THAC0 For 5e Native Players

 Just for fun, I wanted to look into a system from a prior edition of D&D that has an infamous reputation: the "THAC0" system. THAC0 is an acronym, which stands for "To hit armor class 0," and was central to how combat worked in 2nd Edition D&D.

In a certain way, thac0 is not actually that complicated. But it's not straightforward either. Ultimately, the equivalent within 5th Edition is your attack modifier. The better this score is, the more likely you are to hit a target when you make an attack against it.

But while 5E's version (which is, as I understand it, basically unchanged from 3rd Edition) is pretty straightforward - higher number attack bonus is better for you, higher AC for the target is better for them - the way THAC0 works is far more convoluted.

First off, in 2nd Edition D&D, Armor Class was inverted - the lower your Armor Class was, the harder you were to hit. Essentially, it was like a rank - you generally want to be ranked first rather than second, so having an AC of 1 was better than having an AC of 2.

Your Thac0 score is essentially a target number: to hit a creature with a hypothetical AC of 0, this is the score you'll need to roll on your d20 in order to get a hit. So, let's say you have a Thac0 of 15. This means that if you're trying to hit a target with an AC of 0, you'll need to roll a 15 or higher on your die to succeed.

However, against a monster with a worse (remember: higher) AC, you'll be able to subtract their AC from your Thac0. So, say you have a Thac0 of 15, but you're fighting an enemy with an Armor Class of 6. Now, you only have to roll a 9 or higher on your d20 roll in order to hit them.

As you improve, your Thac0 will go down, making it easier to score a hit. But, tougher enemies will have lower ACs, even going into the negatives, which will effectively raise your Thac0 and thus require better rolls.

Now, you might be reading this and saying: hold up, isn't this just a weird and convoluted version of the system we use now?

And the answer is yes! Like in 2nd Edition, tougher monsters now tend to have better (in this case, higher) ACs but player characters also tend to have higher attack bonuses to overcome them.

If you have, say, a melee attack modifier of +5 and you're attacking a goblin with an AC of 13, then you're going to be hitting on a roll of 8 or higher. The equivalent situation could be like if you had a Thac0 of 15 and they have an AC of 7 - in both cases, an 8 or higher roll on the d20 will result in a hit.

But what I find interesting here is that the success or failure is presented as being on the player's side of the equation rather than the monster's. In 5th Edition, the difficulty of hitting a target kind of "ends up" at the target's AC, but it's our modifier that allows us to overcome a low roll of the die. In the Thac0 system, the "end" difficulty of hitting is instead on us, and it's the target's AC that is the modifier.

Functionally, you wind up at the same place, but it feels a little different. In fact, this actually reminds me a lot of other TTRPG systems, such as Blades in the Dark or Call of Cthulhu.

In the latter, your chance at succeeding or failing is entirely based on your character's statistics - you roll a number of d6s equal to your score in that particular skill, and hope that you get at least one 6 among them, which of course becomes more likely the better you are in that skill. That, interestingly, means that the GM in such games doesn't really have much input on whether you succeed or fail. Their role is entirely about adjudicating the consequences of failure, or interpreting what it means to succeed.

In Call of Cthulhu, your skills are on a scale of 1 to 100, and you roll percentile dice hoping to get underneath your score. Here, the GM has the opportunity to make a test more challenging, because the players will have a target roll for normal difficulty, but also one for hard and extremely hard difficulty (usually a factor of two or four smaller, so even if you have a 60 in, say, motor vehicles, you might still need to roll a 15 or lower in a particularly challenging car chase).

I definitely think that the current 5E system works better (though I'm also very eager to try MCDM's "no attack rolls" system). I think it's generally more intuitive when higher numbers are better, and it makes the formulation of AC a little more intuitive - like simply adding your Dexterity modifier to your AC, rather than potentially subtracting it.

I'm given to understand 1st Edition had an even more complicated system, upon which THAC0 was an improvement, but it does sort of surprise me that it took them so long to come up with the current system. D&D is turning 50 years old this year. 3rd Edition launched in 2000 (though 3.5 came three years later,) meaning that this change happened roughly halfway through D&D's existence from today's perspective. In other words, 26 years passed before anyone thought to make attacks and AC this intuitive.

I'm very excited for this year's (and next year's, given the release date of the Monster Manual) core rulebooks, and will likely start implementing the new systems in games I play (we'll see about converting my ongoing Ravnica campaign - I did let people swap to the new versions of their playable races when Monsters of the Multiverse came out). But I do think that there's a conservatism in the design philosophy (particularly in the effort to ensure that the books are backwards compatible) that makes me wonder if we're going to be burdened with things that we might be happier to shed in a true 6th Edition.

Granted, with the wealth of new fantasy adventure RPGs coming out (some of which truly seem to be trying something new with their mechanics) it might be ok if D&D itself remains similar in shape to how it has been.

How to Make a Truly Scary Monster in D&D

 I don't know how this didn't occur to me earlier in the nine years of running and playing this game (and in fairness, it's possible it did and I just didn't remember,) but - to preamble a bit - there is a challenge one runs into as a DM running D&D:

How do I make my players scared of a monster?

To be sure, you can have a monster do insane amounts of damage. My 17th level party of Ravnican adventurers has been charged by Borborygmos to slay a treacherous Ancient Wasteland Dragon (from Kobold Press' Creature Codex) who tried to murder him and the Gruul member of the party (while the two of them were engaged in a duel challenge for the role of Guildmaster - the Loxodon Storm Sorcerer in the party wasn't doing super great in the fight so honestly this probably saved his ass). An Ancient Wasteland Dragon has a line breath attack that does force damage - 20d8 worth of it, with a dex save for half. That's an average of 90 damage, which is a good chunk even at high levels (especially when you've taken two oak trees to the face swung by a 20-foot-tall cyclops).

Still, here's the thing:

As a DM, sure, we want to challenge our players, and that challenge usually involves the threat of character death. It's a game that's largely about fighting monsters, and those monsters aren't going to seem like much of a problem if the players are guaranteed to survive (though as a side note, if I were running for younger kids, I might subtly do away with Death Saves and have characters knocked unconscious simply be stable).

Basically, how do we make a monster that will send a bolt of panic down the spines of the players, forcing them to re-think their entire approach?

Simple: We make a monster that is immune to all damage.

The thought occurred to me while watching a fan edit of a cutscene in Alan Wake II. Without giving too much away, there's a point in which a seemingly friendly character is taken over the Dark Presence - a kind of supernatural embodiment of the Jungian Shadow, and the player character, who thought they were just having a conversation with an ally, is forced to flee from their now-monstrous ally, who seems to be able to take an endless number of bullets and shotgun shells to the chest and barely slow down.

While true damage immunity is uncommon, there is some precedence in Curse of Strahd. There's a mechanic (again, I'll be vague for spoiler reasons) by which the eponymous vampire can take significantly more of a punishment from the players while he stalks the party through Castle Ravenloft, and will appear for a time to be effectively immune to any damage.

Strahd himself is fairly threatening, hitting hard with attacks, with a number of powerful spells at his disposal, but the standard 5E vampire is built in a rather unusual way: the vampire doesn't actually do a ton of damage, but they're extraordinarily hard to kill thanks to their Misty Escape (a feature that, after an argument that got more heated than I'd like to admit, my best friend explained to me even gets around the primary "radiant prevents regeneration" workaround to taking down a vampire).

In our case, though, I think we're trying to make more of an "implacable man" - a monster from which you can run, but not hide, and one who moves slowly not because it's in any way hindered, but because time's on its side - it'll catch up you eventually. And being immune to damage will give it all the time it needs.

Naturally, an overuse of full damage immunity could start to feel like the DM just cheating. We're building adventures for our players to achieve some kind of victory. The Darklords of Ravenloft are functionally unkillable because the whole point is that the Dark Powers keep them locked in an endless cycle of torment, but that's more of a kind of resurrective immortality. Instead, we're looking for something that just can't be killed.

Now, it's funny, because built into many stat blocks in D&D is an immunity to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage from nonmagical attacks. In theory, this is meant to fulfill this idea - if you come across something with these immunities, you won't be able to take them down until you find the magic weapon that will allow you to harm them.

The problem, though, is that of the thirteen existing D&D classes, seven of them have access not just to spellcasting, but cantrips that will deal magical damage. So, really, you're only preventing the damage dealt by martial characters, who in my experience will typically make up half or slightly less than half of a D&D party. And then, the moment they get any kind of magic weapon, their damage will work perfectly well against nearly every monster in the game.

This is particularly egregious in the case of monsters that have some specific material they can be harmed by - Lycanthropes and Devils typically have resistance or immunity to these types of nonmagical damage unless you have a silvered weapon, and Golems tend to have these immunities if you don't have an adamantine one. But these idiosyncratic options never really come into play because usually it's just as easy if not easier to get a +1 magical weapon.

So, no, we've got to come up with something a little more robust.

There are two ways to make such a monster "fair" in game terms.

The first is to give the players a way to make them shed their immunities. This would be a little like letting the players find a Lich's phylactery, but of course rather than letting them revive near it, it would just prevent damage going to the creature. Thus, the quest becomes to find the object, destroy it or otherwise deactivate it, and then they can go in on the bad guy.

The other, which I kind of find more interesting, is that there is no way to actually damage them - instead, you need to trap the monster. This would require A: some ingenuity on the part of the players and B: making sure your world has the kind of objects and such that could be used to trap them.

And even though this is clearly a very dangerous monster, we're going to have to take some of our usual tools off the board: we're probably not going to give it legendary resistances, and we're not going to make it immune to things like being grappled or restrained.

And here's another key: we don't want them to do enormous amounts of damage.

It's all a matter of balance. Your players are going to make the fair assumption that if you're throwing this monster at them, they are supposed to fight it, and will likely begin with their standard battle tactics. You're not trying to punish them for their misapprehension - you're here to present them with a novel challenge.

So, here's what I'd suggest: rather than dealing lots of damage, we can imply the creature's enormous strength by instead having big knockback effects. We can certainly have this incur environmental damage, such as throwing a character off of a balcony and making them take the 2d6 bludgeoning for falling 20 feet, but of course allowing for normal reaction-based mitigation like a Monk's Slow Fall or the Feather Fall spell.

But the actual damage of the attack should be... probably on the low end. Naturally, that has different meanings at different levels - 2d8+5 is a huge amount of damage in tier 1 but needs to be coming at you several times per turn at tier 4 to raise anyone's heartrate.

In other words, I think the monster should seem like it wouldn't be that hard to handle... if only it could take some damage. It might take a round or two, when the Rogue's arrows bounce off of it, the Wizard's fire bolt doesn't leave a mark, and even the Warlock's Eldritch Blast isn't making a dent in its HP, but ideally, the party realizes that they can't just get rid of this thing like your typical monster.

Now, what do we do if the party doesn't get the message? I could certainly imagine a scenario in which a Fighter or Barbarian figures they'll grapple the monster and hold on, believing that if they just pick the right damage type they'll finally be able to deal with this thing?

Well, to start with, we're using melee attacks with a knockback. That means that when we land an attack on the person grappling us, we can knock them away and continue the implacable march. That damage might not be a ton at any given time, but gradually, even the toughest characters are going to start taking enough damage that they'll realize that this just isn't working for them.

And if they don't? Well, at some point as a DM you do need to just let players face the consequences of their choices.

What we're trying to get the party to do is to run away from the monster - the successful completion of the encounter is going to be when the party gets far enough away that they aren't being actively pursued (or at least they think they might have lost their tail).

This might be a problem if our players are slower or just equal in speed to the monster. So, we're going to start by giving the monster the following trait: Patient, which means that the monster will not choose to take the Dash action. So, if we give them a standard 30 feet of movement, our players will be able to get away from them if they run.

And, in an ironic way, the knockback effect on our monster's melee attacks will actually secretly be there to help the players - it will let them use an action to dash rather than disengage.

So, to review: the idea here is to make a monster that cannot be defeated (until the plot allows). What extra wrinkles might we add to them to make them more exciting? And what tricks might we employ to let them make a greater impact?

Let's start with our wrinkles.

    This is a link to the video that inspired this post. It contains spoilers for a late moment in Alan Wake II, so if you haven't played that game and intend to, and have any sensitivity toward being spoiled, you should avoid the link. As we see in the clip, the monster is capable of moving through solid objects, "blinking" through a wall before ripping a metal bar out of the wall to use as a bludgeon. We could give our monster the same kind of limited teleportation ability to make trapping it more difficult. I'd argue that we should really make sure this is limited, like requiring the monster to see the other side of the wall it teleports through, and likely requiring this to use their full action (possibly their movement and their action). Normally when designing a monster, especially one that is supposed to be a threat on its own, you want to give it as many opportunities for actions as possible (see MCDM's Action-Oriented Monsters). But given that we're not playing fair on the monster's defensive capabilities (being utterly unkillable) we've got to rein in how punishing they can be. Let that moment of "oh shit, the cage we lured it into isn't going to hold it!" be the "damage" the party takes that round.

    The next wrinkle to consider is how safe the party can truly be from the monster. Ideally, this thing will show up when least expected. In fact, I think this is the ideal monster to have show up multiple times. To a certain extent, DMs will always be able to contrive ways for villainous NPCs and monsters to always show up to threaten the players. The intricacies of spells like Scrying are sometimes a bit too much for a DM to run through. While you should try to respect the use of things like Mordenkainen's Private Sanctum or other big blanket abjurations, you never want to be so faithful to the rules that it causes the story to grind to a halt (though if you can come up with a way to get around these protections in a manner that doesn't just violate the spells' functions, all the better. A few sessions ago I overcame such a thing by having some Pixies commit a bit of B&E. Did I make them roll to pick the locks on the windows? I don't have to tell you that). So, I think giving a monster like this something like a Revenant's Vengeful Tracker trait could be a good addition to our monster's stat block.

Now, let's talk scenarios:

    I think the first encounter with a monster like this, you'll probably want to keep things simple. The players will assume it's a standard monster that they'll fight once, kill, and move past. By becoming this insurmountable foe, though, you can do something like make a location you don't want them getting into just yet inaccessible. That said, they can always run away from the monster by going in rather than running away, so I don't know that I'd even do that. Instead, I might have this be something at a logical terminus. This could be something found at the end of a dungeon, and motivates the party to leave now that they're finished with the place (perhaps desperately closing the front door of the dungeon to stop the pursuit).

    As I suggested earlier, having a creature like this show up in an area with verticality will make the knockback effect feel more sinister. Again, we don't want it to be deadly, so probably no thousand-foot-cliffs. But if we find this in the attic of a haunted house (and more and more this feels like an undead monster) we could easily have ceiling beams, landings, balconies, grand staircases, and such that the monster could push players off. Likewise, some kind of sinister stone labyrinth (one with bridges and other kinds of overpasses) would work great.

    Given that we can have the party face this foe several times, I'd also recommend that you have it show up at particularly inconvenient times - such as when they're fighting other, more conventional foes. Now, they need to weigh the more immediate, direct, but also "dealable" threat of the monsters they can actually kill against the need to open up some distance with this guy. This could also lend some urgency to a dungeon puzzle (though probably not any particularly challenging puzzle, as that might just make it feel impossible).

    Lastly: you probably don't want this monster to be your main villain. A main villain will need to be in some way analyzed and understood. This is the kind of monster where less is more. Sure, if you're going with the "deactivate the thing giving them immunity" route, you might need to come up with some lore and backstory to them, but I highly recommend that this monster remain largely mysterious. Of course, you can go two routes with this as well. The first is one in which the party just never learns much about them at all - the monster shows up, starts chasing them, and the only thing that's important is getting away from it. However, you could also do something that might even be more intriguing: give them a simple, conventional backstory, but one that does nothing to explain why nothing seems to be able to kill them. Just call them "The Iron Knight" or "The Relentless," or an utterly mundane just... name, like "Casper Smotts," and leave it to the players' imagination why this particular person or creature cannot be killed.

I think it's worth noting that the Relentless Killers from Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft are clearly meant to evoke this kind of trope (there's even a third variant found in Vecna: Eve of Ruin). These monsters do a decent job of this... except that unless you're using them long before the party is of a level to handle a creature of their CR (8 and 12 for the ones in Van Richten's,) and even if the party is theoretically low-level for them, the fight will probably devolve into classic D&D tactics, and then, ultimately, players who know what they're doing will probably be able to take them down.

As another example of where this kind of thing is supposed to exist, but doesn't quite, when I was playing in a Curse of Strahd campaign, we got to the basement of the Death House and encountered the monster there - a Shambling Mound. Despite being CR 5 when the party is level 2, our group (me on a great weapon Paladin, with a Grave Cleric, a ranged Fighter, a Barbarian, and a Fighter/Warlock) managed to take the mound down with relatively little loss of HP. So, while I think the intention of the end of Death House is for the party to desperately flee the dangerous Shambling Mound while the doorways in the upper house erupt into spinning blades (and it actually becomes safer, especially on my 7-dexterity paladin, to smash holes in the walls and deal with the rat swarms that pop out), in our case, there was less direct pressure to move quickly because we handled the monster in the basement already.

What I think this design does is it becomes immune to being "handled." I might even make it so that the only way to ultimately ensure the monster can't come after you anymore is the Imprisonment spell, but we might not need to go quite so far.

Revisiting My Elden Ring Builds Before the DLC

 While I doubt I'll be able to finish the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC before I head to the East Coast this summer, I'm eagerly anticipating a return to this game, which I think is my favorite of FromSoft's "Soulsborne" games.

I've beaten this game on several characters, using a variety of builds. But I'm also very rusty - I've not really been playing Elden Ring since going through Tears of the Kingdom, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and my big marathon of all the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters, so these folks have been sitting there as Elden Lord for months without play.

So, I decided to grab each and take them through my usual late-game rune-farming route in Ephael, Brace of the Haligtree, typically leaving from the Prayer Room and either going to the next site of grace or just wending my way back.

I've found different builds to be varyingly easy to play - I was surprised how effective, for example, a pure-Faith pyromancy build worked (especially given all of the people who have complained about Faith builds) when playing through I think my last full clear. But I figured I'd talk about the impressions I got returning to the game.

    Jumping Blasphemy:

This is a dual-wielding greatsword Strength/Faith build that uses the Blasphemous Blade and the Gargoyle Greatsword with a Flame Art scaling. It also uses a chestpiece and talisman that boosts damage from jumping attacks, so the typical move is to hop and hit L1 to bring both swords down on a target, which does a ton of damage.

This was the first build I beat the game on (though far from my first character) and so I naturally have a certain affinity to it. The Blasphemous Blade's health absorption (when you kill an enemy) makes it very nice for lengthy dungeon crawls. Its ash of war is also quite nice, hitting very hard in a line in front of you that both heals you and can knock enemies over.

That said, I found that the timing on jumping and striking could be a little tricky - you need to watch your stamina, and also just make sure that you hit the attack button while in the air.

    Moonlight Frost Battlemage:

My original character was an Astrologer and went through most of the game as a pure spellcaster, but I respecced him a bit, adding in Strength to wield the Darkmoon Greatsword. While I still have spells to cast, the most efficient way to play appears to be to use the sword's ash of war, which empowers the sword to then send forth powerful rays of frost when you use R2 attacks. This was hitting for over 2000 damage at a reasonable range for a pretty small FP investment. And, of course, you also have a big honking sword if you're caught in a moment when the buff falls off.

I honestly found that in this return this build felt stronger than I remembered it. Notably, I messed up the Selivus quest line by progressing Ranni's quests too far (it was my first playthrough!) so I never got the Magic Scorpion Charm, meaning that this is technically doing less damage than it might otherwise do (though also I'm a little more resilient).

    Different Moonlight Samurai:

This is a dual-wielding build that uses the Moonveil and a Cold Ichigatana. Moonveil's Transient Moonlight ash of war is, of course, very nice and powerful. I was finding that I didn't seem to trigger bleeding or frostbite on targets, which seemed to undercut some of the power of the build. I think it felt a little less effective than the other Moon-themed build, but it might have shined a little more on bosses where the status effects could shine through a bit better.

    Arcane Dragon Build:

I've really wanted to make Arcane work - and to be fair, when everything lines up, dragon incantations can be insanely powerful - but the build does run into some problems when you need sustained power. I have the Ripple Axe for conserving resources.

This character had gone back and forth between this dragon theme and a more Arcane/Dexterity Rivers of Blood build, and I've sort of gone back and forth one which build I prefer. I think I had intended to finish the game with the Rivers of Blood build, but then the Elden Beast's immunity to Blood Loss made it feel kind of powerless.

Again, the dragon build doesn't feel all that great for non-boss situations, so I wouldn't say this is one of my more enthusiastic characters to take into the DLC.

    Pyromancer:

This is a pretty fun pure-caster build, using a lot of Fire Giant incantations. 95% of the time you're just casting Flame, Fall Upon Them (I love the Fire Giant spells' names,) which is hilariously imprecise, but will usually hit your target (sometimes twice) and hits hard. With lots of Mind and your flasks leaning a little harder on Cerulean tears, I don't think I even have a melee weapon in this build.

    Necromancer:

This is an Intelligence/Faith build that is theoretically built around Rancorcall and Ancient Death Rancor, though also Rykard's Rancor. In practice, I found myself falling back on the Sword of Night and Flame, which is a little more user-friendly.

Rancorcall and Ancient Death Rancor are cool, but they're best at long range and as an opener. They charge up and then move very slowly toward a target, but have a bad turning radius, so if something starts to charge at you while the various skull projectiles are going toward them, you often risk not hitting them at all - but if they do hit, they will break poise and add up to serious damage, especially if you set it up so that there are like three castings of this all heading toward the target at the same time.

Rykard's Rancor is a little easier to use - a single flaming skull flies slowly toward the target, but it can turn a lot better, circling around the target. The skull itself doesn't actually do damage, but the trail it leaves behind causes a series of explosions, which means a single casting can hit multiple targets and also the same target multiple times. This is a good crowd option, as well as a medium-range cast before you start facing them off in melee.

Finally, the Sword of Night and Flame hits hard, with the R2 attack doing a sweeping fire attack (which sometimes is not quite as wide as it looks) and R1 giving you a miniature Comet Azure (that can't be held down to continue firing) that can also knock enemies down.

I actually found myself really liking this one, though when I realized I had never beaten the Great Jar's Champions on it, I gave that a try and got utterly hosed.

    So there you have it. I think I'm tempted to take my original guy in first. Naturally, with new weapons and armor to be found in the DLC, I might want to bring in some additional builds - I have a Quality Build that uses the Fallingstar Beast Jaw (which, to confess, is actually what my Necromancer build was using when I beat the game on her - after trying several builds and not feeling like I was doing much with any of them, I fell back on this build but got bored just doing the same thing). I've never done a Strength/Intelligence build (which could be tempting what with Radahn's swords). (EDIT: Oh duh, my Darkmoon build is Strength/Intelligence. Oh well.) I was also always tempted to try a Frenzied Flame build, but I'm given to understand that's really more for PvP, which I'm not into.

Ravenloft and/vs The Shadowfell

 For those of us who came to D&D with 5th Edition, it might come as something of a surprise that The Shadowfell is a recent addition to the D&D multiverse. Introduced only in 4th Edition, there were previous notions of a "plane of shadow" and such, but it was, I believe, less clearly delineated.

Ravenloft as a setting was only codified after the first couple adventures were released - the original Ravenloft with Strahd and the castle that would go on to give its name to the overall setting, and then The House on Gryphon Hill, which I believe introduced what would come to be the domain of Mordent. The original module came out all the way back in 1983, while the campaign setting's first broad sourcebook wouldn't come out until 1990.

In this earlier conception, Ravenloft was somewhat more similar to other settings, in the sense that there was a linked physical geography - a continent known as "The Core" that held within it such lands as Barovia, Darkon, Falkovnia, and Mordent.

These lands were geographically connected, but the Darklords still had control over whether anyone could pass through their misty borders. Mechanically, as I've tended to understand it, is that if the Darklord won't allow you to leave (and it's up to the DM whether they will allow you or not) your only other recourse is to kill them, which won't solve the problem permanently, but will at least allow escape until the Dark Powers bring them back.

But what this meant is that domains might go to war with one another - Strahd could send his forces to attack Darkon, for example, and Azalin might send forces against Barovia. It was - and the caveat here is that I was not playing at the time so this is just my impression - a little more of a classic fantasy map with warring kingdoms and such.

Formed somewhat during 1st Edition but really codified in 2nd Edition, the "Great Wheel" cosmology established a nesting system of planar cycles - you have the various elemental planes, along with the quasi-elemental and pseudo-elemental planes, and then on the outside, the outer planes, and somewhere in there the prime material plane, where most of D&D's settings are found and where any Earth-like world would be (Earth being, canonically, in that plane).

In 4th Edition, the folks at WotC started to feel that this system had too many planes - all the quasi- and pseudo-elemental planes were pretty excessive, without much lore about what actually existed in them, and then you had not just the planes representing each of the nine points on the alignment chart (lawful good, chaotic neutral, etc.) but also planes in the gaps between them, like Acheron, the Lawful Neutral/Lawful Evil plane.

They decided to create a new cosmology, called the "World Axis," and here the Prime Material Plane was in between two great regions - the Elemental Chaos and the Astral Sea. This introduced a concept of a conflict between Gods and Primordials (an element that is still a big part of Exandria, Critical Role's setting) with Gods being more transcendent, ethereal beings (and I feel generally more lawful) while Primordials were these more grounded, elemental, and, well, probably more chaotic beings.

Crucially, the planes in the World Axis model were not required to be all balanced against each other. They were seen as a "Thousand Points of Light," free-floating in their respective mediums (the aforementioned Astral Sea and Elemental Chaos).

However, between these two regions, sort of "next to" the Prime Material, there were two other planes - the Feywild and the Shadowfell.

The "Plane of Faerie" had existed in various forms in previous editions. Indeed, the Chaotic Good plane of Arboria in the Great Wheel cosmology largely played the role of this fey realm, with Eladrin first introduced as elves from Arboria. (The Gloaming Court, on the other hand, with its Queen of Air and Magic, called Pandemonium its home.) But while the Upper Planes still have plenty of hazards for adventurers, the Feywild allowed for the creation of a totally morally unaligned realm that could easily house all the wonder and whimsy and the creepiness and horror of fairy tales.

I don't actually know what the real impetus behind the creation of the Shadowfell was. In certain ways, there's actually a lot of overlap between the Feywild and the Shadowfell. Hags, for example, are your classic wicked witch (in the Wizard of Oz vein, where witches aren't just human spellcasters) and a dark and scary forest filled with monsters would be right at home in the Feywild.

But the Shadowfell is still kind of an opposite to the Feywild in that while everything is heightened and emotional in the Feywild, the Shadowfell is drained and bleak.

It's... honestly a bit of a tough sell for a fun place to adventure.

But, it just so happens that this general vibe - of being stuck going through the motions, performing compulsive actions whose motivations feel distant and forgotten, actually fits pretty perfectly with Ravenloft's Domains of Dread.

The Shadowfell as presented in 4th Edition's Shadowfell: Gloomwrought and Beyond, depicts a dark reflection of the prime material plane. While the eponymous city of Gloomwrought is not, as far as I know, meant to be the direct counterpart to any prime-material-plane place, we do later on get Evernight, a city that stands as the Shadowfell equivalent of Neverwinter in the Forgotten Realms.

What I find sort of weird, though, about the Shadowfell as a plane, is the way that WotC has focused on the Ravenloft setting. Unlike the broader Shadowfell, the Domains of Dread don't (or do they?) correspond to any particular region of the prime material plane. We do know that some of them were taken from the prime material - Barovia, for example, once existed as part of a larger world, but was drawn in along with Strahd when he became the first Darklord (and also D&D's multiverse's first vampire, so this probably happened a very long time ago). But given that we've never learned what world Barovia was taken from, we don't know what was left in its place.

Frankly, I think it would actually be really cool if Barovia as we know it isn't actually the "real" Barovia, but is just the Shadowfell reflection of it, and that there's actually a valley in some world that is either a perfectly pleasant, thriving place, or perhaps uninhabited, with the ruins of towns that may or may not have names like Vallaki or Krezk.

However, such a valley would presumably have some kind of spatial relation to the world around it, whereas in 5th Edition, this idea was jettisoned, instead making each Domain its own weird little pocket dimension, floating freely in the Mists.

Given the popularity of Ravenloft as a setting compared with that of the Shadowfell (more popular because of A: a popular adventure book that is probably the most beloved in 5E, and B: it's more established and thus gets more points for nostalgia) it almost feels like through much of 5E, they've more or less treated the Shadowfell as being one and the same as the Domains of Dread.

Indeed, the idea of a plane like that being broken into separate "domains" carries over to the Feywild with the Wild Beyond the Witchlight, where we travel to the realm of Prismeer (we literally just had a session earlier this evening, which is why it's on my mind,) and which seems to function in some was similar to the Domains of Dread, but in this case are called Domains of Delight. Instead of a Darklord who is a prisoner in their Domain, each Domain of Delight has an Archfey who is just its ruler, with no implication that they're being tormented by some kind of "Fey Powers," or even that there are any such powers whatsoever.

To be honest, I felt like this was a weird choice. The Feywild was never very well-defined - the Wild Beyond the Witchlight was the first adventure to focus on the Feywild even though the plane had been officially introduced in the previous edition.

I'd wondered if they were intending to abandon this idea of the Feywild and Shadowfell being "mirror realms" to the Prime Material Plane.

But then, with Vecna: Eve of Ruin, early on in the adventure the party travels through Evernight, having been sucked into the Shadowfell after beginning their journey in Neverwinter. It's not an extensive stay or anything - the adventure sends you off to different worlds and different planes, including a trip to Barovia itself. But it does stand out as a reminder that the "Shadowfell Proper" is still a concept in the canon lore of D&D.

I will say, though, that I do kind of get the impulse to focus more on Ravenloft's Domains of Dread, and to expand that concept into the Feywild's Domains of Delight (though maybe it's the Sandman fan in me, but I feel like Delight is too positive for the Feywild and might like to see Domains of Delirium). Especially for prefab adventures, this type of setting has clear borders and focuses the players down a finite number of paths.

But I'd argue that for someone who likes to run more free-roaming homebrew campaigns, it might actually be preferable to use the "reflection of the prime material" versions of these planes. A couple years ago, I took a couple regions of my homebrew setting (with maps I made on Inkarnate) and created copies that I then edited, changing the names of locations, the overall look of the world, and now have very satisfying alternate maps showing the Feywild and Shadowfell equivalents of those places.

Now, when I finally get around to running a campaign set in my own world (I guess I never expected this Ravnica one to go on so long!) I'll easily be able to manage it if players find a Fey Crossing or a Shadow Crossing.

When is an Erdtree Not a Tree? (When It's a Giant Pile of Corpses?)

 Lest I fail to give credit where credit is due, this opinion is largely formulated on the speculation by such prominent Elden Ring/FromSoft Youtubers as VaatiVidya, Quelaag, and Smoughtown.

We're told in the base Elden Ring game that the "Crucible" is the primordial form of the Erdtree.

While, as a theater kid, I usually associate the word Crucible with a play from the 1950s that was literally about the Salem Witch Trials (a piece of history close to me as someone from Massachusetts) but was really a metaphor for Joe McCarthy's rabid attempted antiCommunist purge. Given the breadth of Miyazaki's influences, I would not be shocked if that play was also considered when picking this term, but the underlying metaphorical meaning works in both cases: Crucibles are basically pots that are used to melt down metal, which can be done to remove impurities but also to mix metals and create alloys.

As Tarnished Archaeologist argues, the Erdtree literally takes in the corpses of the dead and possibly grows new bodies like fruit, in a cycle of life and death that allows people to be reborn.

    As a side note, such a system would normally satisfy a "balanced" system where life and death can work together, and I think Miyazaki's worlds are usually screwed up because some natural cycle has been disrupted by trying to excise the "bad" part and only have the pure good part, like light without darkness or life without death. But, as TA argues, the Erdtree we see now is not a physical object, but only manifested as pure faith, which means that the old practice of Erdtree burial probably doesn't function as it's meant to. Might the "golden" Erdtree thus only preserve life by preventing any semblance of death, letting people grow old and withered but never letting them die, while Marika's Age of Plenty was one in which death did come, but you could always count on being reborn in a fresh, new, youthful body?

We see in the Shadow of the Erdtree trailer a figure that is almost certainly Marika pulling what appear to be strands of golden hair from a (likely dead) body (Quelaag argues that it's a pregnant woman, and she and many others have pointed out that the clothing is reminiscent if not totally the same as that of the God-Skins - could this be the Gloam-Eyed Queen?)

The strands seem to extend in her hands and form her inverted arc - Marika's Great Rune - while she stands between two massive pillars that appear to be made entirely of corpses piled upon one another.

This gory gateway, which shows around it a dreary, violet sky, but through the gateway is a bright and golden one, has got a lot of people wondering: just what is this?

And so far, the most persuasive argument I've heard is that this is the Crucible.

The Crucible is said to be the "Primordial Form of the Erdtree," but what does that mean? Given that we're talking about spiritual objects, it seems possible that myths can bend and shape, and things can take on very different forms than how they were originally perceived/conceived. The Crucible is a place where all life intermingles and blends - this is why creatures like the Misbegotten and Omens (terms that one gets the sense were applied to them after a big cultural shift, while in a prior age they were considered blessed rather than cursed) are associated with the Crucible. Aspects of the Crucible - a set of Incantations you can get (often used by Crucible Knights) all involve manifesting some kind of animal aspect (or possibly a draconic aspect, but we're going to not get deep into dragon lore here).

And what signals "blending life together" more than a staggeringly enormous pile of bodies?

So, perhaps we could imagine the following:

Before Markia becomes a god, the Crucible is this massive, fleshy, bloody mass, where hybrid creatures are produced and where the dead are added to the pile.

Marika ascends, and she transforms the Crucible into a massive tree instead - the Erdtree. But this is still a physical object, and it actually performs the same function, but the process is hidden away in the Catacombs. Indeed, this kind of mirrors the real-world way in which we sort of hide the decay and rot of death by burying our dead, then allowing plants and fungi (and bugs) to "recycle" the bodies of our loved ones - all we see are the pretty flowers growing up above ground.

Then, however, the Erdtree is burned (in that "first cardinal sin") and all that remains is the faith in the Erdtree - a sort of illusion of faith that is only visible to those with Grace (we encounter NPCs who ask if we can see it, which implies some people do not). While the Erdtree is still there for those who believe in it, it presumably cannot function the way it did in the Age of Plenty or in the Age of the Crucible, and that is why by the time we arrive the world is in this terrible state of stagnation.

Another factor here is the "red gold" associated with the Crucible Knights - while Marika's ascension seems associated in the trailer with the "birth of gold," perhaps that is actually a sort of "pure gold" (though careful, because we're straying into "Unalloyed Gold" associated with Miquella). The red gold of the Crucible Era might be because it's associated with the blood and viscera that made up the Crucible.

As usual, the exact sequence of events is a little up in the air: Godfrey seems associated with the Crucible, but if it transformed into the Erdtree when Marika arose, then it would seem that his association with it would have to pre-date his ascension to Elden Lord, and would thus be more accurately when he was known as Hoarah Loux.

Likewise, we see art in Leydnell of a tree growing out of the Elden Ring, and another tree beneath the ring. Is this just showing the pure-spiritual and the older physical tree?

We also don't know why the original Erdtree was burned or when, exactly. I could imagine that it happened with the Shattering, which feels like the big punctuation in Marika's reign. But why? Well, if we imagine that the original Erdtree was just the transformed Crucible, and then Marika had children who were "cursed" as Omens after she thought she had fixed that bug, might she have decided to burn it down to eliminate any trace of the original Crucible, but in the process also break the entire basis of her reign's stability?

Ravenloft, Vecna, and the Dark Powers' Agenda

 The Dark Powers are one of the most mysterious forces in D&D lore.

Now, I'm very much an advocate for tinkering with lore to make it your own while running a D&D campaign. In my 4+ year Ravnica campaign, I've invented a ton of lore that has no basis in the canonical materials for Magic's most popular plane. For example, the formerly-Orzhov cleric in the party learned not only that he was a reincarnation of one of the founding members of the Obzedat Council (and more or less responsible for the Church's descent into corruption) but that at its founding, the Church incorporated reverence for a being known as the Transcendent Phoenix, which was more or less the embodiment of Red Mana. None of this is remotely found in the canon, but it has served my campaign well. Likewise, I've started to reveal that House Dimir is actually just one of a number of "Houses" that span not just the Magic the Gathering mutliverse but also the D&D one. And I haven't yet decided whether these Houses were all ultimately created by Vecna (I tend to treat House Dimir as True Neutral rather than Neutral Evil, so I'm hesitant to say that its root cause was such a vile figure - I see House Dimir as amoral rather than evil, willing to do whatever it takes to pursue their goals, but not actually trying to further the aims of evil overall).

Ravenloft is built around the idea of very visible primary villains - its Darklords - and then extremely nebulous background forces that keep the whole thing running - its Dark Powers. 

The setting is also filled with ironies - the very Darklords who are empowered within their Domains of Dread are also prisoners. Strahd, Azalin, Akhtepot - all of these people have been locked away in their domains after committing heinous acts of profound evil. Thus, one could imagine the Dark Powers as benevolent figures, plucking truly vile villains from the multiverse and depositing them away in these Domains of Dread where they cannot reach the rest of the cosmos.

But, of course, there are also innocent people trapped within the Domains. And even if the Darklords are subject to an endless torment, they also inflict their monstrousness upon the people in their domains.

Despite being made of nightmare logic, the Domains of Dread are also, to a certain extent, functional lands where people live their entire lives. It's not a, you know, great place to live - one gets the sense that what happiness can be found there is always fleeting and always leads to tragedy.

So, what are we to think of the Dark Powers? Are they guardians, jailing the worst people in the cosmos? Or are they fiendish (maybe literally) monsters who have picked the Darklords out not to punish them, but to use them as engines of pain and torment and terror, using the horror generated by the Darklords as some kind of fuel or resource for some distant agenda?

As far as I know, the only named Dark Power we have in 5th Edition at least is Osybus - but in a weirdly roundabout way. Osybus was a lich, with a cult dedicated to him, but, ironically, the Priests of Osybus are actually the ones who turned against him, betraying him, only for Osybus to join the Dark Powers and basically curse his former priesthood to eventual destruction.

It's strange, of course, because our other encounters with the Dark Powers are always through the Amber Sarcophagi - most prominently found in the Amber Temple, but evidently seeded across all the Domains of Dread. I imagine these Sarcophagi as not being so literal. I suspect that in most cases, they're more of a portal or a relay between their physical location and some distant space or plane of existence.

To a large extent, the Dark Powers strike me as being more akin to Great Old Ones - beings of Cosmic Horror that are incomprehensible. Indeed, while in the movies they look more like demons, I'm reminded of the Cenobites from the Hellraiser series (note: all I know about them is from pop culture osmosis and wikipedia, so forgive me if I get things wrong). As I understand it, the Cenobites aren't truly malevolent - they just think agonizing pain is something to be explored and experienced, and they wish to share these sensations as a sort of path to enlightenment. In other words, what comes across as unquestionably evil and terrifying in our human experience is really just the goal of a being whose experience of existence is so different from ours.

However, I feel like there's another possible interpretation:

Most of the beings in the Ravenloft setting don't have souls. It's a somewhat troubling and semi-solipsistic conceit, but it means that most people you encounter in the Domains of Dread aren't exactly people in the strictest sense of the word. Personally, I've always interpreted "soul" to mean the religious/spiritual word for "consciousness," with an assumption that there's something substantive to this consciousness that allows it to, for example, persist beyond the body's death. Thus, most people in these lands would be "philosophical zombies," who in theory would be indistinguishable from conscious people (unless you had some kind of "soul detection" magic) but would not actually internally feel fear or disgust or anything at all.

One could imagine, then, that perhaps these soulless people were created to function as props and "set dressing" for the Domains of Dread - that the Darklords had to be convinced that they were surrounded by real people, but the intention was only to punish and torment them, and so these beings who would display all the outward behavior and expression of all manner of emotion would in fact not suffer at all from the pain and terror inflicted upon them.

Then, however, if some people became trapped within the Domains of Dread - real people with real souls - maybe the Dark Powers either never noticed or were unable to extract them and send them on their way.

Thus, we could imagine that the Dark Powers are actually benevolent - only trying to capture and punish the wicked (setting aside for now the very real philosophical question of whether any act, no matter how heinous, deserves eternal punishment) and only accidentally subjecting real people to the horrors that the Darklords inflict upon their domains.

Of course, there's also the flipside:

It might be that the Darklords are not there to be punished at all. If the Dark Powers feed off of horror and torment, the wickedness of the Darklords might not be a crime to be punished, but a skill to be exploited.

In this case, the torment of the Darklords might be something like a by-product, while the main resource is the terror they inflict upon those trapped in their domains. The Darklords are too valuable a resource to let go, and this is why the Domains are trapped in these endless loops, with nothing ever fully changing except in rare circumstances (when the engine breaks down, such as in Darkon).

And here, the normal people in the Domains act as one of two reagents (the others being the Darklords) to generate the terror that the Dark Powers use.

This, then, paints them in a more malevolent light (even if they're unknowable cosmic beings, from our perspective they are intentionally creating suffering, which is more or less the definition of evil).

And... well, the latest 5E adventure, I'd argue, points more in this direction.

SPOILERS AHEAD FOR VECNA: EVE OF RUIN

Full Impressions of Vecna: Eve of Ruin

 I have a confession: I get nearly every D&D adventure that comes out, and I usually read about half of them and then put them on a shelf, a vague sense that I might finish them. I've definitely fully read through Curse of Strahd, Tomb of Annihilation, Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, and I think both Candlekeep Mysteries and Keys from the Golden Vault.

We can now add Vecna: Eve of Ruin to that list.

Now, is this a measure of quality? Certainly Curse of Strahd and Tomb of Annihilation have been some of the better-loved adventures to come out for Fifth Edition. The anthologies are, as one might expect, mixed bags (there's one Candlekeep Mystery adventure where I genuinely don't have a sense of why the players are even there in the first place).

Eve of Ruin is also notable as only the second published 5th Edition adventure that takes players to level 20 - a level cap that few games ever reach (frankly the fact that my Ravnica game is even in tier 4 feels unprecedented among any of my friends who like D&D).

So, I figured I'd make this my overall review of the adventure, not in the "thumbs up, thumbs down" sense, but more in the sense of how I think the adventure works and what you might need to tweak to make it work better. My caveat, of course, is that I'm someone who almost exclusively runs campaigns of my own design, which gives me as a DM a lot of flexibility, but also requires a lot of work.

We're also going to go into full spoiler territory here - the book has been out for only two days now, so if you plan on playing in this or even if you want to run it, but maybe discover its secrets for yourself, beware: we're going to drop some big info here, and one detail about the adventure is going to have to be discussed pretty early on.

Got it?

Ok, SPOILERS AHEAD:

More Impressions of Vecna: Eve of Ruin

 I've read quite a bit into the latest 5E adventure, Vecna: Eve of Ruin.

 As mentioned before, the adventure has an episodic structure that is essentially a dungeon for every level as you go from 10 to 20. Transportation between these dungeons is relatively quick and easy - your home base is in Sigil, and there's a little bending of the rules (though easily justified) to allow you to pop from one location to the next.

As with a lot of published adventures, DMs are going to need to really consider some of the details between the details to make this a fun and memorable voyage.

It's very cool to go to all these established settings (most on the Material Plane, but there are forays into the Shadowfell via Ravenloft and I'm just starting a part that takes place in the Nine Hells) but the risk, I think, of having players pop up usually right at the front door to these dungeons is that they might feel disconnected from their broader worlds.

This is always a challenge - no campaign can fully encapsulate a world (though with the relatively light detail Ravnica gets, I think I've gotten a lot out of it in my 4+ year campaign). I do think that the Forgotten Realms chapters and the Greyhawk one could kinda sorta fit into nearly any world, but Eberron's feels very much of its setting (it takes place in the Mournlands and the dungeon is a giant Warforged Colossus) while the Ravenloft one actually takes you into a dungeon many players have already been to - Barovia's Death House (which serves as the optional starter dungeon in Curse of Strahd if you want players starting at level 1 instead of 3) but this time you're getting there at level 14, thus with much more serious threats.

Still, the links that take you from one chapter to the next are pretty obvious for the players, so even though you have this home base in Sigil, for most of the adventure not a lot happens there.

To be fair: there is plenty of stuff to do here. It's easy as a DM to always fill in stuff between the stuff you want to get to, but this can expand your campaign to take a very long time. If you want to be sure you can get through this whole thing, you might consider just running it as written.

Still, I think I'd be tempted to make use of the "not quite in the dungeon" parts of certain chapters to have some fun - for example, there's a little exploring to do in the Mournlands before you find the actual Colossus with the artifact you're looking for, and the Krynn section has a few lead-up quests before you actually reach the big dungeon. These seem like places you could expand into.

Confession: other than a single dubiously-legal Adventurer's League module, I've never run an adventure I didn't come up with myself. So take everything I say here with a grain of salt. But in those published adventures that I've played (or seen played - my best friend has a streaming show where they're in theory going to run through all the published adventures, though they're only finishing up Lost Mines of Phandelver after like a year, so don't hold your breath for them to get to this one) I've always appreciated when DMs add or alter adventures to play into player character backstories and the like.

Given how world-hopping this one is, I'd definitely encourage players to consider making characters from very diverse backgrounds - not just those from the Forgotten Realms - and thread in personal quests to this overall challenge.

One element that's a little surprising is that Vecna, as a presence, is not seen or heard of very much. Local heavies, like Strahd, the Lord of Blades, Lord Soth, or Acererak pop up as thematic figures (though of these you only directly interact with and fight Strahd). Now, the guy is the Whispered One, and so I think it's reasonable to imagine that he'd be pretty good at keeping out of the spotlight. But I think it'd be important to periodically remind the players who the real villain is here.

Vecna, after all, is effectively D&D's biggest bad. While I don't think presenting him as a big enough threat to make some of the game's other major villains want to team up with the party is quite the way to go, I think it would be cool to kind of see how even legends like Strahd and Lord Soth are small potatoes compared to him.

You don't want Vecna showing up constantly like a cartoon villain, but having a sense of paranoia that his spies are everywhere could be fun.

First Impressions of Vecna: Eve of Ruin

 Vecna: Eve of Ruin is the latest published adventure/campaign for 5th Edition D&D. It's both a 50th anniversary event for the game as a whole and the 10th anniversary thing for 5th Edition.

It's also only the second published adventure to take players all the way to level 20, focusing on stopping a plot by Vecna the Archlich, arguably D&D's most storied and infamous big bad, from utterly remaking all of reality in his image.

Structurally, the campaign takes you through various locations across different campaign settings as a kind of tour of the greatest hits - mainly of places touched on in 5th Edition, though with one of its chapters taking place in Greyhawk, which only got sort of looked at in Ghosts of Saltmarsh.

The campaign uses a classic trope of "plot coupons," where you spend most of it assembling the Rod of Seven Parts in an attempt to disrupt Vecna's plans. That rod conveniently has, you know, seven parts, and thus you go on seven little mini-adventures (each of which I'd expect to take 2-4 sessions, depending on how RP-heavy your group is - some Adventurer's League power gamers might clear these in a single session).

There's a conceit that has you pretty rapidly showing up at the front door of the dungeons where these mini-adventure take place, so while I don't think this would be a quick and easy adventure, I'd be tempted as a DM to maybe draw these chapters out a little. The risk, of course, of hitting all of these locations so rapidly is that you don't get the chance to really sense their uniqueness. Granted, the chapters I've read were a starting "inciting incident" adventure set in Neverwinter, and then another Forgotten Realms-set adventure in the Underdark (in a Lolth cult hideout) followed by a wrecked Spelljammer vessel on the Astral Sea and in the body of the dead god that the ship had crashed into. I'm just starting the next chapter, set in Eberron, so we'll see how that does at really distinguishing its feel (having skimmed ahead, there's lots of Warforged).

Going to all these different settings, you also get a pretty big rogues' gallery, with major villains popping up and often able to be fought - though the appendix with the stat blocks for these folks also includes some descriptions for villains who show up, but that you don't actually fight (and thus don't have stat blocks).

One of the major themes of the story is secrets - Vecna is a God of Secrets, after all - and so there's a mechanic by which learning secrets in your adventures lets you use them as a tangible resource.

There's also a clever twist in the story that, obviously, from a DM's perspective, is spoiled instantly so that you can account for the secret the players are not aware of.

In terms of plunderability, there are obviously stat blocks for some big heavies of D&D lore, as well as some heroic/good (or at least neutral) characters. As far as I can tell there are not a lot of unique magic items.

Still, I think it's interesting to get this adventure that starts at level 10 - the book gives suggestions for how you could introduce new characters at this high level but also how to potentially integrate existing characters into the campaign - because several existing 5E adventures leave you around level 10 by the end, it even suggests having this as a follow-up (going from Curse of Strahd to this one could be interesting given that there's a chapter set in the Death House in Barovia that involves Strahd - might reinforce the idea of horror there that after all the effort to kill Strahd and escape, he's just back, and even the intro dungeon to CoS winds up having much more deadly threats).

Skipping ahead to the stat blocks, I noticed that Vecna's stats look very similar to the ones from the Vecna Dossier released a year or two ago (what is time?) I haven't checked the numbers to see if they're identical, but I was honestly a little surprised that he wasn't fully CR 30 - but he's also at the end of a dungeon that has multiple fights that seem pretty formidable.

I'm never good at just understanding how difficult an adventure is - when I'm planning my own stuff and carefully balancing encounters, I can usually get that sense, but with published adventures it's very easy to skim over "oh, that room has three Flameskulls" without really grokking that that means a barrage of Fireballs and monsters that will respawn after an hour.

I think you could complain that the adventure is somewhat fanservice-y, but I don't think they've made any effort to hide that intent.

Shadow of the Erdtree Story Trailer

 Elden Ring and its FromSoft forebears are not generally up-front with story. In a discussion with my best friend, who is not a fan of these games (he's attempted Bloodborne and Elden Ring, and while he got a little farther into the latter, he decided they were not for him, which is fair) we came to the conclusion that if we separate Story from Lore, Elden Ring and its ilk have perhaps thin stories (though not none) but tremendously rich lore.

For that reason, I think this might be more accurately a "lore" trailer. But it does have some intriguing elements.

Our first shot is visceral - we see a hand (possibly Miquella's?) grasping at what appears to be a handful of golden-blonde hairs from some sticky, bloody mass of flesh. A narrator speak of "the beginning," and a seduction and betrayal.

Blonde hair is, of course, linked to Marika. And hair color does seem important, because not all of Marika' children have it. Among the demigods (including those born from Radagon and Renalla) only Godwyn and Miquella have this golden hair. I find this curious. Godwyn's full brothers Mohg and Morgott were born Omens, and thus don't (I believe) have this blonde hair. Meanwhile, all the children of Radagon - both his with Renalla and his with Marika - have his signature red hair, except, it would seem, Miquella.

Radagon's red hair is, of course, a source of shame and/or consternation, as it would seem to link him with the hated fire giants (though whether this implies a direct descent from them, which is unlikely if Radagon was always just the male aspect of Marika, or if it's a curse brought on by his treatment of them, which is also somewhat tricky as Radagon doesn't really show up in the stories until the Liurnian Wars, is up for debate).

Anyway, we know that Godwyn was only one of many demigods to be slain in the Night of Black Knives, which includes those interred in the Wandering Mausoleums. Could this pile of dead bodies all be Marika's children? Is the golden hair perhaps taken from one of her "pure" offspring?

Continuing, the figure (again, likely but not unquestionably Miquella) steps through a giant gateway made of piled flesh (honestly getting Diablo vibes here) holds the hairs up, which seem to elongate and transform into the bent arc shape that is Marika's Great Rune (if this figure serves as the vertical line in it).

We're told of "an affair from which gold arose," continuing this idea of the seduction and betrayal. So, now, what affair might this be?

Well, of course, "affair" can simply mean some kind of sequence of events, but it also means more specifically a romantic/sexual liaison, often implying some act of infidelity. Marika, of course, has had multiple husbands, and Radagon's abandoning of Renalla in favor of Marika could be seen as some kind of affair (though weirder if Radagon was always Marika in the first place - in that case was she cheating on Godfrey with Renalla?)

The thing is, if it's an affair from which gold was born, that seems like it would come before all of this - Marika's reign, I think, was always "The Golden Order," though I could be wrong. I know that Radagon has come to represent the sort of prime proponent of the fundamentalist, kind of cerebral and scholarly version of the Golden Order that moves farther into the abstract, but I believe that even when Godfrey was Elden Lord, the regime was already called that.

Thus, it seems more likely that the birth of gold was the apotheosis of Marika - which makes sense given we've been told that the Land of Shadow is where she ascended to godhood. But is this affair just being used in the same way as the expression "current affairs?" Or is it some other act of infidelity?

The birth of gold also creates shadow - which is a pretty classic "light and darkness cannot exist without the other" idea.

We then move on to descriptions of a War Unseen, which has been left out of bards' songs and history books. The war is left out of history because it was a "purge without grace or honor." The use of grace here is interesting given how grace is a nearly tangible thing in the world of Elden Ring, with clear an practicable uses (and visual cues, like having gold in your eyes).

We see those marching wicker-man-like constructs that we've seen in other trailers, which seem to share some symbology with the Dung Eater's armor (the anthropomorphic sun, along with omen horns) which sure is curious. Messmer is seen overlooking the burning of some city and vast legion of soldiers, with a heavy, heavy implication that Messmer is the one who waged this war.

And we see the lion/dragon dancer attacking Messmer - presumably it's some kind of champion of the target of this purge, but we can also presume that Messmer emerged victorious from this confrontation.

In fact, the next shot seems to show a number of these dancers (which seem to be two or three people fighting in coordination) impaled on spears - presumably a cruel form of execution for intimidation's sake. And all of this is happening directly beneath the shadow tree, whose dripping golden sap also, you know, looks very much like Marika's rune.

And, in classic FromSoft seeming non sequitur, the narrator goes on to say "and so Kindly Miquella would abandon everything," showcasing several expressions of what is presumably Miquella's Great Rune.

Let's talk about this Great Rune. Mot of the Great Runes seem kind of... messy in various ways. They are, after all, made up of smaller characters to form the general shapes, and then you have what seems to be a bloom of rot in Malenia's, or the coil of a serpent in Rykard's. Even the "uncorrupted" Great Runes look a bit like micrography. But Miquella's looks like just pure lines forming the shape, which I find curious.

Miquella is said to have abandoned his "golden flesh," his "blinding strength," both over an image of classically golden demigod Miquella, but then cuts to a picture of purple-lit, falling St. Trina when it mentions "even his fate."

The narrator then uses the first person, saying "we are not deterred," saying "we choose to follow," and inviting the player (presumably) to walk with them. We see several NPCs gathered by one of Miquella's runes, then title screen.

    So...

I'm not sure if there's a ton of new information here. Naturally I'm sure the YouTube community will find fifty details I didn't here.

My overall sense here is that the most obvious reading of what we're getting is that Messmer, at some point, led a kind of black ops wetworks to purge some faction within the Land of Shadow. The war is covered up because, while the acts performed were atrocious (literally) it still furthered the aims of the Golden Order.

The omen horns on the Lion Dancers might imply that this might have been some faction aligned with the earlier version of the Order, perhaps in the Crucible Era, when Omens were seen as blessings rather than curses. Messmer seems to be employing these giant iron wicker-man constructs, and their omen-horn decorations and the sun imagery that is so tied to the Dung Eater's armor might imply that the Dung Eater (or whomever he killed his armor for) might have been part of this purge. Naturally we see Omenkillers in the main game, who use omen horns on their weapons and masks as part of a grim intimidation tactic. I wonder if the Dung Eater armor was maybe from some earlier generation of genocidal hunters. The fact that Dung Eater wants to curse everyone into becoming Omens could even be some kind of weird mental rebellion - what if he was trained and conditioned to become a remorseless killer in order to serve Messmer's purge, but on some level he knew how wrong it all was, and concluded that the only way to make things right was to spread the Omen condition to everyone?

I do feel like these games always make you entertain really strange ideas, like "hey, maybe that psychopathic torturer and serial killer who wants the world to be consumed with endless despair is actually the good guy!"

Actually, now I want to get a better look at the armor Messmer's legion's wear.

Eh, upon closer inspection the armor looks more Roman in design. Still, I think the theory has legs.

Ultimately, I think the best we can do for now is to identify the elements at play here:

Messmer connects us to serpents (and through them probably the gladiators), dragon knights, and possibly Melina. We've got some of Dung Eater's symbology. We've got Miquella, and some images that relate to St. Trina. We've got omen horns and the notion of more animalistic figures.

I guess the really big question in all of this is: why Miquella? Why is he journeying here, and what might we find by following him? Is he truly as benevolent as his reputation holds him to be? What does it mean for him to have shed his flesh, his strength, and his fate?

The Surreal Experience of Playing Final Fantasy VII For the First Time Now

 Final Fantasy VII came out in 1997, the year I turned 11. It was Squaresoft's (not sure if they had merged with Enix yet) first foray into 3D graphics. For those of you too young to remember, the transition from the 16-bit era of the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis to the next generation, which brought the N64, the Sega Saturn, and the first PlayStation (the Xbox would come later as a contemporary of the Nintendo Gamecube and PS2, and I guess technically the Sega Dreamcast) was enormous.

Flat, two-dimensional sprites were the norm in the 16-bit (and earlier) era, with only a few games (like Starfox) playing in true 3D. There were, of course, games like Donkey Kong Country, which used 3D modeling to create its characters and environment, but then essentially used those assets as the basis for 2D sprites.

But this 32-bit era (I've never quite been able to figure out if the N64 was actually 64-bit or if that was marketing - by the time the "128-bit" era came about we stopped using bits to name console generations) was the first in which the use of 3D graphics really came to the fore. It's honestly the beginning of the era we're still in, graphically, but over the past 28 years the technology has evolved incredibly, which is how you get the dynamic lighting, extremely detailed worlds and characters you find today.

So, VII, being at the dawn age of that graphical era, is kind of "where we started." Square I think has always been ambitious with its graphics, and as a longtime Nintendo loyalist (though obviously I've now had three of the five extant Playstation consoles) it was always frustrating that they basically abandoned Nintendo - FFVII was originally being developed for the N64, but Square didn't think they could fit their game on the N64's cartridges, and wanted Nintendo to move to discs as a medium (also, kids, there was a time when CD-ROMs were the pinnacle of high-density portable data-storage!), something Nintendo did actually do the following generation, but by that time FFVII's "killer app" status on the original Playstation cemented a partnership that lasts to this day.

VII does something of a hybrid approach between Donkey Kong Country and true 3D - the environments are pre-rendered still images, which forces the camera to remain at a fixed perspective. The exception here is the battle scenes, which are fully rendered, along with the overworld map, both of which allow for the camera angle to sweep around.

Long ago, when I was a sophomore in college in either 2005 or 2006, I played my first Final Fantasy, FFX, and you can see that the overall concept was pretty similar for how battle would work - for certain special moves, the camera cuts in to a close-up of the monster or character doing their thing, creating a more dynamic visual experience than the classic fixed battle screens of previous titles.

Now, let's talk about the surrealness.

Final Fantasy VII Remake took what was a substantial but ultimately pretty quick chunk of the original game and expanded it into a modern days-long game experience. In Remake, for example, the Sector Seven Slums are something of a hub that you return to a couple times, getting side-quests an other side-areas. In the original, you only go to the Seventh Heaven bar once - between the attacks on the two Mako reactors.

Areas like this, and the Sector Five Slums where Aerith lives, are significantly smaller and not actually as similar in overall look and design as I'd assumed they would be. While Remake does make it clear that the buildings are largely constructed from scrap metal, they're still functionally rather sturdy-looking structures, whereas in the original conception it seems that there are a fair number of "buildings" that are little more than heaps of metal.

Likewise, certain sequences and areas in Remake were originally just single map screens - the collapsed freeway, for example, is just a single map where you'll have three or four encounters (mostly, it seems, with Hell Houses) and the Train Graveyard is likewise a quick and small section with no real "plot" to it other than it being a place to pass through.

There are fewer bosses, as well - there's no Jenova fight in the Shinra HQ, and the rough equivalent of the "Arsenal" fight is more like a pair of consecutive minibosses.

Plot-wise, there's clearly more time for subtlety and characterization in Remake, so characters like Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie aren't really given much in the way of dimensionality.

I think it's interesting to see here how the game was, in some ways, still essentially trying to depict a world and tell its story in a manner similar to the 16-bit era. At one point, Barret smacks Biggs for some reason and sends him flying at the screen - a move that feels very much at home in a 16-bit game (like a point in V when Bartz and Krile smack each other at the gates of Tycoon Castle) but playing with new capabilities (the fact that he comes at the screen).

Given that my primary experience with this story and these characters has been a fully modern game with more modern sensibilities (though still a crazy batshit fever dream) it's kind of fascinating to be reminded that this game is only three years removed from FFVI, and to see how similar it was.

One thing I do find kind of interesting is how the game seems poised to have its characters play more similarly to one another than those in VI did. Obviously, in the Remake trilogy, the "live" gameplay is distinct between Barret's Overcharges, Tifa's various martial arts moves, and Cloud's Operator/Punisher modes, but beyond that they also have all their unique skills. Here, it seems that every character is basically just a basic attack and any materia they have access to, the only unique thing being their Limit Breaks, which do feel like a more regular part of gameplay than they do in the Remakes.

Anyway, as of today (after I started writing this post) I've played through the Nibelheim flashback scene in Kalm. So far the beats of the game are pretty similar, though I think it's interesting that you never see Sephiroth in Midgar - the first glimpse we get of him in the game is on the truck to Nibelheim, when he seems like a pretty chill dude.

Rebirth, I think, gives bigger hints that Cloud's story is skewed, and that the unnamed Shinra trooper is actually him. I'm curious to see the full explanation, because I remember my best friend, who had played the game when it was new, having a rather extreme explanation of what Cloud technically was, but I think that was his youthful misunderstanding.

VII Up

 We're officially past the Pixel Remasters, and as such, an hour into the original Final Fantasy VII has required an adjustment from the homogenized UI that the recent recreations of the first six games in the series provided.

Despite the N64/PS1 era being pretty foundational for me as a gamer (I got my first console, an SNES, in 5th grade, and my second, an N64, in 6th, so the two consoles more or less overlapped for me) I will say that I feel less of a nostalgic connection to those earliest of 3D graphics. So, playing through the fixed-camera environments of Midgar so far has felt mixed. I've seen these places recreated 23 years later with Final Fantasy VII Remake, and they look damned good in that 2020 release.

I suppose there's a bit of a nostalgic connection I feel to the grimy industrial pre-rendered (but still unimpressive by standards that are now like 15 years old) 3D environments with much simpler polygonal characters going through them. It's funny because I think that grimy, grungey look was A: likely so popular at the time because it was easier to render light scattering off of shiny metal in the early days of computer graphics and B: also liable to make me kind of depressed as a kid, but now, paradoxically, as something that was popular at a time of innocence and safety (for those younger millennials and Gen Zers, the 1990s was a time that, at least for a straight white kid in an affluent suburb, was decidedly less anxiety-ridden).

Anyway, being familiar with the story, but getting a somewhat simpler version of it compared to the fleshed-out version seen in Remake, is kind of interesting. I think Remake really drew out, for example, the second reactor mission (which ends with the Airbuster and Cloud joining up with Aerith) with an entire chapter prior to that mission in which you visit Jesse's family to steal her father's keycard. Here, it looks like we're going straight there.

I'm curious to see how long it will take for me to get out of Midgar - I don't remember what my total playtime on Remake was before I beat the game, but Rebirth I think I beat a little past the 100-hour mark.

It's also interesting to see that Materia doesn't work precisely like it does in the Remake games - there seem to be more passive bonuses - and penalties - involved, like "Restore" materia, which grants Cure, etc., also reduces your Strength and Max HP while increasing your Magic and Max MP.

Anyway, I think I'll have to get through a fair amount of the game before I get any truly new story content, but it's interesting to see how the various beats of the Remake originated.

VI Down...

 So, I made a mistake.

In my last-minute clean-up of Final Fantasy VI before going to the final dungeon, I revisited Darill's Tomb and, with a bunch of monsters I profoundly out-leveled, turned off encounters.

Thus, only after finishing the game did it occur to me that Kefka's Tower might not be unique in not having any non-boss enemies, but that I had simply forgotten to turn encounters back on.

Thus, while I feel that, difficulty-wise I don't think I would have been too affected, as I'm pretty diligent about healing up and restoring MP between fights, I did rob myself of the true experience of that dungeon.

Still, while I might go take my "you've beaten the game" save file and muck around in the dungeon if I can to just experience those fights, I did get the climactic ones. There are several bosses to be fought in Kefka's Tower, which are of course not skippable, including the final two legendary dragons needed to gain the Crusader Magicite, along with a couple other less plot-relevant bosses and then the three members of the Warring Triad followed by the big fight with Kefka himself.

For years now I've been familiar with this final fight, if not precisely all of the mechanics involved. Honestly, having Terra spam Ultima over and over did most of the work for me. Indeed, it felt like there wasn't much of a "trick" to it - just heal the party up and pump out damage. The only character I lost from my original lineup was Sabin, mainly because I beat the second or third phase of the fight before I had a chance to revive him (story-wise he survives, and I think Locke came in to take his place - actually both Locke and Cyan were down, I think, at the end of the fight). Terra, even without the Soul of Thamassa to grant her dual-casting, was the star of the show, doing I'm pretty sure the most damage and getting the killing blow on the mad clown god.

For those unfamiliar, and who don't care about spoiler for this 30-year-old game, the final fight with Kefka takes place over four phases, each of which have their own unique battle music.

It's not entirely clear to me if you're really fighting Kefka the whole time, or some elaborate animated sculpture (the targets are all Statue of the Gods A, B, C, etc.) The first phase has a big hulking demonic figure with two arms that can be separately targeted (though again, I mainly spammed Ultima, which hits all enemies). I believe the inspiration for these phases was Dante's Divine Comedy, so this first one is Inferno.

Next, the second phase, which has probably the most unhinged music (the title of the full suite is "Dancing Mad," but I don't know if this part of it has its own title). Here you have I think four statues of what look like tormented souls (one of which actually looks a bit like Terra). Similar to the Neo-Exdeath fight, downing a target doesn't remove it from the sprite, so it can be a little hard to tell what progress you've made, but I do think each of these will do a little revenge blast when they die that hits very hard.

The third phase is really interesting - there's a maternal goddess figure (very Virgin Mary-like) over a reclining image of Kefka (very Pieta-style imagery) and the music becomes some kind of heavenly, serene organ music. I kind of love the concept behind this, because it shows Kefka's blasphemous claim to godhood, with all the imagery here seemingly benevolent (and certainly coded that way if you're Christian). But the melody of the organ is actually a variation on part of Kefka's theme, which we've previously heard more as a sinister, minor-key musical element.

Finally, when this phase is finished, you encounter Kefka himself, and all the quasi-classical elements of the music shift into a driving prog-rock blast. Kefka has a scary ability that will set all the party members to 1 HP, though a swift Curaga on the party will let most if not all of them survive whatever comes next.

Following Kefka's defeat, there's a sort of faux-credits sequence where we get little vignettes of the various party members escaping the Tower of Kefka as it collapses. Most of these are played pretty light, and giving us one last fun moment with the characters we've grown fond of.

However, there is one moment that feels like it's played for laughs, where Gogo and Celes have to punch in some commands while synchronized, which Gogo is obviously well-suited toward, and then Gogo falls in a pit and... I guess they die?

Played more tragically, Shadow decides to stay in the vast heaps of rubble, chasing Interceptor off (the dog, I assume is fine). I think I missed one of his backstory dreams (which you can get just by sleeping at inns with him in the active party - and with the mercy of the RNG gods) but I'm given to understand that there's no sidequest that will prevent this end for him - presumably dying in the tower's collapse. Furthermore, I've read online that Shadow/Clyde is actually Relm's father, but beyond Interceptor's affinity for the girl, I didn't see any clear hint at that, but it would make his death all the more tragic (I mean, that Relm doesn't even find out?)

The other source of tension in all of this is that, with the Warring Triad and Kefka dead, magic in the world is going away, including all of the Magicite (man, and I just got Crusader!) This also means the Espers, and with Terra as a half-esper, no one knows what is going to happen to her.

Well, good news: though she loses her Trance form while guiding the Falcon out of the canyons of detritus, they do catch her and she merely becomes fully human. In a bit of fun 16-bit animation, one of the last images we get is of Terra untying her ponytail and letting her glorious green hair blow in the wind, while the Falcon tours the world, seeing people rebuilding and recovering from the ruin Kefka wrought upon the land.

Naturally, I feel dumb and like I cheated myself for having accidentally missed the non-boss encounters from the final dungeon (I was meeting family in the evening, so it's likely I wouldn't have finished the game this afternoon if I hadn't made this mistake) but I still think I can reasonably say that I've experienced Final Fantasy VI.

I think that, given that I knew I would be biased toward it thanks to my greater familiarity with it (as opposed to just about all the preceding games - I think I knew "there's that one where you start off as a dark knight and then become a paladin") I've been trying to sort of temper my overall impression of the game, but let's just stop beating around the bush: this is the best of the pre-3D Final Fantasy games by a pretty wide margin. I really liked IV and V, don't get me wrong. But there's just so much more originality and creativity on display here.

Now, this does mean the end of my big Final Fantasy gaming project (at least once I fight some trash mobs in the Tower of Kefka) but I'm inclined to keep this rolling. I'll probably be getting Final Fantasy VII's latest port to play the original version of that game. The VII Remake games have genuinely been among my favorite video games (I've played a lot of games, so I don't know if I can confidently put them in my top 10 or even 20, but top 50 feels safe). Given my best friend's deep, lifelong (well, he was 9 when it came out) love of FFVI, I feel almost worried that I'll dare like VII better, but I think the general consensus is that the two of them occupy places 1 and 2 on the ranking (and it's up to you to decide which goes where).

I think there are more posts to be written about the lasting influence of Final Fantasy VI on not just the series, but also game storytelling in general. But I'm tired, so we'll call it here.

Second or Third-Hand Info from the Game Informer Article About What I'm Just Going to Start Calling the 5.5E Core Books

 So, I'm cheap and try to avoid subscribing to too many things (I probably should subscribe to Dropout at this point, but oh well) so I don't have the text of the recent Game Informer article, which I believe is behind a paywall, but which gives a preview to the upcoming D&D core rulebooks.

Generally I've been referring to these as the 2024 Core Rulebooks, but as we learned a few months ago, the Monster Manual won't be coming out until next year. Still, between Flee, Mortals!, recent monster books like Bigby's, the quite expansive Monsters of the Multiverse, and other sources, I think I can manage to wait. The Player's Handbook is obviously the most exciting thing, and that one comes first.

But there's goodies in all of the books.

All three books will be massive tomes - each weighing in at 384 pages (I'm certain this was no coincidence - we saw that with the Spelljammer set all three books in that were 64 pages, even if at least one of them really deserved to be about four or five times as long. 384 I think is plenty even for such foundational books - I believe this is longer than any of the 2014 releases).

But now let's talk about the highlights from each book:

    Player's Handbook:

A lot of the changes to classes and species (the new name for Race - a somewhat clinical but certainly precise term that I think wisely sheds the baggage of "race" as a term) I've already gone over here in this blog, but we do get some confirmations: the Goliath and Orc are both being added to the core list of choices, along with the Aasimar, which was not named in the playtest. Early on, they were experimenting with animal-headed humanoids called Ardlings to be the Upper Planar equivalents of the Lower-Planar Tieflings (riffing on established Celestials like Guardinals and Hound Archons) but the Aasimar were clearly just sitting there as the more obvious counterpart. I believe the plan is still to remove Half-Orcs and Half-Elves, instead allowing characters with mixed heritage to simply choose one species to represent them mechanically (and thus no longer privileging human/elf and human/orc hybrids). In other words, Half-Elves and Half-Orcs can still be part of your game worlds and options for your players, but you can also have, say, a half-dwarf/half-Halfling or a Tiefling/Goliath or an Orc/Gnome - you just pick which species' traits you closer embody (though I did create a character backstory for an Aasimar with a Tiefling wife whose children are just ordinary humans).

Each of the 12 core classes (sorry Artificers) will be present, each getting one big full-page piece of art to depict the class broadly, and then each class gets four subclasses (and upgrade for all but the Cleric and Wizard) that each have their own illustration, meaning 60 pieces of art for all the classes and subclasses. I don't know if we have the finalized list of subclasses, but there are some brand-new ones like the World Tree Barbarian, College of Dance Bard, and Circle of the Sea Druid.

Setting-wise, the PHB is going to be agnostic, intending not to favor one setting (such as the Forgotten Realms) over another, but will still have references to established settings like the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Spelljammer, Planescape, and perhaps others.

The book no longer begins with character creation (though I think that will be toward the front) and instead has an extensive chapter of sample play and basic rules explanations. There will be a rules glossary that includes clear explanations of things like cover, jumping, and other things that one often finds hard to find in the 2014 PHB. One thing of note for those poor neglected artificers is that there will be a section here on crafting, with specific nods to making potions and spell scrolls, as well as specific uses for tools.

Evidently art is a big part of the book, as additionally every weapon type is going to get its own depiction (probably useful to show how a Halberd is different from a Glaive) and the Weapon Mastery will also be making it in there (which didn't seem to be at risk, but still good to confirm it - also, it finally makes a clear distinction between Glaives and Halberds mechanically!). There will also apparently be a lot of art depicting spells being cast, including a lot of the characters who created such spells, like Tasha casting her Hideous Laughter.

    Dungeon Master's Guide

The DMG is always the core book that has to work to justify itself - frankly I think that it was useful when I first started running the game, but the new one is intended to have much clearer uses, including, shockingly, a chapter about literally what you need to do to run this game.

Here, while the book will give guidance on creating settings and does not push you to embrace a particular established setting, they provide Greyhawk as the template upon which to build a campaign setting (the argument being that it's a world that's a little less fleshed out than, say, Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance, and thus easier for DMs to create their own stuff for it).

The DMG will also include a "Lore Glossary" like the PHB's Rules Glossary, giving you information about various notable proper nouns from D&D lore.

The Bastions system appears in the new DMG as an optional set of rules governing the player characters' home bases, which is intended to give players a bit of their own world-building opportunities and something to care about back home.

I haven't seen any mention of it, but personally I hope we get an updated and revised Dungeon Master's Workshop chapter, because I've had great success in implementing its monster-creation rules in building my own creatures that don't totally fit with published ones (for some reason my latest obsession has been with malevolent ambulatory vending machines as a low-level enemy in some surreal modern-set campaign).

I'm eager to see how it's written and set up, because it would be cool if it were the book a DM has behind their screen that serves as a useful reference for more than just magic items.

    Monster Manual:

Well, the big thing is just more stat blocks. But what I find encouraging is their approach to monster families.

They mentioned that they're aware of how certain monsters that only have one or two associated stat blocks (Vampires, for example - which we'll get to in a moment) can sometimes feel hard to use because there's a good chance your players are too low-level to deal with them and could just get squashed, or they're high-enough level that they can't really pose a threat. So, they're taking some of these iconic monsters and expanding their families. Vampires were used as an example: for low-level players, they have some kind of nascent vampire, kind of a humanoid still in the process of becoming one, who could serve as an appropriate challenge for players who aren't ready to deal with the real thing. But then, for high-level players who could wipe the floor with the standard Vampire in the 2014 MM, there are things called I believe Nightbringers, who are like super-vampires and far scarier.

It does look like big, high-CR monsters are definitely something they're looking at here - among those mentioned are Archhags, elemental juggernauts, construct colossi, and something called the Blob of Annihilation, which is a Gelatinous Cube big enough to eat a whole town.

It also looks like various types of NPCs - pirates, wizards, bandits, etc., - are getting more fleshed-out families, which as I understand it means that you'll be able to use them in bigger level ranges. The game does start to run short of humanoid adversaries at high CRs, so this sounds very welcome.

    General Thoughts:

I think WotC earned a lot of ill will at the start of last year with the whole OGL crisis, and paradoxically, the massive success of 5th Edition starting in 2014 has, I think, made a lot of people resistant to a revision of the game. But having gone through all the playtests and surveys, and seeing their approach to the game, I think most people who get their hands on the new books are going to probably be happier with the way the game plays and feels than they are now - which is saying something.

Now, what I'm curious to see is the degree to which the books support creativity. The core rulebooks of 5th Edition led me to the creation of what is probably the most extensively fleshed-out fantasy world I've ever conceived. It's perhaps not as original as my Otherworld setting, but knowing that I could have players delving into the deep history and strata of archaeology and magical agendas pushed me to come up with some ideas I think are really cool.

The great thing about D&D and tabletop RPGs in general, in my opinion, is the degree to which players can create and invent things. Indeed, I've been toying with this idea of creating a campaign on an "Endless Horizon" world, where players don't just come up with their own character's backstory, but an entire land and country that they've come from, all in a world that remains mysterious and unexplored from the players' characters' perspective. But even running in an established (albeit primarily established in a different game) setting like Ravnica, the degree to which I've created my own history and lore for that world has been an absolute joy (the players spent about five or six sessions in Agryem, Ravnica's land of the dead that was, for a time, just another neighborhood in the city-world, and I had a ton of fun turning it into a surreal shadow-realm utterly unsuited for living people to be there).

Something I worry about in terms of the direction that the game has gone has been a push toward doing things "their way," and stuff like the Planescape set feeling like it was mostly there to provide material for the packaged adventure (while it was far more substantial than the Spelljammer set, I really wish they would go back to the style of campaign setting book we got with Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, which felt much more focused on inspiring DMs to come up with their own stories and ideas).

So again, I think it would be utterly tragic if there were not a revised version of the guidance on creating monsters and other such things. I'm happy to see Pistols and Muskets included in the PHB (for someone who abhors guns in real life, I really like having them in my fantasy games - blame Stephen King's Dark Tower series, I guess) but I hope we'll also see modern and futuristic weapons again in the new DMG, as we did in the 2014 one.

We are still a ways off from the releases here, but I am hyped to get my hands on them (and while I hope I can do this in a way that cuts in my local game store, these might be a physical/digital bundle because there's no way I don't want to have access to at least the PHB on D&D Beyond).