With Spelljammer Confirmed, Another Look at the Travelers of the Multiverse

I've had Spelljammer on the brain.

It's crazy, but the Travelers of the Multiverse Unearthed Arcana, which was our first very clear hint that we'd be getting a 5th Edition Spelljammer release, came out all the way back in October - we're closer now to the actual release than that UA was to the announcement.

And now, I'm basically just waffling on whether I want to switch my order from the alternate cover version of the books to the standard version (I think I like the cover art better on that one - but I've often found the soft-finish books hold up better - my local store doesn't charge more for the alternative, so I've just got to make up my mind some time in the next four months).

My Sunday group has been playing a Spelljammer campaign, using lore from the older version of the setting with anticipated updates coming when the new books come out. It's been slow-going - we've only had maybe four sessions in possibly as many months - hoping this gets ramped up with some real-life issues resolved. Anyway, two of our players are playing as Astral Elves while one of us is playing a Plasmoid (with a gnome and myself as a human filling out the team).

On a conceptual level, humanoid races in fantasy and alien species in sci fi often fill the same roles. I mean, you look at the people in Star Trek (particularly the Next Generation era) and you can very clearly draw parallels between Vulcans and High Elves, Romulans and Dark Elves, Klingons and Orcs (indeed, I think Next Gen Klingons were a huge inspiration for the more nuanced, not-automatically-evil orcs we got in franchises like Warcraft,) and you've even got the Borg as a kind of sci-fi version of the undead - a cybernetic zombie plague.

I think that you could easily imagine the Giff or the Hadozee in any other D&D setting, but things like the Autognome, the Thri-kreen, and particularly the Plasmoid really feel like they're stretching out into that "anything goes" world of "cantina" sci fi.

So, I want to look at these playable races from both a flavor and mechanical perspective. We've got stuff that's already six months old, and has probably been iterated upon significantly, so I don't really want to get deep into mechanics that might change. We're going to approach these more on a kind of philosophical level.

Astral Elves:

I don't know what the ultimate plan for sub-races is going to be moving forward in 5th Edition, or perhaps more accurately 5.5/6th Edition. On one hand, given that they're coming out before the 2024 Player's Handbook, you'd need to basically reprint the Elf itself to then apply this as a sub-race, and much as we saw in Monsters of the Multiverse, they're just making these sub-races into full races of their own, though perhaps with a creature type tag. I do wonder if they're just going to make everything independent, given that the Githzerai and Githyanki were published as full races in MotM.

In the UA, you get a bonus cantrip (dancing lights, light, or sacred flame,) which is fine, and Radiant Soul, which has you actually heal for a bit on a successful death save once per day - I'm trying to remember if our cleric forgot to use that or just failed on all their death saves.

Of all the races here, though, this one feels the least exciting on a conceptual level. Elves are everywhere, and there's not a ton that makes these folks feel different than other elves, except that they can be even older. Obviously, especially if Spelljammer is developing the Astral Plane as a core part of the setting, there will be some fleshing out of that plane, but I feel like there's a lot more that's interesting about the Githyanki if I want to play a native to the Astral Plane.

Autognome:

I'm a little heartbroken that they didn't make Warforged a setting-agnostic race in Monsters of the Multiverse. What I find sort of amazing about the Autognome is the commitment (at least in UA) to something the Warforged get around - namely, that the race is a construct.

In the UA for the gothic lineages that were eventually published in Van Richten's, they played with the idea of making an undead or construct playable race, but they had to sort of jump through hoops and use unintuitive rules to allow healing spells to work on them. Here, though, they have a different way of dealing with that. Autognomes are constructs, but they can be affected by Cure Wounds, Healing Word, and Spare the Dying.

It's an interesting kludge, but I also think that, especially at higher levels of play, this isn't going to cut it. A blanket "spells that restore hit points that would normally not affect constructs nevertheless do affect you" would probably be a better solution.

On a philosophical level, though, what does it mean for a character to be a construct? Are constructs inherently, for example, soulless? Warforged in Eberron explicitly have souls just like any other humanoid race - and they are considered a humanoid race even though they're made of inorganic material (well, also sometimes wood and leather). I wonder if this will make the cut in the final version of the books.

While I might like a science-fantasy setting to more generally have a "robot" playable race, these feel very much in keeping especially with the idea of gnomes as the culture built most around mechanical tinkering.

Giff:

On a mechanical level, there's just not enough here - especially given that one of its two features (well, three given the swimming speed - which can be very important in some situations) only works for melee combatants - it does help on melee spell attacks, but much like how when the air force is using rifles, things have gone seriously wrong, when my wizard is in melee, things are not going great.

What I want to know more about is their culture. As presented in Mordenkainen's (actually both books, come to think of it) the Giff have that sort of "gentleman soldier" vibe like a 19th Century British explorer in a pith helmet. I think they're probably going to flesh out and nuance that a bit (maybe pull back on the colonialist imagery,) which we got a little hint of in the Spelljammer presentation when Chris Perkins referred to them as a people "looking for home in all the wrong places."

Fundamentally, they're hippo people, which is great. I think the association with firearms and explosives is probably going to depend on how much the setting book emphasizes those elements.

Hadozee:

So, after the Astral Elf, this is the one that inspires me the least, but I kind of feel like that means that I will find myself thinking about them a lot later down the line and decide that I must make a Hadozee character. There's nothing that's screaming sci fi over fantasy with this race, but I suppose there is some bit of the old "planetary romance" genre in their design.

The ability to both climb and glide actually sets up some very fun scenarios.

Plasmoid:

The real break-out star here, these are, I think, straight-up, the weirdest playable race in all of 5th Edition, and that weirdness really fits in with the gonzo sci-fi world that Spelljammer represents.

The Amorphous trait occupies a central place in my mind, and the difficulties of playing a character who isn't wearing or carrying anything - I think basically a Monk is the only such character who would be fully effective (our Rogue is going to go Soulknife so that they're always armed). Still, even if you want to play a heavily-armored character, there's tons here, mechanically, that you can make use of.

In our game, we're treating the plasmoid character as something of an anomaly - they're very friendly, and most of the player characters (mine especially) have an established friendship with them (my artificer constructed a sort of bowl/bucket for them to sleep in). But I'm curious to see what sort of society and civilization they might have.

Thri-Kreen:

Man, I feel like the Thri-Kreen are just beaten out for weirdest alien by the Plasmoids, and that's a shame given how cool the Thri-Kreen are.

Indeed, though they were established in more "fantasy" settings, the idea of bug-people feels like a very sci-fi trope. Mechanically, like the Plasmoid, these have a lot going for them - for one thing, you could be both a dual-wielder and use a shield, or you could be a very effective martial/melee hybrid, able to use your main hands for weapons and your secondary hands for somatic spell components.

Thri-Kreen Telepathy is also fantastic, though I'd like to see if we can get some clarification as to whether this is two-way telepathy or more like the Great Old One's Awakened Mind.

Interestingly, like the Autognome and Plasmoid, at least in the UA, the Thri-kreen is neither humanoid nor fey (the two creature types used by established playable races) and is listed as a monstrosity - which is especially weird given that they're humanoids in the Monster Manual (where Centaurs are monstrosities but the playable race is fey.) Like Oozes, aside from immunity to "X person" spells like Charm Person, Monstrosities don't really carry a ton of mechanical baggage, so I think there's plenty of room for making playable races these other creature types. (Really, undead and constructs are the ones that have the big issue re: healing spells).

I hope that we're going to see a lot of players pick these weird guys, as I think they're quite cool.

Gleaned Details About Spelljammer 5E

 So, what is "space" in D&D?

Traditionally, Spelljammer in D&D has, despite being otherworldly and strange, still taken place entirely in the Prime Material Plane. The crystal spheres and phlogiston (the region between the spheres that contain the conventional settings and their solar system-like nearby planets) were basically the structure of the Prime Material Plane. Some settings, like Dark Sun's Athas, were sort of locked away - their crystal spheres impenetrable to preserve the bleak "trapped" feeling of such a rough world (otherwise one would assume most people from Athas would do whatever they could to just leave).

The language WotC has been using to describe Spelljammer with the upcoming box set, however, seems to imply that big changes are coming to the way that the setting works, and that a good portion of it will take place within the Astral Plane.

The Astral Plane is one of the "weird" planes in D&D. It's a "transitive plane." While the "Great Wheel" cosmology kind of treats the outer planes like a big cookie, with the Outlands at its core and the other outer planes forming the rim, they're also kind of afloat in the Astral Plane.

The Astral Plane is a realm beyond time - the Githyanki, who make it their home, have to send their young to the Prime Material just in order to let them mature to adulthood. It's also a place where gods go when they die - their corpses floating as decaying titans on the endless expanse.

Travel to the various Outer Planes is potentially easy in the Astral Plane, as there are portals adrift there.

Given this, Spelljammer is actually positioning itself to be an even broader setting than it previously was. As before, you can sail your spelljammer between prime material worlds like Toril or Krynn, but if you're sailing into the Astral Plane, that means you could technically take a portal and wind up flying around Mount Celestial or the Nine Hells.

This also seems to imply that travel between worlds of the Prime Material will also involve the Astral Plane, which sort of makes the Prime Material into less of one contiguous realm and more a kind of scattering of plane-particles. And that, honestly, feels like it could tie into the mythos of the "First World" mentioned in Fizban's Treasury of Dragons.

"Astral" of course means a connection to stars, so I sort of wonder if Spelljammer is going to present Wildspace as "nearby space" and the Astral Plane as the weird "outer space" of aliens and odd monsters. Certainly the Star Lancer shown in the Monstrous Compendium is an Astral Plane denizen, but I wonder if the kind of asteroid fields where we might encounter an Asteroid Spider would be in Wildspace or in the Astral Plane.

Revised Heroes of Krynn UA

 While the cat wasn't ever quite stuck in that bag in the first place (it's hard to misidentify hints coming from something called "Heroes of Krynn" if you know just a little about the Dragonlance setting,) the cat is now completely out of the bag and flying around on a Spelljammer with D&D Direct's confirmation that a Dragonlance product - a kind of hybrid D&D campaign with a war-game component - is going to be coming out some time this year (or, I'd hazard, some time next year).

Now, there's a second version of the "Heroes of Krynn" UA for us to pore over.

Anyway, Jeremy Crawford sat down with Todd Kenreck to talk about this second iteration of the UA. Notably, the Moon Sorcerer is something they feel is good enough to progress in development, so no fear if you liked that and were worried that it didn't show up in this 2.0 showing - the Moon Sorcerer is more or less confirmed at this point.

But, the main thing they were playing with is the backgrounds: Knight of Solamnia and Mage of High Sorcery. Essentially, these backgrounds came with extra, free feats. The new version, however, now establishes that for anyone in this campaign, you'll get a curated list of feats that you get at levels 1 and 4. Essentially, these backgrounds funnel you into certain feat choices, but if you pick any other backgrounds, you won't be left behind power-wise.

It's not the full feat list, but while Knights of Solamnia get the Squire of Solamnia feat at level 1 and Mages of High Sorcery get the Initiate of High Sorcery feat, any other backgrounds get to choose from the following list:

Divinely Favored (found in the UA), Skilled, or Tough.

Divinely Favored gives you a cleric cantrip and both Augury and a 1st level spell from a class list based on the deity that favors you - clerics for good gods, druids for neutral ones, and warlocks for evil ones. You also get to use a holy symbol as a spell focus for these.

So, basically, these are all relatively straightforward feats that don't add too much complexity to the character, and I think are solid level 1 choices.

At level 4, the list expands, granting the following:

Adept of the Black Robes, Adept of the Red Robes, Adept of the White Robes, Alert, Knight of the Crown, Knight of the Rose, Knight of the Sword, Mobile, Sentinel, and Warcaster.

The various Adept and Knight ones are all somewhat complex and I don't really have the time to write them all out here, but obviously these start to get a bit more advanced.

So, regardless of what this means for Dragonlance - other than that characters in this setting will be significantly more powerful - I do sort of wonder about the future of feats in D&D, especially regarding the 2024 5.5/6th Edition that will be coming out.

Most classes only allow a total of 5 ASIs over the course of a character's journey from 1-20. Aside from variant humans and custom lineages, feats are always competing with ASIs, and while I think a lot of the time those feats can be a better choice, it can make character building agonizing.

Looking at Starfinder - the most D&D-like RPG I've read the rulebook for - that game treats feats as a fundamental part of how you build your character. Honestly, I think it maybe overdoes it - and it turns a lot of things that could just be class features into feats (there's no "extra attack" because Starfinder does its action economy a bit differently, but imagine if Extra Attack was a feat that all Barbarians, Fighters, Rangers, Monks, and Paladins automatically got at level 5).

Still, I do sometimes think it would be fun if feats weren't competing as much with ASIs, and I wonder if this might model a way to do that moving forward.

We'll see.

How Important is Godrick in Elden Ring?

 Godrick the Grafted serves as the first "Shardbearer" boss in Elden Ring. While not exclusively, the Shardbearers are kind of the "key" bosses to the game, most of them demigods, and tend to come at the end of one of the game's "legacy dungeons."

As the first, we spend a lot of the game's earliest parts seeing him as a sort of primary antagonist, but when he falls, most people talk about him in a dismissive, disrespectful way. He is, after all, the "distant relation," and we're given to understand that his strength was almost entirely due to the grafting of others' limbs onto his own body. When we kill him, his own body - really just a head and a torso - is miniscule (well, just kind of "normal human" sized).

It also looks like Godrick didn't really enjoy any success in the Shattering War - but not for lack of effort. He besieged Leyndell and we see evidence of his forces at work on Mt. Gelmir and in Liurnia. Indeed, Godrick's army might even be the largest one we encounter, but this seems to be a case of quantity over quality.

Unlike the other demigod bosses we fight, who are all the children of either Marika or Radagon (to the extent that there's a difference,) Godrick appears to be descended somewhat distantly from Godfrey, aka Horah Loux, who had been Marika's Elden Lord prior to Radagon (it's not clear to me if that role involved being quite as close as Radagon and Marika were).

Stormveil seems to have been conquered in the distant past by Godfrey, and Godrick clearly traces his legitimacy to his relation to Godfrey. In the great grafting hall, where the castle's Grafted Scion lurks, we see a massive portrait of Godfrey.

Clearly, Nepheli is also some relative of Godfrey, given that her last name is also Loux, and if we complete her questline (which I haven't actually done yet) she becomes the ruler of Stormveil Castle. I even wonder if the "conquest" of Stormveil by Godfrey might have been a little more metaphorical - Godfrey took that name when he was "civilized" in his marriage to Marika, having been Horah Loux beforehand. Might this conquest actually simply been his one persona replacing his old one?

(Also, I feel it important to point out that Godfrey, with his massive strength and lion spirit hanging over him like a cloak is a clear reference to Herakles/Hercules, the greatest of the Greek heroes who is usually depicted with the hide of the Nemean Lion on his back. Radagon, by contrast, shares visual aspects of Thor, like the red hair and hammer weapon. It seems that part of the story of Elden Ring involves an older, Greco-Roman mythological world being replaced with a newer, northern-European Norse mythos. Not sure what it means, but just throwing it out there).

Regardless of the history of Stormveil Castle's owners, Godrick seems to be a pretender. But let's also look at a few other elements.

First off, the grafting he does is, in true From Soft fashion, horrific and creepy. But I also think it's notable that, while grafting human limbs is pretty rare (typically just used to replace amputated limbs,) the process is actually quite common in tree husbandry - plants are very often grafted to one another. And indeed, Godrick's form, with all the arms coming off of his massive shoulders, is somewhat reminiscent of a tree covered in branches.

Also, Godrick's Great Rune is the very center of the Elden Ring - a piece that one would think is imbued with some special prominence among them. Now, it could simply be that this was Godfrey's and that it was passed on to Godrick through his family line, or that Godrick somehow stole the rune, having closer access to it.

Ok, now let's take things a step farther: Marika's and Radagon's children all seem to be tainted in some way. Marika's children with Godfrey are, I believe, Godwyn, Margit and Mohg. The M twins were born as "omens," those ogre-like creatures with weird horns growing out of them. Margit is actually quite noble, if a bit haughty toward us, while Mohg is a classically diabolic evil who is all about blood (and seems to be dedicated to a different Outer God). Godwyn appears to have been kind of universally beloved, but his soul was slain and now his bloated body seems to be the source of living death - a kind of "hollow undeath." Radagon's children with Renalla are Ranni, Rykard, and Radahn. Radagon himself is likely descended from the Fire Giants, given his red hair (which kind of mashes up Thor and Loki, the latter of whom is actually a frost giant adopted into the Aesir family) and thus likely carry some of the Fell God's essence in them. Marika and Radagon's children (which... don't want to think about how that worked - unless it was before the two shared a body) are Malenia and Miquella, the first of whom is a vessel of the Scarlet Rot and the latter of whom has been perpetually stuck in a child's body (which might have died in that weird sphere where Mohg is summoned).

Anyway, is it possible that Godrick is actually a descendant of Godfrey, but not Marika? (He is a "distant relation," after all, and thus might even just be a cousin or great nephew or something). Wouldn't it be interesting if Godrick is actually the only surviving would-be lord who is not tainted by Marika or Radagon?

In our quest to find Godwyn's body, we actually find a huge, distorted head in the depths of Stormveil Castle - which is odd. What connection does he have to Stormveil? It's also clearly not his "real" head, as that is, theoretically, found in the roots of the Erdtree.

Though now he's a source of Deathroot and the living death that seems to fly in the face of the Golden Order, Godwyn also seemed to be kind of "pure," at least before then. Might Godrick have had some kind of kinship with Godwyn?

We're still just scratching the tip of the iceberg on the lore of this game.

Spelljammer's Spelljammers Will Be The Key

Spelljammer seems really freaking cool, and I love the monsters we've gotten in the first volume of the "Monstrous Compendium," suggesting we're getting a lot of very freaky aliens to encounter in our journeys across the stars.

One thing I noted when looking through these monsters is that some are described as profoundly huge - a gargantuan creature is anything that fits in a 20x20 foot space on a battle map, but it can be much larger than that as well. The Tarrasque, for instance, is described as 70 feet from head to tail.

And the three gargantuan creatures in the Monstrous Compendium are described as being much bigger than 20x20. The Asteroid Spider, for example, has a 30-foot diameter body and 30-foot legs, meaning that, with legs spread out, it could be 90 feet wide.

Thus, it seems pretty clear to me that some of these monsters are meant to be threats not just to a party of adventurers, but to an entire spelljamming ship.

This makes me wonder about how the game is going to handle ship combat. Clearly, part of the fantasy of Spelljammer is to have players fight in starship battles against other ships and giant space monsters.

But I think you always run the risk in such an endeavor of alienating players if the rules for ship combat are too different. Ideally, combat on or off their ship should feel like the same kind of gameplay, only perhaps giving more options when on your ship (such as firing ship-mounted weapons) and raising the stakes (you have to protect the terrain you're standing on, which is your ship).

I'm really hoping we can get a preview of some of the mechanics of ship mechanics, because they seem so central to Spelljammer as a campaign setting.

I'll admit this is fairly conservative, but the way I'd probably go about this is to have whoever in the party is attuned to the spelljamming helm (which seems to be treated like a magic item) will control the ship if they stay in the pilot's position. The rest of the party should be able to act as normal, fighting on the deck of the ship, but perhaps if the ship has things like cannons or other weapons, they might be able to use their action to fire that weapon if they get to its location on the deck.

Thematically, I think it makes perfect sense for ranged characters in particular to be able to use their normal abilities on the ship's deck (which has its own air pocket and gravity well, so it should work just like the deck of a normal ship, as seen in the announcement trailer). Indeed, the image I'm getting right now is of an Artillerist Artificer setting up their Eldritch Cannon(s) and firing a barrage at some monstrous Yggdrasti or the like.

But the ship, presumably, could have its own weapons that might be more effective against other ships or enormous targets. Or perhaps they're just there to give melee-based characters something to do in a naval engagement.

Part of the promise of Spelljammer is, of course, the opportunity to go to strange and alien places (and also to hop between D&D settings,) but I think that getting the feeling for the ships right will be really important.

I cannot wait to get my hands on these books.

Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1

 While we have to wait until August to officially get our Spelljammer book set, today a digital release of the Monstrous Compendium, available to anyone with a Wizards or DnDBeyond account (which are both free to make,) came out with 10 Spelljammer-appropriate monsters, ranging in CR from 1/8 to 16.

Wildspace seems like it's a dangerous place, and the monsters here are not messing around. Let's get into them.

I'm going to change the order here to build up to the really crazy stuff, so we'll start with the lowest-CR monsters.

Gadabout, CR 1/8:

This is an unaligned plant creature that is honestly closer to a magic item than a creature, though it does have a stat block. Used primarily by the elves, Gadabouts are plants that can attach themselves to a humanoid and function essentially as a space suit. They create a bubble of air around the creature's head and also provide nourishing leaves that can keep a creature fed in space. It can also propel them using butterfly-like leaf-wings.

Goon Balloon, CR 1/8:

So, if you ever actually read H. P. Lovecraft, his monsters sometimes come off less as pure gooey, tentacled horror and sometimes fall a bit more into the 50s B-movie monster vibe (which were likely inspired by Lovecraft, after all). The Goon Balloon fits right in with those "scary" creatures like the Elder Things and the Great Race of Yith that... well, maybe seem a little more Jim Henson than Rob Bottin. Anyway, these are evil beach balls with bird-like legs and eyes covering their surface. They're more mischievously meanspirited than profoundly evil, but they can both bounce like a beach ball as a bonus action and also have vulnerability to piercing damage, popping and a poisonous explosion when killed.

Clockwork Horror, CR 2:

One of the classic concepts of Sci Fi is robots run amok, and in this case, these constructs are dedicated to nothing but building more of themselves, and will slash anyone who gets in their way with their dual buzz saws. Most worrying, they can take over the Spelljamming Helm of your ship. The art on this one I think is really fantastic, feeling both high-tech and also fantastical.

Star Lancer, CR 2:

So, we're not just going to be in Wildspace in Spelljammer adventures, but also the Astral Plane (which I gather might be taking the place of the Phlogiston in 5th Edition - that's not confirmed, mind you). And the Astral Plane has the bodies of dead gods floating in them. Some of the souls of people who worshipped those deities become these odd four-winged shark-like celestials, and the Githyanki have made an effort to ally with them and use them as mounts. Most excitingly (and terrifying for anyone fearing Githyanki raids) is that Star Lancers can cloak themselves and their riders, becoming invisible to allow them to strike from out of nowhere.

Puppeteer Parasites, CR 3:

Now we're getting into that real cosmic horror dread. These are basically brain slugs - they attach to a humanoid creature and can either drain the victim or cast Suggestion on their host.

Yggdrasti, CR 7:

These gargantuan plant monsters are broken-off branches of Yggdrasil, the world tree. They look like gnarled, twisted dead trees covered with barnacles. Yggdrasti will attack pretty much any other living thing, but it can also hide in plain sight as a tree if it buries its roots in soil. But the massive creature is also capable of spaceflight, and has its own gravity plane and air pocket, along with hollows where hitchhikers can stay while traveling across wildspace.

Fractine, CR 9:

So, I didn't immediately guess the pop culture reference, but these are essentially constructs that act similarly to the Phantom Zone portals from Superman II. Appearing as Large 2-dimensional mirrored surfaces, these can capture creatures small enough to fit within them, which are displayed on their surface. Many damage types will split the Fractine into shards, which are smaller versions of the same basic monster, but this also will free any monster trapped within it. As a mirror, they also have the ability to reflect damage.

Asteroid Spider, CR 15:

Ok, warning to all the arachnophobes out there, this one might be a bit much for you. Imagine you're traveling through an asteroid field, and you pass one big rock about 30 feet in diameter. And then it unfolds eight 30-foot long spider legs and starts shooting webs at your ship, revealing it's actually a spider that disguises itself as a crater-pockmarked rock. Oh yeah, and its webs? They can shut down a Spelljamming Helm.

Eldritch Lich, CR 15:

So, let's say a wizard or warlock starts studying the forbidden magic of the Great Old Ones, and decides that they've figured out a shortcut to the eternal unlife of lichdom. All they need to do is let this eldritch abomination implant a tentacled parasite into their body. The parasite can now infect the lich's foes with a poison that can potentially transform them into a Gibbering Mouther, and the lich is resurrected in the Far Realm should it ever be destroyed (though if you interfere with that process by killing the lich in a Magic Circle, well, the resurrection isn't going to look so pretty, as they come back as an Otyguh. The Eldritch Lich, also, to be clear, puts out a TON of damage - on average if everything hits, you're looking at 100 damage per round.

Nightmare Beast, CR 16

Technically a monstrosity, this massive, 40-foot-long quadruped are living siege engines, and beyond their powerful claws and tusks, they can also disintegrate targets with their gaze.

So, there you have it. I highly recommend checking out the Monstrous Compendium. These are some very cool monsters, and I cannot wait to see what we get in the Spelljammer box set. Just four months, right?

Spelljammer, Dragonlance Officially Confirmed in Today's D&D Direct

 Spelljammer Confirmed! For real!

Spelljammer: Adventures in Space is going to come out in August of this year. Interestingly, it will be three books in a slipcase.

The Astral Adventurer's Guide will be for DMs and players, with playable races (as seen in the Travelers of the Multiverse UA - all of them made it in) along with magic items, spells, as well as deck plans for different kinds of ships to sail the stars on.

Boo's Astral Menagerie is the monster book, with 60+ space-based monsters. Examples cited were space clowns, vampirates (vampire pirates, natch), as well as solar and lunar dragons.

Finally, Light of Xaryxis is an adventure book set in the Astral Plane.

Interestingly, the mention of the Astral Plane makes me think they might have changed up the general setting for Spelljammer. Each of these books is pretty short, only 64 pages each, which actually means that in total, this will probably be one of the shorter campaign setting sourcebooks. But I'm still very excited to pick it up.

Now, we got far fewer details about Dragonlance - it was the stream's kind of "parting shot." The trailer, narrated by Shoreh Aghdashloo (whose voice is always a pleasure to just listen to) depicts a war-torn world in which haggard heroes fight back against an endless tide of evil. So, honestly, not exactly the vibe I always assumed for Dragonlance - a bit darker and grittier.

Unlike Spelljammer, we didn't get a deep dive into the nature of the product, though it looks like it might be another multi-book slip case.

Anyway, there were some other announcements, but those were the ones I felt were the most important.

Last Minute Predictions/Wishlist for D&D Direct

 Yes, it's an announcement-heavy week for the nerdy things I care about. After WoW's Dragonflight expansion reveal yesterday, I'm getting psyched up for tomorrow's D&D Direct, where Wizards of the Coast is going to announce various new stuff for Dungeons & Dragons.

I don't know how much they plan to announce here, but there are at least a few things that I'm fairly certain will be part of it.

Rather than just listing what I'm expecting, I wanted to get into what I really hope to see with these new books and other things.

Spelljammer:

Ever since the Travelers of the Multiverse Unearthed Arcana, it's seemed pretty inevitable that we'd be getting a Spelljammer campaign setting sourcebook. Spelljammer is one of those things that players have been begging for for years - almost like jokes about Half-Life 3, the phrase "Spelljammer Confirmed" has been something of a meme in the online D&D community.

In its original outings, Spelljammer was actually kind of an unpopular setting - for reasons I can't say for certain, having been 3 when it first came out. Naturally, the 80s were when Star Wars exploded into the collective consciousness. Along with Star Wars, there were also the Star Trek films (Wrath of Khan in 1982) that led into the birth of what I grew up thinking of as the "regular" Star Trek, meaning Next Generation (which didn't really become great until a couple seasons in, to be fair).

Space exploration also became a somewhat more routine thing with the development of the Space Shuttle, which first launched in 1981.

So it was not really that crazy to think that D&D would try out a space-faring, science fantasy setting. Still, for some reason, it didn't do too well. It was intentionally silly, and kind of self-deprecating, at a time when nerd culture was still considered very niche, and nerds were certainly quite defensive about their interests.

I also suspect that there were more purists in those days. As sci-fi and fantasy have grown in popularity, I think the genres have also gotten more flexible, telling new kinds of stories that subvert tropes and mix genre influences.

Anyway, the time is ripe for Spelljammer. 5th Edition is fun to play, and I think looking at other genres is something a lot of players are up for. We'll get into this later in the post, but I even wonder if WotC might be going a little farther than just Spelljammer in terms of bending 5E's genre.

Now, in terms of the structure for the book: Spelljammer is one of the "transitive settings" much as the Astral Plane and Ethereal Plane are transitive planes - they're the settings/planes that let you go between other settings/planes.

In the case of Planescape, the setting technically encompasses the entirety of the D&D multiverse, meaning that really every D&D game is a Planescape game. Spelljammer, historically, has been more limited to "merely" the prime material plane, but it's famous for allowing you to hop in a space ship on Toril (the Forgotten Realms) and fly to Oerth (Greyhawk). Even if each of these traditional D&D settings is literally designed to allow for a full campaign story to take place on it, Spelljammer lets you do a big crossover.

Simultaneously, though, Spelljammer is also a setting in and of itself, because while all the stuff happening on these (mostly pseudo-medieval) fantasy worlds is going on, there are also plenty of space-opera things happening up among space stations, alien planets, and on massive star ships.

So, there's a question of what to focus on.

I think we should absolutely get some background on what the various space-like regions around canonical settings look like, similar to how Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft gives us five or six pages each for some established Domains of Dread. But I also think that most people who buy campaign setting sourcebooks and not just published adventures are into homebrewing, and thus I think a more important tool in the book I want to see is guidance on creating a solar system for your own homebrew world.

Let's move on, though, as there's a lot to cover here, and it'll all be old news come tomorrow morning (if this publishes after midnight, it's currently 11:51 pm).

Dragonlance:

This one's a freebie: the "Heroes of Krynn" UA basically confirms that we'll also be getting a Dragonlance campaign setting sourcebook. Unlike Spelljammer, Dragonlance was super-popular in D&D's early days. I also think it makes sense as a counterbalance to Spelljammer's weirdness to go with a far more traditional medieval fantasy setting.

I know very little about Dragonlance, other than there are a lot of dragons and there are weapons called Dragonlances (which you can find in Fizban's!)

So I really can't say much about what I really want out of this book. I'm even sort of at a loss for what cool monsters we might see, given that Fizban's gave us things like Draconians and all kinds of dragon-adjacent monsters, along with gem dragons and other unconventional dragon types.

DnD Beyond:

Well, they've got to talk about this, right? WotC just bought DnD Beyond, which, while the "official toolset" for Dungeons & Dragons, was still a third party.

DnD Beyond works pretty well (with a few spots that I think still need work, like infusing multiple parts of an armorer's armor,) but I think the huge question on everyone's minds is how the pricing model will work.

DnD Beyond has a subscription that will allow you to make as many characters as you want, and a higher tier that lets you share any content you have unlocked with people in your campaigns. However, if you want to have anything outside of the free basic rules (which includes, like, Paladins,) you need to buy DnD Beyond's version of the book that contains it. While cheaper than physical books, it's still 30 bucks. As someone who has nearly all the 5th Edition books in physical form, if I wanted to get everything I already own but for DnDBeyond, I'd need to spend almost a thousand bucks. Again, for stuff that I already own, just not in the same form.

And yet, on a business side of things, this makes total sense - DnD Beyond is its own company that licenses these books for digital sale. I may have purchased my D&D books from Wizards of the Coast (albeit through intermediaries like Amazon or my local game stores) but DnD Beyond never got anything from me for me to use these things in their service. And given that my only evidence that I own these books is that I physically have them - something that, ironically, in our digital age is pretty flimsy evidence - there's not a really good way for them to "know" that I "should" have access to them.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I hate this, but the problem is more commerce and capitalism than DnD Beyond's own policies.

So, the great hope, now that DnD Beyond is owned by Wizards of the Coast, is that, at least moving forward, there can be some integration between one's physical book and the digital version in DnD Beyond.

How you do this is something I don't really know how to do - ideally, each copy of a new D&D book would have an alphanumeric code in it that you just type into DnD Beyond and it unlocks the book's content. Naturally, you'd need to have some kind of copy protection so that someone can't go into a game store and just peek at the code in the book and walk out of the store with access to it and screwing whoever actually buys that copy of the book. But this seems like a solvable problem.

Honestly, I think even a slight up-charge for the digital version wouldn't be totally objectionable - maybe you even just give people a code at checkout when they buy the book. 5 dollars more wouldn't be totally painful, but 30 is unacceptable. Good thing my Sunday DM has all the books on her account and lets me make all my characters in her "campaign." (And sorry that I have like 60 of them. See the name of the blog).

5th Edition Beyond D&D:

I realize using "beyond" in the title could be confusing, but oh well.

My source for this rumor is "some tweet I saw, and I don't even remember who tweeted it" so take it with a massive grain of salt.

But, the rumor goes that, with the success of 5th Edition, WotC wants to try building more TTRPGs that use 5th Edition as a basis for their rules. Essentially, given how many people are now familiar with how 5th Edition rules work, you could build games in other genres that work similarly - things like ability scores and modifiers, proficiencies, concepts like AC and HP, and attack rolls, saving throws, and ability checks, could easily apply to other genres of RPG.

And, of course, Paizo, the makers of Pathfinder, did just this when they made Starfinder. So there's precedent.

This would be a huge new frontier, and could be amazing, but I also want to remind you that my source is "some tweet," so don't get your hopes up too high.

Anyway, it's now 12:32, so in less than 9 hours D&D Direct is going to start, and we'll see what we actually find out.

Looking into the Dracthyr Evoker

 So, a bit like Mists of Pandaria, Dragonflight will be giving us a new neutral race and a new class. While this meant, in 2012, that most people made a Pandaren Monk, there was nothing preventing you from making, say, a Pandaren Shaman or a Dwarf Monk.

Dragonflight will actually enforce that "new race and new class" build, as Dracthyr will only be able to be Evokers and all Evokers will be Dracthyr.

Honestly, I felt pretty good about every announcement for Dragonflight (maybe get back to me on the "quality" of profession-produced items) but this... leaves me a bit skeptical. Like, I think the natural pattern for a new race and a new class is going to be that most players do both with a single character. But in the ten years since Mists came out and Monks have been around for five expansions, over time that default race/class combo kind of dissipated into players picking up what they wanted.

I'm generally in favor of letting players play the kind of character they feel like playing. I'm still kind of shocked that after we had two Night Elf Paladin champions in Legion, that's still not a player option (I mean, how could you not imagine some Night Elves wanting to get a bit of Retribution for Teldrassil?)

The finer details on Dragonflight are scarce. I think I tend to agree with Taliesin over from Taliesin & Evitel that this expansion is probably a long ways off. Expansions are usually announced a year before they come out, roughly, and this one has some tantalizing ideas but not a ton that got showed off.

But I wanted to make this post specifically about the new class, which is part and parcel with the new race.

Actually, I think this is the surprising element of it: that Dracthyr can't be other classes. With the precedent of the Demon Hunter, I can see that Blizzard is willing to restrict some classes to only a single race option per faction - which is a pretty big reversal of the race/class option expansions we got in, for example, Cataclysm (yes, there was a time when Humans couldn't be Hunters... for some reason). Before Cataclysm, if you wanted to play a Druid, you could only be a Night Elf if you were Alliance or a Tauren if you were Horde. With the addition of Worgen and giving Druids to Trolls, no class was restricted that way.

Obviously, we have yet to get a really strong sense of what the Dracthyrs' whole deal is - apparently they were created by Neltharion (we don't know if it was pre- or post-corruption, though I'd assume the former because A: they use his original name and B: one would think the Dracthyr would be corrupted by Old God nastiness if it was post-corruption).

But I could definitely imagine these dragon-people taking on various established classes like Warriors, Mages, Priests, etc. Apparently not, though.

The Evoker fits into the exact niches that it seemed any new class should take. They wear Mail and can serve as ranged dps or healers. This actually makes them the first post-vanilla class in the game that cannot be a tank, and it also marks the first ever addition of a ranged dps spec.

Evokers' spells are all dragon-themed, and often built around the idea of the five Dragonflights. Apparently Devastation, their dps spec, will focus on the Red and Blue flights, while Preservation, the healing spec, will focus on the Green and Bronze flights. (Maybe the Black flight's near-extinction is why they're less of a deal).

One of the most interesting aspects of the class (no pun intended) is that there's a new type of input they're playing with: being able to hold down a key to charge an ability. In fact, this reminds me a lot of Elden Ring, where some spells can be charged up to do more damage, hit more targets, or go farther.

We saw a few spells, including one that has us take a Deep Breath like Onyxia and fly over targets, breathing dragonfire down on them.

Like the true dragons, Dracthyr will have their true, draconic form, and a "visage" form that looks like a sort of draconic elf - not unlike the humanoid forms the aspects take, but with draconic scales and horns and such. The eyes are somewhat more human-like than the Blood/Void elf models whose skeleton they clearly share, with visible irises and pupils.

While we got nothing in the way of specifics, the new dragonflying mechanics for the expansion (which will be a sort of more interesting take on flying mounts - in theory) it seems that Dracthyr might interact with this feature in a different way - I suspect by flying on their own wings.

Like the Pandaren, the Dracthyr will have a faction-neutral starting experience, at the end of which they choose one faction or the other. However, story-wise, at least, this choice is presented less as a huge philosophical decision and more of a practical choice - the plot is going to actually set aside the faction conflict, and in fact the beginning of the expansion is a joint Alliance/Horde expedition to the newly rediscovered Dragon Isles.

Evokers, and thus Dracthyr, are a hero class, meaning that the starting experience should spit you out at a level to start the main adventure with established level 60 characters. Also, like the Demon Hunter, these will be available in the pre-expansion patch so that players can get a feel for the class.

I tend to love a new class - my Death Knight and Demon Hunter are my two primary alts after the Paladin. So, this to me is the most important and exciting feature that the expansion could have. Again, I do have to wonder a bit about the wisdom of making the race and class options so profoundly limited, and wonder if that restriction could be loosened in future expansions, or if it's kind of set in stone.

Even though I will generally default to any opportunity to make a blue player character (it's one of the reasons I love the Draenei so much) I'm feeling a strong urge to make a Bronze Dracthyr, given how much I love the Bronze flight.

But we'll see. Ooh, and I guess I've got to throw a new class tag into the blog labels.

So, Dragonflight? Looks Pretty Good

 I'm in this weird place with WoW, in large part because Shadowlands felt like it was "supposed" to be my favorite expansion - dealing with stuff like the Scourge and an extra-planar adventure. But I think the expansion had two things (well, and a third outside-the-game issue) going against it. One was just the bad luck of the Covid pandemic, and Blizzard's struggle to keep up with content in the face of such a disruption. The other is that the Jailer was just the most disappointingly boring villain - the kind of villain who kind of retroactively cheapens what he has touched.

In all honestly, I'd been hoping for a wall-to-wall spooky expansion, and while I think in the long run varying things up was the right call, the Jailer could have been much more - and honestly, if he had had any other personality than "alpha male douche bro" he probably would have been way better.

(The third thing is the whole harassment and discrimination revelations about so many well-known names from Blizzard's past).

Having played this game for nearly sixteen years, I am asking myself questions about how excited I can still get about the endless progression treadmill, and what that's going to mean for my enjoyment of the game.

But I also have a deep love for WoW, and I think the shifting philosophy in design look really enticing. Also, let's not forget that the expansions that add new classes tend to be bangers. (I'll confess that I'm not quite as enamored of Mists of Pandaria as some are, but that merely bumps it down to 3rd place for me after Legion and Wrath).

I'll also admit I'm a bit skeptical about the notion that, not only must all Evokers be Dracthyr, but all Dracthyr must be Evokers. Apparently the idea for the playable race - essentially WoW's version of D&D's Dragonborn - came first, and then they decided they wanted to make a class that would fit with their draconic nature.

Still, I wonder if they might reconsider, given that it would be nice to see Dracthyr in all different armor types, and perhaps just to build out what they might be as a culture and society.

The Dracthyr are clearly going to be a huge part of the story. I also appreciate that the Evoker is filling that niche that has needed something more or less since the Monk gave us a third leather class. We needed a new Mail class, and a new ranged DPS class. Naturally, I think Blizzard has always regretted having any "pure DPS" classes, so anyone using magic can theoretically be made a healer, especially given the nature of Warcraft's dragons.

I'm very eager to see how the Evokers play.

Another thing I'm really happy to see is that they've designed the Dragon Isles with flight in mind. We haven't really had questing zones designed for flying since Cataclysm, and some of my favorite memories of leveling up in Wrath was when you hit level 77 and could get flying, and all of a sudden had these super vertical zones in Icecrown and Storm Peaks.

So, could this be an amazing expansion? Yes. We won't know until the next one's about to come out, but I imagine we'll have a very good 10.0. Shadowlands started off very strong, and honestly probably only suffered because of the lack of content, not any problem with quality.

The general sense I got was that Blizzard is doing an experiment: give the people what they want. So many aspects of Dragonflight seem direct responses to the players' demands (or at least the most common ones). I hope this experiment pays off, and that WoW gets a new lease on life.

World of Warcraft: Dragonflight

 Yep! It was Dragonflight, all right!

Premise:

Interestingly, we have a sort of more optimistic and less conflict-driven opening premise for the new expansion. The Titanic watchers left to guard the Dragon Isles have finally managed to pull back the veil that kept them hidden since the War of the Ancients, and the dragons are returning to re-settle the isles and take their role once again as protectors of the world. The Dragon Isles look pretty universally gorgeous, filled with natural splendor.

One thing I find exciting is that the main Alliance and Horde forces being sent are the Explorer's League and the Reliquary, which are cooperating on a joint scientific expedition to aid the dragonflights in exploring this forgotten land. While we're sure to get some major conflict (it is Warcraft, after all,) it looks like we're starting this off with a peaceful mission, which is pretty cool.

New Race/Class:

So, we've got something a little odd: we're getting a new race and a new class, but all members of that race must be part of that class, and vice versa. The Dracthyr will be the second "neutral" race like the Pandaren, and all of them will be a hybrid Ranged Caster/Healer.

The Evoker will be a dragon-themed class, using the powers of all five flights, but mostly the Red and Blue for damage and Green and Bronze for healing. There seem to be a lot of breath-based attacks and ways to fly over foes breathing fire (or other elements) in-combat.

Dracthyr were one of Neltharion's first experiments in making draconic super-soldiers, and as a Dracthyr, you'll be able to take on a "true" draconic form or a humanoid-like form that retains some draconic elements (currently that form looks based on the Blood Elf skeleton, but we'll see if that stays that way).

Talent Revamp:

After ten years since Mists of Pandaria got rid of talent trees, we're getting them back. Details are scarce, but you'll have two trees at a time - one for your class and one for your spec. You'll still be able to change talents out in rest areas, and they'll let you save different builds that you might want for different content.

The thing they want to bring back was that sense of incremental power gain as you got to put more points in certain talents.

Zones:

We got a preview of four zones.

The Waking Shore, which seems associated with the Black Dragonflight, is going to be our first zone, where we see a lot of primordial elements at play in a lush forest.

The Oh'naran Plains will be, I think, associated with the Green Dragonflight, and has a culture of centaurs that we'll meet and befriend.

The Azure Span going to be a vast zone that has us progress from forests to tundra and icy mountain peaks, and seems affiliated with the Blue Dragonflight.

And then Thaldraszus is the sort of center of all the draconic culture on the islands, which includes an area dedicated to the Bronze Dragonflight, and also has the capital city for the expansion.

Professions:

We're getting a profession revamp. We'll have new gear slots for professional gear (I'd assume including things like miner's picks, but it looks like something they're expanding). There will also be professional specializations and more incremental increases to the quality of your wares.

Also, there's a new system for work orders, where a player can provide all or some of the materials needed for a recipe and have someone of that profession make the item for them, possibly getting a commission. This can be arranged "in person" or through the auction house, but it also means that BoP gear won't be limited to people who have the profession, and they said this will free them up to let professions make more powerful gear.

Dragonriding:

We'll be learning a skill called dragonriding, where we get a customizable dragon mount that we'll be able to use to fly around the Dragon Isles basically right after we arrive. The intention is to make flight a more dynamic and exciting feature than it is with a standard flying mount, so you'll be able to dive or do barrel rolls and such. You'll also unlock ways to give your mount all sorts of different visual features.

No Borrowed Power:

There does not look like there will be another "borrowed power" mechanic, and they'll be focusing on evergreen progression systems.

Indeed, there was a lot of talk about their shifting philosophy toward listening more to player feedback.

Honestly, I think if you looked at most players' wishlists for an expansion, this checked nearly every box. Obviously, the key is the execution, but I think they've got a really strong set of possibilities with what they presented today.

What Class Could WoW Fit?

 Tomorrow, we're going to be getting the announcement of the next World of Warcraft expansion. All signs point to its being "Dragonflight" (or is it "Dragonflights?") but we technically don't know that yet.

Only three times over WoW's 18 years have they added new classes to the game, but I'd contend that, whether by coincidence or not, the expansions that brought new classes have been the best to come out.

Two of these have been "hero classes," which required you to have played long enough to "unlock" them, which simply meant hitting a particular level. The Monk is the only class to be introduced as a normal, "non-hero" class that starts at 1 like anyone else.

Obviously, the way that leveling works has changed significantly, and hero classes don't get the massive level boost they once did (in fact, I think they might just get spat out at level 10 just like new characters doing Exile's Reach).

The thing is, classes are a big thing to add. Given the effort and complexity of adding a class to the game, it's one thing that I think the developers are, appropriately, hesitant to do.

There's also the danger of stepping on another class' toes. The Demon Hunter, infamously, stole the Metamorphosis ability from Demonology Warlocks. This ability was the core of the Demo rotation, and what had been a very enjoyable spec required a huge redesign in Legion, totally changing the emphasis of how it worked (once they got rid of Demonic Empowerment in BFA, I think the spec became just as fun as its Mists/Warlords incarnation).

The thing is, Death Knights and Demon Hunters were already represented by very iconic characters in Warcraft's canon. Monks, meanwhile, were distinct enough from previously-existing classes that they didn't really have to steal much. (Indeed, Death Knights, while they fill a similar niche to Warriors and to an extent Paladins, were also the only "necromancy" class in the game).

So, this brings us to a new question: what does WoW have room for?

The obvious thing to start with is armor type. There are four Leather-wearing classes, three in Cloth, three in Plate, and only two in Mail. These days, with personal loot, the balance of these armor types isn't quite as important, but I'd argue with the return of tier sets, adding a new Mail class would actually increase the visual diversity of armor for Shamans and Hunters, so it would be a real positive.

Another interesting thing these days is that there are certain weapon types only a single class can use. Warglaives are exclusive to Demon Hunters, and while Warriors and Rogues can equip ranged weapons, in practice, Guns, Bows, and Crossbows are really only used by two specs, both of the Hunter class.

Shields are also only usable by Paladins, Warriors, and Shamans - yes, even among the six tank classes, less than half use shields.

So, on these mechanical levels, some mix of letting a new class wear Mail, be able to use ranged weapons, and wear a shield (though obviously not with those two-handed weapons) would make sense.

Next, the game has only ever added one healing spec, with the Mistweaver Monk, and we've never gotten any new ranged specs (indeed, the once-ranged Survival Hunter is now a melee spec). So I think a ranged DPS/healer would be a good thing to add.

The next question is one of flavor.

The magical cosmos of Warcraft is laid out in a fairly orderly manner. If we look at the six primordial forces, we have classes that represent each: Light has Paladins and Priests, Disorder has Warlocks and Demon Hunters, Death has Death Knights, Shadow/Void has Priests, Order has Mages, and Life has Druids and sort of Hunters... and also sort of Shamans and maybe Monks.

Now, there's a strong chance that the next expansion will be dragon-themed. Dragons occupy a kind of odd place in WoW mythology - kind of affiliated with the Titans, sort of a major force in and of themselves, though also kind of separate from the whole Titanforged lineage. I'm sure we'll see that role fleshed out if the expansion focuses on the dragons. But if draconic magic or power becomes something we explore in Dragonflight, a dragon-themed class would make a ton of sense. Hell, even the fact that they have mail armor would work in that sort of "dragonscale armor" vibe.

Given the multiple dragonflights, theming specs around said flights would be fairly simple. The only problem is that there are five main flights, and a class like this would probably only want two or three. Interestingly, there's precedent for dragons filling the tank, healing, and dps roles in the infamous Oculus dungeon from Wrath of the Lich King. This was also at a time when the Blue dragons were antagonistic and the Black dragons were still the "evil, corrupt" ones, so that made for a nice narrowing down of just Red, Green, and Bronze, playing Tank, Healer, and DPS respectively. But the Blues were only bad guys for a very brief time, and of the three canonically still alive black dragons, two are good guys (or at least not corrupted). So it would be hard to just cut out two or three of the flights.

So, overall, I'm kind of iffy on any new class - I'd love it, but I also can see how it would mean taking on a lot of extra work permanently. But I also think that new classes are a really exciting shot of adrenaline to a game that kind of needs it.

We'll find out soon!

WoW Expansion Wishlist

 So, in two days we're going to get the official announcement of the next expansion for World of Warcraft: the big 10.0. This is the expansion that will, in theory, take us through to 2024, meaning it will mark the 20th anniversary of the game (though the subsequent expansion would be the real "anniversary" expansion, much as Warlord of Draenor was - hopefully it'll be better).

At this point, it seems almost impossible for the expansion to be anything other than "Dragonflight," given that this name was discovered in Blizzard's own website. There's also been a kind of collective assumption that the next expansion would focus on the dragons and possibly the fabled Dragon Isles, which were initially going to be a part of the original vanilla release of WoW.

So, I'll mention here that I have not played WoW in months. I'm given to understand that the final patch of Shadowlands has improved a lot of the issues that the expansion has had (though honestly, the top thing I feel is just that there is some content) but I've sort of decided that I don't want to play purely to avoid fear of missing out, and have been happy to take a WoW vacation to the Lands Between in Elden Ring.

Still, WoW's important to me, and I'm hopeful that it'll do well.

So, what do we want to see in 10.0?

One thing that has been heartening about the things we've seen in recent Shadowlands patches has been a kind of acknowledgement that players actually have some good ideas. WoW has often had caps on things like reputation gains and such that are intended to make it feel like a player doesn't need to play eight hours a day, but the implementation of these caps has often made it so that a player will need to log in every day and play for an hour, when many players (such as those who have 9-5, 5-day a week jobs) prefer to play for several hours on the weekend. Such players get left behind in the old systems, but we've seen how in Zereth Mortis, there have been some adjustments to that to make it so that players can catch up without being pressured to do it all the week 9.2 dropped.

So, a general philosophy shift would be good.

I will also say that I'd like them to pull back a bit on "borrowed power." This became a major thing in Legion, which was my favorite expansion, but ultimately, I think it would be nice to see a bit of a "back to basics" shift to making gear the main arbiter of player power. I'm not sure how confident I am that they would do this - we've had some kind of borrowed power for the last three expansions, and it seems to be a dial they like to have to adjust.

Cross-faction Grouping: Well, this is basically coming in 9.2.5, so maybe we don't need to worry about it. I think with the shrinking playerbase (something that, to be fair, ebbs and flows) and plenty of in-world justification for members of the opposing factions to team up, this should be gradually phased in as a standard thing in the game, if you ask me.

More Self-Contained Expansion Story: Starting with Mists of Pandaria, there's been this idea that every expansion's story needs to lead directly into the next. I don't know that that's been great for the game. The problem is that by doing so, every expansion feels like it's just a preview for the next one. When we finished Wrath of the Lich King (and we'll just set aside Ruby Sanctum for the time being) it felt like this really exciting, cathartic moment to see Arthas lying, defeated, only now seeming to understand the depths to which he had sunk. Yes, we knew Deathwing was on his way by then (thanks to the Blizzcon announcement) but Arthas got his time in the spotlight and a proper curtain call.

But in the past several expansions, there's always been a kind of cliffhanger, and that's sort of meant that we never get to take the deep breath and feel like we've finished a story before we move on to the next. We didn't have time to even consider that we had met the Pantheon and sealed away Sargeras before we were like "oh crap, we gotta deal with that giant sword."

A Full Slate of Content: So, we have to account for Covid, of course. But after Warlords of Draenor gave us only three raids, I figured Blizzard would never again give us a shortened expansion. Yet here we are, with only three Shadowlands raids.

A New Class: I get that adding a new class means a permanent addition to the complexity of the game. But I also think that when you go for too long in WoW without giving players a reason to roll up a new alt they're going to be excited about, the game starts to feel a bit stale. Maybe you could accomplish this with class skins or some other compromise, but I think you're really best off making a new class.

Anyway, we'll be getting more details on Tuesday, and we'll see how this turns out.

Strength Guy Getting Strong - Elden Ring

 So, my Wretched character is now working on clearing out everything I can find in Liurnia of the Lakes, as I am reasonably confident I've gotten almost everything out of Limgrave (and the Weeping Peninsula, which I think counts as part of Limgrave). I guess the exception is that I haven't fought the ulcerated tree spirit in the basement of Stormveil Castle and witnessed Rogier's bloodstain and infection with deathroot.

I'm not sure what ending I'm shooting for on this character, but the Mending Rune of Death is a contender.

Anyway, I believe I have actually managed to screw up one thing, which is that I progressed Nepheli Loux's quest line before getting to Renna's Rise and getting Selivus' potion. It's really not obvious. It seems so odd to me that you'd want to get all the way through Caria Manor before doing that stuff with Nepheli, but oh well.

Anyway, I've befriended the guy at the shrimp shack and gotten Fya her necklace back. I'm given to understand Hyetta's quest can be progressed quite quickly here, and I actually got ahead of myself and have the Fingerprint Grape to give to Hyetta. Man, the first time I encountered a Shabriri Grape I did not read the description and genuinely thought it was a fruit. I also found out that apparently Shabriri is a kind of demon from Jewish folklore that causes blindness. I know that when you get to the Mountaintop of the Giants, a being called Shabriri has taken over Yura's body, so I'm curious to see where that leads.

One thing I find really shocking is that there's no hint I've been able to find as to where the hell you get the other half of the Dectus Medallion (it's Fort Faeroth in the Dragonbarrow in northeast Caelid). But characters have told me about the bypass that I stumbled upon in my first playthrough.

Going through the Raya Lucaria Tunnels, where you get the bell bearing that lets you by tier 2 and 3 smithing stones, I had finally gotten 31 strength and could use the Brick Hammer, which is fantastic against all the crystalline enemies in there. Even as it's caught up with by Rusted Anchor in terms of upgrades, the anchor's still doing more damage I think just because the Brick Hammer's scaling isn't yet making up for the lower base damage. So, for now, I'm still swinging around the big anchor with the War Cry ash of war giving it heavy attunement (also, the charged R2 after using War Cry gives you great poise and amazing damage).

So far, my stats other than Strength, Vigor, and Endurance are still all at just 10. My general intention with this character is to wield the most ridiculous colossal weapon I can find. I guess I should figure out what that will be and then bump up supplementary stats in anticipation.

D&D Class Analysis: Fighter

 Yeah, I've abandoned doing this alphabetically, and I'm even not sure I'll get to all of them. Turns out that this is a pretty big thing to bite off.

Fighters in D&D are a class I have a profound deal of ambivalence about. They are simultaneously simple to the point of being kind of generic while also being potentially hugely powerful.

Let's start with a look at the lore.

Ok, that was quick.

Kidding aside, Fighters are what I've seen described as "Warriors" or possibly "Knights" (though I think Paladins often fit that vibe as well).

Character classes in D&D are typically meant to represent exceptional people - being a Cleric is more than just being some priest. And a Fighter is supposed to be a kind of exceptionally great warrior or soldier. In theory, you're supposed to be a master of arms, more skilled with weapons than even other martial classes. I think the main way this manifests is in their additional Extra Attack features.

The general Fighter features are pretty bare-bones. Essentially, without considering subclasses, you just get Second Wind, Fighting Style, Action Surge, and Indomitable. You also get two more Ability Score Improvements than most players. The other class-wide features are just additional uses of Action Surge and Indomitable.

Now, in practice, we can't really discount how huge the extra attacks are. A third attack at level 11 and a fourth at level 20 become enormous if you can get your hands on a great magical weapon. I think a Fighter wielding Akmon, Hand of Purphoros is probably capable of higher damage output than just about any other character (for those unfamiliar with this weapon from Theros, it's a warhammer that does an additional 3d10 fire damage on each hit - so a level 20 fighter would be getting 12d10 more damage per turn with no cost in resources).

Still, while the class on its own is pretty darn powerful (especially given that it gets most of its features back on a short, rather than long, rest,) those things aren't particularly interesting.

Both on a flavor side and on a mechanical side, the Fighter really gets its more interesting elements in its subclasses. The character I've played the most is an Eldritch Knight Fighter, which means I have a bit of spellcasting borrowed from the Wizard.

The thing is, unlike, say, the Artificer, it's not that the subclass fundamentally changes the way in which the class plays. A fighter is still going to be focused primarily on attacking with weapons.

And I think to a certain extent that's fine. There needs to be a class that's the "no frills" martial class, and focuses on the armor and weapons of the medieval setting. I also appreciate that, with a few subclasses excepted, the class is built to be equally effective as a melee and a ranged one (though I only rarely see ranged fighters).

I do think that the extra ability score improvements are really only exciting if your DM plays with Feats. There's a whole discussion to be had as to whether feats should be an optional rule or just part of the expected base rules. Given that most Fighters will only need to have one decent "attack" stat and decent Constitution, the extra ASIs would be kind of wasted if you couldn't use them for feats.

One thing I've noted in other posts is that WotC clearly feels that the Battle Master was a huge success, and it's the only subclass they've really added to (other than the Beastmaster, who I think they really just felt they needed to fix) in later books.

I wonder if there might be some idea to make Battle Master maneuvers a class-wide feature for the Fighter, and then perhaps give new maneuvers with each subclass (for example, the Eldritch Knight might be able to cast spells using maneuvers).

But, last thoughts on the Fighter: the name is dumb. Surely "Warrior" would have been a better name for it, or even "Soldier."

D&D Direct Coming April 21st

 Wizards of the Coast will be holding an announcement event on April 21st, called D&D Direct. In it, we'll be getting some news about the future of D&D.

Here's what I expect we're going to find out about:

Spelljammer: Beyond the Travelers of the Multiverse UA and a kind of general will of D&D players to get it, I have some secret reasons for being extremely confident that a Spelljammer sourcebook is on its way. At least a week from now we'll be able to say, with no irony, "Spelljammer Confirmed."

Dragonlance: Likewise, WotC hasn't exactly been playing coy with this one, given the "Heroes of Krynn" UA. But I think we're going to get an official announcement of a Dragonlance campaign setting book for 5th Edition.

Movie: We knew a D&D movie was in the works, but I imagine we'll get more details on it.

Video Game: There was an Xbox controller amongst the images in the preview video, so I think we can expect a new video game as well.

Lastly, something I think we're all going to be very curious about: the DnD Beyond acquisition. I've got equal parts hope and cynicism thinking about this, hoping that we'll be getting the digital versions of the books free with the physical purchase, but also cynical skepticism that no big corporation is going to want to just give something away for free that customers are used to paying for.

Anyway, some big new coming. Between this and the April 19th WoW Expansion reveal, we're in for a big April for news.

WotC Buys DnDBeyond

 DnDBeyond, the digital toolset for D&D, has now been purchased by Wizards of the Coast.

For those of you who have not used DnDBeyond, it's an app/website that serves as a database for all things D&D 5th Edition, and on top of that, its most popular feature is its digital character sheets, which make rolling up a new character very easy to do, and tracking things like spell slots, inventory, class features, taking rests, etc., pretty quick and easy.

But there's one problem I've always had with the service: in order to use it, you need to buy digital versions of the D&D books from which you are using materials. For example, if I want to play a Gem Dragonborn Warlock with a Fathomless patron, I'd need to buy the DnDBeyond versions of Fizban's Treasury of Dragons (for the Gem Dragonborn), Tasha's Cauldron of Everything (or the Fathomless patron) and the Player's Handbook (for the Warlock class!) While I own those books already in their physical forms, I'd have to pay 30 bucks each (90 total) if I wanted to get all of those on DnDBeyond.

And, like, I understand why: DnDBeyond is its own company with its own license to distribute D&D books in their digital form. But now that it's been acquired by Wizards of the Coast, in theory that would mean that there could be some kind of digital integration.

The question is: will there be?

Here's how I imagine it looking from a fan's perspective - essentially the way that I hope it will work.

When you buy a D&D book, you should get a digital code stamped in the back of it that will unlock that content on your DnDBeyond account. Essentially, the physical book should include a digital copy, similar to how a lot of Blu-Ray DVDs these days also include a code to access the movie through streaming.

I could imagine that even with this, you'd still need a monthly subscription to the service, but you should only have to buy the content once.

Now, unfortunately, I've grew up in the era of late capitalism in which every single move by pretty much any corporation has been one to maximize profits at the expense of their workers and customers. There are further announcements yet to be made regarding DnDBeyond - at this point the only thing they've really confirmed is that there's no plan to shut the thing down (which is sadly so often the case when a big company acquires a smaller company,) which is welcome news. In other words, I'm not terribly worried that what we're getting is going to be any worse than the system as it exists now - and that's great, because apart from that big problem of having to buy the books twice, the DnDBeyond is a great service (and thanks to the way they let people with the higher tier of subscriptions share the content they have unlocked within their campaigns, I have been able to make characters with stuff beyond the basic rules - though it also means I have like 60 characters in my friend's "campaign").

A lot of people are celebrating this as a guaranteed positive, and I'm hoping they're right to celebrate, but I'm going to hold off until we get actual confirmation that things are going to work the way I hope they do.

Killing Darlings in D&D

 So, I have a lot planned for the remainder of my Ravnica-based D&D campaign.

The players are in the middle of a fight against one of the major "praetors," members of each of Ravnica's guild who have allied together to bring about Phyrexian "compleation" to the massive city plane, and for them to rule over it as a kind of Ravnican version of Phyrexia (rather than 5 praetors, like New Phyrexia, there would be ten). The players have fought the Simic, Rakdos, Izzet, and Azorius members of this conspiracy, and are now fighting the Golgari one, leaving Selesnya, Gruul, Boros, Orzhov, and Dimir to go.

On top of that, because I wanted to play around in the broader Magic multiverse, each player character actually possesses a planeswalker spark, which will ignite under certain circumstances for each of those player characters. Two have already ignited, and thus can travel to other planes.

Finally, the campaign's finale, which will take place at level 20, will see them attacking New Phyrexia and destroying Elesh Norn, the mastermind behind this plot.

As you might imagine, it's a lot to get through.

It might be too much to get through.

So, I've been thinking about ways to pare things down.

First off, the last few Praetor adventures have been quite long. I think this Golgari one has taken months, as there's been a kind of extended dungeon-like journey through the Undercity to reach the true, actual dungeon, which itself has taken a few sessions.

So, I think in most cases, the later Praetor stories will probably be built more as big set-pieces rather than extensive adventures - maybe two big things, like something that reveals the bad guy and the big confrontation.

Next, I think I need to restrain myself on how big the interplanar adventures will be. I had this idea for a long journey across all of Innistrad, but I think now I want to just drop them into a part of it (either Kessig or Nephalia, probably) and have a one-or-two session adventure there.

Finally, one of my players has this ongoing plot in which he is trying to free the pseudo-divine "elder shade" he worships (a former member of the Obzedat Council) from his prison, and I've, well, dragged it out a bit.

Now, this campaign is a lot of fun, but I also don't want it to go on forever. So I've been thinking about how to streamline it to get a bit more forward momentum.

Really, the plan for the campaign was itself part of the problem: I bit off a LOT. I think future campaigns are going to try to be built more around the player characters' plots and thus make sure that it's always stuff the players feel extra invested in.

A Thorough Playthrough of Elden Ring

 After respeccing my "paladin" to be more of a dragon communion caster (and man, it's nice to see boss health just melt away under those breaths) I decided to make a character that was decidedly physical-based, using weapons and such. I figured it'd be fun to get some of the insane giant weapons, so I'm making him a strength-based character. When picking out classes to start off with, I was looking at the Hero, Warrior, etc., but ultimately decided that the class that would give me the most freedom was the Wretched - you start off with nothing but a club and 10s in every stat.

While this makes the early part of the game a desperate scramble to find some armor and a better weapon, it allows you to put your levels only into stats that are relevant to you, and because you're starting at a lower level, the exponential curve on those levels is a little gentler.

So far, I've only put levels into Strength, Vigor, and Endurance - I got my Strength up to 26 so I could wield the Rusty Anchor weapon, and I've been putting more into Vigor and Endurance to make me a little more durable (I've actually started going back to my Lordsworn Greatsword now that I have a decent shield, as I can't actually use the anchor with a shield if I want to stay at a medium equip load).

Anyway, the other change in the approach to the game that I've made is that I'm being very thorough. I haven't actually fought Margit the Fell Omen yet because my plan is to try to do every mini-dungeon, and possibly every world boss, in Limgrave before I move on to Stormveil Castle.

Doing so has revealed several mini-dungeons I never went to on my older characters. I even met Patches finally. After I felt reasonably confident I'd found all the dungeons on the Weeping Penninsula, I went and did Castle Morne and beat the Leonine Misbegotten, which took a few tries, but I got him down.

So I'm almost certainly powerful enough to enter Stormveil Castle, but I want to be really thorough.

One of my motivations here is to try to get some questlines I'd missed on older characters. For instance, I know they gave Nepheli Loux more stuff in the patch, but on my second character, I talked to her in the Albinauric Village in Liurnia and then beat the boss there, only to come back later and find her two axes left behind there, as if she had died.

With this character, I've had more extensive interactions with Bloody Finger Hunter Yura, and I've met Kenneth Haight, who I'd never seen on older characters.

There are also a number of items and spells I'd never gotten on those older characters. So, it's been an interesting, if slow-going process.

The Six Ability Scores

 Several months ago I idly began to try my hand at figuring out a sort of reconstruction of 5th Edition D&D to work as a purely science-fiction based RPG system. By this, I mean that I wanted to have a system that could work in a world without anything "magic" or "supernatural," but where the fantastical elements were portrayed as technological or new scientific discoveries.

For most of my life I've had this kind of internal debate as to whether science fiction and fantasy are actually the same genre or very firmly distinct, with science-fantasy hybrids like Star Wars making things all the more complicated (well, or just really making the former argument).

I ran into the following problem, though: in a world of firearms (and indeed, things like laser guns) what purpose would melee weapons play? To be sure, melee weapons are still employed in combat these days, but generally they're employed either because you screwed up and let the enemy get close to you, or you're planning on fighting an unarmed adversary. But lethal combat is almost entirely fought at range, and has been for centuries. The sword had a really good run for thousands of years as the most versatile, effective weapon, but once the average joe could shoot that guy with the sword from a hundred yards away, it didn't seem so great anymore.

Anyway, my solution was to create an alternative set of ability scores. I wanted to use them both to get rid of what I figured would be a useless strength stat and also add a bit of nuance. So I got Hardiness, Agility, Knowledge, Awareness, Capability, and Presence.

To explain: some of these are more or less one-for-one conversions. Agility is Dexterity. Awareness is Wisdom. Presence is Charisma. The new names were to reflect more accurately what I think those stats do. Indeed, you could make the argument that Intelligence and Wisdom in D&D should each have the other's name - Wisdom is something I usually associate with a broad breadth of knowledge and the ability to sort through that and come up with the right thing to do, while Intelligence is something I tend to associate more with on-the-spot logical and intuitive reasoning that lets you understand things as you see them.

Wisdom makes sense as Awareness both in that things like Perception, Insight, and Survival all really deal with you "noticing" things. Even Medicine (which maybe should be an Intelligence skill) can be argued as your being trained to spot the tell-tale signs of various injuries, poisons, or other medical issues, not necessarily just being able to recite a medical textbook from memory.

The way Intelligence works in D&D almost always involves recalling information. Indeed, of all the Intelligence skills, only Investigation really plays into that idea of taking in new information and sorting through it. One thing I'd encourage dungeon masters to do is make intelligence checks more helpful. Nine times out of ten it seems that succeeding on such a check at best just gives the players some interesting background lore that, honestly, everyone at the table would probably like to just know. I think you can and should absolutely let players who succeed on intelligence checks know things like what a creature is resistant or immune to. But this is, of course, very knowledge-based.

I created Capability to kind of differentiate between the sort of book-smarts and more direct, practical knowledge. A Wizard is all about the pursuit of knowledge, gaining new spells to cast as their knowledge increases. But someone like an Artificer uses their intelligence in a more creative and intuitive way, inventing and building. The benefit of separating these out into different stats is that you can have a brilliant mechanic who has never read a book in their life, or you can have a cloistered academic who has no idea how the hatch on a spaceship works.

Presence is borrowed from Black Void (which has a lot more of these stats than D&D) and plays the part of charisma. Charisma has certain connotations in typical parlance that often force a player to kind of run into a conflict between their character's conceived vibe and what they can, mechanically, do. Say you've got a Sorcerer whose power has made them isolated and awkward, but on a mechanical level, they have the best Persuasion or Deception, and thus tend to serve as the party's face. Calling it presence doesn't really fix that, but it emphasizes the notion that charisma isn't just suaveness - it's a kind of ineffable and not even conscious impact that the person has when people interact with them.

Now, Hardiness was the attempt to combine Strength and Constitution. In normal D&D, this would be terrible, given that it would mean some classes would really only care about one stat. But, my thought was that the lack of melee weapons to use in this sci-fi version would make this ok.

But, as a friend advised me, in fact it would lead to a bunch of problems where either making a Hardiness-based character work would result in an overpowered character, or you'd have to nerf any possible melee build to the point that you might as well not even have a stat for melee damage.

And I think that led me to a conclusion: the six ability scores in D&D feel flawed and broken, but they're profoundly versatile, and I think it's hard to come up with as elegant a spread.

Class Analysis: Warlock

 Ok, I'm doing a couple things differently. The Barbarian post was far longer than anticipated, and I also felt like I landed on fewer actually suggestions for how the class could move forward.

The Warlock is one of my favorite classes in D&D, but it's also one that has some issues. Many of these issues stem from what I think are false assumptions on what a Warlock should be.

Let's address the main issue, which is the other "W" class. Much as everyone in fantasy has different ways of distinguishing ogres and trolls, the various Wizards, Witches, Sorcerers, Warlocks, Arcanists, Magicians, etc. that show up tend to have very different distinctions. I was a particular fan of the conclusion that Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes landed on in Falcon and the Winter Soldier: that a Wizard was a Sorcerer with a hat (hence why Doctor Strange is the latter, and not the former). Of course, the irony is that by D&D terms, Doctor Strange is very clearly a Wizard, whereas Scarlet Witch is quite clearly a Sorcerer. (Moon Knight, while his powers seem much more "brawler" based, is more or less a Warlock, with Khonshu as his patron).

Anyway, the image I often have for a Warlock is a character who, like a wizard, delves into ancient and obscure tomes of magic. The distinction is that the Warlock is the one who goes into the dark, forbidden magics.

The thing is, in D&D terms, classes have to have a pretty strong distinction both in flavor and mechanics. A "dark wizard" is still a Wizard. Instead, D&D defines Warlocks around the idea that their powers are granted to them by a patron.

Most patrons are evil or at least skew toward the evil side of things, but this isn't a hard and fast rule. Player characters could easily have a good-aligned Archfey, Celestial, Genies, or Fathomless patron, and you can even stretch Undying/Undead, Great Old One, and Hexblade to be more benign.

I think the strongest aspect of the class is that idea of the patron. Your power is a gift that was consciously granted, and the nature of that power is transactional, rather than something born of, say, faith in a deity. The patrons are also a little different than deities - they're powerful, surely, but not divine, and thus potentially could appear as NPCs or even villains to be fought.

Likewise, due to the transactional nature, the player character does not need to share an alignment with its patron (I don't think you necessarily have to share your alignment with your deity if you're a cleric, to be fair, but I think the general assumption is that that's the default).

But even though the classic warlock story is that they seek out power, reach out to this magical patron, and then make a deal to secure that power, it actually doesn't have to work just like that. A pact might be made not for an individual, but for a group, such as a family who all inherit warlock powers because an ancestor made a deal back in the day.

There's also an open question as to whether the deal is done, and the power is not something the patron can take back, or if the deal is still ongoing, and requires the warlock to do certain things (even things at odds with the party's goals) to fulfill their pact.

This latter concept carries a ton of story potential (for instance, Fjord's story in Critical Role's second campaign) but the former option allows other storytelling options.

The concept of the Warlock obviously brings to mind the Faust story, in which Doctor Faust sells his soul to Mephistopheles for power, but none of it is worth it given that he's now doomed to hell for all of eternity. D&D's less absolutist concept of the multiverse of course makes that a little more complex (the warlock might think they have a chance of actually rising in the ranks of hell) but also, given the many potential patrons, means that the deal could take on all manner of form. Even a classical Fiend Warlock whose patron is a devil (which could even be Mephistopheles, who is canonically one of the most powerful archdevils in the Nine Hells) the deal doesn't necessarily need to be one that damns the player (though I think any fiendish patron is going to want some kind of evil done to give the warlock their power).

Anyway, one place where there's a disconnect with that concept of Warlocks as the "dark wizard" is that their spellcasting ability is charisma, rather than intelligence. As such, this is not (inherently) a character who has memorized all manner of dark and forbidden magic, but instead someone who's channeling their patron's power by force of will. I do think Charisma makes sense in a way because the Warlock attained their power through a pact that probably took some chutzpah to negotiate, but my general sense of charisma as a spellcasting stat is that it's the stat you use when your magic is not so much calculated and attuned but is more done through intuition, leaning into the magic based on the way it "feels." In other words, there's a kind of emotional investment made. Bards make a performance that stirs hearts, Paladins commit to a kind of confident righteousness, and Sorcerers let their inner power flow through them. Warlocks, in this way, are very much like Sorcerers, except rather than the power being theirs innately, it's one that has been invested in them.

Indeed, I think that on many levels the Sorcerer is the more similar class to the Warlock, in terms of flavor. Really, the only difference is that the Sorcerer is channeling some raw power while the Warlock is getting it from a sentient source.

Still, I think a lot of players want the warlock to be more of a scholar and knowledge-seeker, and thus base their spellcasting on intelligence. Given how scarce the ability to improve your ability scores is in 5th edition, it's unlikely that a warlock character will get high intelligence, which can feel kind of off.

Let's talk about Eldritch Blast.

Technically, a Warlock could totally ignore Eldritch Blast. And there is some theorycrafting I've heard about that suggests the Warlock is better off using a Pact weapon crossbow. I haven't seen that math, but I'm a little skeptical.

Just in case you've never looked at this class: Eldritch Blast is basically the same as Firebolt, except it's actually totally different and I think might be strictly better. From level 1-4, they're basically the same except Eldritch Blast does force damage rather than fire damage. Almost nothing has vulnerability to force, but more importantly, almost nothing has immunity or even resistance to force damage. Thus, with the exception of Helmed Horror-style constructs, Eldritch Blast will always damage your foes.

But the much bigger benefit happens when you hit 5th level. Like most cantrips, EB gets improved when you hit each new tier of play (at levels 5, 11, and 17). However, unlike most damage cantrips, which just do an extra die of damage with each upgrade, Eldritch Blast instead has you make multiple eldritch blast attacks.

Notably, these are made sequentially, so you can choose a new target after each EB. If you've got a target that's low on health, you might try to hit it, and depending on if it's gone down or not, you can choose to hit it with your second blast or move on to a new target.

What really makes EB's multiple blasts great is various warlock spells and abilities that trigger on each hit. Agonizing Blast (which adds your Charisma modifier to EB's damage - almost as if you were attacking with a charisma-scaling weapon,) Hex (which adds a d6 of necrotic damage on the hexed target each time you hit it) and Repelling Blast (which lets you push a target back 10 feet if you hit it with Eldritch Blast) all trigger each time you hit the target, so you can have these go off multiple times a turn.

I hear people complain when a Warlock just casts Eldritch Blast turn after turn, but I think the reason is that they're thinking of this cantrip the way that you might think about a Wizard's Fire Bolt - Fire Bolt is meant to be a filler when you don't have more interesting things to do or you're trying to conserve resources. A Fire Bolt is a "boring" turn for a Wizard, because it's taking the place of bigger effects.

But Eldritch Blast shouldn't be compared to Fire Bolt. It should be compared with the fighter's sword. Martial classes spend most turns just attacking their foes with their chosen weapon, but the various ways they can finesse those weapon attacks make the class interesting. Warlocks, the way they work mechanically now, is like that. They have other spells they can cast, but these are better thought of as magical maneuvers they pull off between their standard magical blasting.

Now, the question is: is that design satisfying?

Personally, I've enjoyed playing a Warlock. Indeed, despite their relative paucity of spell slots, you can still pull off some cool things (in fact, the introduction of Mystic Arcanum, which has a lot of weird feeling to it, actually opens you up to spend more rounds in a climactic battle casting big spells).

Assuming we don't want to just throw the table over, we can suggest a few tweaks and changes while also reframing the way we think about the Warlock.

First off, I heard a suggestion at one point that Warlocks be given spell slots equal to their proficiency bonus. This would mean getting a few more in most cases - other than levels 2-4, you'd get one or two more slots in the rest of the levels. Now, might that be too much? Sure, but we're talking about trying out something a bit more liberal.

To me, a much more exciting and welcome change would be to change how the patrons' expanded spell lists work. More and more classes as new books have been published have gotten access to additional spells based on their subclass. The Cleric, Paladin, and Artificer have always gotten additional spells that don't count against their prepared spells each day. Now, we've seen a lot of new Ranger and Druid subclasses get bonus spells, as well as the most recent Sorcerer subclasses (these latter ones even being flexible and changeable on level-up).

So I think that it would be a simple and welcome change to just make all the expanded spell options for warlock patrons into just "bonus spells," which you'd learn and have it not count against the spells you know. As it works currently, Warlocks learn 15 1st-5th-level spells and one of each 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th level spell. The Mystic Arcanum four did put them ahead of Sorcerers, but now, with the Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Souls' bonus spells, those subclasses each get 10 more. I don't think it would break the game to treat the expanded spell lists in a similar manner.

Now, that said, Warlocks do get Eldritch Invocations, which I think wind up being some of the coolest and most unique aspects of the class. In a lot of ways, I think these are where you could emphasize the idea that warlocks get forbidden knowledge and techniques - things that aren't even spells (though they might allow them to cast spells).

Here, my recommendation isn't so much to change how these work as to introduce some random tables to show how these could be represented. On my original Great Old One warlock, I imagined each eldritch invocation would manifest as a different physical change in his body. Devil's Sight would turn his eyes (or maybe just his scleras) black, with wheeling stars visible in them, while Agonizing Blast would leave his hands looking cracked like the stone rubble he called forth to shoot as his eldritch blasts (his patron is either a perpetually-collapsing stone tower or an entity that resides within it).

But I think you could do this in other ways. Perhaps your pact object - a familiar, weapon, tome, or talisman - gets new marks, glyphs, or images on it that represent your various invocations. Maybe you get new tattoos that appear on your body to represent them.

I'm not going to belabor a point I've made time and time again, but I think rolling some of the Hexblade's amazing enablements for Pact of the Blade into the pact itself would do a few things I think would be quite favorable: the first being that other warlocks would not feel they were handicapping themselves by taking a non-Hexblade patron, and the second being that getting that feature would require a bit more investment into the warlock class.

I think Warlocks are often a class players "dip" into, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but I think perhaps the class needs some really appealing benefits in higher levels to encourage people to stick with the class. I don't know precisely what that would be, but I hope that's something they're considering for 2024.