Speculating on the Alan Wake II DLCs

 Alan Wake II, like Control and the first Alan Wake before it, is going to get two DLC expansions. The DLCs will be called Night Springs and The Lake House.

There is some speculation that, much as Control's second DLC, called AWE, tied into Alan Wake's story and teased the eventual release of Alan Wake II, the Lake House could easily hint at Control 2 (by the way, I've been using Roman numerals for Alan Wake and Arabic numerals for Control, but I'm not sure if Remedy maintains such a strict style).

Night Springs is the Twilight Zone-like show that exists in the world of Alan Wake, which Alan wrote for briefly at the start of his writing career before becoming better known for his Alex Casey novels. What little we've seen of Night Springs was found on televisions throughout the first game. The show's title screen is nearly identical to the iconic Twilight Zone title, and like that inspiration appears to be an anthology show with unconnected stories each episode that tell some bizarre tale (naturally these have a bit of a connection to Alan's story, such as one in which a man is framed for crimes by his doppelganger, much as Alan will one day be blamed for Mr. Scratch's actions).

While The Twilight Zone is the obvious inspiration for Night Springs, it's naturally a far more recent show if Alan was able to write for it (though we've also seen posters for Tom the Poet that claim this 1970 movie is based on the novel by Alan Wake, who wouldn't be born for a few years). The clips from Night Springs we see also appear to be more modern, but I think we can't take that at pure face value because I imagine the production budget was way lower than it would be for episodes made for a game today - I suspect that they probably shot this stuff on a camcorder at the Remedy offices or at developers' homes).

In Alan Wake II, we know that the show has been revived and that Logan and Saga's husband David are planning on watching the newest episode while Saga is on the case in Bright Falls. In Control, we find out that the FBC has secured the rights to the show and is backing this revival of it as a means to introduce paranatural concepts to the public in a subtle way (similar to their radio show, America Overnight - which is itself likely inspired by real radio show Coast to Coast AM, which was a radio talk show that often discussed conspiracy theories and the paranormal).

However, in addition to the FBC, it appears that Warlin Door is also involved - not only appearing in the Final Draft version of the TV promo for it as a Rod Serling-esque host, but also mentioning it in his final confrontation with Alan in the chapter "Masks."

The official Alan Wake II FAQ on its official website describes the expansion thusly:

"Visions and dreams. Fiction is written and coming true. Fiction collapses and remains just words on a page. These are those stories... in Night Springs."

And then, less flowery, it explains that we'll play as several familiar characters from the world of Alan Wake, in a series of self-contained episodes of the fictional tv-show.

In other words, it seems that this will be a pretty strong break from the main game. The way it's described, I doubt that we'll even be accessing it from the main game, and likely instead getting to it from the main menu (which is good since I think my auto-save is probably in the bleary dawn version of the Dark Place New York that you get right before the end of the game, and from which I don't think you can really go anywhere else).

I'm curious to see which characters we might play as. A strong contender could be Tim Breaker, who feels like he's got to have more going on (unless they're just holding onto him as a potential kinda-sorta connection to Quantum Break). I've seen speculation that the DLCs will each focus more on one or the other of the Dark Place and Bright Falls, with this one being more likely to focus on the Dark Place. That being said, there are just fewer characters in the Dark Place, and fewer still that I could really imagine playing as - basically just Alan and Tim, at least until far later in the game when Saga and Alex (the real one - though I maintain the possibility that the Alex Casey that Alan meets in the Dark Place is actually the real Casey with the fictional personality Alan wrote grafted onto him) are there.

But if we're not limited to the people we've seen in the Dark Place (I guess Tor and Odin could count as well?) there are lots of others who could be involved. Indeed, Barry Wheeler could even show up (a presence that was sorely missed in this sequel - though I think his connection to the Blessed Organization means that even if he's never seen in Alan Wake II, I'm sure we'll see him in the broader RCU at some point). Ed and Tammy Booker also feel like strong candidates, especially given how they feel like they're going to be bigger characters in the game than they wind up being - though the manuscript page found in their room to me suggests that they're more likely to be involved in the other DLC.

Still, we'll be getting a number of shorter vignettes with potentially a bunch of playable characters. I almost wonder if neither Alan nor Saga will be playable in these chapters.

Moving on:

Expansion 2 is called The Lake House.

The Lake House, I believe, is the building where Emile Hartman had his sham mental clinic that he was using to try to manipulate artists. It has now been taken over by the FBC as the central facility to monitor and study the Threshold in Cauldron Lake. We know that the place went dark some time around the events of Alan Wake II, and we hear from Agent Estevez that her team's attempt to check in with the Lake House did not go well - it's fully fallen to the Taken.

Much as AWE introduced the Dark Presence to the world of the FBC and the Oldest House (and turned Hartman into the nastiest monster I've personally seen in any Remedy game) there's a lot of speculation that this DLC could turn around and return the favor - clearly the FBC is a significant presence in Alan Wake II, but this looks to focus significantly on it.

The FAQ confirms that the Lake House is a research facility run by "an independent government organization."

Interestingly, the next line in the FAQ is that you'll be exploring the Lake House on two separate adventures as "the realities of the Pacific Northwest and the Dark Place collide again." The fact that this will involve two adventures to me suggests that this might be the DLC where we get an Alan segment and a Saga one. I believe this one is also not due to arrive until about a year after the game's initial launch (which was in late October of last year). I wonder, then, if this will be accessed from within the main game or if it will be from a menu. Given the "point of no return" in the primary game toward the end, I suspect it'll be accessible via a menu. But that raises some questions: we don't really know what actually happens to Alan and Saga following the events of the game (specifically the Final Draft). Indeed, I'm not even entirely sure if they're in the Dark Place or just physically on the third floor of the Valhalla Nursing Home. If it's the latter, it might be easy enough to simply say that the story continues from that point. That might still be easier accessed via a menu.

What I wonder, as well, is what it will mean to have two adventures set there - will one be in a more "real world," mundane version of the building while another is in some bizarre Dark Place version of it?

We don't have a ton to go on - there are some datamined files that are likely part of the Lake House, but we don't really have the context for these.

Anyway, Night Springs is supposed to come out in the spring (appropriately enough) which is not too far away. I imagine we might get a trailer relatively soon. And then, boy is my gaming dance card full!

Twins in Elden Ring

 I don't know that this will be an exhaustive list or anything, but I think twins are an important motif in Elden Ring.

Among the demigods, we have two examples of twins - first, Morgott and Mohg, and then Malenia and Miquella. To be fair, I find myself remembering Morgott and Mohg as twins but can't recall if that's officially confirmed. Still, their Great Runes both look very similar and are activated at the same Divine Tower (the only case, I recall correctly, of activating both runes at a single tower). Though not demigods, we also have the "D" brothers, who are said to share a single soul and are zealous hunters of Those Who Live in Death.

Now, first initials are also clearly pretty important. I've been presenting a sort of code for how demigods are named somewhat thoughtlessly for a while: that there are essentially three generations that each have their own initial. G for the children of Godfrey and Marika, R for the children of Radagon and Renalla, and M for the children of Marika and Radagon.

But that's wrong, isn't it?

After all, Morgott and Mohg are from that first generation (I've tended to interpret them as being Marika's firstborn children) but their names start with an M, just like dear old mom.

In fact, the only confirmed members of the demigod cohort are, I believe, Morgott, Mohg, and Godwyn. There are, of course, plenty of other demigods who aren't named - while Godwyn was the first to die, it seems many other did in the Night of Black Knives, some of whom are the interred of the Wandering Mausoleums. There are also other G demigods, but these are not Marika's direct children - they are presumably descended from Godwyn, and include our likely first demigod boss, Godrick the Grafted, along with some figure between them found in an evergaol (I don't know if Miyazaki just learned British English, but between this and the Hypogean Gaol in Bloodborne, he must prefer the UK spelling of the word Americans spell "jail") known as Godefroy.

Godrick is obsessed with the idea that he's the last scion of the "Golden Lineage," and so I'll concede here that the "G" names - which, I'll also point out not only have the initial G but actually have the entire word "God" in all of them - might not have been assigned to all of Godfrey and Marika's children, but only reserved for those directly descending from Godwyn. Godwyn was more or less the equivalent of Baldur from Norse mythology, as a deity who was universally beloved but whose killing ignited an apocalyptic war.

Also, consider that Godfrey is not really the guy's name: he's actually a barbarian warlord named Horah Loux who made a lot of changes to his whole demeanor, the way he dressed, and how he acted in order to fit the proper kingly image of Elden Lord. So, why was "Godfrey" chosen as a name?

Given that Morgott and Mohg were born as Omens (periodic reminder here that the very word "monster" comes from the Latin "Monstrum" which means Omen - so Omens are basically just "monsters," at least when people are calling them that) but Godwyn was not (though he sure as hell is a crazy monster now!) I could imagine that he became kind of the great hope of Marika's dynasty - that perhaps Godwyn was meant to sire the rightful and noble successors of power in the Lands Between.

But let's consider something else:

While I doubt he'd want to simply repeat himself (and he's got a pretty broad set of subjects he's written about,) George R. R. Martin did, you know, famously write a fantasy series (and will maybe finish it one day?) in which a massive war breaks out because it turns out that the heir to the throne is not actually the king's son.

In A Song of Ice and Fire (and the TV adaptation, Game of Thrones,) the three royal children are actually bastards, born out of incest between the queen Cersei and her brother Jaime. In fact, hair color plays a big part in the story, as the king, Robert Baratheon, has dark hair and basically every Baratheon has had dark-haired children, while the two princes and the princess all have their mother's golden blonde hair - a family trait of her Lannister clan.

Marika's third generation of children are... sort of also born of incest if you consider a single person being both mother and father as like that. Radagon, as we discover, is actually just the male aspect of Marika (though it's ambiguous whether Radagon was ever his own person - in the past I've tended to think that he was, though I've moved a little more toward the notion that he was always Marika. Basically the only sticking point was that I thought Radagon was descended from Fire Giants while Marika is pretty clearly part of the Numen people. But if Radagon's red hair isn't a sign of ancestry but instead a spiteful curse placed upon him for the cruel genocide he waged against the Fire Giants, then the conflict goes away).

This transformation between sexes is clearly true down to the physiological level, as Radagon fathers Rykard, Radahn, and Ranni while Marika had mothered Morgott, Mohg, and Godfrey. You know, she's a god. It's not that crazy.

But, let's take a step back: those names. If Godwyn was not a special case, getting a G name like his father, then what would it mean for Morgott and Mohg to have M names? The other demigods with M names are the children of Marika and Radagon - which is to say children who are entirely born from Marika herself. (Even if Radagon seems to have developed his own conflicting will and intention separate from Marika's, and might even resent that his female half is the only one who gets to truly be a god.)

Consider the following:

Of all the demigods, only four we know of are considered cursed in some way. Morgott and Mohg were born as Omens. Malenia is a vessel for the Scarlet Rot. And Miquella is cursed with eternal childhood.

Are these curses the result of being the child of a single biological parent? In other words, is Radagon the true father of Morgott and Mohg?

Whether they are or not, Godfrey did seem to love Morgott - and, interestingly, also seems associated with an era that might have been far more accepting of Omens and the other expressions of mixed biologies and the Crucible.

The nature of the curses is, of course, quite different. Morgott and Mohg are afflicted in the same basic way, only that Morgott seems to strive to transcend his Omen nature while Mohg seems to have gone all in on the pain and suffering of that existence as if it's a positive thing. The younger twins, though, have somewhat more individualized but also more... how to say it, sophisticated curses? Miquella and Malenia are empyreans, after all.

But I wonder if that reflects the changes in approach that Marika took in birthing them. Radagon, of course, had created this hybrid of sorcery and incantation, combining scholarship with faith to create Golden Order Fundamentalism - a practice that seems to tie itself closely to esoteric Alchemy in real world traditions (Radagon and Marika make a rather perfect Rebis, combining the Red King and White Queen).

Still, the other parallel here is that if Morgott and Mohg were born from Marika alone, that would mean two instances of Marika's children from self-impregnation coming out as twins.

What if there's a third pair?

Melina is one of the game's biggest enigmas. But one thing I think pretty much any Elden Ring lore theorists agree on is that she's probably Marika's daughter. She comes very close to saying so explicitly.

Melina, given her M name, would probably be from that third generation of demigods. In fact, it's long been speculated that the Smoldering Butterfly is associated with her in the same way that the Nascent Butterfly is with Miquella and the Aeonian Butterfly is with Malenia. These latter two butterflies reflect the curse that afflicts those twins. And so, given that Melina is both already burned and bodiless and also is burned to ignite the Erdtree (if we don't get that Frenzied Flame that is) it seems a strong connection to make.

However, with the introduction of Messmer in the Shadow of the Erdtree trailer, we're given a surprising new wrinkle. Messmer is confirmed to be a demigod on the same level as the others we've seen (hence why he's seated on a throne similar to the ones that appear in front of the Erdtree before the Morgott fight in Leyndell) and, as a fellow M name, he's probably 3rd generation (again, I know that Mohg and Morgott complicate this as a way of referring to it, but I mean post-Godfrey, post-Renalla). And he is also associated with flame. Also, like Melina, his left eye is closed.

So... could he be Melina's twin brother?

I realize here that in the last several posts, I've suggested that Messmer either is Miquella (or a kind of shadow version of him), or he is Melina, or that he and Melina are twins. And you know what, any of these could be right. And we might not even get a clear answer!

When the DLC actually comes out, we'll probably have some clear answers and a million new questions.

But here's another question to toss on the bonfire: Every single one of Radagon's children has red hair (Ranni did when she was in her original body).

Except for Miquella.

Why?

Lynel-Hunting and Feeling Powerful in Tears of the Kingdom

 Well, I have now gotten the Fierce Deity set fully upgraded. The combined defense value when this is completed is 60 - 20 per piece of armor, which seems likely to be better than just about any other. Doing so took a lot of effort - you need one of each of the four pieces off the three dragons that fly above Hyrule - first a scale, then a claw, then a fang fragment, then a horn - along with various powerful monster pieces - first Hinox toenails, then I believe teeth, then guts, and then, the last and hardest part: Lynel guts.

Guts, it has become apparent, are only guaranteed drops off of the most powerful version of a monster, and when it comes to Lynels, the Silver ones (which are the most powerful) only show up after you've killed a lot of their fellows.

Lynels, incidentally, are the giant lion-centaurs that will kill the absolute crap out of you until you get really good at dodging their attacks - and the silver ones will break a pretty serious shield in only one or two hits.

Upgrading armor to +4, as well, requires a number of side quests to reunite a band of musicians and then put together a mechanism to get their wagon to the Great Fairy Fountains - some of these are pretty trivial, just as easy has taking a board, popping a couple of wheels on it and a steering stick, and going for it. But the second one I wound up doing required crossing a pretty broad snow field, including a fairly steep climb (oh, and I was out of Big Wheel capsules).

So it takes some serious effort to do this.

But, having a full set of fully-upgraded Fierce Deity armor, I feel pretty darn powerful. And, in fact, because I've been killing tons of Lynels (having had to kill a number of them just to get the Silver-Maned ones to show up) I'm now kitted out with a ton of Lynel bows, which each shoot multiple arrows at a time and thus triple or, at higher levels, quintuple the damage you deal with them (luckily the Lynels also drop a lot of arrows). I think I've gotten better at doing precision dodges as well, which has helped make taking down Lynels a lot easier (the last one I downed to get by sixth Lynel Gut to finish the set, I paraglided in and unleashed with a 5-arrow Lynel Bow churning through Black Bokoblin Horns and got him down to about 5% health before finishing him off with a melee strike).

I think this is one of the things that makes me like Tears of the Kingdom better than Breath of the Wild - because you can stockpile monster parts like all the Lynel horns and hooves that I've been collecting, even when your weapons break as long as you can find a sword or spear somewhere, you can fuse in one of those items and have a perfectly decent weapon to fight with. Because Breath of the Wild had no such system, there was no real ability to stockpile weapon supplies other than simply carrying a bunch of powerful weapons and swapping them out as they broke. Now, even if every one of my weapons get destroyed, as long as I can pick up any weapon (and it's not hard to find some decent ones on those rock piles in the Depths) I know that I'll have something decent to fight with.

I still think we run into the problem that the Master Sword feels too precious to use - even after it's recharged and repaired.

I honestly think that if they wanted to keep the Fuse system in a future game, I could imagine doing something where we have a base weapon that we fight with in all cases similar to other games but making these fusions the temporary thing.

Still, I've got to say that the power fantasy of being able to absolutely clobber things like Hinoxes and Taluses that were once a real challenge to me when I started the game feels pretty good. And having now taken down like a dozen Lynels after the first one unceremoniously one-shot me feels pretty good as well.

(I still don't love having to farm food materials, though.)

Occluded Eyes, Melina, Messmer, and Fire

 Despite the fact that she is our traveling companion for the first two thirds or so of Elden Ring, we don't really know much about Melina.

Or, rather, there's not much of a record of her. Let's be honest, I'm not sitting here with a giant comprehensive list of all the flavor text in the game, so there's a real chance I've missed some things, but I think we can conclude a couple things:

First is that Melina is probably Marika's daughter, and thus a demigod in her own right. She plays the role that our Finger Maiden was meant to, but is not one herself. She gifts us the whistle to summon Torrent, implying she has some connection to Miquella, who likely was Torrent's previous master. In her state as of the start of the game, Melina is an incorporeal spirit, "burned and bodiless," and bears scars of this burning. Melina has the red hair of a child of Radagon, which, coupled with her M name suggests that she's a member of the third demigod generation along with Miquella and Malenia.

Melina's most distinctive feature is her closed left eye, which appears to be sealed with a tattoo. Notably, if we get the Lord of Frenzied Flame ending to the game (and do so before Melina burns with the Erdtree, using ourselves and the Frenzied Flame to burn it instead) Melina appears at the end of that cutscene vowing to kill us and opening her occluded eye, which is a dusky shade of blue.

This has long inspired speculation that Melina may actually be the Gloam-Eyed Queen, a rival to Marika who was an empyrean and is associated with the Godskin Apostles. Tarnished Archaeologist goes as far as to suggest that The Gloam-Eyed Queen was fully the previous god before Marika, with Farum Azula as her seat and Placidusax as her Elden Lord. Even the Deathbirds might be affiliated with her reign as well. Naturally, the blue eye that Melina displays would seem to fit the description of "gloam-eyed."

But there's an alternate interpretation that relates to the Beast Eye, the first item we get for trading in Deathroot to Gurranq. The color of this eye is about identical to Melina's occluded eye (and given how important golden eyes are in Marika's reign, the fact that this eye is pure blue is notable). As Marika's champion, it would make sense that Maliketh might have been the one to defeat the Gloam-Eyed Queen personally, and her eyes might have been taken as objects of power (haha, sneaking in a little Control terminology here). With the GEQ's connection to the power of death, then, it would make sense that the Beast Eye would help trace Deathroot, and on top of that, the bestial connection, if Farum Azula is the seat of the GEQ, would further tie things together given the place is a city of beast-men in addition to dragons.

To go a step further - the current Empyreans are all children of Marika, so it would stand to reason that Marika was probably related to the Gloam Eyed Queen as well. If Maliketh is Marika's "brother," he might have been well-established in Farum Azula and its population of beast-men before the conflict arose. I think it's reasonable to assume the Gloam-Eyed Queen was either Marika's mother, sister, or cousin. (And again, given that we're dealing with gods here, it might even be that by becoming a god, Marika retroactively became the GEQ's relative).

Now, I've postulated before that Melina could be the Gloam-Eyed Queen and was somehow reconstituted as Marika's daughter - given that Marika's victory saw the removal of the rune of death from the Elden Ring and that her Erdtree serves as a kind of soul-recycler that allows people to be born anew (mind you, I wonder if that stopped working when the Erdtree became an incorporeal spirit-tree) perhaps it's not even that hard to imagine that Marika's ultimate conquest of the Gloam-Eyed Queen was to make her into her loyal daughter through rebirth.

Still, it's also possible that the eyes were removed and in Melina's case inserted into her head to make use of the GEQ's power (and these two aren't strictly incompatible scenarios).

We know the Erdtree burned a previous time before we burn it at the end of the game - Leyndell is filled with ashes, and this likely also explains why most of the tree is this golden spirit-tree and only a little shard of it remains dark, wood-colored and physical. Melina is "burned and bodiless," and I think it's not unreasonable to imagine that the first time she burned it was with the burning of the original Erdtree.

Indeed, Melina is insistent that you not pursue the path of the Frenzied Flame, and reiterates that she knows what it will mean to burn the Erdtree, and that you should not try some dangerous alternate method of burning it for her sake. In part, this is surely because she knows how horrifying the Frenzied Flame is and what it will do to the world. But I've also often wondered if Melina is truly dead if we allow her to kindle the Erdtree. When she burns, she doesn't seem to be in pain.

In fact, one of the pieces of evidence to suggest Melina is a contemporary sibling of Miquella and Malenia is that there's a butterfly that corresponds to her - Miquella has the nascent butterflies, Malenia the aeonian butterflies, and Melina, thus, could have the smoldering butterflies (which are actually the most common in the game, found near almost any source of flame).

But the introduction of Messmer adds some ambiguity here - Messmer is almost certainly a demigod of the same generation as the twins, and he's clearly associated with fire, meaning that he might instead be the demigod associated with the smoldering butterflies.

Messmer looks like serious bad news - he appears to hate the Tarnished and views them as unworthy of ascending as Elden Lord ("Wouldst thou truly lordship sanction..." is trochaic tetrameter, which is actually the meter of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven, though the rest of the sentence doesn't follow this - still, this speaking in verse is a wonderfully Shakespearean way to introduce this guy). And despite the fact that the guy is dripping with symbols of heresy - between his snakes and his clear signs of Dragon Communion (note that the Leyndell dragon cult was not the same as the dragon communion folks) it appears that he may have been a monstrous enforcer of Marika's order upon other cultures that did not conform to her orthodoxies.

Given that Messmer was part of George R. R. Martin's original worldbuilding, my guess is that this is a Ramsay Bolton-level psychopath, and we're going to find out worse and worse thing about him over time.

Still, something sticks out - or rather doesn't stick out. Like Melina, Messmer's left eye is occluded. It's easy to miss as that eye is somewhat shaded by the shape of his helmet, but his wide-open and draconically-slitted right eyes stands in stark contrast with the closed left eye.

What does it mean?

So, I've been running with the theory that Messmer is some kind of dark version - a shadow - of Miquella. But what if he's actually Melina?

Gender-bending in Elden Ring seems easy and commonplace among the demigods. Obviously, the grand reveal of the main game is that Marika's consort Radagon is actually the same person as her (though whether Radagon was always Marika or if two separate individuals were merged remains up for debate - I tended toward the latter for a long time but I might be more inclined toward the former if we interpret Radagon's red hair as a sign of the Fire Giants cursing him rather than having direct lineage from them,) but we've also seen in with Miquella and St. Trina. You could imagine that Miquella, cursed to look ever-youthful, was able to disguise himself as a woman thanks to his prepubescent appearance, but I think it seems possible that he's also just capable of changing his appearance (admittedly, his youthful curse might feel like less of a burden if he can just appear however as he likes).

Or, of course, there's the much more straightforward idea that he's just gender-fluid and sometimes identifies as female. There's absolutely room for a queer reading of all of this but I am not the one to give it.

But, if Miquella can appear as St. Trina, might Messmer and Melina be two sides of the same identity?

It's tough: the closed eye and the association with fire are clear parallels. Likewise, Melina is, as I interpret it, on a secret mission on Marika's behalf. Likewise, Messmer may have been doing off-the-books work for Marika in his purging of the Land of Shadows.

On the other hand, Melina is clearly eager and happy to aid us in our quest to become Elden Lord, and only ever turns against us if we decide that the safe and proper thing to do is to incorporate some horrifying Lovecraftian flame into our bodies. We clearly fight Messmer, but beyond that it also seems his attitude toward the Tarnished is a negative one.

On the other other hand, though, we have plenty of precedent for the male and female halves of an entity being at odds with one another - Radagon and Marika seem to have very different visions for the Golden Order, and I've tended to interpret it that Radagon's rise as the dominant personality between the two of them is a big part of why the Lands Between are suffering under such chaos. Marika smashes the Elden Ring, Radagon tries to repair it. Radagon bars the way to the inside of the Erdtree while Marika guides us toward entering it. I mean, she charges Hewg with creating a weapon that can kill a god... in a world where she is the only acknowledged deity.

But then...

If Melina and Messmer are one and the same, why is she burned and bodiless and he's seemingly very corporeal? Granted, we can summon Melina to fight Morgott (just had a thought - see below,) but then again, she's a kind of spirit summon, implied not to necessarily be physically there.

The fact of the matter is that we just don't have enough to go on. There's evidently a ghost near the Impaler's Catacombs, which are likely related to Messmer the Impaler, who talks about an unwanted child. But Melina, barely referenced anywhere in the game, might also be considered an unwanted child.

    Ok, here's that bonus thought - unrelated to the rest of this post.

In general, the naming conventions of the demigods refer to their generations - the children of Godfrey and Marika have G names, those of Radagon and Renalla have R names, and the children of Radagon and Marika have M names.

Except for the Omen Twins (tangent to a tangent, interesting that there are two pairs of twins birthed by Marika). Morgott and Mohg both have M-names, which you'd think associates them with the third generation, but instead, I think they're meant to be Marika's firstborn sons. But they were born as Omens, while Godwyn was not, despite having the same two parents. Godwyn was, I think, part of the "Golden Lineage," the last of which is our (likely) first shardbearer boss, Godrick, who appears to be many generations removed. I suspect that the Golden Lineage might actually just be a singular line - that perhaps only the most beloved son of each most beloved son was counted amongst them, tracing back to Godfrey and Marika. But clearly this line didn't work out so well given that its end result was the weak and pathetic Godrick (along with Godefroy somewhere in there). Still, they're all given "God" names which might have implied some kind of intent to create a perfect empyrean? Or to control the destiny of divinity in the Lands Between?

Morgott and Mohg, who would have been honored in a previous age for being Omens, were instead cast away in Marika's Golden Order as cursed (though Godfrey seems to still bear some love for Morgott, as he holds his body when he returns to Leyndell and seems to speak lovingly to him).

Given that George R. R. Martin wrote this, it's hard not to see some parallels with the plot of his Song of Ice and Fire, particularly the way that the anointed heir to the throne is revealed not to actually be the son of the king at all, and instead a bastard born of incest. I doubt he'd do precisely the same thing over again, but I could imagine a world in which Marika self-impregnated to create the Golden lineage, but perhaps this was prior to her war against the Fire Giants and thus Radagon was not yet cursed with his red hair? Alternatively, maybe Morgott and Mohg were born this way, and their curse was a curse of an earlier age compared with that of Malenia and Miquella. But it would explain why they also have M names.

Man, the lore in this game. It goes ocean-trench deep.

Shadow of the Erdtree: What is a Shadow?

 There's a concept in storytelling of a "foil." This more or less refers to any character who presents a strong contrast with a protagonist. The nature of this contrast is not necessarily one of antagonism - the classic buddy cop duo of a straight-laced by-the-book detective paired up with a loose cannon is a classic cliche, but one that works well because the dual protagonists of such stories work as foils to one another. Such stories usually involve solving some mystery, and as the joint protagonists work toward the goal of resolving it, we can see the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and attitude.

When there's a story with a singular protagonist, a foil will often be an invitation to reflect, based on how different they are, what really makes that character who they are. Han Solo is absolutely one of Luke Skywalker's most important friends, but his sarcastic, cynical worldview (one that he admittedly evolves into something a little more idealistic over the course of the series) contrasts with Luke's desire to become an honorable and honor-bound Jedi who fights for lofty ideals rather than personal gain.

However, Han's not the only foil to Luke in the Star Wars series - Darth Vader is introduced as a terrifying figure of death and totalitarian oppression, killing anyone in his path and even those officers below him who fail to succeed in accomplishing the goals he sets for them. Darth Vader is the great villain of the Star Wars series (at least the original trilogy) and represents the opposite path of Luke's - while Luke strives to be a hero who will save the Galaxy from tyranny and protect the innocent from the violence and fear the Empire uses to retain its power, Vader is that violence and terror - a walking weapon of oppression who is dressed in a big cybernetic suit with a mask that looks like a skull. He wields the power of the Force just like the Jedi, but does so for the sake of evil rather than good. (For D&D players, Darth Vader is basically the perfect Death Knight analogue, if we substitute "would be dead if not for powerful cybernetics" for "undead.") The revelation at the end of Empire Strikes Back, that Vader is, in fact, Luke's father Anakin (spoilers for a movie from 1980, I guess? One that the existence of the prequel trilogy is entirely focused on?) just hits home this idea: Luke, this could be you.

Literarily, this type of foil can be called a Shadow. In fact, in most stories that have a villain character, there's usually some element of that character that acts as a shadow to the protagonist, or at least one of them in a multi-protagonist story. Dracula, for instance, in his rapacious and insidious seduction of Mina Harker, is a shadow to the brave and noble Jonathan Harker, who deeply values and respects his wife as a human being (you know, by 1890s standards). Fascinatingly, Abraham Van Helsing, the Dutch mentor to one of the novel's other heroes, Doctor Seward (and who basically leads the campaign against Dracula) is often portrayed in adaptations as something of a shadow to Dracula himself, played as a similar kind of force of primordial nature but in this case one that stands for good.

As anyone reading this blog for the past several months will surely be aware, I've also looked at the idea of the Shadow from a Jungian perspective. Carl Jung believed that all people had an inner shadow - an archetype that represents the aspects of our personality that we are unaware of and perhaps in denial about. Most classically, this might be the existence of repressed desires. We might externalize this shadow - projecting these desires and tendencies onto others - in an effort to distance ourselves from the realization that that urge is within (that the "call is coming from inside the house" so to speak.) Jung believed that bringing that unconscious shadow into conscious awareness - confronting the things that one does not realize about oneself - is a key step toward better mental health. Note that these repressed desires are not strictly negative ones, but they are unconscious and denied. Luke's experience in the weird root cave in Empire Strikes Back, in which he fights a phantom Vader and defeats him, only to see his own face beneath the mask, coupled with the revelation of his parentage, forces him to confront the idea that there is the same rage, spite, hatred, and will to power that his father possesses. We see in Return of the Jedi how Vader provokes him by threatening Leia and he has to stop himself before he murders Vader and falls down that slippery slope of the Dark Side - pretending those negative feelings aren't there isn't helping him, but only in seeing what he was capable and choosing to stop does he truly become a Jedi proper (that's my interpretation at least).

This has been a lot of writing and we haven't actually touched on Elden Ring itself. Let's make one pit stop along the way, though, which I think is important.

Shadows have a specific meaning in the Lands Between. Each Empyrean is assigned a Shadow by the Two Fingers, or perhaps even the Greater Will. The Shadows we have seen are Maliketh/Gurranq and Blaidd. These Shadows, I think, are using a different meaning of the word. To "Shadow" someone is to cling closely to them, following them everywhere - much as we are followed by our own shadows. It implies a profoundly close connection, and with Maliketh and Blaidd, we see that these beings are referred to as siblings to the people they shadow. Maliketh is the brother to Marika and Blaidd was raised alongside Ranni.

These Shadows have lupine/canine features, and seem to be sort of wolf-men (Blaidd is just the Welsh word for wolf) but I think the primary symbolism here is that of the loyal companion - dogs are a classic symbol of loyalty, and as we see with the tragic end of Blaidd's storyline, he is torn between his unshakeable loyalty to Ranni and his unshakeable devotion to the Greater Will, and so when Ranni acts against the Two Fingers, he is mentally torn apart and loses his mind, forcing us to put him down if we return to Ranni's tower. (It's beside the purview of this post, but I also think there's a question to be asked about the beast-men of Farum Azula, who might be the same species of wolf-man as Maliketh and Blaidd).

Notably, we have not met the Shadows for Malenia and Miquella, despite the fact that, as empyreans, they ought to have them.

So, with that in mind, let's think about Shadow of the Erdtree.

The first big puzzler here is that, as it exists in the game, the Erdtree casts no shadow because it's a source of light. For a long time I thought that there was no sun in the world (making the whole Eclipse thing at Castle Sol curious) but it turns out that there are places on the map where you can see a pale little sun up in the sky. Still, the Erdtree glows a bright golden light similar to sunlight and is visible nearly everywhere on the map. Tarnished Archaeologist has a really interesting theory about this, suggesting that the original Erdtree was a physical tree, but that it was burned down at some point and that the one we see is a manifestation of faith - and one that not everyone actually sees there.

But the point is, how could the Erdtree cast a shadow?

There are numerous ways to think about this. One is to suggest that it's a metaphorical shadow - the faith in the Erdtree, after all, conquered the Lands Between and left many cultures and faiths buried beneath the enforcement of Erdtree orthodoxy, just as the spread of Christianity across Europe saw the dismantling of older religious traditions. And given the imagery we see in the Shadow of the Erdtree trailer, along with interviews with Hidetaka Miyazaki, it seems that the Land of Shadow will be one where the remnants of lost cultures and civilizations exist in a kind of exile. The lion-dancer featured in the trailer that is probably going to be some very tough boss, for example, has the big lion-mask surrounded by omen horns, which we know was once considered a sign of divine favor but is, in Marika's age, considered a cursed affliction.

On a very literal level, of course, a shadow is an area of darkness obscured by something blocking the light that would otherwise touch it. The Lands of Shadow could, thus, paradoxically, be hidden by a light that illuminates it.

One last idea, though, is if the Erdtree has a physical, manifested thing that is its shadow in some sense - perhaps the literary, or the Jungian, or even the companion sense. Indeed, the gnarled tree we see in the key art and which looks like it will loom overhead in the DLC much as the Erdtree does in the base game is, upon close examination, probably two separate trees - one standing somewhat straight up (though at a slight tilt, similar to the Erdtree) and the other with a trunk wrapped around it and going at a far more pronounced tilted angle. Perhaps this Shadow Tree is quite literally the Erdtree's Shadow.

The DLC certainly appears to center heavily on Miquella as a figure. Miquella, of all the demigods, seems to be the most "good aligned" so to speak. At least his public persona is one that welcomes in those rejected by the world, and which promises a better future for all.

We are said to be following Miquella, who appears to have traveled to The Land of Shadow in a purely spiritual form - he has divested his flesh and his lineage and all that is golden about him. The "why" of it is a big question.

But the other central figure to this expansion is Messmer, whom we will clearly fight and who may even be the DLC's final boss (though given FromSoft, I'm not going to bet on it - they freaking love having some really unexpected thing show up, whether it be the Moon Presence, the Elden Beast, or Slave Knight Gael pop up with a subversion). Messmer is drenched in imagery that we can speculate about - between his signs of partaking in dragon communion, his association with snakes, his weird shadowy fire he wields, the big polearm, and the fact that he's got an occluded eye similar to Melina.

While the evidence is far from comprehensive, it seems a possibility that Messmer might actually be Miquella in some other form. My initial speculation was that Messmer is that dark shadow of Miquella - that all of the hidden ambition and disdain that Miquella represses might emerge as Messmer. Notably, we get a nice shot of Messmer's lanky arm, which looks very similar to the shriveled arm hanging out of Miquella's cocoon.

The simplest interpretation, of course, would be simply that Messmer is a shadow to Miquella in a more literary way - here is a previously-unknown demigod from the third generation (the Radagon/Marika one) who is cruel and hateful in every way that Miquella is kind and loving. And I'm not ruling that out.

But that really then raises the question of what, precisely, the Land of Shadow is. I saw one take (I think Tarnished Archaeologist) who claimed that the field of ghostly gravestones was a pre-Aeonian Caelid, though I don't know if the evidence is there to confirm that (this was his off-the-cuff reaction video, so no shade to him if he guessed wrong - I still think TA's the most convincingly detailed lore speculation channel I've come across). It could, of course, simply be another land mass. But on the other hand, I've often thought of The Lands Between as being something like D&D's Outer Planes - a realm of the gods that doesn't really follow the same physical laws of our own (which is in keeping with my D&D-ification of FromSoft titles, where Dark Souls is set in the Shadowfell and Bloodborne is a Domain of Dread in Ravenloft).

We access the Lands of Shadow via Miquella's lifeless (but not strictly dead?) body, suggesting that maybe it's something of a mental journey. Does this realm exist on another level of reality? Could the existence of lost cultures there suggest that, perhaps, these are not the literal forgotten and exiled worshippers of older religious traditions, but instead the repressed desires to retain those traditions within the collective unconscious of the people in the world of Elden Ring?

It might be strange to think that Messmer prosecuted a military campaign against repressed desires of the collective unconscious, but remember that we're dealing with gods and demigods here - surely such domains are the potential battlegrounds for the divine.

And, in a certain way, that means that the question of whether Miquella and Messmer are truly separate individuals or different versions of the same one might not actually have much meaning as a distinction (by the way, this is what it actually means to "beg the question.")

Now, there's one last bit that will probably spawn its own entire post:

Are Melina and Messmer the same person?

But Holy Crap, Address Unknown is Eerily Familiar

 Literally just after writing that post about the eventual Max Payne remake, I found a YouTube video of all of the Address Unknown shows from Max Payne II. And... boy howdy, if you've played Alan Wake II, buckle up.

Released almost exactly 20 years before Alan Wake II, Max Payne II (dear god I feel so old that things that happened when I was a teenager happened 20 years ago. I suspect I'll have this feeling every decade - already I have clear memories of things that happened 30 years ago) has a few television shows that you can find, similar to how you find episodes of Night Springs in the original Alan Wake (or, kind of, Threshold Kids in Control). One of these shows is Address Unknown.

Given the limitations of the time, the "shows" are just slide shows of still images found on the TVs. Address Unknown is presented as a cult hit from the 90s (which, given this game came out in 2003, was not terribly long ago,) and very clearly takes inspiration from Twin Peaks (much as Alan Wake would in numerous ways, not the least of which is that the Oh Deer Diner is nearly identical in layout and general character to the Double R in Twin Peaks). Indeed, the first episode you can find shows the narrator walking between red curtains, just like Twin Peaks' iconic "Red Room."

 As an aside:

If you haven't ever seen Twin Peaks, let me give a quick rundown. The show first aired in the Spring of 1990. It takes place in the eponymous town, a small burgh in eastern Washington state, near both the Idaho and Canadian borders. This seemingly idyllic town is shaken to its core when Laura Palmer, the popular and beloved prom queen at the local high school, is found murdered. When a survivor of the same terrible night is found crossing a bridge over state borders, the FBI is called in to investigate. But a few things make this show very different from your typical police procedural. For one thing, the show peels back the layers of the community to reveal some genuinely bizarre and shockingly dark secrets. But beyond that, there is a growing understanding that something deeply weird and supernatural is at work in this town. Even then, I feel I'm not quite getting across how weird the secrets of Twin Peaks are - our heroic FBI investigator, Dale Cooper, uses a number of mystical techniques (some of which come off as utterly absurd) and has prophetic dreams that guide him in his investigation. It's implied that a couple of people in the town are actually magical spirits. And nothing really neatly fits into conventional mythological structures to allow this to be read as true fantasy - there's a question of whether it's all a kind of meta-narrative. Man, it's hard to sum this show up. On one level it's a soap opera (or a satire of 1980s soap operas) and on another level it's one of the biggest mindfucks out there (oh, did I mention it was co-created by David Lynch?)

Anyway, this Red Room imagery and the backwards-talking of a Flamingo in Address Unknown are clear references to Twin Peaks (in Twin Peaks, people in the Red Room speak backwards - the actors read out their lines, had the audio reversed so that they could then mimic the backwards recording, and then when they shot the scene, acted backwards and then in editing the footage and audio was reversed again. See the results for yourself.

But, parallels to Twin Peaks aside, I think what's fascinating here is the connections that this show-within-a-game has to Alan Wake II, which came out twenty years later.

Given that Alan Wake II is still a recent game, I'll put this behind a spoiler cut.

Spoilers ahead for Alan Wake II and the show-within-a-game Address Unknown from Max Payne II.

Our narrator is trapped within Noir York City. He can't seem to navigate through it by conventional means, and has to intuit his way around.

    Here, there's a parallel with Alan in his Dark Place New York. Like "John," Alan sometimes needs to descend stairs to end up on a nearby rooftop, or go into the bathroom of a hotel room on the first floor to walk out into a room on the second floor.

John is pursued and tormented by John Mirra, his double, whom he claims mocks him when he looks in the mirror.

    Alan, likewise, spends his time in the Dark Place trying to outmaneuver Mr. Scratch, his own evil double.

John finds himself tracing the path of John Mirra from murder site to murder site.

    Alan finds himself needing to discover murder sites in the Dark Place to find the inspiration to write Initiation.

John eventually becomes John Mirra, perhaps realizing he was John Mirra all along.

    And of course, as we learn in Alan Wake II, Mr. Scratch is just Alan with the Dark Presence inside of him - a Dark Presence that may, depending on how you interpret the closing monologue of the game, was birthed from him in the first place.

John gets phone calls on payphones from John Mirra.

    Alan gets phone calls on the same payphone from Tom Zane, and eventually himself (for now we're operating under the assumption that Tom Zane isn't him, of course.)

When John fully embraces his transformation into John Mirra, he gets a call from... John Mirra, who welcomes him to "the next level."

    Alan's last call on the payphone is from a version of him seemingly from the future, who has wisdom that the receiving Alan does not yet have, suggesting that this might be the "ascended" Alan following the ending of the Final Draft NG+. It's not quite the same, but could be a comparable conversation.

In his last episode, John refers to a poet named Poole, and quotes a verse.

    This is a more tenuous connection, but Alan has a similar memory of the poet Thomas Zane (who of course doesn't match up with the Tom Zane he meets).

To be fair, there are plenty of elements here that don't have parallels. While the pink flamingo altered item does appear in Control, I don't know that there's any clear connection to this weird entity that seems somehow aligned with John Mirra. And there's an extensive segment of Address Unknown in which John is taken to a mental asylum and goes on a violent rampage to escape after the doctors there attempt to perform a lobotomy.

Still, the parallels here cannot be accidental.

But is this just a story form that has been rattling around in Sam Lake's head for 20 years that he wanted to revisit, or is this an implied connection?

Works of art within these works of art (as in, the games) have a special power. Naturally that's truest in the Alan Wake games, where art shapes reality. I think it's also possible that the show's role in Max Payne was more to suggest that Max's own story is one of self-delusion, and that perhaps the traumatic loss of his family was his own doing, and that he's projected it onto this grand conspiracy to alleviate his guilt.

One thing I do find kind of fascinating is the echo in esseJ and the mirror altered item in Control.

Control suggests such a massive world, but because of the game's format and structure, needs to keep things pretty much focused on the Hiss as antagonists. But there's an optional side area in which you can enter a mirror and face off against Jesse's mirror-world doppelganger. Why she's hostile is a big question mark, and there are even some meta-references in there (like one of her backwards lines playing back as "I'm much wilder than you," which is likely a nod to Jesse actress Courtney Hope's role as Beth Wilder in Quantum Break). But Jesse has, in effect, faced her own "Mirra," only in this case it really is a different person... maybe.

Anyway, the fact that there are such strong parallels found in these games that came out twenty years apart from one another really has me wondering how many other things one could discover by poring over these games with a fine-tooth comb.

I Know Next to Nothing About Max Payne

 As any reader of this blog can tell, I've become obsessed with Remedy Entertainment and their newly-launched Remedy Connected Universe. Even if I'm skeptical of the whole "shared universe" trend that has consumed the entertainment industry ever since the success of The Avengers in 2012, despite it not really working for nearly anyone (and even the MCU has been struggling to maintain audience enthusiasm since 2019's Avengers Endgame... holy crap, how did we have four Avengers movies in seven years?) the extremely unique storytelling sensibility of Remedy's games has me obsessing over their every project (fingers very much crossed that we don't find out that there's some terrible malfeasance behind the scene like what came out about Blizzard in 2021. This is a sort of corollary to "never meet your heroes," which might be "maintain a healthy distance between respect for artists whose work you like and making positive assumptions about who they are as people." I really hope Sam Lake is as cool a person as he comes off in interviews, but let's just say I've been burned in the past.

Anyway, the games that put the studio on the map, of course, were the Max Payne games.

I've never played them.

May Payne came out around the same time that Rockstar published their transformational Grand Theft Auto III, which could arguably be credited with establishing the conventions of the Open World Game style (actually GTAIII came out a couple months later). This was in the PS2 era, which was a golden age of creativity in the games industry but also an era that, frankly, looks like crap compared to more recent console generations due to the technical limitations of the time. But it was the era in which Nintendo, for example, finally went to optical disks instead of cartridges (ironically we're back to cartridges, but the new ones are extraordinarily tiny SD Cards and to be honest, most of my Switch games I just own digitally).

For younger readers who either were too young or not even born, you might not realize the enormous cultural impact of the 1999 movie The Matrix. For a straight cisgender guy like me, the fact that this sci-fi action masterpiece was an allegory for the trans experience (seriously, consider how many times Agent Smith deadnames Neo - I'll concede that it became much easier to read the movie that way after the sibling directors both came out as trans women) flew right over my head. But the visual effects invention that blew people away was Bullet Time, which used a series of still cameras on a green-screen set to allow for ultra-slow-motion and simulated camera "movement" that you could never do with a movie camera. Thus, we got a number of really cool shots of Trinity leaping into the air, the camera spinning around her while the scene was frozen in place, and then kicking a cop in the face, or Neo dodging a barrage of swiftly-fired bullets.

There were actually a couple Matrix video games that, naturally, made use of this slow-motion action, but the games, and the movie's sequels, never totally had the pop culture impact that the original film did. However, parodies of these shots showed up freaking everywhere.

However, while officially licensed Matrix games did crop up (even some made as side-stories with the sequels with the real actors appearing in full motion cutscenes) probably gaming's most famous use of bullet time was in Max Payne.

Here, of course, I need to remind everyone of the title of this post:

I've looked up some synopses and such online of the games - games one and two were in that PS2 era, and a third game that didn't involve Remedy at all (I believe) and was made directly by Rockstar was made in 2012. But I've never played them.

The games, however, are credited with having great storytelling and a lot of weird stuff seen in other Remedy works.

That being said, while Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and Control all have some speculative fiction element (Quantum Break, which I've also not played, seems to be straightforward science fiction, while Alan Wake and Control are in the broader speculative fiction ocean, with Alan Wake closer to the horror pole and Control happily swimming in the deepest depths of the New Weird) I'm given to understand that Max Payne is merely a stylized crime/noir/pulp detective story. There are surreal elements that are due to an unreliable narrator, but there's nothing "paranatural," as our friends at the FBC would say.

Which brings me to the remakes.

Remedy has a lot more experience under their belt now, and their last two games were critical darlings. As such, I wonder to what degree we're looking at remakes that simply recreate the games with modern graphical design and to what extent these are going to be serious remakes - along the lines of what SquareEnix is doing with Final Fantasy VII.

Rockstar is financing the game, but it looks like, according to the press release from two years ago, that this will be allowed to be Remedy's baby. And I wonder if that means that we might see a little more of that RCU stuff in there.

It's no secret that Alex Casey from the Alan Wake games is based on Max Payne (not only was Alex Casey an early name they came up with for Max Payne before they changed it, but in Alan Wake II, Alex Casey is, like Payne, modeled on Sam Lake and voiced by James McCaffrey). Given the fact that the IP belongs to Rockstar, though, it was prudent to come up with a different equivalent. A similar thing appears to have happened with Warlin Door acting as the equivalent of Martin Hatch - while David Harewood did a fantastic job as Door, it's been stated that the original intended casting was Lance Reddick, who had played Hatch in Quantum Break, but Reddick died before he could perform the role.

Sad as it is to use that as a segue, another question to be raised is how they'll approach the vocal performance. James McCaffrey died last year shortly after the release of Alan Wake II.

If the remakes are a faithful recreation of the original titles, it's possible they would just use the old voice lines recorded by McCaffrey over two decades ago. But if the intention is to make something genuinely new of the games, they'd likely need to record new things.

Granted, it's also possible that McCaffrey already did work on the games (or game - I believe the remake is going to be released as a single title, which could imply that it's a more serious reworking, unless it simply means that both games will be sold as a package).

While McCaffrey's contribution to Remedy's success cannot be overlooked - not only did he voice its breakout protagonist, but we got an amazing performance as Zachariah Trench in Control (this time with the model matching his own look) and again as multiple versions of Alex Casey in Alan Wake II (unless you subscribe to the idea that the "fictional" Alex Casey Alan meets in the Dark Place is actually the real Casey with the fictional one's personality taking over because, you know, Dark Place) - at the same time at a certain point you have to just accept that sometimes you'll need to recast.

The big question I have regarding this is whether, if it's truly a remake rather than a recreation or remaster (and it's not a remaster - they are using their proprietary Northlight engine, which did not exist in 2001,) we'll see some additions that connect it to other Remedy games.

While dubiously canonical, the This House of Dreams blog, which told the story of a woman buying a house in Ordinary, ME and finding a shoebox full of poetry by Thomas Zane - some of which is recited by Tom Zane in Alan Wake II, does have a reference to something from Max Payne.

Specifically, in Max Payne (or 2, again I don't know these games) there are episodes of a strange television show that Max can find playing on various TVs (man, Remedy freaking loves this kind of thing) called Address Unknown, in which a man named John is trapped in a strange, shadowy version of New York called Noir York City, and is framed for a murder by his doppelganger, referred to as John Mirra. (Hm, a noir-ish version of NYC? Where have we seen that in recent games...?) But there's a handwritten note on one of the poetry pages shown in the blog that quotes a poem that is quoted in this TV show, connecting, potentially, the RCU to Max Payne - though even there, by connecting to a work of fiction within Max Payne.

It's obvious that Remedy would happily connect all of the games it has worked on - the relationship between Tim Breaker and Mr. Door in Alan Wake II is clearly a gesture toward their work in Quantum Break (whose rights belong to Microsoft).

On a legal level, I wonder to what extent Rockstar will be willing to give Remedy the go ahead to incorporate Max Payne into that shared universe. But then, I also wonder how well Max Payne fits in with all of this stuff.

The Remedy universe is theoretically very much like ours - the paranatural/supernatural seems to be something that most people are unaware of, and of course there's even an internal debate within the FBC (or rather, a scandalous memo that's been circulating) that questions the way the Bureau has been thinking about these strange elements. But Alan and Jesse each had to be initiated into the strangeness of the paranatural creeping in on what was thought to be the normal world (Jesse's eye-opening moment happens long before the events of Control, back when she's 11 years old). Thus, a figure like Max Payne might be having mundane-if-drug-fueled adventures alongside all this strange stuff that's going on.

That said, I also wonder if Max Payne takes place on a sort of other layer of reality. I'm given to understand that in the games (at least the first two) we never see anything in daytime, and it's implied that given all of Payne's trauma and bitterness, we're just seeing things through his subjective point of view.

Anyway, speculation and all. No idea when the remake's expected to come out.

Subtle Storytelling as a DM in D&D

 As this blog can attest to, I am a big fan of subtle environmental storytelling in games. After watching the Shadow of the Erdtree trailer earlier today, I watched a few videos on YouTube about deep Zelda lore, and while I never really appreciated it when I started playing these games at 12 years old, there's honestly a lot of subtle implication in entries from my childhood like Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask.

FromSoft's approach I think borders on (if not fully planting its feet within) having tons of lore and little story, whereas Zelda's games, even the recent free-form, open-world ones, still have a pretty clear narrative to play through.

My recent obsession with the games from Remedy Entertainment, specifically the Alan Wake games and Control, is partially born out of my love for the subtly hinted plots - for example the entirety of the looming threat of the "Blessed Organization," which-

*Grabs the camera and points it to my cork board covered in yarn* Alice didn't get her memories back by getting help from the FBC! With Trench running things and maybe already infected by the Hiss, he'd never allow the Bureau to do such experimental stuff to help a civilian! She made contact with the Blessed Organization through Barry Wheeler, and they figured out how to do it!

Ahem.

The point is, I love the style of storytelling.

But can you do it in D&D?

To be fair, I think the question concerns two different levels of storytelling.

I've said multiple times that I think Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft is the best sourcebook they've come out with in 5th Edition. Not only does it talk philosophically about the different kinds of horror and how to run a horror game, nor does it only conceive the classic setting in a far more imaginative manner than the original sourcebook (holy crap do I hate the idea of "The Core" as just a big continent,) but it also has some subtle mysteries that you can uncover through reading it.

Old school Ravenloft veterans will not be at all surprised to discover the true identity of Firan Zal'Honan, as it's a straightforward part of the lore in the original setting book. But in Van Richten's, there's proof of who he really is if you can just remember things like the name of his imp familiar and intuit why he might not be interested in going to Darkon (though I'll note that there's no obvious explanation for why Firan is a living human once again - just a disguise bolstered by Nystul's Magic Aura? Or has something far more notable happened here. Or perhaps there's a far weirder explanation.)

But what about running the game yourself?

See, I think that's difficult. Unless you have a confidante that isn't in your campaign (my problem is that nearly all my D&D-playing friends are in the one I'm running) you sort of want to get the secrets out. What use are they if they're only for you?

Something like a video game exists as a persistent document - something people can turn over and revisit over and over, and even datamine if they're so inclined. There can be a vast online community that's into digging up all the possible lore and secrets of the game.

FromSoft basically builds their games on the premise that half the game is going to be about going online and speculating about it (and also finding out who has made builds that actually make the game beatable - Fextralife's Pyromancer build for Elden Ring, incidentally, is absurdly good. Makes me wonder why people were complaining about Faith builds being weak.)

But when your game is basically being shared by only a handful of other people, you don't get the benefit of that vast internet hive mind to pick up on all your subtle clues. Likewise, as a largely improvised narrative that you tell over a long period of times, it's hard to keep every tiny detail in mind.

Right now, in the Ravnica campaign I'm running, I've got a period in which I want to make sure that some character-specific beats are handled - we have a Gruul sorcerer who wants to challenge Borborygmos for leadership of the guild, we've got our formerly Orzhov cleric planning to marry our Izzet artificer, we've got our Rakdos bard trying to enter Agryem to find his exploitative parents so he can resurrect them and then kill them again. But I've also had the party discover that their memory was wiped a year ago and that everyone on Ravnica has forgotten about the existence of House Dimir.

There have been some giant lore bombs - for one, that House Dimir is both aware of and has some connection to the D&D multiverse (xenoplanar regions, as their necrosages call them). But the big twist that I'm building to is...

Well, couple things: first, if you're in the campaign, stop reading. Second, the party is currently in Agryem, both following the bard's plotline but also under suspicion that the hidden guild hall of the Dimir, Duskmantle, is in Agryem, or at least the way into it is.

I have concocted a sort of secondary hall for the Dimir that is in the Ghost Quarter, but what they'll find there is just the long-dead spirit of Szadek, who remains as a spirit here purely to advise his successor, Lazav. But Szadek has, in the afterlife, taken up poetry. I'll confess this is basically just because of my obsession with Tom Zane in Alan Wake II, but it's a great way to hint at things subtly.

What Szadek knows, and what Lazav knows, and what basically no one else knows, is that there's another demiplane like Agryem (note that this is my original lore). Essentially, if Agryem is Ravnica's Shadowfell, this quarter is its Feywild (sort of).

I figure one of the coolest "gigantic secrets" that House Dimir could hold is that there's a whole layer of Ravnica known only to them. But it gets better.

The Feywild is often associated with the natural world, but in Magic the Gathering terms, Fairies (I think often spelled as Faeries) are often Blue, the color of more cerebral magic but also trickery. Fairies find themselves in House Dimir, actually - I think some can be found in the Izzet League as well, but not so much in the Simic or Azorius. So, the idea I've had is that this is the Mirror Quarter.

I've made poetic references to Dim Mirrors - which of course sounds like Dimir. And so, for a building that doesn't exist in a space with no room, where better than to house it in a reflection?

Here's the next cool thing: they've been to this realm before.

Way, way back years ago when they were in tier 2, they were in a district original to my version of Ravnica, and for one reason or another had to go into a big library. The library was actually in the middle of a giant circular pool in a canal-heavy part of the city, but the library only actually existed in the reflection of this pool. To access it, one needed to step into the water and come around to the other side. (Also the library was a giant living being that required anyone who entered to give up a secret and thus forget that secret once they told it in order to enter.)

So, there's precedent!

But here's the best part:

One of the characters, the artificer, is a Changeling.

Changelings, of course, in Monsters of the Multiverse, were changed to the Fey creature type. It makes sense, of course. Ironically, despite living pretending to be a human, the artificer overall really dislikes secrets and lies.

Fey are... somewhat like people. They're the most common creature type other than humanoid for playable races/species (though Spelljammer gave us an Ooze, Construct, and Monstrosity - I wonder if they'll ever reprint Warforged as constructs). But on a certain level, fey creatures can be very weird, and I think sort of occupy a place in the fantasy where they can be things that look and talk like people but might play something of a different role in the magical world.

If our Feywild is a mirror realm, what part might Changelings originally have played?

Why, they're the ones you see when you look in a mirror!

Like, any mirror.

It kind of makes sense, doesn't it? They can shift their appearance to look like anyone they've seen, so as you step up to the mirror, they become your mirror.

That's also why I've decided that Changelings in this version of my Ravnica have their hearts on the other side. (There's a real condition called Situs Invertus, so this is true for some humans - about 1 in 10,000.)

Now, our artificer grew up in the primary part of the Ravnican plane, and was never one of these mirror people themselves. But it strikes me as just a perfect reveal that is fitting so well with the themes of House Dimir (who have spied on the artificer in an effort to see if they can recruit them) and this mirror-world that no one has ever heard of.

And the best part? The artificer's primary specialty is glass blowing. They're a glazier.

    But, getting back to my point:

Given the nature of D&D, I expect every one of these points to come out in the running of the game and the telling of the story. There's no real opportunity to simply hint at it and let the players discover it only after careful and close contemplation.

It's true that I could just leave this up for some people to get but to allow them not to get it if they can't.

But I guess I want them to get all of this stuff!

That, I think, is maybe the biggest challenge: do you, as the worldbuilder, have the restraint to let these mysteries remain unsolved? Are you willing to put the effort into setting something like this up and being ok with it going unnoticed and forgotten?

A Shot-by-Shot Analysis of the Shadow of the Erdtree Trailer

 Four months from now, I'm going to be dusting off my Pyromancer, my Blasphemous jump-attacker, and my original Moonlight Sorcerer-Knight to tackle Shadow of the Erdtree, Elden Ring's long-awaited DLC expansion. Today we got the official trailer for the DLC pack, and because I'm insane and also because FromSoft tends to hide tons of subtle detail in just about everything, we're going to do something crazy: we're going to go from shot to shot and comment on each thing we see in the trailer.

Let's do this shit:

We begin with what appears to be Melina standing at the top of Moghwyn Palace, where we fought the Lord of Blood, who had seemingly torn away Miquella's cocoon from its rightful place in the heart of the Haligtree to, as I interpret it, force Miquella to ascend as a god while Mohg would serve as his Elden Lord. I'm curious to see what happens here if we enter this DLC post-game or post entry to Farum Azula, as by that point Melina will have left us one way or another. We hear voiceover here talking about (presumably Miquella) "wielding" love to shrive clean the hearts of men.

In the next shot, we see Miquella's body in the cocoon as we did in the base game, a long and withered hand hanging from the crack in the sphere, and the VO continues: "there is nothing more terrifying."

    To pause real quick: frankly, there is a sort of fascinating question about Miquella and his intentions. Is his love and universal acceptance of all the lost and abandoned people of the world genuine, or a stratagem? Would could be more terrifying, after all, than a malicious being who can inspire (or force) a feeling of love and adoration in all who behold them?

Our next shot picks up with exciting music and presumably our Tarnished riding Torrent through a new landscape - massive castles and bridges line the horizon as we ride down a rain-puddled road.

We then get a sweeping shot of what could be the same area, with ghostly gravestones. This looks similar to the promotional art that they used when the DLC was first announced. The ghostly gravestones are similar to the banners outside Leyndell and the ghost-trees in the Mountaintop of the Giants.

Next, riding in that same field to a ridge, the Tarnished stops and beholds a massive, gnarled and blackened Erdtree (or Erdtree-like structure) that seems to have diaphanous shrouds coming off of it and appears to be dripping golden sap into the top of some great tower. The tower has a crescent-shaped top, as if to catch the sap. Notably as well, there are thick root systems coming out of the top of a cliff nearby the Tarnished as they survey this sight. Unlike the Erdtree as we've seen it, this branches into at least two major crests, and only its sap seems to radiate light, while the rest is black or at least dark.

    It seems very possible this could be the eponymous Shadow of the Erdtree, whatever that really means. The Erdtree itself in the Lands Between is likely an illusion, or perhaps to be more charitable, and object of pure faith. This seems more physical.

Then we see an armored knight with a cloak and who seems to be holding some kind of polearm made purely out of thin beams of light. The light has a long haft and then a crescent shape with a cross through the haft where it enters the circular interior of the crescent, almost like it's creating a star inside the crescent. The knight appears to be standing near below the tower where the dark Erdtree's sap runs down, as it looks like we've got a closer view of that tower from the previous shot.

    The symbolism of the crescent I would imagine is associated with this tower and the Erdtree sap, so I could imagine this is something of a guardian of this tower or castle or city.

Cutting away, we see some kind of sentinel, resting on their sword, below a red sky. The sentinel has a helmet with a mask-like face on the front, and their sword near the hilt has a pattern that looks either like roses or ears - if it's the latter, this could have some connection to Gideon Ofnir. The helmet also has bun-like protrusions over the ears. We hear "in that forsaken place, blood must spill" from a different voice.

Next, we get a person in thick grey armor leaning over a pot, with some kind of corkscrew-like column behind them, as they look up at a stormy sky.

Then, we see a sleeping figure in a field of purple flowers. They wear white robes and a white mask. The robes look vaguely similar to the garb of the Nox, while the purple flowers and their sleep seem to call to mind Miquella's persona of St. Trina, who is associated with sleep (and Trina's Lillies are used to make things like sleep arrows).

Next, we see a figure approaching a throne in a dark throne room, with shattered pews, pages scattered on the ground, and braziers burning with violet flames. There is a figure on the throne here, whom we see in the next shot.

The voiceover continues "the blood of your fellows," as we see the woman on the throne (I'm assuming a woman) with a headdress and a strange mantle that looks almost peacock-like, though it also reminds me of Indian Naga figures.

Cutting away again, the Tarnished rides through a dreary swamp, with dark trees overhead and some kind of cabin up on a cliff. The same VO continues "the Erdtree faithful."

    So, to complete the sentence: "in that forsaken place, blood must spill, the blood of your fellows, the Erdtree faithful."

Next is a portrait: an older man sitting down with a woman standing behind him. The man has short white hair and a beard, and has a cloak with a clasp. The woman behind has a cloak hood over her head and two braids that come down with some kind of lace decoration hanging from them, and also seems to be holding her belly as if pregnant.

Now, our Tarnished makes their way up some sort of deep shaft with a spiral path along the interior, and many Living Jars (or at least jars of the same design) hanging from chains over the shaft.

Then we see a figure (if it's the Tarnished, they're wearing different armor) climbing some giant pipe diagonally tilted into some lava, with a fan or turbine of some sort inside that seems to act as a pump, perhaps.

Now, we see a grand castle on a hill, with one of those strange shrouds that extend from the darkened tree above it. The castle looks massive - maybe it's really more of a city - and seems to be accessed only from a stairway up from a forest. We hear a third voice, this one feminine, saying "They were never saints."

Then we see a giant construct of some sort that seems to be like a giant walking wrought-iron basket filled with flaming boulders. The woman continues "they just happened to be on the losing side of a war."

    This is interesting: As far as I can remember, the only person referred to as a saint in Elden Ring is St. Trina, who is the feminine aspect of Miquella. It doesn't look like any particular faction really won the shattering, but if Miquella and Malenia were intending to conquer the Lands Between, they certainly didn't succeed. (There is a question I still have about certain sequences of events - namely, did Malenia attack Radahn in Caelid because she thought he had been the one to take Miquella - believing that, since Moghwyn Palace is below Caelid that he might have been allied with Mohg, or was her absence from the Haligtree the opportunity Mohg took to steal Miquella in the first place?)

We get another shot of this fiery construct stomping around - yeah, you knew we were going to have to fight this freaking thing, didn't you?

Next, we see what looks similar to a Wormface slurping up a Tarnished. Notably, the one big difference is that this thing doesn't have any worms dangling from its face. But it still has a big old honking mouth to slurp people up in. So that's fun for everyone.

Then, we get the first shot of what I imagine will be one of the major bosses of the DLC. There is a lion-like face - that's about it.

The second shot, though, is more intriguing: the lion-faced being has bare feet that look very, very much like those belonging to Morgott, the Omen King (and his paper-thin cover identity of Margit the Fell). Morgott seems pretty unambiguously dead at the end of the game, his body dissipating in Godfrey's arms. But given that the existence of Omens, to me, is likely related to the Crucible and the hybrid animals like the Misbegotten, I wonder if this is some version of Morgott that fully underwent this bestial transformation, perhaps becoming lion-like like his father's seneschal, Serosh.

This lion-creature is covered with the twisting horn-like protrusions we see on the Omen, and we fight the guy in some grand plaza, not unlike Morgott (in both of his real "boss boss" encounters, other than the surprise one in the battlefields outside Leyndell).

We get a shot of the lion-omen breathing some kind of stone or dust breath and then wielding lightning. (Technically multiple shots, but bear with me, there's some quick edits).

Now we get I believe fourth voice - likely "Messmer" saying "Mother, wouldst thou truly Lordship sanction," as we see the guy walking into frame, long legs and arms.

He holds out his hand and conjures what seems to be a ball of shadow that then begins to burn with deep red flame.

Next, we get a wide shot, showing him with two snakes emerging from his back and perhaps a draconic wing off to one side, along with his polearm (that I think looks like the Blasphemous Blade). He continues "in one so bereft of light?"

And we get a closer shot of his face, which shows red hair (suggesting he's a child of Radagon) and an eye with a slitted pupil.

    This last fact actually seems to argue against this being a younger Rykard, Likewise, if we're taking "Messmer" as his real name, that would seem to suggest he's the offspring of Radagon and Marika, and a full brother to Malenia and Miquella (assuming he's not just the dark side of Miquella, in which case he'd be a bit more than a brother).

The next shot is one of a Tarnished pulling of some quick and dexterous moves against some candelabra-wielding foes in what seems to be some kind of flooded basement? We don't get a good look at the enemies, but something about their movement and shrouds reminds me of the beastmen in Farum Azula.

Then, on what looks to be a road of some sort, another Tarnished swiftly throws some knives at an approaching foe with a cleaver-like sword (who almost looks to me like a larger version of a Vulgar Militia member) and staggering them. This is the highlight reel of "look at the cool stuff you'll be able to do in this expansion!"

We then see what actually looks a bit like Roderika in a white dress and a blue hood (contrasted with her old red one - both of which you can find in game) casting some grand spell that involves a bunch of butterflies and purple-pink energy (usually associated with sleep). She seems to be in front of an altar with some kind of beast sculpture, and is surrounded by big willow trees. The next shot shows the spell going off and a bunch of enemies reeling from it. The blackened tree is visible in the background.

The next shows a Tarnished unleashing a multi-kick combo on some armored knight, making me wonder if there's going to be some awesome unarmed fighting build you can make.

Then, we see someone (maybe another Tarnished?) hurling a giant bomb at people approaching on a bridge.

Now, an armored knight unleashing a rapid-fire crossbow, as we get a new bit of VO (will need to check whether this is a voice we heard before) saying "I assume you, too, are keen to know..."

Next, a somehow even more terrifying Runebear, with what appears to be Omen-like horns growing from it, roars. The VO continues "just what kind Miquella is doing here." (EDIT): Upon closer inspection, this appears to be similar to the Dragon incantations that summon a big dragon head above the caster - we can see a normal humanoid-sized body casting this spell. There are some hints that Bears are becoming draconic in nature in the Lands Between, so a full on bear-dragon spell doesn't seem that far outside the realm of possibility.

    Again, to complete the line: "I assume you, too, are keen to know what kind Miquella is doing here," which suggests to me that the people in this area know it to be one of dark and troubled souls, and Miquella being this beacon of light and love and everything is either out of his element here or it reveals that he's not so perfect and sweet as we might have thought.

We then get a field of ghostly blue flowers that looks like a nighttime version of the field from the original promotional art, and two people dueling.

We get a shot of someone on beast-back wielding a sword that crackles with purple energy - suggesting likely Gravity magic.

Then we get this giant-mawed beast charging at the camera through some kind of shallow marsh. It looks like a rhino or something, but in the next shot, it slams the ground and seems to grow thorns that make it look a little like a porcupine. The thorns are also barbed, making me wonder if there's something like Deathroot coming out of it, or perhaps if it's related to the Thorn sorcerers.

Then, in some cave we see a skeletal-looking monster throwing a boomerang-like blade that might also be part of its body. It's riding a white horse (death riding a pale horse? Hm.)

Next, in truly gruesome FromSoft fashion, a corpse seems to pull a sword out of its own body and seems to be taking the skull with it as it does so. We get another VO line: "Those stripped of the Grace of Gold shall all meet death."

This line leads to our Tarnished marching up to Messmer. He continues: "In the embrace of Messmer's flame."

    So, likely Messmer (if that's who this is) is being set up as the big bad here (knowing From watch him be the first boss). A little side-note, Death as a power in Elden Ring has a few manifestations, one of which are the Deathbirds, which might have been worshipped by followers of the Gloam-Eyed Queen (though they could be a totally different tradition). Importantly, though, the Deathbird worshippers burned the dead, and the fires lit from bone ash were part of their power. Is there a connection here? Who knows.

    Oh, and the full line is "Those stripped of the Grace of Gold shall all meet death in the embrace of Messmer's flame."

The shots here are all basically just awesome battle shots of the Tarnished fighting Messmer, so we don't need to go shot-for shot here. However, a new VO begins in the middle of them: a female voice that says "Come now. Touch the withered arm, and travel to the realm of shadow. I will not be far behind. May we meet again."

And then, title screen.

Then, a radiant figure, glowing with light, raises a hand.

The hand passes in front of the gnarled tree, which in this shot is not dripping sap.

    So, that's got to be Miquella, right?

    It would be foolish to assume that I'd figured out any of the big lore here from the trailer alone, which is almost certainly edited to hide some of the juiciest pieces. Still, I want to throw out this idea:

Let's assume Messmer is the guy with the snakes and the polearm and all the fire, and is also the voice of the second to last line and the fourth line. He looks youthful, and seems to be speaking skeptically to an unseen "Mother" about whether one bereft of light is worthy of lordship. This suggests the guy hates Tarnished. That would make him a fitting villain for us to fight in this expansion.

Let's also consider the meaning of his name, Messmer: to mesmerize is to grab someone's attention, and archaically means to hypnotize them. Hypnosis, incidentally, is based on the Greek word "hypnos" which means sleep (and was personified as a deity). And who is associated with sleep in Elden Ring? Why St. Trina, of course. And who is St. Trina? Why, Miquella, of course.

I realize that might look like it needs a cork board and some red yarn, but given how central Miquella clearly is to this DLC, it seems fitting that its main villain is some aspect of the demigod himself.

The real question, then, is this: is Messmer just plain Miquella, full stop, or is Messmer Miquella's shadow, in the Jungian sense - the aggression, hatred, and cruelty that Miquella has repressed within his own mind to be the saintly demigod that he appears to be?

Will our defeat of Messmer be the death of Miquella, or will it free him from the shadow?

    Again, given FromSoft, I would not be surprised if the answer to that question is left ambiguous, and that we'll be debating that for years to come.

Shadow of the Erdtree Trailer

 Elden Ring came out two years ago this month (kind of shocking to think it's only been that long) and we've now finally got the release date for its DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, along with a trailer:

The expansion comes out on June 21st, so you can start your summer off with deadly FromSoft adventure.

I'm tempted to do an in-depth shot-by-shot analysis of the trailer, but don't think I have time for that. Instead, let's talk about the elements introduced here:

First, it does seem to be themed around Miquella. It appears that the way to get into the DLC will be by touching his withered arm at Mohgwyn Palace, which suggests that defeating Mohg will be the prerequisite for going in here. While Mohg is perhaps not as tough as Malenia or Placidusax, Mohg is nevertheless one of the big endgame optional bosses of Elden Ring, so this suggests that the difficulty of the DLC will likely be quite high. Miyazaki has said in an interview that it should be comparable to other endgame areas, but we'll have to see. But unlike Bloodborne or Dark Souls III, it does seem you'll have to be pretty far into the game to get to this - but then again, we've had two years.

While Miquella is obviously the central figure of the DLC, the trailer features a fairly distinctive character that looks like they'll be a major boss.

While the character seems to refer to the "Flames of Messmer" and it seems might have been named in other material as Messmer the Impaler, one cannot help but notice some imagery that seems similar to Praetor Rykard - Messmer has a red serpent (or serpents) that seem to extend from his body, and like all the Radagon/Renalla children, has brilliant red hair. His polearm weapon also seems to have flanges coming off of it that look a little like the weird vein things coming off of Rykard's Blasphemous Blade.

Up to this point, I've generally taken the reading that Miquella is ultimately one of the good guys - his Haligtree seemed to genuinely be a sanctuary for those who were lost and abandoned (though not the merchants, who probably needed a sanctuary more than anyone else). Still, given that this is coming from both FromSoft and from the original mythmaking of George R. R. Martin (who was not directly involved in the DLC, but they're still building off of the foundation he made - incidentally, I cannot think of a cushier job for a fantasy writer than to do a bunch of worldbuilding but never have to write out an actual plot. Living the dream, man) I would not be shocked to discover a darker side to Miquella, and even could imagine fighting him as the DLC's final boss (or perhaps as a kind of "secret final boss" like Laurence, the First Vicar).

Miquella is universally beloved - something that I think kind of bites him in the ass when Mohg kidnaps him. But as a demigod, this might be something of a strategy - we know that he's associated with sleep, and can kind of bewitch people into fawning over him. So... is he actually pure goodness and light, or is that just what he wants us to feel about him?

Indeed, I think it's interesting that Miquella is cursed with eternal childhood - as if the curse has hacked our brain to feel protective and positive toward him.

We're told that we're traveling into a Shadowland in this expansion, which we evidently access by holding Miquella's withered arm. What does it mean to be a Shadowland?

Given my recent obsession with Alan Wake, there's one obvious interpretation of the term, which is that the Shadowland is a reflection of the hidden, sometimes darker, truths about the land we know. The Lands Between have a lot of dark secrets hidden away (perhaps none so gruesome as the evident genocide of the Merchant people, buried deep below Leyndell). But a Shadow is also something we don't even really know about ourselves. In Jungian psychology, excavating and confronting the shadow, and integrating it into one's identity is a way to emerge as the true self.

Partially because I'm writing a book that, thematically, plays in the space of Jungian psychology and alchemy, but also because these two have strong parallels, I think it's also worth looking at this from a psychological standpoint, given the strong alchemical themes throughout Elden Ring.

Miquella is an empyrean. Indeed, he's probably the one most worthy to succeed Marika as a god if his benevolence is genuine. (Malenia clearly doesn't want the job - even if she possibly does achieve apotheosis in our fight with her. Ranni has a very different vision of what divinity should mean for the world, which could be better or worse, but she's definitely utterly ruthless in her pursuit of that goal.) But given Marika's rebis-like combination with Radagon, it might suggest that to be worthy of such a transformation there is some synthesis that is required.

Is the Shadowland the place where the shadows of the people of the Lands Between reside? Perhaps what we'll need to do is to find Miquella's shadow and confront it - vanquishing it so that it can be incorporated into him and for him to achieve completion.

And that makes me wonder if this Messmer is not, perhaps, some aspect of Miquella as well. What if he is the dark side of Miquella that he must acknowledge? We know that snakes are a symbol of something to be hated in the Lands Between - not only is there Rykard and his god-devouring serpent, but we also see the snake motif on the gladiators we occasionally fight, the snakes serving to identify them as "heels" in their gladiatorial fights. Might this be related to that?

Naturally, DLCs are often a chance to visit the distant past - we saw that in the original Dark Souls and in Bloodborne (sort of - technically the Hunter's Nightmare is a hellish dimension that old hunters are trapped in, but I believe it represents the past in which those hunters' sins were committed) and so it's possible we're going to be seeing an earlier era. Could Messmer be the enemy that led to snakes being this hated symbol in our present day? Possibly.

Anyway, it's precisely four months away. Hopefully I'll have finished Tears of the Kingdom and Final Fantasy Rebirth by then!

Napkin Math: Deflect Attacks versus AC

 The most recent playtest of the Monk addressed many concerns - it gave Monks something akin to Cunning Actions by letting them dash or disengage as a bonus action for free and did a few other thing to make Discipline Point usage more efficient.

But one of the concerns I've always had with the Monk is their survivability in melee. Monks, along with Barbarians and Paladins, are the only class that really has to be in melee (while most Fighter builds are melee-focused, you can make a perfectly effective ranged build,) which puts them at two disadvantages - they need to get close enough to monsters to hit them, requiring navigating the battlefield, and also that it puts them in harm's way, setting them up for the monster to retaliate. The former, Monks are actually pretty good at, with their increased movement and various movement bonuses (like being able to run along walls and such). But while a Barbarian has the biggest hit die and Rage to halve the damage they take from most melee strikes, and Paladins can strap on a shield and plate armor to have a very high AC, Monks often have a lower AC and lower HP than their melee comrades.

Deflect Missiles has been part of the Monk's feature list since 2014, and it's very cool, but tends to only come into play if you're fighting humanoid enemies that aren't flinging magic at you. Most inhuman monsters will stick to melee attacks, and at higher levels of play, ranged attacks will often be spell attacks rather than arrows and crossbow bolts. There are occasionally spines and needles tossed by various fiends and such, but these are less common.

In the latest playtest, though, Deflect Missiles got a massive upgrade - it became Deflect Attacks, and at higher levels, it allows the deflection of attacks of practically all damage types.

The math for the feature is the same - you use a reaction to reduce the incoming damage by 1d10 plus your Dexterity modifier plus your Monk level, and then, if that reduces the attack to zero, you can spend a DP to turn it back on the attacker or another foe.

But, setting aside this limited means of outputting damage, how does this compare in terms of defense?

As is usually the case, it seriously depends on the nature of the battle you're in, the luck of the rolls, and other factors.

But get a sense, I want to try a scenario in each tier. I'm going to set Barbarians aside and instead look at a Paladin as a point of comparison, because many other classes can similarly get high ACs with medium or heavy armor.

To begin, we'll look at a tier 1 encounter in which a single Orc is attacking a 3rd level (this is the level this comes online) hero. The "Orc" stat block is a little tougher than your garden variety goblins. We'll assume, because of this, that there aren't a ton of foes in this fight. This one orc is the only one that's really going after our hero (who, to be clear, could be an orc themselves). To compare the relative survivability, we want to see, on average, how many attacks it takes to put a hero down.

We'll also assume the following: both characters have a +2 to Constitution, are taking average HP at each level up, and have started with the Standard Array. Our Paladin is wearing chain mail and a shield (not having gotten enough gold to upgrade to split yet) and our Monk has a +3 to Dex and a +2 to Wisdom. In other words, we're looking at the following key defensive stats:

Paladin: 28 HP, AC 18

Monk: 24 HP, AC 15

No one has gotten any serious magic items that can increase defensive stats yet.

An Orc can make a single Greataxe attack as an action, with a +5 to hit and dealing 1d12+3 slashing damage, or 9.5 on a hit and 16 on a crit. (I'll note here that the lack of multiattack favors the Monk - this might change in higher tiers).

Attacking the Paladin, the Orc is going to hit on a roll of 13-19 (35%) and crit on a 20 (5%).

So, per attack, we're looking at 35% of 9.5, which is 3.325, and 5% of 16, or .8, giving us a total damage per round of 4.125.

With 28 HP, it'll take this Orc an average of 6.79 turns to take down our paladin - not bad, honestly, as it's unlikely he'll live long enough to do so.

Attacking the Monk, the orc only needs to roll a 10 to hit, so it'll hit on a roll of 10-19, or 50%, and again crit on a 20.

Per attack, we have half (50%) of 9.5, or 4.75, and then our same .8 from the crits, for a total of 5.55 damage.

But, then we apply the Monk's deflect attacks, which at this level is 1d10+6, and thus equal, on average, to 11.5.

Meaning that, most of the time, the Monk is going to fully negate the attacks and could theoretically live forever.

    (Note: I made a slight error - they'll only be deflecting when there's a full hit, which means that actually landing the hit gives an average of 9.5, or a crit doing 16. It's less likely that the Monk will fully negate a crit, though they will significantly reduce it. However, more often than not, they will fully negate hits.)

Naturally, this is where taking averages fails us - sometimes, the Orc is going to roll high on their damage dice and/or the Monk is going to roll low on their deflect attack die. I will say, though, that given that the minimum reduction is 7, that means the Orc is going to need a minimum of 4 on their damage die - they have a 75% chance of doing so, but it is a pretty hefty chunk out of the damage.

    But let's skip ahead. In fact, rather than going to tier 2, we'll go to tier 3. And we'll go with a much newer monster. A monster I, in fact, used just last night on my newly tier 4 party. While these guys are a serious threat in large numbers against a tier 4 group, a tier 3, perhaps level 13 group, might face off against one or two of these guys: Ferrumach Rilmani. (The Rilmani are the true neutral to the Outlands - I reskinned them as non-evil but angry spirits of the dead within the Ghost Quarter of Agryem on Ravnica, which I've imagined as a sort of surreal underworld/Shadowfell for Ravnica, and where the dead spirits are not undead, because they're where they're supposed to be, and are thus generally considered celestials).

A Ferrumach has three attacks that have a +8 to hit and deal 1d10 slashing damage and 2d10 psychic damage. We'll assume here that there's no resistance to psychic or slashing, so it all comes out as just normal damage (by level 13 as well, a Monk's Deflect Attacks can also deflect psychic damage, so it will be fully effective against these attacks).

Now, my prediction here is that the thing that will hurt the Monk is the many attacks - even if they can do a massive amount of damage reduction to a single attack, that won't carry over to the damage of the other attacks.

At this stage, I think it's reasonable to assume that a Paladin would be in full plate, but perhaps not any kind of magical armor. Our Monk has had three chances for a feat (apart from the 1st level feats). While I think the design of the new 4th level feats (all giving a +1 to one of your stats) means that many more builds will go for them, I'm going to keep this simple and assume the Monk has gone in for pure ASIs to bump up their Dexterity and Wisdom. And while I think a Paladin has good reason to consider upping their Constitution, they could also go with Charisma to buff their Aura of Protection and their spells. So each character will still have a +2 to Constitution. The Paladin has gotten their Strength to +5 and Charisma to +3, but that's not relevant to their melee survival. The Monk, however, having gotten to +5 in Dexterity and upped Wisdom to +3 now has an AC of 18 (I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility for them to get Bracers of Defense, but we'll say the DM has been very stingy with magic items). So, let's look at their stats:

Paladin: 108 HP, 20 AC

Monk: 94 HP, 18 AC

Our Ferrumach has a +8 to hit and deals a total of 20.5 average damage on a hit with their Sharpened Limb, and deals 37 damage on a crit on average.

Attacking the Paladin, the Ferrumach has to roll a 12 or higher to hit, so gets a hit on a roll of 12-19 (40%) and crits on 20 (5%). So, per attack that's 8.2 plus 1.85, or a total of 10.05 damage per attack. With three attacks, that's 30.15 damage per round. Thus, it'll take 3.59 rounds on average for the Ferrumach to take down our Paladin.

Attacking the Monk, once again they only need to roll a 10 to hit, so they have a 50% chance to get a hit and a 5% to crit. That means each attack will do, on average, 10.25 plus 1.85, or 11.1 damage per attack.

However, our Monk can deflect one of those attacks. At this level, their deflection is 1d10+18, or 23.5. Again, this means that there's a good chance that they'll fully deflect one of these attacks. Given how close the average deflection is to the average damage, it's probably going to let in a little bit half of the time, but it'll always be taking a big chunk out of it.

Still, for the sake of argument, we'll imagine that the "average turn" sees the deflection negating an entire attack. The others incorporate the miss chance into them (hey, can you tell I'm not a statistician?) so we'll basically be counting two attacks as working as normal. That means the Monk is taking an average of 22.2 damage per round.

And thus, it's now taking the Ferrumach 4.23 rounds to take the Monk down.

    So, I've got to say, I was worried a bit about the Monk's ability to be a front-line fighter. But in terms of survivability, this seems pretty damn respectable. Naturally, this does cost the Monk their reaction, which limits things like Slow Fall and opportunity attacks. We're also ignoring a ton of other features that could come into play.

But in terms of just being able to stand up to a Monster and take a beating, Deflect Attacks has become a real game-changer. Without it, the Monk is obviously not going to be able to stand up to as much. But with it, they're arguably better at tanking than most.

Again, against a monster with a ton of attacks - something like a Marilith, for example - you're going to see the value of Deflect Attacks depreciate. Likewise, a Monk doesn't want to get swarmed. I can't recall off the top of my head what the hardest-hitting attack in the game is. It might belong to the Aspect of Bahumut's Bite attack, which deals 2d12+10 piercing and 4d10 force, for a total of 45 damage on average. A 20th level Monk deflecting that attack (and assuming the new Monk capstone) would be rolling 1d10+28 when deflecting, which averages out to 33.5. That means it's probably not usually going to be fully negating that attack, but will take a major chunk out of it most of the time.

Once again, I don't have the mathematical proficiency to really determine if this is going to ultimately mean Monks are the tougher front-liners. I also think it's always going to be hard to beat the Barbarian's fully halving of most melee damage they take (though we'll have to see if they keep giving high-level monsters force damage on their attacks, which would negate this advantage) combined with their massive health pools.

Still, Deflect Attacks is really good. Probably doesn't need any improvements before it goes to print.