New UA Brings Another Revised Artificer, Cartographer Subclass, and Dragonmark Feats

 Now that the book has actually been announced, WotC doesn't have to play coy about the fact that we're getting an additional Eberron supplement later this year. While I'm super-curious about the airship combat rules coming in it (evidently built on the bones of the Infernal War Machines from Descent into Avernus, which seemed like the most robust vehicle combat rules we'd gotten - though my DM seemed pretty uninterested in running them, so we only had one such fight) I'm also a big fan of the Artificer as a class, and eager to see a version of it that fits in with the updates we've gotten to the other classes. As far as Eberron specifically, I've never played a game set there (which, to be fair, is also true of Greyhawk and Dragonlance and many others).

    Artificer General:

Largely this is similar to the previous UA. Highlights include infusions being replaced with just "replicate magic item," which allows you to just manifest an item without needing the mundane base for it - something that means an Artificer can get early access to expensive armors like Plate and Half-Plate as early as level 2 (which sort of makes up for only getting Studded Leather, and no option for Scale Mail, at creation) and just overall simplifies the process. With no second look at the Armorer, there's no official word on whether their special, built-in weapons can be made in +1, Radiant, etc. versions.

One nerf here is that only Wands and Weapons created via Replicate Magic Item can be used as a spell focus, rather than just any infused/replicated item. In fairness, I think this probably won't really make too much of a problem (and as a DM, I let our Artillerist use their +2 All-Purpose Tool as an Arcane Firearm, even if that's not strictly kosher).

Another nerf is that the number of plans you can learn has been cut by 33% - you can still replicate 2 to start and 6 eventually, as in the current version, but you only learn up to 8 plans by level 18, down from 12 (the current version lets you learn twice as many plans as you can infuse).

The new Soul of Artifice, likewise, I think, is a pale imitation of the old one - I get that a +6 to all saving throws might have been a lot, but it was cool.

Frankly, even if the replicate armor thing lets me cheat out an AC 20 (or 21) Armorer right at level 3, I'm currently not feeling like this version of the class is giving me much I didn't get in the 2019 version, and is mostly taking things away. Maybe I'm missing something here?

    Cartographer Subclass:

Now, I love genre-bending and putting technology in my fantasy worlds. I love that steampunk aesthetic, I love putting futuristic science-fantasy stuff up next to gothic castles, ancient temples, and medieval knights. But I also get that there are some who feel that such "anachronisms" (whatever that means in a world with a fictional history) take them out of the game, and, you know, who am I to tell them no? (Hypothetically, their DM, but my players never seem to complain when I do my genre-bending stuff.)

However, I do think it's notable that this joins the Alchemist as the only other Artificer subclass that I don't think clashes in any way with a pre-industrial fantasy world.

Unfortunately, I also think it joins the Alchemist as among the most underpowered.

Now, to be clear, the Cartographer has some very powerful abilities. And I think that they stand a chance at being really good at certain challenges, especially exploration-based challenges. But in a combat role, they are, like the Artillerist and Alchemist, limited primarily to spellcasting, but unlike those two, they don't get any boost at level 5 to make up for the fact that they're probably casting mainly cantrips.

A Cartographer is definitely set up to be more of a support player, and I think where I might be underestimating it is its capacity for teleportation and movement. But let's look at their actual features:

Cartographer Spells:

As with all other artificers, you get free spells automatically prepared per spell level that you can cast:

1st: Faerie Fire, Guiding Bolt, Healing Word

2nd: Locate Object, Mind Spike

3rd: Clairvoyance, Haste

4th: Freedom of Movement, Locate Creature

5th: Scrying, Teleportation Circle

    There are some decent spells in here, with a pretty clear theme of movement and divination. This is very utility-focused, though I think these guys could have a niche of being very good at fighting sneaky foes who can dip into hiding. An enemy NPC will have a hard time keeping a Cartographer off its trail. Again, we're looking at a subclass that has a ton of exploration benefits.

Level 3:

As with all artificer subclasses, Cartographers get tool proficiencies, in this case in both Calligrapher's Supplies and in Cartographer's Tools (the latter being a no-brainer, of course) with the usual caveat that you can take a different tool if you have one of these already (RAW I don't know if this means that if you already have both, you only get one, but whatever).

And, as the updated subclasses tend to, you also get a boost to crafting a particular kind of item, in this case halving the time it takes you to create spell scrolls.

Adventurer's Atlas is one of the subclass' core features: at the en dof a Long Rest, while holding your Cartographer's Tools, you can create a set of magical maps by touching at least two creatures, up to a maximum of 1+ your Int modifier, and give a map to each of those creatures. The map is illegible to others, and lasts until you die or use the feature again. These provide two benefits: first, "awareness," they add 1d4 to initiative rolls, and then "positioning," which allows the target to know the location of all other map holders on the same plane of existence as itself, and if a spell requires them to see a target, they can target the other map-holder even if they're fully obscured, as long as they're still within range of the spell.

    I think that 95% of the time, you'll mainly be thankful for the initiative boost here. The positioning benefit will only rarely be helpful, but when it is, it'll be quite good. This is also a feature that the subclass builds on (which is a good aspect of subclass design,) so we'll be checking in with it again.

Scouting Gadgets gives two benefits. "Boost" allows you to expend half your movement (likely 15 ft) to teleport to a space you can see within 10 feet of yourself, as long as your speed is not 0. "Radar" lets you cast Faerie Fire without expending a spell slot a number of times equal to your Int modifier (minimum 1) per long rest.

    Faerie Fire is great, and a good Artificer spell regardless, but Boost here is the real game-changer, and the main feature of this subclass that makes me wonder if I'm seriously underestimating it. Because you can teleport 10 feet, assuming your speed is the standard 30, you're really only sacrificing 5 feet of movement to potentially get past a locked gate, up a 10-foot wall, or escaping a monster's grapple, or avoiding opportunity attacks without spending any action. This is, frankly, really, really good. It's just a question of whether the rest of the subclass is decent enough for this feature's power to drag it all into the "good subclass" territory.

Level 5:

Portal Jump allows you to, as a bonus action, teleport up to 60 feet to an unoccupied space you can see. You can do this a number of times equal to your Int modifier (minimum 1) per long rest, or you can do so without expending a use if the destination space is within 5 feet of a creature carrying one of your Adventurer's Atlas maps, but this destroys their map.

    I have two conflicting feelings about this. On its own, this is a great feature. Like an Archfey Warlock's free Misty Steps, which I think is a great feature, this is actually better - it's not a spell, so can't get countered, and it goes twice as far. The free use of it is probably an emergency button, but it'll be a great way to get you to an ally who needs healing desperately.

    However, every other artificer gets some kind of damage boost at level 5. As the only half-caster for whom half (and with this, over half) of the subclasses don't then make you a martial class, being obligated to cast spells for the majority of your damage means that you ought to have some kind of benefit for your damage, and yet Cartographers get none.

Level 9:

Ingenious Movement improves your Flash of Genius. When you use it, you or a willing creature of your choice you can see (and remember that you can see the bearers of your maps if you have one) within 30 feet of yourself can teleport up to 30 feet to an unoccupied space as part of the same reaction. Notably, the target here need not be the one who receives the Flash.

    A reaction-speed teleport of a friend is, ok, pretty darn good. I'm trying to think of a scenario in which you'd really need to teleport someone who succeeded on their saving throw, but I guess in theory this could help them if they failed despite the Flash of Genius. Of course, it also just means that you're basically getting two things out of a reaction - maybe you help your Rogue turn that miss into a hit... while sliding the Barbarian into melee with the target so that they get sneak attack.

Level 15:

Superior Atlas improves your Adventurer's Atlas feature in a couple ways. "Safe Haven" allows a creature bearing a map, when they are reduced to 0 hit points and not killed outright, to destroy its map and be teleported to an unoccupied space within 5 feet of you or another map bearer, and become Stable. "Unerring Path" lets you cast Find the Path without expending a spell slot or needing spell components once per long rest. "Unshakeable Mind" prevents you from losing concentration on Artificer spells when any of your maps still exist.

    Getting Unerring Path out of the way, this feels a bit "ribbon"-y, just in the sense that that spell is... ok, but mostly just flavorful. However, consider the following: Safe Haven has no range restriction. Suppose a party member gets kidnapped, or even, for story reasons, goes into a dangerous situation on their own. Now, it's very unlikely that they'll be killed. And Unshakeable Mind... the only downside here is that if you took War Caster, it'll feel a bit redundant. But this is actually really good for high-level adventures where you might take 60 damage from a dragon's breath and have no way of making the Con save to keep your Bigby's Hand active.

    So, overall, I'm deeply mixed on the Cartographer: in situations where you need unrestricted movement and the ability to track down creatures or objects, this is going to be very good at that. But I do feel like in a straightforward fight against a group of monsters, your power level is going to be falling behind other Artificers - even the Alchemist.

Magic Items:

As in the last UA, we saw all the unique artificer infusions turned into magic items in their own right. This continues, but we have one addition, the Manifold Tool. This kind of brings back "Right Tool for the Job" and a bit of the All-Purpose Tool. It does require attunement, so you have to pay a price to basically have proficiency in all tools.

Feats:

A Ton of new Dragonmark-themed feats have been introduced, so I won't go into all of them. These come in three varieties: Dragonmarks (a new category of feat,) General Feats, and a single Epic Boon.

I'm not entirely clear on what the rules around a Dragonmark are - they each come with a rider that says that you must be in an Eberron campaign and you can't have another Dragonmark, but I don't know if this can be an Origin Feat for you or if it needs to be taken at level 4 or one of the other feat-levels. These do not come with an ability score bonus, and given that this would be kind of replacing sub-species or variant species options, I'd kind of assume you can take them in place of an Origin Feat, but I don't see any guidance on that.

There are Greater Marks of each of the normal Dragonmark feats, which are all General Feats (with an ability score boost) that then improve the power of that Dragonmark.

The single Epic Boon is Boon of Siberys, which gives you the typical "max 30 ability boost" as well as letting you pick any Sorcerer spell, or specific ones from a list (which are all 7th- or 8th-level spells). Frankly, unless you already have it, I feel like Wish is going to be hard to turn down, as it can literally cast any of these spells. You can cast the spell once per Short or Long rest, and you can choose between Int, Wis, or Cha for the spellcasting ability.

    This is obviously great. I mean, again, how would you not just take Wish? But with the only prerequisite being that you are playing in Eberron, being an Artificer - or, hell, a Monk - who can cast Wish is pretty awesome. Actually, this is too powerful. There's no limit on the number of short rests you can take during a day (Ok, I guess technically 24) and so you could do utterly insane things with this. I think if you forced the player to pick one of these specific spells (True Seeing, Teleport, Animal Shapes, Regenerate, Heroes' Feast, Demiplane, Plane Shift, Symbol, Mind Blank, Project Image, Control Weather, and Maze) it would be far more manageable.

All right then! It's fun that we've got a quicker cadence of UAs coming out after a pretty enormous dry spell during the rollout of the 2024 core books. While I've never played or run an adventure there, I do really like Eberron as a setting - it does a good job of answering "why play here rather than the Forgotten Realms," which is my main standard for campaign settings. My homebrew world shares some DNA with Eberron (mainly the technology) and so I'm really eager to see how the updated artificer shakes out and I'm super-pumped for the airship combat system (which could likely be adapted for Spelljammer to actually give us the ship-to-ship combat we 100% should have gotten in that set).

Undermine Reminds Me of Why I Love Azeroth So Much

 On its surface, Warcraft as a franchise is classic fantasy. The original games pitted Warhammer-esque orcs against humans who live in a city that looks like a big fairytale castle all made of white stone.

But as the series evolved, the setting got weirder and weirder. It's honestly, I'd say, more of a science-fantasy game than classic high fantasy, but rather than going into space (though I'd say that our trips to Outland and Argus for sure qualify as straight-up Star Wars-style sci-fan) we mostly remain on a planet that has a little bit of every genre.

Gnomes and Goblins have always been kind of comic relief - even if goblins didn't become a playable race until Cataclysm, they were always kind of positioned as the two "small, silly, weirdly technologically-advanced" races for each faction. Setting aside that the Draenei clearly have far more futuristic technology, these guys - and I think the goblins honestly more than the gnomes - really hit that wonderful sweet spot of a kind of modern/modernish technology level in our world that still has knights and dragons and such.

Cataclysm allowed players to glimpse the island of Kezan, where the goblins are originally from, but only as a prologue (actually a prologue to a prologue, given the Lost Isles) from which we were forced to flee around level 5, never to return. But this was in Bilgewater Harbor, meaning we never got to see the previously-mentioned goblin capital, Undermine.

Until now.

And it does not disappoint.

Undermine is the industrial-pollution-filled capitalist hellscape that we always thought it should be, a kind of vaguely 20s/30s (I guess I should specify the 1920s, given that we're halfway through the subsequent "'20s" decade already... guys, I was born in the 20th century, which is starting to make me seem old) aesthetic coupled with the goblins' signature jury-rigged look and feel, where you get the impression that everything here was made out of junk that the goblins were able to find for cheap.

The music does a massive job in really establishing the tone, giving us hints of noir, though far too silly to be actually noir-ish, perhaps more broadly just kind of classic American crime fiction, with the city operating basically like it's run by the mob, which it sort of is.

Also, after a full fifteen years having to deal with Jastor Gallywix, it looks like that douchebag's number will finally be up when we fight him as the raid's final boss.

Actually...

Boy it feels kind of apt to have this bloated bully who everyone freaking hates somehow return to a position of power after we thought we had finally gotten rid of him, and one whose earlier oafish incompetence is now more closely aligned with a true, profoundly dark evil that could be the end of us all.

I don't know. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Anyway, goblins have been part of Warcraft since WCII, and it's fun to get a moment to really see them in the spotlight, to flesh out how their society works. I never thought I'd find myself allied with members of the Venture Company, but here we are!

Dungeon Pacing in 2024 D&D

 I'll confess: in the time between when I got the original 5th Edition core rulebooks and when I got the 2024 ones, I didn't really spend much time reading the DMG.

There was guidance in the 2014 DMG about encounter-building and the "adventuring day," with suggestions on how much xp's worth of monsters a party might fight by level. But I was so frustrated with the far-too-conservative encounter-building rules (where you more or less had to throw harder-than-deadly encounters at a party to challenge them) that I kind of bounced off of it.

I've been running a fairly large dungeon (the party seems to think they're near the end of it, but they're really hitting the halfway point - I did have an NPC explicitly tell them not to try to clear the whole thing in a day, so they're sucking on fumes and hoping to fight the final boss soon while I know they've got four encounters to go before the 2-part boss fight - it's cool though, as this will become a cool moment where I can have them realize that the boss wants them to keep pushing through).

This was the first adventure I built using the 2024 DMG's encounter-building rules. But one thing that is missing from the 2024 DMG that is honestly a big oversight is that "adventuring day" guidance.

D&D, of course, the way a lot of people play it these days, is less the slow dungeon crawl that it used to be. My introduction to the game was the many Acquisitions Incorporated games at various PAX conventions, having been a fan of Penny Arcane already. Because of the one-shot nature of these games, though, they were basically all built around a single big fight, which Chris Perkins would have to get the party into within their couple-hour session and then, I think, probably often had to fudge monsters' HP in order to make sure they were out in time.

This structure is fun, but often fights like this can feel too easy, because if the party has all of its resources to burn, they can "nova" and take down your cool monsters before you get to do their cool things.

But if we want to pace things out so that the party can't always just nova down what you throw at them, what is the right number of encounters?

Now, again, my dungeon is designed to have no ticking clock - the party can venture forth and retreat with few consequences. I'd initially intended for there to be minor (as in, trivial-difficulty, like 11,800 xp when a low-difficulty encounter for this party has a 27,000 xp budget) combat encounters (and probably an opportunity to treat them as social encounters) in previously-cleared rooms if the party needs to retreat to rest, but I'm almost wondering if I shouldn't even do that, because of both the time it takes to run these encounters and the quite-significant drain on their resources.

As I talked about in a previous post, the new encounter-building guidance is significantly deadlier than earlier systems (I'd say most of my DM'ing career I was using the Xanathar's system). But not only are encounters of all difficulties quite tougher than before, but I also think we need to consider pacing.

Perhaps foolishly, I built the current dungeon using the Flee, Mortals! guidance for daily encounters, which uses a system of "encounter points" of which you have 6 or 8 (depending on how tough you want the day to be) and each difficulty of encounter is worth a certain number of points: 1 for easy, 2 for standard, 4 for hard, and 8 for extreme. So, if you want a hard encounter, you'll have a smaller budget for lead-up encounters.

Where I think I erred was that I built this dungeon using that system for its "encounters per day" but using the 2024 DMG's system for actually building encounters.

To give an example, my party just fought an encounter using the Star-Spawn of Cthulhu from Tome of Beasts along with five Skeletal Knights from Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen. The Star-Spawn (oddly a fiend rather than an aberration,) is CR 15, worth 13,000 xp (just under half of our total budget). The Skeletal Knights are CR 7, worth 2900 xp apiece, so they add up to 14,500, meaning that our total expended budget was 27,500 - barely above the target xp total (and I have a party decked with powerful magic items).

But let me take a look at what this would be if we had used the FM! encounter-building rules. It was budgeted for 6 17th-level players, and is meant to be an easy difficulty fight. That means that with each player adding 7 to the total CR budget, it should have been a total CR of 42. Our actual total was 50, so an 8-CR difference, which is not nothing.

Now, there are other factors at play: one thing that is always kind of a question is how to let the party strategize around how much they have ahead of themselves. Blowing a big spell on an early combat encounter can feel like you're losing something you wanted for the big boss, but if it means clearing out (or crowd-controlling) a bunch of enemies that might have taken significant chunks of HP out of the party, it might be worth it. (Actually, two of the skeletal knights were basically taken out of the fight with the old classic, Turn Undead.) However, because the players don't actually know how many encounters they're going to have, they need to kind of guess at how much they can afford to let out of the tank.

And I wonder if there's a way to telegraph that. The dungeon they're in is one of the departments within Duskmantle, the guildhall of House Dimir, which is Ravnica's super-secretive, kind of "dark conspiracy guild." And thus, deception and misdirection are kind of central to what is going on here. I've been building up the "Analysis Leadership Council Conference Room" as the likely final boss room, but in fact, there's not even going to be a fight there, and instead the room will have a secret spatial anomaly that signals where the dungeon gets well and truly weird (they literally noclip out of reality and have to navigate the Backrooms, like from the internet memes - though in fairness, they're only sort of in reality in the first place, as I invented a Feywild-like "Mirror Quarter" where I placed Duskmantle, which doesn't have a canonical location - I think my players might be surprised to find out how much of their Ravnica I've fully invented myself).

There is always kind of a tension in D&D - optimally, every time you have a combat encounter, you retreat for the day and take a long rest. But that both feels weird stakes-wise and forces a DM to make every fight insane. And yet, especially for a deadly dungeon, if you don't make a dungeon fairly short, you want to give your players the opportunity to retreat and rest before taking on the next chunk of it.

I think I learned a lot about adventure design playing in Curse of Strahd (which we never finished - our party actually never even went into Castle Ravenloft, even though I think the adventure is designed to allow the party to make multiple trips into it). Where that campaign ultimately perished at the hands of adult scheduling and pandemic-induced logistical problems, we had made a few forays into the Amber Temple, the adventure's second-biggest dungeon, and one meant to be almost as deadly an ominous as Castle Ravenloft.

Even as we encountered groups of three Flameskulls (each casting Fireball, and here my paladin had a -2 to Dexterity. At least she had Aura of Protection) and other nasty monsters, we found that it was best to take the dungeon in chunks (and thankfully succeeded on the checks required to know we could permanently destroy Flameskulls if we doused their remains with Holy Water - because those things are there, I think, to make it tough to keep coming back). I suspect that, unless the party is really sneaky, you're unlikely to be able to clear that dungeon in a single day (even if the Lich there is non-hostile).

So, to try to wrangle some thesis here, it's clear that we want to find some balance where players feel they can retreat and rest, but also that they shouldn't do it after every single fight or expenditure of resources.

I think D&D's earlier, more survival-based gameplay might have helped to facilitate this. If you had to spend your gold to buy rations, and really tracked how much you were eating each day, you would still have that incentive to rest up to regain HP and spell slots and the like, but you'd also have the pressure to get what you could done in a day, because that was also a dwindling resource.

But I think modern players, or at least mine, are not generally excited to do such bookkeeping (we did hold pretty strictly to this in a similarly abortive Tomb of Annihilation campaign during its tier 1 jungle exploration segment,) but that leaves us with questions about what we can use to achieve this balance.

More than this concern, though, is that we should try to figure out what we actually expect a party to face between long rests.

Again, I'm starting to feel like a High difficulty encounter (which for my players now would be a budget of 70,200 xp) should probably be "the one fight you have that day," and even Moderate encounters should be quite limited, with maybe 2. Can we then have four low-difficulty encounters? Well, my party is still standing, but feeling a bit pressed after two low encounters and one moderate (they talked their way out of another moderate encounter).

And hey, maybe it's fine. Maybe this is where my players need to learn to manage their resources better. And maybe I need to put the fear of god into them.

Still, it would be good to kind of find that sweet spot of just how many things a party should fight between long rests.

What Does the Cat Man Do? Looking at Sphinxes (I'm Sorry)

 Sphinxes are, of course, classic creatures from Egyptian and Greek mythology - The Sphinx is one of the most iconic sculptures in the world, and of course the Riddle of the Sphinx is one of the great stories of Greek myth (and probably what Oedipus wishes everyone remembered him for, other than, you know, that other thing).

The 2014 Monster Manual had two sphinxes, which had the quite explicitly gendered names of Gynosphinx and Androsphinx. As we've seen monsters less explicitly gendered, with the advent of male hags, medusas (medusae?) dryads, and succubi, and the introduction of female incubi, it makes sense to change this aspect of sphinxes (which, to my knowledge, never had any mythological basis even. Don't get me started on how Medusas should be called Gorgons, and Gorgons should be called literally anything else).

But, they didn't stop at just renaming the Gynosphinx and Androsphinx. Sphinxes got expanded to a family of four, a creature-type change, and a pretty cool new, colorful art design.

Let's talk creature type first:

Sphinxes are now considered Celestials. This does not make them good-aligned. As before, they remain Lawful Neutral (except, oddly, the familiar-sized Sphinx of Wonder, which is lawful good, and a perfect familiar for a Chain-pact Celestial warlock). As we saw starting largely in Spelljammer, the creature-type of Celestial has really expanded in its definition. No longer necessarily a being of the Upper Planes, I think of Celestials as being kind of the default "otherworldly" creature type, which could include beings from neutral planes as well as beings from the Astral Plane. I could even imagine a world where Fiends were actually Celestials that just happened to have the evil alignment, but I think having a creature type tag that specifically latches onto evil outer planar entities keeps things in line with real-world folklore, where divine magic can bind and smite demons.

In fact, as an aside, I've been looking at my own homebrew setting and considering the role of various powerful beings in it. It's a thing in that setting that several angels descended to the world thousands of years ago to keep watch over it, working on behalf of the good-aligned gods before accidentally becoming the subject of worship themselves (which most felt appropriately uncomfortable with.) But I'd also had a number of evil servants of, originally just the God of Death, but then I decided to make these figures the proxies/servants of other evil deities. And then I realized that between these two groups (who warred with each other in the world's pre-apocalyptic history) were kind of the same thing.

The question, then, was whether the evil servants ought to be fiends or celestials. One of them, the Angel of Death, who is the God of Death's top lieutenant (and proxy, to use a Planescape term,) is obviously referred to by a celestial creature type. In a sense, I see Fiends as operating kind of independently of the setting's gods, more of a separate force that might actually oppose even the evil gods (if Asmodeus and Tharizdun represent the most powerful deities of the Hells and the Abyss, respectively, and are associated with Devils and Demons, respectively, then both probably harbor hatred and resentment for my setting's evil deities).

But I think this really opens up possibilities to make a lot more Celestial creatures, and make it easier for your party to have reasons to fight them.

Case in point:

Sphinxes, in 2025, are defined as a kind of celestial manifestation of curiosity and knowledge. By CR, you can kind of think of the four of them as working well as creatures a tier 1, tier 2, tier 3, and tier 4 party might encounter (not unlike the four ages of Dragons). All appear as winged lions, with colorful, runic patterns all over their bodies.

Again, each is an embodiment of curiosity.

The Sphinx of Wonder, the Tiny-sized one that is a potential familiar for Warlocks who have Pact of the Chain, are CR 1, with a simple rend attack that does slashing and radiant damage, as well as magic resistance, and, most notably, a 2/day reaction that allows the Sphinx to add 2 to an ability check or saving throw of their own or of a friend within 30 feet.

Said to come into being whenever a person has an original thought on the Material Plane, a Sphinx of Wonder obviously works for a curious warlock (my GOO-lock would probably have one of these as his familiar if he took Pact of the Chain). But I think you could easily have one of these serving as the companion of a classic wizard. I love one of these as a bodega cat, too, who loves meeting and conversing with anyone who comes in.

You could fight one of these, but they seem built more to be friends (especially with that reaction).

Moving up, though we come to the Sphinx of Secrets.

These CR 8 creatures safeguard sites of magic and learning. Because of their extreme longevity, a Sphinx of Secrets can outlive the institution where it lives, and so I think these work really well as guardians of ancient sites. If a player character is trying to extract lore or ancient magic (actually, a good example would be the dungeon that my Wizard currently finds himself in, which I wrote into the character's backstory, and the dungeon my DM came up with does not disappoint) they might encounter a Sphinx of Secrets who is not so keen on people coming in to plunder the place. Given that we're now in lawful neutral territory, a party trying to recover some ancient but dangerous magic or knowledge could encounter a sphinx who doesn't care how many people they're trying to save, and will stick to their duty to keep anyone from getting their hands on this stuff.

The Sphinx of Secrets has Magic Resistance as well as the Inscrutable trait, which gives players disadvantage on insight checks against them and prevents anyone from reading their thoughts without permission.

In combat, the Sphinx can make some claw attacks that do slashing and radiant damage, but they can replace one attack with Curse of the Riddle, which potentially curses a target with the need to solve a riddle, distracting them with the brain puzzle until they finish it. They get disadvantage on ability checks and attack rolls, and if they try to use a Magic action (such as to cast a spell,) they need to succeed on a DC 15 Intelligence saving throw or the action is wasted (though I'd guess not the spell slot or other resource). However, if they take the Study action to try to solve the puzzle, they can do so on a successful DC 15 Intelligence check. That's actually somewhat tough to do - even with a maxed out Intelligence, that's only a 55% chance to succeed. (Keen Mind would be great for this, as you can Study as a bonus action).

I think this is a creature that I'd really try to flavor interestingly - what does the puzzle taking root in a person's mind look and feel like?

Much like Dragons, when we get into the final two versions, we can also have lairs, which, of course, not just grant additional legendary resistances and legendary actions, but they do have environmental effects, which help the Sphinx keep an eye on things.

The Sphinx of Lore is the updated version of the Gynosphinx. With more damage to their Claw attacks, they get a recharge ability (5-6) in Mind-Rending Roar, which hits essentially everyone (unless you're over 300 feet away somehow) with psychic damage and the incapacitated condition on a failed Wisdom saving throw. The Sphinx of Lore also has a number of spells, though most are pretty utility focused. Its legendary actions are Arcane Prowl, allowing it to teleport up to 30 feet and make a claw attack, or Weight of Years (once per round,) which can age a target and inflict levels of exhaustion - which, again, is not as debilitating as it used to be, but could potentially make recovering from a fight take a long time (that Ranger ability to cure a level of exhaustion on a short rest is looking more powerful).

Lorewise (heh,) the Sphinx of Lore is the powerful guardian of a particular secret, with a reputation as a great sage or oracle, but who tend to live in remote locales. Obviously, it could be a whole quest just to find a sphinx of this sort, and a fight against one might be a test to prove yourself worthy of the secret they keep (indeed, I see a lot of fights with Sphinxes having the potential for them to surrender rather than fight to the death, and maybe even fight the party as a test rather than true animosity.)

Finally, we have the Sphinx of Valor, our replacement for the Androsphinx. As before, the centerpiece of the this sphinx is their ability to roar three times a day, having a different effect each time they do. The roars first frighten, then paralyze, and then inflict a hefty chunk of thunder damage on top of knocking targets prone, and these can be used along with its ordinary Claw attacks (which, interestingly, only do slashing damage).

The premise of a Sphinx of Valor is that they guard extraordinarily dangerous secrets or deadly artifacts, and they're meant to have the power to keep those secrets from falling into the wrong hands - not really unlike the others, but with a stronger emphasis on "better that a good person seeking this truth die than an evil person seeking it discover it."

I think the opportunity for a Celestial is that their perspective is very different. These beings are probably quite ancient, and their lawful neutralness (again, excepting the Sphinx of Wonder) could be portrayed as a kind of callousness, or at least a sense of broader responsibilities that require a cold heart.

As masters of knowledge and truth, I also think it makes sense for them to be associated with contemporary learning institutions (one of my setting's top universities is run by a sphinx).

The obvious quest involving a sphinx is to seek out the knowledge that it possesses. But I think you could also have a sphinx found outside of its traditional home in order to try to contain some bit of information that got out. Safeguarding knowledge can mean both keeping it hidden as well as keeping it preserved, and I could imagine a possible adventure in which a sphinx is holding onto some deadly truth that would be better off forgotten (if you want to go into true cosmic horror territory.)

D&D Going to Lorewyn/Shadowmoor

 Evidently announced at MagicCon, along with some art previews from the Dragon Delves adventure anthology, we had the brief announcement of a supplement taking place in the Magic the Gathering plane of Lorwyn/Shadowmoor.

Notably, the last time that MtG visited this plane was in 2008, with the culmination of the four-set block comprised of Lorwyn, Eventide, Shadowmoor, and Morningtide.

It's surprising to see this plane brought up, given how long it has been since the game that it was created for has looked at it - though I take this as strong evidence that we'll be seeing a card set that takes place there some time in the next year or two. One reason we haven't seen this plane much is that it shares a lot of DNA with another recently-introduced plane, Eldraine. Eldraine is the "Fairy Tales and Arthurian Knights" plane, with the recent "Wilds of Eldraine" putting a greater emphasis on the former than the first visit, "Throne of Eldraine," which was more evenly balanced.

Like Eldraine, there's a real fairy-tale vibe to Lorwyn and Shadowmoor, but it's definitely different. Notably, while most worlds in Magic have humans, Lorwyn/Shadowmoor (I'm just going to call it Lorwyn for now) does not. The block was built around creature-type tribes, with merfolk, kinder (kind of Halfling-like,) changelings, goblins, elementals, and elves, and some others if memory serves (it was 17 years ago,) with each tribe being based in two colors.

Lorwyn was a pretty cheerful, low-conflict setting where the biggest problem were the elves, who deemed all other peoples less beautiful than themselves, and thus had a kind of elvish supremacy thing going on. However, Lorwyn is a plane that goes through cycles. When it is Lorwyn, it is an endless daytime. However, when the Eventide comes, and night finally falls, the entire plane transforms into the grim and dangerous Shadowmoor.

In D&D terms, I think both Lorwyn and Shadowmoor would still probably both be rather analogous to the Feywild, but the latter reflects the dark, "Unseelie" elements of the Fey. Ironically, again, if memory serves, in Shadowmoor, the elves are more heroic, representing the last vestiges of beauty and serenity in a world where the Kinder have become cultish hive-minds, the treefolk have become burned-out, gnarled menaces, and goblins are not the goofy tricksters they were, but are instead murderous little monsters.

Personally, I'm not as familiar with this setting because it came out around the time I entered by "second interrgnum" regarding Magic the Gathering (first playing with physical cards from about Fallen Empries through Tempest Block, then playing MTG Online for Kamigawa through about Time Spiral, before picking things up again in Arena I think when Theros Beyond Death came out (whatever was out when Arena became available on Macs and iOS.)

I think this setting has a lot of potential. While I've obviously gotten a lot out of Ravnica, I did think that Theros and Strixhaven were kind of odd choices for other crossovers. This feels a little more unique and original, and as I said in my previous post, I think a setting really needs to do something to distinguish itself.

Now, does this count as one of the two brand-new settings for D&D coming in the next few years? It's possible, though I'd argue this is not "brand-new."

With D&D 5.5 Complete, What Do We Think, What Do We Predict?

 I think this blog has shown that I'm pretty sanguine on the revisions that WotC has brought to the most-popular-ever edition of Dungeons & Dragons. But let's also take a moment to address something:

Is this 6th Edition?

Having never played through the transition between previous editions, I can't really speak from direct experience. How much changed, for example, between AD&D and 2nd Edition, or 3rd, 3.5, and 4th Editions? I know that 3rd ditched THAC0 in favor of the what we more or less use now, which basically says "higher numbers are better."

The promise of D&D '24, or 5.5th Edition, was that everything published since 2014, including, for example, the Cleric and Wizard subclasses from the 2014 PHB that didn't make it into the 2024 one, would still be compatible with the new rules systems, and even modularly mix-and-matchable to a great extent.

I think this is technically correct, but there are some admittedly surmountable challenges and questions to ask when using old content.

As an example, I love the Genie warlock patron, published in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. (I think I've gone on record on this blog talking about how much I love genies/the djinn in fantasy stories.) But one change we saw in the new PHB is that the Fiend, Great Old One, Archfey, and Celestial have gotten a categorical change, transforming their expanded spell lists into patron spells, now granting all of the listed spells to the warlock for free and not counting against their spells known.

It would stand to reason, then, that Genie warlocks using the 2024 version of the warlock, probably should get their expanded spells for free. But this does create an odd wrinkle that was perhaps not as difficult to resolve with the 2014 version because Genie warlocks, unlike others, have a 9th level spell on that list, namely Wish. Do Genie Warlocks then need to have a special system to address whether they can cast one of two spells with their ninth level Mystic Arcanum each day? Or as written, would this allow them to cast two 9th level spells a day?

This isn't a computer game, where everything needs to be logically tied down with only one incontrovertible interpretation, of course. Even using digital tools like D&D Beyond, you can fudge things (indeed, sometimes you have to, whether because of a homebrew magic item or their years-later inability to handle the fact that Armorer Artificers get more infusions than others, and also that their built-in-weapons can be infused).

The point though, is that playing D&D '24 with old content, metaphorically if not literally, requires a bit of white-out to correct some of the places things don't perfectly line up. And in a lot of places, it'll be fine - an old monster stat block that is immune or resistant to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage from nonmagical attacks will still take full damage if your 2024 Barbarian attacks with a +1 Greataxe, even if a similar monster from the 2024 version won't havre such a resistance or immunity.  Likewise, a spell-casting monster that has a ton of spell slots to track rather than the modern, simpler design, will still work, even if it'll be more challenging for the DM to run it (some DMs might like the versatility of such design, though if I never have to track monster spell slots again it'll be too soon).

Beyond questions of backwards compatibility, though, what do we think of the system as it is now?

So, this is going to take time. In November I'll have been playing D&D for ten years, and so I have a lot of 2014 D&D under my belt. But I haven't started a brand-new campaign since then (though I had a session zero for a campaign that is there to play when my DM for my Wednesday game is unavailable - we haven't played yet, and honestly, the hope is we play this rarely) and in the one I run, only some of my players have converted their characters to the new system, while others have chosen to keep things as they were.

So, even if I've started to incorporate elements of the new rules, I still don't feel like I've fully delved into the updated system the way I would starting a whole new campaign.

In other words, my impressions remain mostly hypothetical, looking at how I think the game will feel more than speaking from direct experience.

Again, I'm pretty positive on most of what has changed. I think that the revision reflects a lot of feedback from the past ten years, and tightens up a lot of things that needed tightening up. Its flaws, I think, are where it didn't go quite far enough, such as how the Ranger feels, at least, like it needed some kind of combat buff to keep up with other martial classes (though I wonder if some of the Paladin nerfs to Divine Smite were to bring it down a bit, with the argument that half-casters shouldn't be quite as good at weapon-fighting as non-caster martials because of their access to spells - I still think Paladins will probably do better overall damage output, at least outside of scenarios where weapon range is a major factor).

Now, how newbie-friendly will it be?

With ten years of experience, most of how D&D works is pretty second-nature to me. And the greater customization and more features that we see in 2024 is pretty exciting to me, because hey: it's new toys.

Take Weapon Mastery, for example. This imbues weapons, at least for classes that naturally have to focus on using weapons, with greater power. Unquestionably, a Warhammer with Push is better than one that doesn't have it. But, it does mean that new players are going to have one more meaningful choice to make. Previously, if you were making a sword-and-board character, you could take any number of d8 weapons and they'd pretty much play the same: a War Pick, a Morningstar, a Rapier, a Longsword, a Warhammer, or a Battleaxe. I'd generally take one of the latter three because, even if I was never likely to use it, having the Versatile property made them strictly better choices. And, of course, if I wanted to use Dexterity instead of Strength, I'd have to go with the Rapier. Personally, I'd tend to prefer the Warhammer both for aesthetic reasons and because of the sense that more creatures have vulnerability to bludgeoning damage than any other "kinetic" damage type.

But, under this old system, a Longsword and a Battleaxe were functionally the same. Indeed, a Glaive and Halberd were actually 100% identical, with the same damage die, same properties, and same weight and cost.

Weapon Masteries make it so that there's actually a significant distinction between these weapons. And that can be fun for a player who is looking to optimize their character, but it does a couple things that might be less welcome for a new player - mainly that it makes picking the "right" mastery a potential area in which to make the "wrong" decision.

It also, by imbuing the choice of weapon with a mechanical consequence, can clash with aesthetics. For example, as I mentioned, I really like the image of swinging a big blunt weapon - something about the hammer as a tool of creation makes it, in my mind, a kind of ideal weapon for a good-aligned champion tied deeply to some sort of deep, mystical force for good and order. But if we're talking about maximizing our damage output, a Greatsword is going to outperform a Maul, thanks to the power of the Graze property.

Likewise, for a DM rewarding magic weapons, you'll need to consider whether the weapons you offer will even work for a player's build. Giving a dual-wielder a magic handaxe and a magic shortsword will feel kind of bad, because what they need is for one of those to be a scimitar, otherwise their Dual Wielder feat is being wasted.

Another area where the game has become more complex is Feats.

In 2014, Feats were technically an optional feature, which a DM could disallow. However, 2024 D&D is not only built around feats (like making the Fighting Styles a type of feat and giving everyone an Origin Feat) but also strongly encourages players to take on Feats instead of simply boosting their ability scores because each General Feat (and Epic Boon) comes with a single bump to one ability score.

But is this a bad thing?

Honestly, while this is an increase in complexity, I think it's easy for someone like me, who has been marinating in all the minutia of D&D for a decade, to worry about new players (or just less-invested players) struggling with their character builds. But it's not like things weren't complex before - feats already existed, as did multiclassing, which can make a character build a super-delicate dance of configuring things to feel fun to play and effective (personally I'm not a big fan of multiclassing, as nine times out of ten it's a decision that players make purely for mechanical advantages rather than story reasons, but even I can see how taking a single level of Fighter on a character who intends to be a Bladelock solves a huge number of problems for you).

DMs will need to understand these systems to guide their less-versed players through them, but once the decisions are made, there's not going to be a ton of change to them. How often do we swap out which weapon we're using, after all? So, once a player gets used to the fact that their Warhammer can knock enemies back, they'll just keep doing that until they come across a +1 Battleaxe and learn to incorporate that new mastery into their strategy. As long as the DM is there to remind them how it all works, it might not be that hard to overcome.

One thing I'm truly unsure of is how much deadlier the monsters in the new Monster Manual are going to be. Many, of course, will be only slightly different. But even at low CRs, you have Goblins who are getting a little sneak-attack-like bonus, while the high-CR creatures are doing more damage with their attacks or imposing pretty powerful conditions on your players with nothing more than an attack roll. Is your Dwarf Barbarian counting on a high con modifier and advantage on saves against it to avoid getting poisoned? Well, some creatures are going to be able to poison them just by hitting their armor class.

This is, of course, also coupled with the fact that the encounter-building guidance in the DMG is going to make fights tougher, in general. Indeed, using them to build fights for my 17th-level party, I find myself surprised at just how many high-CR creatures I need to throw at them even to make what the DMG claims is a low-difficulty encounter. According to the guidance in Xanathar's Guide to Everything, my six 17th level characters can handle just a single Iron Golem and then a single CR 6, 7, or 8 monster along with it. In the 2024 DMG, a moderate encounter for that party would mean an xp budget of 43,200, which is almost enough to have three Iron Golems.

Player characters have definitely gotten more powerful in the 2024 PHB, though I think the power shift is less in raw damage output than their various ways to control the battlefield (again, like Weapon Masteries,) with perhaps some of the classes that fell behind in raw damage power catching up a bit (this, honestly, is where people felt the Ranger needed more love.) But the balancing question, then, is that if monsters and the encounters in which we fight said monsters are harder, does this buff get cancelled out? Is it even possible that D&D has gotten harder, even as player characters are more powerful?

That's the kind of thing that will require extensive play to get a real feel for.

Of course, there's the mental fallacy that we're ever at the "end of history." We look at the current state of things and think that all of the past led up to this moment, forgetting that the present is the future's past. Much as 5th Edition was shiny and new in 2014, a big transformation that learned from the past (and the failure of 4th edition,) the new Core Rulebooks are the dawn of a new age in D&D, but will also be looked back on as the base upon which many new things are created.

I have my gripes about the new books, even if I'm mostly on board with their revisions. It's more about what was left out.

I like that 2014 D&D spent a lot of pages talking about characters and building a backstory. Backgrounds having their Traits, Ideals, Bonds, and Flaws were all very nice prompts to build out a compelling story for your character. While a video game's gameplay is usually its top asset, RPGs in particular are often remembered for their characters. Some of the most popular computer/video game RPGs, like Mass Effect or Baldur's Gate 3, are notable because of their well-drawn cast of characters. And I think that D&D functions best when we're not just worrying about "winning," but really playing out the internal and external conflicts of fictional people.

The original Ravenloft module was created because the creators wanted to make a vampire who you really felt a strong reason to fight, not one that would just happen to show up in some room of a dungeon. The new books had lots of pages worth of stuff they needed - and I'll never begrudge the decision to spend a big chunk of the DMG telling DMs, you know, what they actually need to do to run the game.

But I do hope that we'll see a continued emphasis on story and storytelling. I love that Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft has a pretty extensive chapter on just exploring Horror as a genre - stuff that could potentially be useful for any horror game, or even horror writing. Again, these books need to get a lot across, and are already quite thick tomes, but we'll see how future books look.

Of all the mechanical things in the system, I think the only true blunder was the way that ability scores were tied to backgrounds. The shift in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything to divorce ability scores from Race (now called Species) was a fantastic change - not only did it resolve some of the problematic cultural issues that arise when you start saying that one group of people is inherently smarter than another group, but it also just opened up class and species options in a way that had been really annoyingly limited - you could play an Elf Barbarian without having to wait until level 4 just to get your Strength modifier up to +3.

The way 2024 handles backgrounds is not as painful as the way that the old species ability score bonuses worked, but I do think that the system as it stands funnels players into a narrower range of options. My Eldritch Knight with a Sage background, for example, would now run into the same issue that that Elf Barbarian would have before Tasha's, because Sages don't get to boost Strength.

There are rules in the DMG to create custom backgrounds, but I think it would have been smarter to have Backgrounds be tied to skill proficiencies and origin feats solely, and to have ability score bonuses just be a separate character-creation step (some systems have you do this according to class, which could also work, potentially, though I think just making it an independent choice is best). Adding in ability scores to backgrounds creates one more factor to triangulate.

What feels so strange about this is that we got the ideal fix in Tasha's, so to see them become more restrictive in these options feels like a step backwards - and one that might require a correction in some future book years from now.

Now, what of the future?

We do have a number of announced books coming later this year - a dragon-themed anthology, a new Eberron book (with an updated Artificer - though no new subclasses, apparently,) as well as a new starter set (with an adventure based on Keep on the Borderland) and two new Forgotten Realms campaign-setting books.

On a meta-level, I have a confession: I bought the Core Rulebooks directly from WotC, rather than my local game store, because I knew I'd want the digital versions for D&D Beyond, and at the time the only way to get those bundled with a discount was to do so via their store. But I prefer to buy my books at my local store, and would really prefer to have a way to get the D&D Beyond version bundled with a book bought at the local store (for one thing, it'd be a way to get the cool alternate covers, which I tend to collect).

But what books do we expect to see, and what books do we want to see?

It's notable that there is not any big "epic campaign" adventure book coming out this year. I wonder to what degree such books remain popular. I have a huge backlog of these that I haven't even tried running or playing in, and so I wonder if players are really clamoring for such an adventure when they still haven't run, say, Rime of the Frostmaiden or Out of the Abyss. Such books are the most "consumable" that WotC can release for the game, of course, but I think the books that I, at least, get most excited about (and the ones that I think most players do) are the broader rules-expansion books that allow for more player options.

In the first ten years of D&D, we got two major rules-expansion books in Xanathar's Guide to Everything and Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. Bringing in multiple new subclasses for each class (only one for the Wizard in Xanathar's, but to be fair, Wizards already had a lot) meant a lot of new ways to play the game, and new prompts for character stories.

I would love to see more books like these.

However, if I were to suggest a general trend I'd like to see, it's this:

I don't want to see too many retreads.

Given the revisions we saw in 2024, there's certainly an impulse to see every subclass get its own 2024-style glow-up. Surely the Cavalier, or the Sun Soul, or the Necromancer, would be fun to see with updated, rebalanced mechanics.

But the worry I have is that it's very easy for WotC to fall into the trap of just kind of re-running the last ten years. Already, the Forgotten Realms sourcebooks are looking a bit like the new version of Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide - hopefully with better-balanced subclasses, but it's notable that two of them are genuinely revisions of subclasses first seen in SCAG.

What I don't want to see over the next ten years is just more of the same. If we're going to be getting revamps of old campaign settings, for example, I want to see ones that we didn't get to in the past decade. Bring on Dark Sun! The only exceptions here, I think, would be in the case of Spelljammer and Planescape. Spelljammer was a huge disappointment because it didn't really give us any "setting" in its setting, and while Planescape was better, doing a decent job of giving us the city of Sigil and the plane of the Outlands, I desperately want updated sourcebooks for all the Outer Planes (and hell, let's look at the Inner Planes while we're at it!)

If we do get more published big adventures, I want to see them looking at different settings. Let's get another Ravenloft adventure to complement Curse of Strahd. Let's get something set in Eberron.

A couple of more recent books I've been pretty happy with were the creature-type-focused Fizban's and Bigby, with lots of lore and material focusing on dragons and giants, respectively. Getting a "book of the dead" all about Undead monsters, or even going into less common creatures like Constructs would be very cool (if they did a whole book on Oozes, I'd be impressed, though I'm fine if they prioritize, say, Fiends over that). These books are, admittedly, more useful if you want a campaign that really centrally focuses on that kind of creature, but they have some very cool ideas in them, and some fun monsters.

Speaking of monsters, much like the rules-expansion books, I'm always happy to have a big compilation of new monsters. Volo's and Mordenkainen's, while kind of folded in together as Monsters of the Multiverse, were really great additions to the game. Monsters of the Multiverse is kind of funny, because it sort of served as the "2024" update to the creatures in those books, even though now some of it is already slightly outdated (like the creature types for many types of creatures now being wrong).

Going back to the subject of campaign settings, there is talk about two brand-new settings being added to the game. We know zilch about what these are actually going to be like, but here's what I'm hoping for them:

A lot of D&D settings are, frankly, pretty similar to one another. Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms are not all that distinct from one another. I think a campaign setting should really make a compelling case for why you'd run something there, in particular. Eberron, for example, moves away from a Late Medieval/Renaissance period in favor of a more 1920s/1930s pulp adventure one. Now, sure, you could argue that D&D itself is built on tropes established in just such genre stuff, like Conan the Barbarian, but Eberron updates the setting to be contemporary with when those stories were written, rather than when they took place.

I think we can go further, though. Ravenloft, of course, is one of the more radical campaign settings, taking place on a separate plane of existence in order to bend reality to function in a sort of nightmare logic. Dark Sun, while I'm less familiar with it because it hasn't had a 5E sourcebook, creates a kind of post-apocalyptic, resource-scarce setting that could foreground the oft-ignored exploration and survival mechanics of the game.

For brand-new settings, here are some ideas of what I'd hope for:

    A science-fantasy setting:

I grew up on Star Trek and Star Wars, and particularly given the latter, I've always loved seeing mystical/supernatural elements mixed into a more sci-fi-style setting. Spelljammer was always kind of flawed for me because it ejects a lot of the sci-fi tropes that I'm sad to see go. I don't want to travel through space on a ship that looks no different from a seaborne vessel - give me a rusty, used-future junker that looks like some nerd in 1975 spent weeks painstakingly constructing by kitbashing old WWII model kits. I want to be able to kill the Slaad that has been stalking my crew by knocking it out of an airlock. I want to have a friendly ship computer, as well as killer robots to fight.

    A modern urban-fantasy setting:

My first introduction to Dimension 20 was The Unsleeping City, which is a campaign set in a version of New York where there are tons of supernatural things happening there all the time, but most people don't realize it because of the collective power of New Yorkers' ability to ignore weird things around them. Those who are awakened into the eponymous Unsleeping City start seeing things as they truly are, where those big, burly guys in an alley are actually ogres, and where that equestrian police officer is actually a centaur, but it's still a world with all the modern elements like cellphones, subways, the internet, and such.

There was, long ago, a UA with subclasses and spells built for this kind of urban fantasy (in fact, in The Unsleeping City, the party's Cleric uses that UA's "City Domain" for his subclass). While using a modern, real-world setting could work, I'd also be fine with a fictional setting that happens to be more modern in its appearance (actually similar to another Dimension 20 series, Fantasy High - Brennan Lee Mulligan and I must share some tastes when it comes how we do fantasy.)

    An ancient setting:

This is kind of the opposite of the other two. Most fantasy settings assume a kind of medieval millieu - I think the legend of King Arthur looms large over the genre, even if we don't often think of it. But I think you could also have a lot of fun with an earlier era, such as one that takes place in a world with some equivalent of the Roman Empire. The Forgotten Realms setting doesn't really have a lot of nation-states, and is more organized around city-states (or maybe that's just the Sword Coast,) but I think a broad empire could make for some interesting stories as well. 

I'll concede that the stories you tell in such an environment might feel pretty similar to those in medieval settings, but there could be some interesting wrinkles - the Romans, like us today (though given the state of the world, who knows how long this will remain true) were kind of unprecedented, at least within their geographical region. While human nostalgia is a powerful force, the Romans didn't really have some earlier, "greater" civilization to look back to. In D&D settings, there are often fallen civilizations like Netheril in the Forgotten Realms or the great city-states of the Age of Arcanum in Exandria, which were far more advanced than what exists in the settings' modern ages. This trope, I think, is seen a lot in Western fantasy because of the medieval fascination and bewilderment at the relics of the Roman Empire. But when you are Rome, what does that look like? In some ways, it could be actually kind of akin to the modern or futuristic settings described above. If the general assumption in the Forgotten Realms is that those +1 weapons you find in dungeons are relics of Netheril, and forged with a technique and technology that no longer exists today, then a setting in that earlier era would presumably be one in which powerful magic is being wrought all over the place, perhaps at an industrial scale.

    The real question, though, for all of these, is the degree to which you would have to shift the mechanics of the game to allow for the genre to work. What use is a Sending spell when you have a cell phone? And how do you get people fighting with laser guns when only a few classes really allow you to build around ranged weapons?

I'll be honest, I'm a little pessimistic on how much of a departure these new settings will be. But we still don't have any details on them. A classic medieval fantasy world can still be good - Exandria doesn't really reinvent the wheel, but Matt Mercer and his collaborators have done a lot of work to make it a world with rich history and political nuance. But personally, I guess I've always just been someone who feels like we can bend and stretch those tropes to do something more original.

It'll be a few months before we get the first of 5.5's supplementary books, so for now, I think the best thing to do is to play the game with the new rules and start to suss out where it needs expansion and refinement.

Humanoids and Playable Species

 If we treat the 2024 D&D Core Rulebooks as a total fresh start for the game, like a full new edition, it works pretty well. Pretty much the only things I think are really missing from the game are the Booming Blade and Green-Flame Blade cantrips, the Gunner feat, and about twenty or forty more backgrounds that let you get the Origin Feat and ability score bonuses you really want. (Yes, the DMG has rules for making custom backgrounds, but it's not something that is immediately apparent to players.)

There's been some talk (including on this blog) about the sweeping creature-type changes in the 2024 Monster Manual. In an effort, I think, to emphasize that humanoid species can live any kind of lifestyle and be of any alignment, the entries on Orcs, Drow, Duergar, and Deep Gnomes (damn was the 2014 MM heavy on D-categories) were swept away entirely, with advice to use various other stat blocks to represent the creatures that might be referenced in previously-published adventures.

But, more controversially, many creatures that had been humanoid in the Monster Manual became, instead... well, other creature types. Goblinoids all became Fey, along with Centaurs (Satyrs I think were already - Centaurs I believe were originally monstrosities, so this one's a little unusual). Aarakocra, Merfolk, and Lizardfolk were all made elementals - vastly expanding what we even consider an elemental. Sahuagin and Gnolls were made into fiends. Kenku and Thri-Kreen were made into monstrosities. And the Gith (both -yanki and -zerai) were made aberrations.

The implication, I think, is that we're meant to look at these creatures as less the kind of free-willed people that Humans, Orcs, Wood Elves, and Drow all are, and instead are that more kind of alien, "natural force made manifest" that many fantasy creatures tend to represent.

And I think it's always a fine line to walk. One of the mainstays of fantasy fiction is the idea that of encountering beings that are very different and have a different way of seeing the world - like how Merry and Pippin struggle to emphasize the urgency of dealing with Saruman with the extremely long-lived Ents.

But, of course, there's certainly been cases in which other species - or, more typically, other "races," a term D&D used until 2024's PHB - carry with them some problematic characteristics. Whether these were specific parallels with existing real-world racial stereotypes or, more broadly, the inherent idea that "well, these people are smarter and these people are stronger" (and especially in the cases where you took a negative to Intelligence with some "monstrous" races,) there was an, I think, admirable desire to move away from such world-construction, most of which I feel was accomplished simply by divorcing ability score improvements from species in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything.

So, does this solve the problem? Or re-create it?

That's open for debate, and I think as players and DMs, we'll have to come up with our own ideas at the table.

But it also adds a curious mechanical wrinkle:

A lot of these are playable.

Monsters of the Multiverse revised and reprinted many playable species (and monsters) largely from Volo's Guide to Monsters and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, but also a bit from various setting books, like the Changeling and Shifters from Eberron, or the Minotaur and Centaur first made playable in Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica.

And so, the weird thing here is that many of the creatures found in the Monster Manual are actually playable. Specifically, the list is:

Aarakocra, Bugbears, Centaurs, Githyanki, Githzerai, Goblins, Hobgoblins, Kenku, Kobolds, Lizardfolk, Minotaurs, Satyrs, Thri-Kreen, and Yuan-Ti.

Now, in fairness, the creature type had already shifted for many of these already. Since the Ravnica book, playable Fey have been the most common player-species creature type after humanoid. Centaurs and Satyrs, along with Changelings and Fairies, are already playable fey species. And Spelljammer added several playable species that were a lot of different creature types - Thri-kreen were made monstrosities there (having been humanoid in the 2014 MM) but you could also play an Ooze as a Plasmoid, or a Construct as an Autognome.

So, one thing we might expect, then, if they like this model going forward, is that if these species get re-published again, we might see their creature-types shift to reflect this. Much of 5th Edition really limited player characters to humanoid and a small number of fey, but Spelljammer kind of opened the flood gates (in a way that Van Richten's walked back from after their initial playtest - though I think Hexbloods remained fey. Just that Dhampir were not undead and Reborn were not either construct or undead).

So, perhaps we could see these species get updated, with even player Gith characters being aberrations.

But I do think it's funny: where exactly to we draw the line?

As an example, I've been playing a Triton Wizard for the last four or so years. Tritons, like merfolk, are tied to the elemental plane of water. In a lot of ways, they are just kind of the "playable merfolk," but does that distinction, then (not to mention their having legs instead of a fish tail) mean that they really are the humanoid version of a merfolk?

I think you could say the same about a lot of the playable species in the Player's Handbook. All of them are considered humanoid, but Goliaths are clearly the "playable giants," much as Dragonborn are playable dragons, Aasimar are playable celestials, and Tieflings are playable fiends. But at a certain point, don't we reach the stage where elves are playable fey? At one point are humans the only humanoids left?

I suppose we can thus say that there are playable species who are just humanoid enough to count as, well, humanoids, and that they are distinct from the monsters that are not so human. Tritons rather than Merfolk, Dragonborn rather than dragons. Genasi rather than genies. Dhampir rather than vampires. Warforged rather than golems.

But, then, does that mean that we need a kind of playable birdfolk who aren't aarakocra? (Someone has to beat the aasimar to the race for first species alphabetically!) Or do we take the Spelljammer approach and just not get hung up on creature type so much?

Honestly, it's kind of minor. The only real consequence is the weakening of things like Charm Person or other spells and features that only work on humanoids. I remember playing a Hexblade Warlock in Descent into Avernus, and I had only like two opportunities in the entire campaign to make a Specter out of a slain humanoid, and the first time, the character turned out to be undead (I think I was only able to actually use it in a weird pseudo-illusion flashback.)

I think we're always going to be debating exactly how we deal with non-humans in a fantasy setting. I guess it's just that WotC made a pretty bold choice with this core rulebook to their game.

A Look at Metallic Dragons and, More Broadly, How to Get Your Players to Fight Good-Aligned Creatures

 I really appreciated the contextualization that Fizban's Treasury of Dragons brought to the dragon creature type. While dragons are the most iconic creature in the fantasy genre, their role can sometimes feel ambiguous. Fizban's established a great mythological niche in the D&D multiverse, and I really like that they represent the primordial, most ancient beings of the Prime Material Plane, who have a very different relationship with the gods than mortals do.

Going back I'd assume to AD&D, if not earlier, Dragons are divided into to camps (well, three when the Gem dragons were introduced). Chromatic are your evil dragons while metallic ones are your good dragons. Again, this is not a hard-and-fast rule, but broadly speaking, the metallics are meant to be more benevolent and the chromatic ones are the destructive tyrants.

Every color of dragon is distinct, with different breath weapons and damage immunities. The new Monster Manual has also further distinguished them by granting adult and ancient variants spellcasting abilities, which they weave into their attacks when they aren't using their breath weapons. And, of course, each of the ten colors/metals represented in the Monster Manual comes in four age categories (which also, conveniently, cover four different sizes.) This pattern of fours also kind of helps you place them in different tiers of play, though because not all dragons are of the same challenge rating, you might find it more reasonable to put a young white dragon against a group of tier 1 characters than a young red dragon.

Notably, one major distinction other than alignment between Chromatic and Metallic dragons is the existence of a secondary breath attack. Chromatic dragons simply have their destructive elemental breath, whether it be cold, acid, poison, lightning, or fire. Metallics have these as well (though rather than poison, two of the metallic dragon types have fire breaths) but they also have a secondary breath weapon that doesn't do damage, but instead inflicts various conditions.

Brass dragons can put creatures to sleep, Bronze dragons can push creatures away and knock them prone, Copper dragons can slow creatures down and limit the actions they can take on a turn, Gold dragons can weaken creatures and reduce the damage they deal, and Silver dragons can paralyze creatures.

Notably, these secondary breath weapons do not have a recharge, so you can use them on every round in combat. And I think that is one tool you can use to have a fight with a metallic dragon.

While you can play a bunch of amoral treasure-seekers who will fight anything that gets in their way, in my experience, most D&D parties try to be heroic and moral. Most characters are either good-aligned or morally neutral in a way that still bows to the social utility of generally not killing people who don't deserve it. (In my long-running Ravnica game, there's even a Chaotic Evil character who is a literal cannibal that is still eager to fight against the greater evil the party faces, and is still a loyal friend).

And so, the obvious problem when presented with any creatures that are good-aligned is that, well... surely we can talk things out instead of having a fight to the death, right?

Obviously, not all fights in D&D must be to the death - I think it's very reasonable for creatures to surrender if, say, they become bloodied (which is now an official status in the rules as of 2024). Still, you run into this issue where goodness, as I think most people would define it, often has as one of its core tenets the idea that we can settle things through dialogue and come to a consensus, rather than having it out as a big fight. Certainly, in the face of true evil, good people can be lured into bad-faith negotiations, like when the UK agreed to allow Nazi Germany to take over the Sudetenland, hoping that this appeasement would sate the fascist state's hunger for conquest - which, obviously, did not work. But I like to believe that actually good people can usually find some common ground, and thus we come to this conundrum:

There are all these really cool creatures that would be fun to run, but they're good guys.

This goes beyond Metallic dragons, and includes things like most Celestials, as well as creatures like Storm Giants and other creatures. There are, I think, fewer of these than evil or neutral-aligned creatures, but that's probably because it's easier to justify a fight with something that is not benevolent.

So, what scenarios might we concoct where our heroic party comes into violent conflict with a creature that is good?

    Not So Good After All:

Alignments on D&D creatures are really more examples of what is typical than what is inherent. While good Fiends are practically unheard of (given that fiends are more or less made up of the essence of evil) and Celestials are typically good or neutral, and more often good (as many are beings of the upper planes and thus made up of the essence of goodness,) creatures like dragons, fey, and the like are still ultimately beings of free will.

Thus, a creature could be a resplendent gold dragon with all the trappings of a serene guardian of sacred places and enemy to evil, but they might harbor a vindictive, covetous, contemptuous heart, and perhaps use the assumptions people make about them to hide a villainous agenda.

Likewise, a good-aligned creature might become corrupted somehow, either via mind control or some kind of spiritual corruption. (Whether this then changes a Celestial into a Fiend is kind of up to you - I think there are some evil-aligned Celestials here and there, though I don't know of any non-evil Fiends.)

    The Greater Good:

Honestly, much of human history's greatest crimes have been justified (sometimes after the fact) by claims that what dirty deeds were done were all done in the name of a greater good. This can be an ends-justify-the-means mentality, or even a whitewashing that refuses to even acknowledge that a crime was committed in the first place. But even if we're not talking about things in retrospect, a character who at least believes themselves to be good might commit acts that they regret even as they do them, but still feels that they are the right thing to do. A good-aligned creature might, for example, have faith in an institution and thus work to cover up some misdeed done in the institution's name. They might sanction the mistreatment of a class of people or beings, fearing that, were such a class not restrained or even eliminated, that some far greater catastrophe might befall the world. The party might have a different perspective, or might believe that the good-aligned villain has actually lost perspective, and that the net effect of all their compromises on behalf of this greater good are actually outweighing the benefits. (As an example, an arc I never got around to in my first campaign was going to have a gold dragon attack the holy city of a powerful church that was leading a rebellion against the continent-spanning empire. The dragon figured that the empire, for all its faults, had done a great deal to maintain peace across the world, and that after years of war, the revolution had to be ended definitively.)

You could also flip this: the party might be trying to destroy some sacred site is going to be corrupted by an evil villain or otherwise doing something in the name of a greater good while a good-aligned monster is fighting for some more narrow good.

    Honor:

Philosophical principles can sometimes override morality. If the party discovers that a king or other respected leader is engaged in some great evil, they might come into conflict with a good creature who is honor-bound to defend, for example, an office, regardless of the person occupying said office. A great example of this can be found in World of Warcraft. General Nazgrim, an orcish warrior of the Horde, has sworn to defend the Horde's Warchief, and in the Mists of Pandaria expansion, the Horde is run by the brutal war criminal, Garrosh Hellscream, who, among other things, is using the heart of one of the Old Gods (eldritch monstrosities embedded in the planet trying to corrupt its soul) to empower himself and his soldiers. Nazgrim is well aware that what Garrosh is doing is abominable, but he has dedicated his life to serving the Horde, and so, even though we've fought alongside him in the past, we have to fight him to the death to progress to our confrontation with Garrosh. (Ironically, he receives his "redemption" by becoming a Death Knight two expansions later - but WoW has good Death Knights, including playable ones.) This example would certainly lean toward lawful good characters, but I think you could easily have chaotic good ones as well - some druid who, say, is dedicated to preserving the pristine and untamed wilds, keeping it free of any artifice, might feel they must stop a party from interfering with an Elemental Cataclysm that threatens some city on the edge of the forest.

    Sacred Guardian:

This could be seen as a combination of the Greater Good and Honor ideas, and I think is probably the most obvious option: D&D characters have a tendency to delve into ancient tombs, shrines, vaults, and such, often to retrieve some unique and powerful or important item. And it's likely that if that item is in such a dungeon, it was probably put there for a reason. The party might want or need, say, the staff of an ancient archmage who bound a powerful demon. A good-aligned monster might, then, have the sacred charge of safeguarding the item.

They might have the attitude that simply no one should be able to take it - maybe they feel it's too dangerous to be allowed back into the world. Or, perhaps, they are there as a test, to ensure that whoever takes the item is strong enough to keep it safe and use it properly (Guardian Naga are great for this, because they aren't really worried about dying since they can just come back to life.)

    There are tons of other scenarios that will let you use these good-aligned monsters, and the limit is really just what you can come up with as a DM. Another thing to always consider is that these creatures might be fighting alongside the party. This can be tough, as you'll need to seriously increase the number or power of the monsters the party is fighting to compensate for the power of their new ally, but it is an opportunity to get to use these creatures. Also, if you're running a campaign with morally-questionable or even flat-out evil characters, you'll of course have plenty of opportunity for them to face good-aligned foes.

But I figured I'd just share some of my thoughts on how you could make use of them.

Checking Out the Genies

 I think I may have actually known the story of Aladdin before the Disney movie. The movie trimmed down the story a bit - for example, the story as I heard it had the title character hand over the lamp to the evil vizier and still get trapped in the cave, but he discovers a ring that holds a second genie, who allows him to escape.

But that movie became my favorite Disney movie, and I adored Robin William's big blue Genie. I've sort of loved the idea of genies ever since. In Arabic folklore, the Djinn (the plural, while the singular is Djinni - which D&D actually gets right at least when referring to its Efreet and Djinn, though they use the anglicized version as the collective name for all four kinds) are kind of like humans, having free will, but while God made humans out of clay, He made the djinn out of smokeless fire. I thus really like the idea of the djinn being sort of just another people, very much like elves and dwarves. We can kind of get that in D&D with the Genasi, who are basically half-Genies (and while WotC is down-playing the idea that this is the result of true mixed ancestries, I like playing a Genasi with one parent who is profoundly magical).

In D&D, Genies are not necessarily the most powerful elementals, but they are the most people-like of them (or at least they were before they made Aarakocra, Merfolk, and Lizardfolk into elementals. I suppose Azer were always kind of like this). Genies are the elementals you can really talk to and kind of relate with, and who will engage in commerce. They're also typically resplendent and wealthy, and of course sometimes have the power to grant wishes.

Unless you're running a campaign set in the elemental planes, Genies can play the role of a powerful outsider, with the wealth and influence to be a real mover-and-shaker. A genie could be an ally or an adversary, and I think also work very well as a villain's ally who might be turned away from them if they can be convinced to.

One notable change to the four genies in the new Monster Manual is that each now has a Neutral alignment - which is also being used as the catch-all for "whatever alignment you think makes sense for this creature." Thus, Efreet and Dao are no longer presumed villainous, and Djinn are not presumed to be good guys.

Like the CR 5 basic elementals, Genies are all of equal power, each being Large, CR 11 elementals (with a genie subtype). And, as a cycle of creatures, they share similar mechanics, though they have some features that are thematic to their element.

Each tends to have a melee attack and a ranged attack, and sometimes an additional ability, most of which inflict some kind of condition. They all have some spellcasting ability, and each has a 30% chance to have the ability to cast the Wish spell, but only on behalf of another creature - doing so, they can grant three wishes before being unable to cast the spell again for 365 days. Notably, though, the genies don't suffer the "stress" from casting Wish, so they can never lose the spell.

So, therefore, a genie can be a quest in and of themselves, and even a quest that's really at the center of a character's personal story: Currying favor with a genie who can cast Wish is something people all over will probably want to do, and with only three wishes they can grant in a year, you need to really prove yourself worthy of the genie's services.

A genie could make for a great quest-giver, tasking the party with doing things on behalf of the genie before they will consent to grant them their wishes. Another possible twist you could have is that the genie the party is working with is a fraud - that they cannot cast Wish at all, and are merely manipulating the party into doing something for them.

But beyond this, Genies also act as the nobility of the elemental planes, and could thus be powerful and well-connected figures who command a whole coterie of loyal servants.

A genie itself is not a legendary creature, so while you can still absolutely use one as a major villain (just as you can with any of the high-CR humanoid stat blocks) you'll certainly want to have an encounter with one involve a large number of minions. Genies aren't immune to any conditions (except those that are elementally-appropriate, like a Dao being immune to petrification - they're already made of rock) so having creatures that can dispel magic on them or counter offensive spells would make a lot of sense.

Given their high CR, a fight against a genie is probably something you'll hold off on until at least late tier 2, but that's fine, as they're meant to be beings of considerable power. However, there's nothing preventing you from having a friendly or at least non-hostile genie show up as an NPC earlier than that.

At much higher levels, a Genie could even serve as a minion in a fight (though probably not a wish-granting one). They're not profoundly complicated to run, so they can work here, but unless you're just re-skinning the stat block, you probably want to run them as powerful allies of a villain, and give them their own personalities and reason to be there.

Particularly if you have a campaign that takes you across the elemental planes, Genies make sense as the movers and shakers of these worlds. Remember also that these Inner Planes are closely connected to the Feywild and Shadowfell, and generally speaking, most non-Prime Material planes have greater contact with the rest of the multiverse - Efreet might do business with the Nine Hells (and devils might feel perfectly at ease in the elemental plane of fire given their immunity to the heat). Marids might do business with the various aquatic celestials who swim the River Oceanus across the Upper Planes (which, unlike its lower-planar counterpart, the Styx, has no harmful effects if you're not a fiend or undead.)

Interestingly, like many fiends, Genies will respawn in their corresponding elemental plane after they are killed (though it is 1d4 days before they do,) and they also have a 1/day Plane Shift. Thus, angering a Genie is a dangerous thing to do, given that they can keep coming after you as long as you're not on their home turf.

When Can I Use That Monster? A CR-by-CR Guide for DMs Who Want to Run a Fair Campaign

 Technically, the first monsters that I ever had two players see were an Azer and an Efreeti, though neither was remotely hostile to the party. The big set-piece that I ran was one in which the campaign's big bad, a cult's prophet who had taken part in the conspiracy that destroyed the long-lost civilization that once spanned the world, used his eldritch powers to call upon the Tarrasque (thinking back, I think primarily by going "here I am, that aberration of all natural law that you exist to destroy,") which then went on to destroy most of the city that the party was in.

Of my three players, the one familiar with D&D, said "well, we're not ready to fight that," and I, brand-new novice DM that I was, thought "well, obviously I'm not expecting you to fight it. This is just a set-piece and a background event while your first fight is actually two kobolds and an octopus."

That encounter was actually balanced according to the 2014 DMG, but obviously, as anyone who has actually run this game would know, was far too easy - in fact, neither kobold even got a turn, falling before the Paladin and Fighter, and the octopus retreated into a jar only to be adopted (as I suspected it would) by the party.

In my early days DMing, I was excited to use every creature in the Monster Manual, and as such, I often pushed to try to use just one big monster in my fights. I'm actually not sure that this is always a losing strategy, but I struggled to challenge my players, such as when the Spectator boss of my first true dungeon was taken out in a single critical hit by the paladin (again, before it could get a turn in combat).

Only rarely do I actually run a combat with just a single monster, and if I do, it basically has to be a legendary monster to make up for the deficit in its action economy.

But we've seen a real re-balancing. The new Monster Manual has beefed up a lot of monsters, and while this is mostly true in the higher CR range, it's also true at lower levels. I'd also advise new DMs as well to remember that, as cool as a new, tougher monster is, even simpler, low-CR monsters can make for interesting fights if you have cool tactical opportunities. Ledges, destructible platforms, cover, and obstacles can make for more dynamic fights.

The encounter-building guidance in the new DMG is significantly more generous to a DM. (Also, building encounters for a three-player party is pretty limiting). This means that a fight is liable to be tougher.

Another word of warning to greenhorn DMs is that, the lower level your players are, the less wiggle-room you have to course-correct. Generally speaking, you want to present a challenge to your players but not to "beat" them. But at low levels, even if you're doing little more than just attacking with low-CR monsters like Kobolds or Goblins, a few unlucky rolls can kill a new character. As PC HP goes up, and as healing capabilities become available to the party, this gets less tenuous.

This post is primarily just going to be a list of CRs and their corresponding XP value. The way I'm evaluating this is whether a single creature of the given CR can be presented to a group of players at a given level and for its XP value to be equal to or less than the total budget for a High-difficulty encounter. Again, my sense (and this requires more playing with this system to know for certain) is that the new DMG's High-difficulty budget is genuinely, like, really quite difficult - a deadly threat in the way that the 2014 rules could only hint at.

Now, there is another question to ask: how many players are we talking?

In my experience, most D&D groups are 4-6 players. If we want to look at the earliest we can employ a creature of a given CR, naturally we could use a 6-player party to maximize our XP budget. But I think it might be wiser to look at the average here, sticking with 5 as a typical example (naturally, your table might differ).

CR 0, CR 1/8, CR 1/4, CR 1/2, and CR 1:

These challenge ratings represent creatures that are fairly weak and easy to take down. Even for level 1, none of these has enough XP to expend a full high-difficulty budget. But even if you're going for a Low-difficulty encounter (which you probably should when the party's just starting out in most cases) a single CR 1 monster is worth 200 xp, which would just fit for a 4-player party, and if we're at 5 players, you're actually below Low difficulty if that creature doesn't have any help.

CR 2, 450 xp: Level 1

If you have 5 or 6 player characters, each contributes 100 to the budget of a high-difficulty encounter, meaning a budget of 500 or 600. Thus, in theory, a party of five or six could take on a CR 2 monster like an Ankheg, though it would be a hard fight. Note, though, that an Ankheg's Bite attack deals an average of 13 damage to a target, meaning that it's unlikely anyone other than a Barbarian is going to remain standing after a single successful hit. It's highly unlikely that no one in the party will go down if the Ankheg gets a turn.

CR 3, 700 xp: Level 2

5 2nd level players have a high-difficulty budget of 200 apiece, meaning a total budget of 1000. This could thus allow you to send a Mummy against them along with 300 xp-worth of creatures to aid them (perhaps six CR 1/2 creatures). Here, though, consider that the Mummy has its mummy rot curse, which requires a 3rd level spell to remove - something the party won't have access to for themselves for several levels.

CR 4, 1,100 xp: Level 3

While just over our budget for a high-difficulty encounter at level 2, we're actually at only around half of what the encounter budget for 3rd level characters would be, which is 2000 (yes, it doubles at this level, perhaps reflecting the influx of power from choosing a subclass). A Lamia, as an example at this CR, is hitting relatively hard for a 3rd level character, but is actually pretty unlikely to down someone in a single hit (doing 14 damage on average per hit).

CR 5, 1,800 xp: Level 3

While our Lamia might have needed some help, something like a Troll is going to be a really significant threat to 3rd level players on its own. (Though technically it could fit a CR 1 ally to further trouble our party).

CR 6, 2,300 xp: Level 4

Much as the Troll nearly expends the entire high-difficulty budget for level 3 characters, the relatively small bump to the per-player budget here means that we're actually only 200 xp shy once again of hitting that ceiling. Here, we might have a dastardly Ghast Gravecaller, which confounds the party with conditions rather than outright power.

CR 7, 2,900 xp: Level 5

This is a pretty massive leap, as our budget per-player more than doubles now that the party is in tier 2, with extra attack, 3rd level spells, and such. Despite a jump in xp for our CR 7 creature, our actual full budget is now nearly twice what a CR 7 creature is worth, so if we want this to be high-difficulty, we'll have to make up a deficit of 2,600 xp, even if we're using something classically scary like a Young Black Dragon. Consider, though, how powerful that breath attack is - dealing an average of 49 damage on a failed save. If you're playing, say, a 5th level Bard who has, say, +2 to Con, you probably have 38 HP at this level. So, that dragon on top of, say, a Troll (unlikely given the Troll doesn't want to hang around with all that acid damage, but you get the gist).

CR 8, 3,900 xp: Level 5

Yeah, that leap in power that comes with hitting level 5 opens up a lot of potential foes to fight. Here, we can apparently still fight a Chain Devil with enough xp to spare to have a CR 4 ally for them.

CR 9, 5000 xp: Level 5

Damn, guys. Again, as a reminder, we're talking about high-difficulty encounters here, and I would not recommend sending a Clay Golem after your party several times in a day after they had just hit level 5. Still, this is in-budget and has enough for a CR 2 monster left over.

CR 10, 5,900 xp: Level 6

Finally we hit something 5th level characters just shouldn't try to fight. Something like a Yochlol demon is now pushing us beyond the mere beginning stages of tier 2, though again, we've got enough left over for a CR 4 ally.

CR 11, 7,200 xp: Level 7

Ok, we're now blowing through to a new level. I do think that as we hit CRs 10 and higher, we're starting to get into the range of monsters that can remain relevant all the way to level 20, even if what is now a dire, deadly encounter would serve better as a minion to some tougher boss later on. A Remorhaz can swallow PCs and pump out a lot of damage, with an attack bonus that should hit pretty consistently even against heavily-armored foes.

CR 12, 8,400 xp: Level 7

Still in this level range, a CR 12 monster is coming very close to fully expending our xp budget, but it means that a party of 7th level characters (like my Wizard, whom I've been playing for over three years) could take on something like an Arcanoloth... though it would be a tough fight.

CR 13, 10,000 xp: Level 8

As a note, I'm ignoring the "in lair" version of creatures here, but if we accept that, this means that 8th level is the lowest a party of 5 can be before they can face off against one of D&D's most iconic creatures: the Beholder. (And here I was always thinking that you'd have to be tier 3 to get there).

CR 14, 11,500 xp: Level 9

Now, we're starting to hit a point where, at least in the Monster Manual, the number of creatures at any given CR is diminishing. Here, I'm looking at the Ice Devil as an example - a relatively simple creature that might make more sense as an elite minion at higher levels (though it can cast Wall of Ice, a fairly complex spell).

CR 15, 13,000 xp: Level 9

This, it turns out, is precisely what the high-difficulty budget for a group of 5 9th level players is. So, if you want to give them a hard but theoretically winnable fight, you can throw a Purple Worm at them.

CR 16, 15,000 xp: Level 10

This isn't quite as perfectly precise, but it's only a little below the full budget for 5 10th-level characters. Thus, if you want a really hard fight near the end of tier 2, an Iron Golem is technically an acceptable choice.

CR 17, 18,000 xp: Level 11

I may have screwed up the math in my analysis of the Death Knight as a potential boss at the end of tier 2. In fact, this, or the new Dracolich (outside its lair) will generally be considered overkill until the party reaches tier 3. Armed with 6th level spells, or some features that really enhance player power (like Radiant Strikes or the Fighter's third attack,) the party can take on either of these undead menaces - though it's going to be a really tough fight. (I might have been budgeting for a 6-player party, actually. That would explain it.)

CR 18, 20,000 xp: Level 11

Truly filling nearly our entire budget, we only have one example of this CR in the Monster Manual, which is the Demilich.

CR 19, 22,000 xp: Level 12

Again, only one example here, and it nearly fills the entire budget, we have the toughest demon in the book, the Balor.

CR 20, 25,000 xp: Level 13

At CR 20, we're now getting into levels where most of what we find are legendary monsters. Here, we get the first of the Ancient Dragons, such as the Ancient White Dragons. Given how a lot of campaigns only go up to level 12-14, it's fitting that at least we can start facing down these most epic of monsters.

CR 21, 33,000 xp: Level 15

That's interesting: we have to wait two levels before we can actually get up to CR 21 monsters, including another of the most iconic creatures: the Lich. Given how iconic a Lich is, it's interesting to think that only characters of a level few ever reach are considered ready to face one (though the 2014 one was kind of pathetic and could be taken out in a good turn by a Fighter or Paladin, so their mystique suffered a bit).

CR 22, 41,000 xp: Level 16

Yes, we're hitting the end of tier 3, and it's only at this point that we can face down one of the new Titans, the Elemental Cataclysm. Note that it's hard to find creatures at this level that aren't ancient dragons.

CR 23, 50,000 xp: Level 17

While 16th-level characters are only just shy of hitting this with their budget, apparently now that we're getting into the truly globe-shaking monsters like the mighty Kraken, we've got to get into tier 4.

CR 24, 62,000 xp: Level 18

A mere 9th level spell is apparently not enough for you to face the deadliest of all the Chromatic Dragons, the Ancient Red Dragon, as you'll need to be level 18 before you fight one, in theory.

CR 25, 75,000 xp: Level 19

We're running out of monsters, with only the Colossus at this CR, and only one more monster in the Monster Manual to look at. And, evidently, such a creature is meant only for a party that is on the cusp of achieving their ultimate power.

CR 26, 90,000 xp: Level 20

Now, I'm cheating, because we're going outside the Monster Manual and looking at Demogorgon, the Prince of Demons, the Sibilant Beast. Yes, according to the encounter-building guidance, you don't want to face the giant two-headed baboon that wants to and actually could destroy the universe until you're level 20. Does Monsters of the Multiverse live up to the 2024 standards of monster difficulty? I'm not sure. I will say that I ran a one-shot in which the party fought Orcus (also CR 26) at level 17 and did fine, so color me skeptical.

CR 27, 105,000 xp: Level 20

The Chromatic Greatwyrms from Fizban's are technically doable for a party of 5 players, but this cheats slightly because they're mythic encounters that in theory should be worth double their XP - and thus be officially beyond the budget for any party of less than 10 20th level characters.

CR 28, 120,000 xp: Nobody

Yes, we've now hit the XP level where 5 players, no matter how high-level they are, is actually supposed to be able to fight something as powerful as Sul Khatesh or Rak Tulkesh, or a Chromatic Greatwyrm. Notably, the former of these is infamous for being basically unkillable, as she can create four massive anti-magic zones that don't affect her own spells, and she cannot be harmed by non-magical weapons (which, notably, any weapon becomes when in her zone). So, you basically can only harm her with an artifact, and even then, she has at-will Shield, which gives her an effective AC of 27.

CR 29: ???

I don't think there are any CR 29 monsters in all of 5th Edition, but presumably they'd also be in this category.

CR 30: 155,000 xp: Nobody, But More

Yes, in theory, the Tarrasque is too difficult for any party to face. (I'll note though that I think the hardest fight I can imagine running would be the Aspect of Bahamut, also CR 30, if he's accompanied by the polymorphed seven ancient gold dragons he tends to travel the material plane with, given that even when those insanely powerful dragons are killed, he can restore them to full HP with his breath weapon. Good thing he's a good-aligned deity.)

Now, obviously, there would be little point to having such powerful monsters if they didn't think you could ever fight them. Powerful magic items and clever strategy can make up for the raw power these creatures possess (though the old "just have a Clay Golem fight the Tarrasque" strategy won't work anymore). Also, allied NPCs can help balance this out as well.

There's no specific guidance as far as I can tell on how to adjust an encounter's difficulty when the party has help from other creatures, but my general rule of thumb is to simply add the NPCs' xp value to the total budget - thus, if we wanted, say, a group of 6 18th level characters to fight the Tarrasque (er... no one in my group reads this blog, right?) the 85,200 xp budget I get from them is still shy 69,800 xp, but if we sent 6 Warrior Commanders (each worth 5,900 xp, for a total of 35,400) and 9 Berserker Commanders (each worth 3,900, for a total of 35,100,) we actually wrest that CR down into theoretically manageable territories (even if those Berserkers are going to still have to roll an 18 or higher to actually hit the monster).

This list is not perfectly scientific - among other things, it assumes a party size of 5, when your party could be fewer or more. And, again, at most levels, ignoring these insane super-high-CR monsters, most fights you run will probably involve multiple monsters, and multiple kinds of monster. In tier 1 and even early tier 2, don't ignore those less-than-1 CR creatures, who might be individually pretty weak but in the massive numbers you can start to have with them, can still be quite a threat.

Essentially, this exercise is primarily to be for DMs who are champing at the bit to use some cool new creature that has inspired a story in their minds.