotC brought back the pretty standard, recognizable fantasy creature names (except Yugoloths, which stuck probably due to how confusingly similar their names were to demons.)

Now, I don't know if this is just a relic of the fact that the sourcebook I was reading was from the early 90s (and that was probably the case,) but even though those names were created as a concession to a repugnant social movement (one whose effects we continue to suffer) to be honest, I kind of like how it redefines the outer planes - less the classical heavens and hells of various real-world mythologies, and more like alien worlds that we'd better not make too many assumptions about.

Planescape is cool, which is sort of half my point.

The thing is, while it's a very cool setting, I'm always interested in tools to homebrew concepts and mechanics. I don't know if I'll ever be able to match the massive amount of detail that has been poured into the Planescape setting, but when I first started designing my own setting, I took the license to create my own multiverse and ran with it. So while my Tartarus probably shares a lot with The Abyss, I'd really enjoy some more general mechanical concepts for planar adventures.

I think the plane that most fascinates me is one of the inner planes - the Shadowfell. This plane has actually only existed since 4th Edition, being a kind of merging of other concepts from earlier editions that was, canonically, merged in the massive events that took place between 3rd and 4th Edition.

There was a 4E book about the setting, and I've been tempted to pick it up on DM's Guild. But in more general terms, I wonder if there's a place for a book that's less about the specificity of various planar settings - less about telling me about specific NPCs and dungeons found on a particular giant gear in Mechanus than giving us monsters and environmental mechanics.

Actually, thinking about this, I couldn't imagine making a book that ignores such specifics. But the real question is how broad such a book could get in its subjects.

If we look only at the Outer Planes, we still have 17 entire universes to explore. If you take just the Nine Hells, that's still, you know, nine layers that each have their own different locations. Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, finds enough content for levels 5 through 13 on just the first layer.

So I have to imagine that a book that tried to give details about all of the Outer Planes would wind up only being able to touch on each briefly.

That being said...

The MTG crossover books (and to an extent the Eberron book) are broken down in a rather clever way. (For the sake of my typing fingers, I'm going to just call these by their setting names.) Ravnica has chapters divided by guild - there's a chapter for player characters of each guild, one for adventures that involve each guild (and broader suggestions on possible villainous plots by those guilds as well as missions the players might be sent on by those guilds) and the treasure and monsters, also divided by guild.

Theros does the same with its pantheon of 15 gods.

So perhaps a Planescape book could do the same, but focusing on each of the 17 Outer Planes - with sample maps, monsters and NPCs that you'd be likely to find in those planes, some extra playable races (bariaurs, for example) and maybe some subclasses, and you've got a comparable 5E setting book.

Honestly, I would not be surprised at all if we get something like that in 2021.

However, while I think this would probably get a lot of fans in a nerdy frenzy to grab the book, I feel like the Inner Planes get neglected.

I guess it's an open question: would players be more excited for an updated, 5th Edition version of the Planescape setting's most iconic elements, or would we want something a bit newer, focusing on aspects of the D&D cosmos that haven't gotten a lot of attention?

Screw it, I'm going to get that 4E Shadowfell book on DM's guild.

Would a Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting Book Make Sense?

 Ok, so the obvious response to my title is: "um, what about Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide?" And that's fair.

SCAG was the first 5th Edition book that was primarily built around detailing a setting, giving us some information about such famed places as Waterdeep, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter, Candlekeep, and Daggerford, and the general Sword Coast region of the Forgotten Realms, which is the sort of basic "home base" region of D&D's default setting.

The published adventures, with a couple exceptions, are set on the Sword Coast (even Out of the Abyss is, I believe, set in the Underdark regions below the Sword Coast.)

But SCAG is also generally derided as one of the most unnecessary books in the 5th Edition collection. It's very thin, and while it comes with a bunch of playable subclasses, only two or three of them are actually considered any good (indeed, a lot of the debate over the Undead patron that appeared in Unearthed Arcana has been about how it steps on the toes of the Undying patron - to which I say "good! Let this be a much cooler replacement!")

Since SCAG, we've had four campaign setting books with Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, Eberron: Rising from the Last War, Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, and Mythic Odysseys of Theros. Each of these has, I think, been received with a lot more enthusiasm.

So there is something to be said that WotC might have learned a lot on how to make these books more interesting and useful to DMs and players, and while the Core Books provide content that's perfectly suited for the Forgotten Realms, the books don't provide the extensive geographical detail you get in a dedicated setting book.

On the other hand, we've also gotten quite a bit of info for these locations in some of the published adventures. Waterdeep: Dragon Heist and Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus both have extensive "gazeteers" that provide a lot of info on their urban settings. Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden doesn't have the same sort of segment, but that location's more focused on the barren, frozen wastes, and we get a bit about Ten Towns.

The existing campaign setting books tend to focus on particular regions in their settings. Eberron gives us mostly info about the continent of Khorvaire, though there's a bit of info on Eberron's planes and some of the other continents. The Wildemount book of course only tells us about the eponymous continent in Exandria, with not a lot about Tal'dorei or other parts (though given that there was a separate, independent publication for the Tal'dorei setting, it could be seen as redundant.)

Actually, the previous parenthetical is the real issue here: wouldn't an FR setting book be kind of redundant? We know a ton about the Forgotten Realms already. And between all the published adventures, I think it would be easy for DMs to come up with their own adventures set there.

That being said, there's a Magic the Gathering set coming out next year set in the Forgotten Realms, and the previous crossovers have come with the release of Magic sets based in those worlds - the 2018/2019 "season" was all set in Ravnica, while 2019/2020's middle non-Core Set release was Theros Beyond Death. So I wouldn't be shocked if one of the three campaign setting books that come out will be FR-based - though I'd hope it would focus on the larger world, giving us other parts of Faerun and even the other continents (none of which I could name if you held a gun to my head.)

Scute Swarm and Mutate is a Match Made in Green Hell

 Scute Swarm is a 1/1 Insect creature for 2G. It has the following text: Landfall: when a land enters the battlefield under your control, create a 1/1 green insect token. If you control six or more lands, instead make a token that is a copy of Scute Swarm.

Anyone who understands exponential functions can realize how insane this gets after only a few lands six and over. It's 2 to the X, where X is the number of lands you play. So after one land, you have two, after two lands, you have four, three and you have eight, etc.

While a 1/1 body is not terribly hard to deal with, the real power of this is overwhelming your opponent with a repeating replication that requires you wipe out every last one of them to keep them from making more.

As such, any sort of sweeping damage spells or black -X/-X kind of sweepers will be very important should this become a major part of the metagame.

But if you'll recall, just two sets ago, we got a mechanic that lets you transform your creatures into some powerful kaiju monsters - Mutate. And because the text of a card will still refer to itself (even if the name is different,) you get some total madness: the Scute Swarm copies any mutated effects, as well as power and toughness if you put something over it, to all copies.

So while it'll still take you 5 landfalls to get over 20 Scute Swarm copies on the board - enough to, in a vacuum, slay the opponent... and given that you'll have 32, it's unlikely they'll have twelve creatures on the board to block enough to keep you from sweeping in for the kill.

But when you, say, mutate a Migratory Greathorn onto your Scute Swarm, not only do you get that extra land to duplicate it, but you've also now got a solid 3/4 body. You only need seven 3/4s to take down a full-health opponent, and three lands (one of which you just got for free) is all you need to get eight of these.

Ah, but we're still thinking in too much of a vacuum.

Another really promising card in Zendikar Rising is Lotus Cobra. This is a 2/1 snake for 1G that has Landfall: add one mana of any color to your mana pool. So you're either getting bonus mana for the lands you drop, or, far more importantly, getting mana out of lands that come into play tapped.

You know, like most ramp spells do.

If you have a hand full of Cultivates or other Rampant Growth variants, they start paying for themselves, meaning at a relatively early turn, you can chain these spells to get out a massive number of lands out.

This is good news for ramp decks anyway.

While I haven't managed to pull it off yet, there's a combo I've built into my Landfall deck (it's Bant colors, with a blue dip for Uro and a white dip actually for just the common... maybe uncommon Fearless Fledgling, which is just there to give me a cheap creature that benefits from Landfall and can get giant.)

Yorvo, Lord of Garenbrig, is a 0/0 Giant Noble for GGG, but it comes into play with 4 +1/+1 counters. Every time a green creature comes into play, he gets another +1/+1 counter, and then another if that creature still has a higher power than he does.

Which means that every Scute Swarm puts a counter on him. And that gets insane pretty quick.

Ok, now, sure, we're overwhelming the opponent with sheer numbers, but what if someone is blocking your Yorvo with something that's indestructible or renewable?

Garruk's Uprising might be the answer.

The important thing to remember with that, though, is to be very careful not to let your Scute Swarms trigger Garruk's Uprising's card draw mechanic. Because you will mill yourself very quickly.

Anyway, this does take a little time to set up, but given the power of Green Stompy last season and the likely power of some variant that incorporates the amazing ramp potential of Lotus Cobra, well... unless Dimir Rogues is enough to stave it off, I wouldn't be shocked if there were some bans here.

Campaign Setting Books Coming in 5E's Future

 Since the fall of 2018, we've actually managed to have a large number of campaign setting books come out for D&D 5th Edition. From its launch in 2014, the only "campaign setting" book was Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, which detailed aspects of what is generally considered the "default" setting for D&D - the Sword Coast region of Faerun, the main continent in the Forgotten Realms. The Sword Coast is home to familiar places like Waterdeep, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter, and Icewind Dale (three of which have rather popular computer games named after them) and so it made sense to provide some background on those locations for new players like myself, but for four years, that was it.

However, starting with the release of Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, along with the sort of preview/partial release book Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron, WotC has gotten a lot more forthcoming with campaign setting books. Over the past two years, we've gotten Eberron: Rising From the Last War (a more thorough, and physical, book covering Eberron,) Mythic Odysseys of Theros, and Explorer's Guide to Wildemount. We also got Acquisitions Incorporated, which isn't truly a setting in its own right, as it takes place in the Forgotten Realms (though you could easily imagine Omin Dran is expanding to other worlds) but does bring in concepts that could make for a very different tone of campaign.

Of the published adventure books, most are set in the Forgotten Realms. Curse of Strahd, probably the best-received of them, is actually a full-on Ravenloft campaign, though its insular nature and the universality of Ravenloft makes it practically setting-agnostic (in the game I'm playing, half the party is from the Forgotten Realms and half is from the DM's homebrew world.) Ghosts of Saltmarsh is actually set in Greyhawk, though its small-scope stories can easily be placed elsewhere (that being said, there's a whole section on Saltmarsh itself that doesn't have anything to do with the individual adventures, so it's a bit of a back-door campaign setting book.) Then, Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, while it starts in the Forgotten Realms, arguably becomes a Planescape adventure when you descend into the Nine Hells (I don't know - do we consider any visit to the Outer Planes a Planescape adventure? Or only if you go to the Outlands/Sigil?)

While I do still prefer to run things in my homebrew setting (though I do really enjoy Ravnica, after six months of this campaign I've gotten a very "grass is greener on the other side" feeling now. I miss wilderness!) I do really love reading about new and different settings (and the various mechanics, monsters, and other features that come with them!)

According to this article (I can't find a VOD of the panel myself,) WotC has confirmed that they'll be publishing a lot more campaign setting books. While we haven't gotten any specifics on which ones, we know that there will be "classics" that people have been asking for for a long time.

So let's review D&D settings, and consider their likelihood of showing up.

Now, there are actually a lot of settings that have come out over the years, so I'm going to take a somewhat biased approach and base this a bit on how much I, as something of a neophyte (albeit a zealous one,) know about the settings and their popularity. I'm going to be skipping some of the obscure ones like Beta World or Birthright, which I know basically nothing about. I'm going to describe first whether I want it, and then whether I think it's a likely candidate for a release.

Ravenloft:

Let's get this one out of the way first. I think this is likely to be the first of these setting books to come out next. I base this almost entirely on the Unearthed Arcana for the Undead Warlock Patron and the College of Spirits for Bards, which both have that gothic vibe that would fit perfectly in the Ravenloft setting. Also, the popularity of Curse of Strahd must also mean that more tools to build new Ravenloft adventures would probably sell well. I, for one, would jump at the chance for more monsters and details on the Ravenloft setting (as well as those sweet subclasses,) and I bet a lot of other people would as well. So I place this likelihood very high, maybe a 90% (I'm not going to do a percentage for every setting.)

Greyhawk:

Greyhawk I think is generally described as a grittier type of setting - like the Forgotten Realms, it's something of a fantasy kitchen sink, but while the Forgotten Realms generally expects players to be heroic, Greyhawk is more of the "heroic fantasy" that ironically is less about heroism than self-interest. I'll be honest here, that doesn't really inspire me, personally. Now, Greyhawk does have the important legacy of being the original D&D setting, created by Gary Gygax himself, and I'm sure that some old-school players (and maybe some newer ones as well) would be excited for a book here, but I also think there's probably a reason the Forgotten Realms has displaced Greyhawk as the game's default setting. So while I think this is a possible option, I'm not really gunning for it.

Dragonlance:

I know very little about this setting, other than that, like FR and Greyhawk, I understand it to be another fantasy kitchen sink setting. Just from the name, it strikes me as possibly more "classical fantasy" in style, with a bit more of an emphasis on medieval/Arthurian imagery, though that is, again, purely something I'm getting from the name and could be totally false. Still, given that we have Forgotten Realms, I don't really think we need another "it's, you know, a fantasy world" kind of setting, though like Greyhawk, it does have the advantage of nostalgia.

Dark Sun:

Ok, here's where things get a bit more interesting. Dark Sun, which blends influences like Dune, Conan the Barbarian, and maybe a taste of Mad Max, starts getting into the "weird" sort of D&D setting. It's also a harsh one, and the limitations on magic and even metal weapons and armor could make things feel very different here. Like Greyhawk, you've got the sort of self-interested cynicism, but in a world that looks profoundly different from the Forgotten Realms - a harsh, sun-blasted desert. Couple that with the Psionic options likely coming in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, and the fact that this was, I believe, a popular setting in the 90s (the two settings I heard of after Forgotten Realms, long before I started playing, were Dark Sun and Ravenloft,) and I think this could be a candidate.

Planescape:

Probably the weirdest of the settings (though see Spelljammer, next,) Planescape is built around running an entire campaign set in the Outer Planes. With the excellent potential to set things in surreal landscapes, including the famous city of Sigil and the 17th Outer Plane known as the Outlands introduced in this setting (the True Neutral plane, of which Sigil is sort of but also sort of not a part,) this is one of my personal favorites - I actually bought an old 2nd Edition book as pdf from DM's Guild here to read up on it, and there's a lot of potential. Given that the Outer Planes described in the Great Wheel cosmology are mostly universal to D&D (though Magic worlds are obvious exceptions and Eberron has its own planar cosmology that I think officially sits in a bubble in the Ethereal Plane) you could argue that this is just as default as Forgotten Realms. But I also think the outer planes are some of the coolest elements of official D&D settings, and I'd love to have more details on how to actually run adventures that take you around them (I mean, what does a dungeon look like in Bytopia?) This is one of the setting books I'd most want, so I'm just crossing my fingers it's coming.

Spelljammer:

It's practically become a meme at this point for people to demand that we get a Spelljammer book. And if you ask me, I'd be super into it. I love mixing sci-fi and fantasy (I mean, I grew up on Star Wars, didn't you?) and on top of that, this is one of those "settings" that allows you to visit practically all the other ones. On the other hand, the original release of Spelljammer was fairly unpopular (though how much of that was just the name?) though I also wonder if the broader audience D&D has today would be more accepting of a unapologetically silly setting. I'm not going to hold my breath for this one, but I'd be very happy if it happened.

Nentir Vale:

Um... this was the official setting for 4th Edition, I think, and I know nothing whatsoever about it. 4E was pretty unpopular, and... yeah, no.

So, those are the settings I imagine are in contention. If all three of the new books are going to be classic ones, that means any one of these stands a good chance of coming out.

I'll confess that while I really want to see the more surreal, otherworldly settings, I imagine there will be some desire for balance between grounded and high fantasy. So while I'd say give us Ravenloft, Planescape, and Spelljammer, I think we're more likely to lose one or two of those and get Greyhawk, Dragonlance, or Dark Sun - the latter of which is my preferred option.

I am still pretty confident about Ravenloft, which is, frankly, the one of these I want most.

I've been a bit of a completionist for 5th Edition content - I think the only official book I don't have is Dungeon of the Mad Mage, so whatever they come out with, I'm sure I'll get it. But I'm very eager to find out what does come out.

Reviewing the "Spirit Conjuring" Spells That Are Likely to Make it Into Tasha's Cauldron of Everything

 As fun as it was to read through Rime of the Frostmaiden and all the really cool concepts it has (I think I've maybe been harsh on my perceived lack of horror to it - when you factor in all the environmental effects, it does seem extremely scary) the book I'm most excited for of all is Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. While I love campaign setting books and adventures, the books I'm most likely to use in their entirety are the setting-agnostic rules expansions. Volo's Guide to Monsters and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes are both fantastic to have, but of the currently published books, I think Xanathar's Guide to Everything is the rules book outside the core three that I find to be the best addition to the game.

Tasha's has some big shoes to fill, but I'm optimistic it'll succeed.

Now, to specifics:

We're getting new spells in Tasha's, just as we did in Xanathar's, and while we don't have the official list yet, or their text (I guess I'll have to, you know, wait for the book to come out) some of the spells teased in Unearthed Arcana are really interesting.

There is a set of spells that conjures creatures - spells like "Conjure Celestial Spirit," "Conjure Shadow Spirit," "Conjure Fey Spirit," etc. Unlike the "Summon Woodland Beings" - style spells, these have a simple, singular stat block that has values based on the caster's stats and the level at which the spell is cast.

I. Love. Them.

Because while the idea of conjuring creatures to fight for you is a great fantasy trope, in practice, most of the summoning spells are extremely complicated. I once had a wizard conjure eight mephits - four different types - and it was a nightmare to handle all their stats and such.

These spells will conjure a fairly beefy, hard-hitting creature that gets harder to kill and dolls out damage more based on the level at which you cast the spell. And you get to pick your flavor, so a hexblade warlock can summon shadow creatures, a cleric can summon celestials, and an aberrant mind sorcerer can summon aberrant spirits.

Again, each spell conjures just one creature, so it shouldn't bring combat to a grinding halt, but that creature can be capable of really helping in combat.

The spells, which all take the form of "Summon _____ Spirit" names, also let you choose within that category between different variants, which get different abilities that might be suited to your particular needs.

Aberrant: Your options are Beholderkin, who can hover and shoot ranged eye beams, Slaadi, who regenerate health and have a claw attack that prevents healing, and Star Spawn, who have an aura that deals psychic damage as well as a psychic melee attack.

Bestial: Your options are Land, which gets pack tactics and a climbing speed, Water, which has a swim speed and can breathe water and also gets pack tactics, and air, which can fly and has the flyby ability (no opportunity attacks if it flies by your enemies.)

Celestial: Your options are Avenger, who has a bow that deals radiant damage, and Defender, whose melee attacks also grant temporary hit points to a friendly target nearby.

Elemental: Your options are Air, which grants lightning and thunder resistance, Fire, which grants fire immunity, Earth, which grants slashing resistance (and is the only one without amorphous form, so no squeezing under doors and such - though it can burrow,) and Water, which has a swim speed and acid resistance.

Fey: Your options are Deceitful, which creates darkness after using its Fey Step ability, Joyful, which can charm a nearby creature after it does its Fey Step, and Furious, which gets advantage on its attack rolls after using its Fey Step (Fey Step is a bonus action 30-ft teleport.)

Fiendish Spirit: Your options are Demon, which has a climb speed, explodes when it dies, and bites for necrotic damage, Devil, which can fly, gets devil's sight and can hurl flame from a distance, and Yugoloth, which can teleport after using its claw attack.

Shadow: Your options are Fury, which has advantage on attacks against frightened creatures, Fear, which can hide as a bonus action in dim light and darkness, and Despair, which reduces the speed of nearby beasts and humanoids other than the caster. (In addition to a cold-dealing melee attack, they also have a once-a-day AoE fear ability.

Undead: Your options are Ghostly, which can hover, has incorporeal movement, and its attack can cause the frightened condition, Putrid, which has an aura that can poison other creatures and an attack that can also poison and possibly paralyze targets, and Skeletal, which has a hard-hitting ranged spell attack.

Not only are these a lot of fantastic options to pick between, but their scalability makes them really attractive.

The general math for AC is 11 + the spell level. HP is generally ten times the spell level plus its Con modifier and your spellcasting ability modifier. And then each has multiattack, hitting a number of times equal to half the spell level rounded down.

So if we take the lowest-level of these spells, Summon Bestial Spirit, which is available to Druids and Rangers, and is a 2nd level spell, you get the following:

A 3rd level druid, using the standard array (and thanks to the new way racial ASIs are assigned, now pretty much guaranteed to have a +3 to wisdom) would be able to summon a creature with AC 13 and HP 26, with a single attack that has +6 to hit and deals 1d8+6 piercing damage.

While the AC's a bit low, you've pretty much got another party member right there.

Now, let's say you have an 8th level warlock, summoning an aberrant spirit. Again, with the standard array and assuming they've maxed out Charisma, you have a creature that has AC 15, HP 47, and two attacks with a +7 to hit, dealing 1d8+7 on each hit (if it's a beholderkin.)

We're talking about respectable damage for a player character to be doing, and these are just spells that last up to an hour (yes, they're concentration) and require you to buy special material components - but the components aren't consumed!

While I would caution players who use these spells to be sure that they have their attacks figured out ahead of time so that the game doesn't slow down profoundly, I think these could be really fun additions to your spellcasting repertoire.

Of Future Campaigns

 Today, my Ravnica-based campaign is going to hit the end of tier 2 - players will be jumping into tier 3, level 11, and officially hitting "high level D&D."

Having only run a couple one-shots at these levels, I'm nervous but also excited. Already, at level 10, the party is nigh-unstoppable, though while I haven't been pulling my punches, exactly, the higher levels introduce foes I can set against them that have some really nasty abilities. Before long, there will be liches, adult and maybe ancient dragons, and other really serious foes for them to contend with.

The way my campaign works is that all characters will turn out to have planeswalker sparks, allowing the campaign to jump around the Magic multiverse, with a final reckoning on New Phyrexia (I doubt this would seem like a spoiler to any of my players if they found this blog.)

But I'll confess that as much as I love Ravnica as a setting, I'm also really feeling a strong "grass is greener" yearning to return to my homebrew setting.

I have a campaign I started years ago that ran pretty consistently from November 5th, 2015 (I made a blog post about it!) up through the fall of 2018, and then started to kind of falter in 2019 (there was, admittedly, some drama, which I think is mostly under the bridge, but it's hard to build up momentum again.) I'd love to return to that, especially given the importance of its plot to the overall story of my setting, but I think doing so will require some reworking and probably a change in the player roster to accommodate schedules and such.

But naturally, as any DM I'm sure experiences, I've got a number of campaigns I've been eager to run that are a little more limited in scope. My initial campaign was very much a sort of "yes, there's a bad guy, but you're going to be going all over the world and doing many different things" type of campaign. While I love that style, and would probably have elements of that in any campaign I run, I've also come up with a few other concepts that are inspired more by the published adventures - more limited in scope and location.

What I think I want to do is come up with a few ideas that I'm particularly excited about (it's important that I expect to have fun running it, of course) and then present a sort of thematic summary of the campaign type, then recruit a group of friends to play in the campaign, and have them decide which they want to do.

So here are the concepts I have in mind:

The Dead of Rhevan Dror:

Up in the frigid land of Cotieras, across the Rimescar Sea from the safety of the Empire, a few tiny villages have formed on the southern coast, hoping to explore this land and seek out relics that might exist from the long-fallen Parthalian Empire. However, a great and terrible sea storm has erupted on the Rimescar Sea, trapping Cotieras' inhabitants. If that wasn't enough, the dead have begun to rise from the icy tundra and march on the port towns while necromancers raise zombies and ghouls from the graveyards. Ancient evils lurk in the frigid darkness.

The Sands of Lost Tenebra:

Lost in the middle of the arid Roshak Desert after their airship is shot down by a horde of orcs, our brave adventurers must struggle to survive in the sun-blasted heat, weathering desert monsters and roving berserkers. But even as they seek to avoid becoming desiccated corpses out on the sands, the adventurers must discover what has driven the orcs to this newfound aggression, and what terrible, mind-shattering secrets lie buried beneath the dunes.

The Shadow of the Dire King:

Transported to the dark and dangerous mirror-world known as the Shadowlands, our adventurers must struggle to survive the delicate and dangerous courtly intrigue of the Dire Kingdom, navigating gothic castles, pyramids of sorcerous power, and a surreal landscape like something out of a 1980s metal album cover. In this sandbox-style campaign, the party defines their own goals and allegiances across this land all while under the watchful eyes of the Dire King.

The Secret of Wisedji Hill:

In this wild-west style campaign, the party comes across a sacred site where a relic of incredible holy power stands vulnerable after its archdruid protector fell. Now, the party must act as its new defenders, constructing a fortress to defend the Celestine Stone and the Ki-Rin spirit within from various threats that would seek to claim the spirit for their own end. The party would have to build and manage their fortress and the nearby town, going on occasional excursions to recruit builders, engineers, and craftsmen to repair and improve their fortifications, while enduring onslaughts by elementals, cultists, and the infernal Red Rattler Gang.

The Burning Depths:

A maritime adventure built using the seafaring rules found in Ghosts of Saltmarsh, the Dharam Sea has recently been discovered by explorers from the Empire and the Republic of Nephimala, and both powers are racing to claim the resources found in these new lands. In doing so, one of the colonists, looting a triton temple, broke a seal holding demonic forces at bay, and now demonic madness has spread like an infection across the islands. An open-ended, sandbox campaign, the Burning Depths would focus on the party acting as the officers of their own ship, exploring the islands, fighting demons, and choosing their allegiances in the struggle between natives and colonialists.

So, these are the concepts I've come up with. I think at the moment the Dead of Rhevan Dror is the one that I have the strongest structural concept for, though the Red Scar Plains adventure I ran for my original campaign, which took place in the Shadowlands, was a lot of fun, and I'm tempted to revisit that part of my setting with the Shadow of the Dire King.

The Secret of Wisedji Hill and the Burning Depths both bring in some strong mechanical aspects to the game, which could prove really cool, though I worry both are also a little too narrow in scope.

The ever-present other option, of course, is to simply run another campaign in the "kitchen sink" style, which could use elements of all of these.

Dimir Rogues

 It's a bit early for us to really start talking about deck archetypes for Zendikar Rising, but I've noticed a couple that have started to develop that I'll be following. I've built some version of both, but one of them I'm a little more confident in.

That one is Dimir Rogues. This deck uses Thieves Guild Enforcer and Soaring Thought Thief to reinforce a sort of rogue tribal theme. There are a number of rogue-themed cards in blue and black that like it when your opponent has 8 or more cards in their graveyard, or sometimes they just like it when the opponent's graveyard is stacked.

The deck isn't strictly a mill deck, though if you find yourself having a hard time with big blockers, you can hold back with various deathtouch-enabled rogues to scare off attacks while the opponent gets milled down into nothing. Glasspool Mimic is one card I use to duplicate the Enforcers so that I'm milling for a lot with each creature I play.

I played back during the Kamigawa Block on MTG Online, and one thing I remember loving was Ninjutsu - much as Kamigawa had samurai instead of knights, it had ninjas instead of rogues, and the defining Ninja mechanic was Ninjutsu, which let you trade out one of your unblocked attackers for the ninja, usually at a discounted cost, and ninjas tended to do something fun if they hit the opponent.

Zareth San, the Trickster (who is that poor merfolk who gets petrified in the cinematic trailer) is, essentially, a ninja, as he has a mechanic that lets you swap him in for an attacking creature at a reduced cost. And when he hits the opponent, you get to pick a creature from their graveyard and put it into play under your control - which is particularly great given that you've been milling them all this time.

Obviously I don't know how this is going to turn out in the longterm metagame, but I'm enjoying the deck nonetheless.

Afterlives: Revendreth

 

The final "Afterlives" short is now upon us. The whole thing takes the form of a missive that Sire Denathrius is dictating to his scribe, to be distributed to his Venthyr. He laments the anima drought and also mentions that he's taken to "conserving" anima, drawing it from the remaining souls in his realm as well as his own venthyr.

Perhaps the biggest revelation here is that it looks like Garrosh has wound up in Revendreth, and is one of the souls that is being constantly drained for anima. Garrosh turned into a total monster by the end of his life, but earlier in his appearances, he showed some trepidation about the kind of acts he feared (rightly) that he was capable of, and thus I think that he's a perfect Revendreth candidate. I haven't seen him there in the beta yet, but whether we see him or not, he's a fitting "inmate" for Revendreth as a correctional facility.

The point of the short is more to point out the hypocrisy of Denathrius and his elite - we see essentially a stratified class system form as the "poor" (in anima) venthyr are forced to give their wealth up, but the rich happily indulge in decadence, living large on the donations that have been made. As the short ends, we see how one poor venthyr who tried to sneak away from the collection of anima is condemned to what we find in-game is called the Ember Ward - where a breach that allows the Light into the Shadowlands burns venthyr, killing them or driving them mad with agony.

All in all, I think Bastion still had the biggest lore impact of the four shorts, and Ardenweald was the most emotionally devastating. I'll be curious to see how this one gets picked apart for clues and hints.

The release of this fourth short, though, I think makes the release of 9.0 this Tuesday all the more likely. That should give us a little over a month of pre-patch before the expansion proper lands (which I'll try to use to get used to the class changes, particularly to Enhancement Shamans.)

Initial Zendikar Rising Impressions

 While the MTG Arena servers are clearly groaning under the weight of what I imagine is a huge influx of players who want to check out the new set, I've managed to play three games using new cards I've gotten. I'm still "waiting for server" to record my latest win with a new landfall-based deck.

I've played with two archetypes - a "party" based deck that seeks to have a warrior, rogue, wizard, and cleric out, and another that is built around landfall and a mythic legendary elemental card that makes all my non-token creatures also count as forests, which means that landfall creatures trigger their own landfall effect.

I was happy to get a fair number of pathways in my 50-pack pre-order. These are very odd dual-lands, as unlike most dual-lands, where you want to get them out first (especially as they often come into play tapped,) with the Pathways, you generally want to hold off on them - if you have a forest, a plains, and a green/white pathway, for example, you'll probably want to see if you draw another plains or another forest during your next couple turns before you pick which side you want to play.

I haven't really investigated how synergistic the new cards are with existing deck archetypes, though I think the landfall stuff should play in nicely with Mono-green stompy and ramp builds.

Naturally, the metagame will take a while to develop.

How to Pillage/Rework Rime of the Frostmaiden

 So, I'm not someone to generally run published adventures, even though at this point I literally have every official 5E book other than Dungeon of the Mad Mage (some day, probably.)

I imagine I'll do so at some point - it's really a question of commitment. However, I've definitely taken ideas out of published adventures, as well as campaign setting books, to build my own adventures.

Having now read through Rime of the Frostmaiden, I'm thinking about what really appeals to me about the book, and thus what I'd want to take.

Perhaps better than anything, the book really portrays a region of frigid isolation. There's an afterword by Lead Narrative Designer Chris Perkins in which he mentions that when they were first working on the adventure's design, they didn't realize how isolating a year 2020 would be (fingers crossed that we have some return to social engagement in 2021 - though there are a million things I feel anxious about regarding the future that even go beyond the horrific pandemic.)

Rime of the Frostmaiden is dark - literally. The characters never see the sun until they defeat Auril, and I think you could really play with that sort of powerful magical phenomenon as a central concept to an adventure.

Another thing I'd consider taking is the "secrets" option for character creation. There are several secrets that players can draw from a stack, and while some are rather innocuous (like, "I'm looking for my dad's missing ring, which he lost after his finger was bitten off by a knucklehead trout") to totally horrific (like, "I have a slaad tadpole growing in my chest that's going to burst out of my chest and kill me very suddenly, probably at an inopportune time.")

The random encounters, which have a mechanic that causes them to occur during Blizzards (you have an encounter d20 and a weather d20, and if the weather d20's roll plus 1 is more than the encounter roll, it takes place during a blizzard, which can dramatically change it) are actually really exciting.

The book also gives you a rather broad overview of what Icewind Dale is like, and could easily be repurposed to set entirely different adventures within the region.

My tastes, of course, tend toward the really high-fantasy and cosmic horror side of things, and the latter chapters of the book push more in that direction. We were introduced to Living Spells in the Eberron book, but while those tended toward straightforward damaging spells, this one introduces Living Demiplane, which is actually utterly terrifying - a living spell that tries to catch you and trap you in an extradimensional space.

I think the thing I'm most tempted to do is borrow some of the structure - particularly the small, isolated towns amid a frozen wasteland - and use it for events in my own setting. After first hearing about this book, I came up with a frozen island north of the main continent in my setting called Cotieras where people fear to tread. I might borrow some of the creatures and frigid terrain rules here, and perhaps some of the adventure locations, to build a relatively open-ended campaign in that region.

One of the chapters in this adventure presents a really great high-stakes event - while most D&D books tend to focus on explorable dungeon environments, the attack by the chardalyn dragon-construct on Ten-Towns is a massive race against time with the feel of a chaotic battle, and it makes travel-time between the towns feel urgent.

I believe that Rime of the Frostmaiden was designed to be broken up - allowing DMs to use different parts of it depending on what appealed to them. Frankly, I think this makes the adventure itself feel a bit unfocused - Auril herself doesn't totally feel like a big bad you're building up to a fight with - in fact, the place you're most likely to fight her, she's kind of just alone in a random room she pops out of (which, to be fair, is appropriate given how she embodies in part the isolation felt in winter). While I'm sure you could run the whole thing as written and get a really fun game out of it, I think the book is probably best used by pillaging and repurposing the things found within.

Rime of the Frostmaiden Part Two: Um, The Rest

 The first chapter is extensive. Over yesterday and today, I've now read through the whole adventure. Here are my thoughts:

The past three years, the adventure books have had their location in the Forgotten Realms as the sort of headliner - rather than just "Dragon Heist" and "Dungeon of the Mad Mage," these twin adventures were marketed as Waterdeep: (the title.)

Last year, Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, was sort of funny for doing the same, given that the Baldur's Gate segment and the Avernus segments were quite separate, and even though there was certainly a thematic and plot connection between the events in both, to me the real main event to that adventure was the Avernus segment of it.

Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, I think, is much more location-centric than plot-centric. Indeed, there are actually three major plots going on that are only tangentially related to one another.

I also think I'd raise some doubts as to what extent this truly is a "horror" adventure. If you're looking for something as horror-centric as Curse of Strahd, that's not really what you're going to find here. While there are some adventures that skew that way, and the final segment of the adventure does borrow heavily from H. P. Lovecraft's story At the Mountains of Madness, there's enough here that is more general fantasy adventuring that I find myself disagreeing with the way WotC has characterized the overall book. Admittedly, some of the "secrets" player characters can choose from at the beginning can lend the adventure a more paranoid and creepy feel, but the majority of the adventure locations found in the book carry a more general fantasy danger than what I'd really call horror. The line between them is subjective, of course, but when I compare this to other adventures I've read, such as Tomb of Annihilation, Ghosts of Satlmarsh, and Descent into Avernus, I don't really think that this is that much more horrific.

Still, this will be an adventure in which the bitter cold, harsh environment poses a major threat, and there's a major event that happens after you've gotten to know the location that is less horrific in terms of genre than just horrific for the massive potential loss of life.

So let's get into spoiler territory:

Rime of the Frostmaiden Part One: Ten-Towns

 I've picked up my copy of Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, and I'm currently reading through it.

Oh, heads up, if you are planning on playing this, you might want to stop here given spoilers. I'm keeping specific details pretty vague, but the overall arc of the campaign is something I'm discussing.

Adventurer's League Season Ten Rules

 The Season 10 rules for Adventurer's League have been released. I realize that most D&D players aren't familiar with AL, but it's basically the more structured format that allows players to drop in and out of quick modules at game stores. It's not quite the same as playing at home with a group of friends, but the buy-in is a lot lower.

The first really exciting bit of news is that Tasha's Cauldron of Everything is an available book for AL games - when making an AL character, you can only use things from the Player's Handbook and one additional book (and these tend to be limited to setting-agnostic books outside of Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, given that AL games tend to all take place in the Forgotten Realms.) By adding Tasha's, this allows players to play Artificers, as well as the many subclasses coming in that book (which include all four that came in the Magic crossover books.)

The other thing I'm excited to see is that we've got a preview of how the new racial customizations are going to work, and it's the simple system that I expected we'd be getting: when your race grants an ability score bonus, you can simply move that bonus to another ability. Half-Orcs get +2 Strength and +1 Con by default, but you can decide your Half-Orc has +2 to Charisma and +1 to Dex, if you'd like. And perhaps your Triton is going to take bonuses to Dexterity, Wisdom, and... well, probably still Constitution.

I'm currently waiting to get my confirmation email that my local store is ready to give me my copy of Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, but I'm also very excited for the November release of Tasha's Cauldron of Everything.

What Concerns Me About Shadowlands

I've been excited about the Shadowlands expansion since it was announced. I'm really happy for WoW to go very high-fantasy in its concept, and I've always found the death/undead elements of Warcraft lore to be really interesting and aesthetically cool.

And, having played in the Beta, I'm mostly pretty happy with what I see. The zones are all really cool (I'll confess I find Maldraxxus a little dull) and the overall plot feels big and high-stakes, which makes it feel like what you're doing matters.

I also really like the idea of choosing a covenant, unlocking the story that comes with it.

But with just over a month until the expansion launches, I'll confess that I am concerned with a few things.

First off, bugs: I know it's a Beta, and thus the whole reason we're playing it is so that we can find bugs. But even this far into the beta, I'm encountering a fairly large number of game-breaking bugs. Some of these involve crashing the client (or even my computer,) some involve the "really cool when it's happening in the right moment" visual effect for the "In-between" happening forever after you take a flight path some times. And lastly, some break the Soulbind/Conduit system, which is probably the thing that requires the most testing.

There is a massive amount of stuff for you to do when you hit the level cap, which I think is mostly a good thing, but I also wonder how much of a weekly grind it will be for a character to feel "up to date."

I think they reduced the amount of XP required since I leveled my Death Knight, but I think it's crucial that a player should be able to play through the main story and get to level 60, without lingering and struggling to finish.

As has been suggested by Taliesin & Evitel's YouTube channel, I fear that conduits are going to have one of the big problems that Azerite Armor had - which was that you felt compelled to farm the same pieces over and over. Admittedly, because this won't get in the way of other gear you might find, I doubt it will be quite as annoying, but it's still a potential for some empty gameplay rewards.

The other big concern is that some covenant abilities just seem better than others. My intention is to just brace myself and pick covenants that fit with my characters' vibes, and just hope that the abilities become balanced over time, but there is a concern that if my guilt-ridden, ancient Draenei Death Knight picks Venthyr as his covenant, he's going to be putting himself at a disadvantage thanks to the fact that the Night Fae have a more powerful ability.

There is a sort of sense that the expansion maybe needs a little more time to iron out these kinks. I suppose the good news is that, given the way WoW tends to work, fixes can happen over the course of the expansion, but the general way the systems work is going to be relatively locked in place.

I think I feel invested in this expansion being good just because it's the one that I was hoping would come. Blizzard is swinging big, and I'll always respect someone trying out big ideas. I just hope that it works out, and I hope that the expansion lives up to its potential.

MTG Cosmos for D&D Fans (Part Two of Two)

 The multiverse of Magic: the Gathering is rather unusual in that it technically has a name: Dominia. Granted, that's some old and probably defunct lore from the mid-90s, but I think it's good to take into account.

Given that two Magic settings are now officially also D&D settings, it might be a good idea to look into the way that these worlds bear resemblance to, but also are distinct from, classical D&D cosmology.

Both Ravnica and Theros might strike you as particularly strange and rather high-concept worlds, and that is true. The reality of building a card game primarily around mechanics, with worlds that are often made to fit with the mechanics, rather than the other way around, tends to make for some very high-concept worlds - worlds that sometimes have you wondering how one actually lives in them. Nevertheless, Magic does have ongoing plots and stories set within it, and while the cards represent the most over-the-top, crazy things one can find in these worlds, the underlying premise is that these are still worlds that people live in, with all the potential for a fantasy RPG like D&D to fit within it.

One thing to bear in mind in the worlds of Magic is that each world is its own separate plane. Admittedly, there's an argument to be made that "plane" is just a different concept in Magic than it is in D&D, but I actually think it works pretty well if you think of each world as a truly separate universe with its own distinct rules - more akin to the differences between Limbo and Arboria than those between Oerth and Toril.

In the Magic multiverse, the ability to actually travel from one plane to another is extremely rare. People who gain this ability are called Planeswalkers. About one in a million people is born with a Planeswalker spark (though if you're running a D&D campaign in these worlds, you might want to ignore these statistics to allow the party to hop between settings) and only one in a million of those ever have that spark ignite to turn them into a full-fledged planeswalker.

Typically, what ignites the spark is an event of profound emotions - often traumatic (though they need not be in every case.) A newly ignited planeswalker will, involuntarily and unexpectedly, travel to a different plane at random.

In an earlier time, planeswalkers were godlike in their power - their physical forms little more than a manifested avatar behind tremendous magical force. But after an event called The Mending, which occurred on the world of Dominaria, Planeswalkers are now more or less just people, though they tend to possess some great magical power and the unique ability to journey between planes.

There have been some exceptions to this rule, but for the most part, only planeswalkers can travel to other planes. Even gods are generally limited to their home plane, which is why different worlds will have different pantheons - at least those whose religions weren't just deifying old planeswalkers.

Beings that would be considered "outsiders" in D&D are probably native to the same planes that have ordinary mortals and beasts. And this is also why angels in one setting might be very different from those in another. Races found on multiple worlds can be quite different from one another. For instance, Vedalken, the blue-skinned, hairless intellectuals, have only internal ears and wider facial features in Ravnica, while those found on Kaladesh have earlobes and vertical lines along their foreheads.

The one constant in the multiverse, though, is the manifestation of the five colors of Magic.

Magic flows through everything in the worlds of MTG, and the magical essence known as mana comes in five varieties, known as the five colors. This is, to be fair, a major element to the rules mechanics of the card game, but it's also an underlying organizing principle for how the worlds of Magic are constructed. The five colors are White, Blue, Black, Red, and Green. The colors represent and also drive forth certain values and philosophies, as well as certain types of magical creatures.

White mana is a color of unity, altruism, order, authority, and selflessness. Found in wide-open plains and associated with sunlight, it's easy to conflate white mana with goodness, but white can often be good, it's also a color of tyrannical authoritarianism and strict hierarchies that have no real interest in freedom. Angels, who in MTG are nearly always female-presenting, are beings of pure white mana who represent justice and protection, tending toward the better aspects of white mana (usually.) Knights and soldiers, often human, are also usually associated with white mana (though humans, being so adaptable, are found associated with all the colors.)

Blue mana is a color of intellectualism, knowledge, trickery, cleverness, and illusion. Found on islands and associated with the elements of water and air, blue mana is the primary color associated with powerful wizards. Blue is of course laudable for its rationality and cleverness, though it can sometimes veer into cold callousness. While beings like Sphinxes and Djinn represent the cleverness blue is known for, it's also a color that can call upon great ancient monsters like krakens and leviathans, using its knowledge of hidden secrets to call forth forgotten beings form the depths. Merfolk and the aforementioned Vedalken are also usually associated with blue mana.

Black mana is a color of ambition, self-interest, greed, ruthlessness, death, decay, and resourcefulness. Found in fetid swamps, black is often associated with that which is buried or sunken, including anything from dead bodies to precious metals (and thus wealth.) Much as white is often assumed to be good, black often gets "type-cast" as evil, and while there's often an overlap, black is not bound only to be villainous. At the heart of black mana is a focus on the accomplishment of a goal, no matter the cost, and as such, when directed toward noble goals, black can be effective and heroic. Still, its disregard for any kind of moral framework means that its methods are often quite distasteful. Much as white mana can manifest as angels, demons are manifestations of pure black mana. Black mana is also used to raise the dead as zombies, skeletons, and vampires.

Red mana is a color of passion, impulse, violence, aggression, creativity, and destruction. Found in rocky mountains and volcanos, red mana drives emotions and rage. More than any other color, red fights for freedom, and while black might fight against structures of authority for its own self-interest, red does so on principle. Red is associated with the element of fire, but also with earth and lightning, and even, very rarely, ice. Red's recklessness can make it a danger to its foes, but also to its allies. The creatures most associated with red mana are dragons, as well as goblins and minotaurs.

Green mana is the color of life, nature, instinct, and symbiosis. Found in the living forests of Magic's worlds, green is a color one might tend to associate with goodness, though like white, this tendency is not a universal rule. Green can grow dangerous when its obsession with raw strength leads the strong to menace the weak. Green is associated with great and powerful beasts and monsters including Hydras, but also with humanoids like elves.

Generally, the colors are depicted in a pentagon-shape, with white at the top, and then blue, black, red, and green making the other corners, clockwise. As you might sense reading the descriptions of these, each color has two "allies" next to it, which have more of a philosophical overlap (for instance, Red and Green are both very action-oriented worldviews) and two "enemy" colors across from it (by contrast, Red isn't such a big fan of White's tendency to try to boss people around.)

And while it's true that there can be some conflict between enemy colors, there are also individuals who embody aspects of two seemingly opposing colors.

The guilds in Ravnica each represent a different pair of colors, meaning half of them represent "enemy" color pairs. But you might also be able to see how sometimes these opposites can complement one another. The Boros Legion takes the order and duty of white and combines it with the zeal and passion of red.

While the colors are the closest equivalent to D&D's Lawful/Chaotic and Good/Evil alignment system, they're less hard and fast in terms of how alignment with one precludes the other.

Within the Magic worlds, most people aren't really aware of these five colors - they might recognize tendencies in certain cultures and creatures, but it's a subtle thing that probably only very advanced spellcasters would truly be able to see the underlying structure.

The planes of Magic are not really organized in any real hierarchy or arrangement like the Great Wheel. While Dominaria is theoretically the "central" plane of the Magic multiverse, its position does not seem to make it manifestly more important than other worlds.

The list of Magic planes is extensive, and also constantly growing, so I'm not going to do an exhaustive list here. But the thing to keep in mind is that each world is governed by the balance of these five colors and what they represent.

In recent times, a group of planeswalkers has formed something called the Gatewatch, which is dedicated to fighting against interplanar threats. Given that this group is essentially an adventuring party, you might want to keep them separated from your own D&D group, though you can also potentially bring them in as powerful NPCs.

A List of Returning Characters in Shadowlands, So Far

 I've been playing the Shadowlands beta for a few weeks now, and I've played through the leveling experience and gotten a significant chunk into the Venthyr covenant campaign.

Given that we're heading toward the land of the dead, it's no surprise that we're going to be seeing some familiar faces. Some are very apparent from the promotional materials we've received, while others might come as a bit of a surprise.

The Shadowlands is the most alien place we've ever gone in WoW, and certainly is the most alien place we've gone for a whole expansion (I'll accept arguments on behalf of Warlords, given that it was a whole other timeline, though the weird rules about demons complicates that.)

This is, of course, spoiler territory. But it's also potentially incomplete, as I've only seen a portion of the expansion. But let's get to it!

Threads of Fate Mode in Shadowlands

 Blizzard has a new system for players who have completed the 50-60 Shadowlands campaign. To be clear, you just need to finish the final story quests in Revendreth (not counting the Venthyr covenant) to qualify for this, and I'd assume you also have to be level 60 (while one would think that completing said quest should get you to 60, when I did it, that was not the case. Here's hoping that's fixed come October 27th.)

You'll still need to complete the Maw intro quests, which is enough to get you to just shy of 51 (I'd say it's 45 minutes of questing, roughly) but the moment you arrive in Oribos, you get frozen in time and the Fate-Scribe comes and offers you two options: to simply repeat the story quests and do the zones in a predetermined order, or to go with the "Threads of Fate" mode, which scales all the zones and lets you do them in any order, as well as having you choose your covenant immediately.

Like the level 60 quest, you do get some target dummies and the ability to test out the covenant abilities before you make your choice, but once you do, it's locked in, requiring a bit more effort to return to a covenant you abandon.

With the covenant chosen, you also effectively have the story campaign completed as well - you don't actually get to do the main story quests for the four zones, or the various trips to the Maw.

Instead, when you arrive in your chosen covenant's zone, you'll get quests telling you to complete objectives around each zone to earn the favor of the various factions/covenants in those zones. These quests, along with new bonus objectives, as well as all the side quests in those zones, are what you'll be doing to actually level up.

The big "blanket" quests for the zones say you should get credit for doing side quests, killing dungeons bosses, killing rares, and completing bonus objectives, but my brief experience with it showed that not everything was awarding credit (though as a new system, that could just be a bug.)

While I do like being able to choose the order in which I do zones, I'll be honest and say that I'm probably going to stick with the main leveling path for at least the first few characters I bring through Shadowlands. Getting to test out your covenant ability over the course of a whole zone's story is a pretty good way to get a feel for it and whether you want to use that (while I don't know what is simming for most powerful, I've found that I'm pretty happy with the Venthyr Death Knight ability, and I also find it fits thematically for my ancient draenei. I actually found I liked the Night Fae Demon Hunter ability better, even though my plan is still probably to have him go Necrolords. My Paladin (who's actually my main and will probably go through first) is leveling the story-mode way, and I actually really like the Kyrian ability, which is also a pretty Paladin-appropriate covenant, so cool!)

Thoughts on Creating a Horror Campaign

 Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, is said to be a horror campaign, focused on "modern horror" as opposed to the gothic horror of Curse of Strahd.

While I think there's a lot of ambiguity to the notion of what, exactly, "modern horror" entails (though I'm going to guess Cosmic Horror is a major element of it) I was thinking about ways in which to make a campaign feel really menacing and dangerous - to get players to feel like they've got to really fight to survive.

Naturally, a lot of this can be established tonally. While your average fight against goblins or orcs out on the roads can be felt in the sort of bloodless combat one sees in much of the Lord of the Rings movies (not always, of course - you often see Orcs getting totally chopped up and spewing blood everywhere in those movies) if you want to drive home the notion of horror, a great way to do that is simply by establishing the creepy tone - being very descriptive about the horrific elements of the monsters you're fighting. For instance, if your party is taking a rest and they pass the perception check to see the monster before it can attack, you can make the monster's strike scarier by only slowly revealing the danger it poses - a rustling branch, a dark shape in the shadows, and then the glint of eyes - all giving the player time to warn the party and actually face the monster in a safer way, but building the sense of horror with this anticipation.

Stephen King (kind of an expert on the subject) describes a difference between horror and terror. By King's definitions (though frankly, just from my own connotations, I prefer to flip the two,) horror is the sensation of panic that fear causes when something massively disruptive and obviously dangerous occurs, but terror is the creeping dread and ambiguity over whether there is a threat or not - being stuck in that moment before choosing fight or flight.

(Again, I really think I'd flip those definitions, as I think of terror as more the "I'm already running for my life" kind of emotion, and of course associate it a lot with terrorism - and yes, I'm aware of the coincidence of mentioning that on this date - whereas horror, more connected with the genre, feels more associated with that pit in the gut, suspenseful feeling.)

(The point, though, that I think King gets spot on, is that these are two related, but distinct emotions, and what he calls terror and I call horror has a lot more potential for nuance and complexity.)

But D&D being a game in addition to a storytelling medium also allows for you to make things scary via difficulty.

Now, you could just dial up the difficulty to be unfair and brutal, but I think that's A: uninteresting and B: could wind up just making it impossible to have fun with if you're a player. It's true that a game like Call of Cthulhu is sort of built around the idea that player characters are going to die, and you can have fun with that, but I think a game like D&D - especially given that the full potential of your character doesn't unlock until after you've vanquished many a foe - means that just making it brutally difficult kind of ruins the game.

However, there is wiggle room in what kind of difficulty your players can face.

So I'd suggest having a fairly open world, with breadcrumbs to lead the players to certain places, but uncharted locations on the way that have a range of threats and monsters. You need to get the players to buy into the notion that there are some fights they should just run away from (though my Curse of Strahd party - one in which I'm a player, not DM - managed to just stick around and kill the Shambling Mound in the basement of the Death House at level 2 thanks to a few lucky rolls.) So I'd suggest that you have the area your players are exploring have encounters that are balanced for a wide level range - meaning they might find a monster that's a reasonable challenge for a bunch of level 7 player characters when they're only level 3.

I think another way to ratchet up tension is to disrupt rests. Resting in D&D is the way players recover their resources, and when you mess with that, you mess with the math that they do in the encounters they face - you might blow all your spell slots on a monster if you think that the next thing you'll be doing is hitting the hay, but if the DM then makes it impossible for you to do so, you're going to be scrambling to survive with just your basic things like Cantrips. Health management, then, becomes a real challenge.

I think another thing to play with, and this can tie into that disrupting rest, is to take places that are established as safe early on and in some way deprive the party of them. Maybe they find a friendly inn with some sympathetic staff early on, and they think of this as a home base to return to. Maybe, then, they come back to find the inn has burned to the ground. Or worse yet, they come back and it looks normal, but then they find out that the staff were monsters all along, and this time, they're taking the opportunity to strike.

Messing with perception is also a really great way to make things scary. Letting individual player characters see or hear things the others don't can both provide fun RP opportunities for the players, but also start messing with their sense of the scenario's reality - they'll probably assume that the one getting the visions is having hallucinations or illusions inflicted upon them, but maybe you flip that by proving that the "vision" was actually the objective reality while the rest of the party was deceived.

The final thing I'll suggest to truly mess with the party: invite a player to conspire with you.

Now, you have to use a light touch here, and you should only pick a player who is really going to follow your lead and not game things to be especially mean. But there's an implicit trust within D&D groups that the party will cooperate, even if the characters themselves are shady (this might not be with every group, but it tends to be in mine, which is part of the reason why, to both mine and the player's shock, my Ravnica group always trusts the Rakdos Bard despite the very clearly established fact that the guy's a chaotic evil serial killer.) But if you can break even that trust, it can induce a real sense of paranoia (still, use this sparingly.)

I'm really excited to get my copy of Rime of the Frostmaiden, and I'm really eager to see how this measures up to Curse of Strahd in terms of creepy scenarios and adventures. 

Afterlives: Ardenweald

 The latest Ardenweald short is out, and... well, watch it and we'll talk:

I realize I was a little dismissive of the Maldraxxus short, downplaying the reveal that Draka had been fighting the Burning Legion (in fact, almost certainly infiltrating the same Legion base Illidan later would attack after whatever world it was on was turned into a fel-blasted hellscape,) though I still think that short was more or less just telling us the basic gist of what is going on in that zone.

Ardenweald, though not quite as explosively revelatory as Bastion, still gives you a massive gut-punch.

We've known about this anima drought and the fact that every soul is being sent to the Maw, a realm of torment and not much else, which feels like pretty big stakes. But even though playing through places like Torghast you see trapped souls ultimately expire - a kind of existential extinction that, frankly, is the most terrifying thing I could possibly think of - it's abstract enough that it might not hit hard just how horrible things are.

And so, Ardenweald arrives to take a familiar character and tell us that no, he's not coming back. There's no afterlife left for him.

Ursoc is gone.

As the short begins, we see Ursoc fighting in the Emerald Nightmare - fighting us, as this was after his mind was tainted by the Nightmare. But with his death, with Malfurion standing there as a friend, Ursoc's mind is restored to sanity, and he takes comfort in the fact that he's going to be spending the "long winter" in a sort of hibernation within the "Great Forest Beyond," which is, of course, Ardenweald.

Ursoc's soul comes to rest in one of the giant seeds that house the souls of fallen nature spirit in this realm, and an unnamed (though I think he winds up being a major NPC in the zone) faun (useful that there's another term for satyr given how satyrs in WoW are demons, rather than fey) passionately swears to the Winter Queen that he will nurture and protect Ursoc until the bear-spirit can return to the land of the living.

And this seems pretty standard - the forest is lush and healthy, and the anima-fruits that he feeds to the spirits are plentiful.

This is actually a pretty important revelation. There's been some speculation on when, exactly, the anima drought started, with some assuming that it began with Sylvanas' deal with the Jailer, or perhaps with Uther's unjust condemnation of Arthas. While I think both are very likely part of the cause of it, we can see that at least as of the earliest raid of Legion, the afterlife was still mostly functional.

Time passes, and the forest grows brown and dried out - drained of anima. The anima-fruits are few and far between, and our faun character has to roam farther to keep his charge fed.

When he returns to his grove, he finds a group of other Night Fae attacking it, destroying the spirits within. In a rage that uses the same color scheme as Ursoc's last moments consumed by the Nightmare, he fights back - this is his nightmare scenario, after all.

Having sworn himself to the Queen herself to defend this grove, he strikes with a primal fury.

But the attackers are not evil agents of the Jailer or anything. They are there on the orders of the Winter Queen herself, and when she arrives, our hero is shocked and confused. Finally, she reveals why they are doing this: the anima drought threatens the entire forest, and if they don't cull some of the groves, the entire ecosystem will collapse.

Seeing that his heart is pure, she tells the faun that she will respect his decision - whether to continue trying to save this one soul, or to sacrifice him for the sake of the forest.

Devastatingly, the faun realizes what the right thing to do is. And so, he abandons the grove, and leaves Ursoc's soul to wither and die, swearing to his queen now that he will do whatever he can to defend Ardenweald and the souls that may yet be saved.

This really hits us right in the gut. Ursoc might not have been the biggest Warcraft character, but he's such a part of the mythos - Druids' bear form (well, any of the Night Elf-derived Druids, so Night Elves, Worgen, and Tauren) base that form on Ursoc. This guy fought in the War of the Ancients.

This is a major stakes-raising story, but I also find it kind of interesting that the perspective from which it's told also frames it in larger terms. Ursoc might have been a hugely important figure in Azeroth's history, but for this one Night Fae faun, he was just an individual responsibility and charge. And Ardenweald - and the Shadowlands in general - are full of every important figure who has died in Warcraft history. And it's all in danger of being lost.