What is the Blessed Organization's Role in Control Resonant?

 I don't even know if anyone even mentions the Blessed Organization out loud across all of Control or in Alan Wake II.

Sam Lake talked about the trick they discovered (or learned, at least) when building the lore of Control: that you can get players to read a whole lot of text if the text itself is a reward for exploration. If you play a game like World of Warcraft, a lot of players don't really bother to read the quest text, because it's just so much to get through before you're on your way, completing objectives. Control obviously took some inspiration from FromSoft's Souls-like games (control points being like bonfires, Source being like Souls) and I think part of that inspiration was the idea of hiding a lot of the game's story and lore in dense text.

I can't tell you exactly why I find the various FBC memos more compelling to read than the item descriptions in Elden Ring, but somehow, it works.

But like in FromSoft games, entire subplots can be hidden in these documents.

And the subplot that feels most consequential is that of the Blessed Organization.

I've written about this before, and there's nothing direct to link with the new trailer for Control Resonant, but I think it's worth reminding myself and others about it.

The FBC monitors and has a mandate to stop "paracriminal" organizations, a designation that basically means a criminal organization that takes advantage of paranatural phenomena, often trafficking and/or using altered items or OOPs.

While we'd later see the Cult of the Tree designated as one of these (and discover that their aims were far more benign than they first appeared - though still messing with an OOP) the only other one I think that is named is The Blessed Organization.

I don't recall exactly, but I think that Blessed gets mentioned only in the DLCs, primarily in the AWE expansion for Control (which tied into Alan Wake as a story). The memos don't always make the connection explicit, but we find out about various paranatural crimes that involve various companies that are called "Blessed" XYZ, such as Blessed Pictures or Blessed Repair and Service. The companies in some way provided or were linked to an altered item that caused some havoc, sometimes causing injuries.

Later, when an altered item kills an FBC employee, the PO box from which the item was mailed is the same associated with the altered movie camera affiliated with Blessed Pictures.

The only individual known to be associated with the Blessed Organization is one Chester Bless, who in 1994 ran a self-help course using a surfboard that could impart a sense of confidence and self-esteem upon those who touched it. The FBC took notice and attempted to raid Bless' home, but found it empty, the surfboard left behind. Notably, Bless' self-help course was called "The Power of the Board," which should raise some eyebrows for anyone aware of the cosmic entity behind the FBC.

In Alan Wake II, when Alan is able to visit some kind of Overlap/Threshold within his own apartment (his accidental "haunting" of Alice) we see that she is in correspondence with Barry Wheeler, Alan's best friend and agent, who has been in Los Angeles managing the film rights for Alan's books in an effort to maintain a revenue stream for Alice. Barry jokes that he's joined a cult, referring to what he believes is a Hollywood social club, but the name rings alarm bells for us players: The Blessed Wellness Center. Barry claims it's led by someone named Chester, who gave him an ominous warning that something bad was going to happen in New York.

One detail that I feel like every YouTuber I've watched seems to have missed is that when Alice leaves New York to plunge herself into the Dark Place, the empty apartment we find is filled with moving boxes labeled "Blessed." Now, this could be because Barry, having lost both Alan and Alice, was left to manage what was left of their shared estate, and he might have sent movers from the organization to pack things up. However, I'm also the only one online that I've seen who thinks that Alice is also linked to the organization now - when she talks about how an "organization" helped her regain the memories she had repressed from the events of the first game, seemingly everyone else says that this is the FBC she's talking about, but I think that that choice of word is deliberate: the FBC is a bureau or agency, and the word organization is what we use to refer to Blessed.

But that might not even matter that much: the important thing, though, is that Blessed knows that something bad is going to go down in New York.

And as we see from the Control Resonant trailer, things have gone real bad in New York.

Now, I'm disinclined to think that Blessed are good guys. Their actions have clearly put a lot of innocent people in danger, and especially the killing of the FBC employee at their America Overnight studio points to violent, hostile intent.

It's possible that there's some sympathetic motivation under all of it - the FBC of course, has a pretty awful ethical track record. If their goal is to strike out against a corrupt and tyrannical government agency, I might quibble with their tactics, but I could understand the motivation.

But if Chester Bless knows that an apocalyptic event is coming in New York, he's got a moral and ethical obligation to warn someone who can do something about it.

Maybe Blessed is behind it.

First off, we're making a certain assumption here: that Chester Bless and the other members of the organization are human. Certainly, all mentions of them seem to point toward a group of human paracriminals. But are we sure of that?

There are a number of somewhat angelic/heavenly visuals in the Control Resonant trailer. In the first shot, where the camera tilts up from Dylan's containment cell, the circular resonance pattern is surrounded by gold-limned clouds. I had also noted that the twisting pattern of pigeons soon after that recalls some descriptions of angels - I remember the cover of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door left a big impression on me when my sister was reading it when we were kids, and I think it depicts an angel. And when we see Dylan step out of the Thomas Street Subway to battle some very mutated Hiss, above in the sky there's a golden ring that looks like a god's eye.

One of the central questions in Control is whether we can really confront all of these strange phenomena and retain the kind of rational detachment to still call it science fiction. The Tennyson report (almost certainly written by Langston) argues that the insistence on all of this quasi-scientific terminology is just a way to deny the clear fact that all of this is magic, and that we're just denying the existence of magic, gods, and such because we've convinced ourselves that our less rational forebears must have been mistaken about their worldview.

Is this a paracriminal organization, then, or the cult to some kind of dangerous god?

There's also the interesting question of what connection the Blessed have with the FBC. Are they targeting it simply on ideological grounds? I think that the cheeky pun about The Power of the Board suggests some deeper knowledge of the FBC's inner secrets than a regular gang of criminals would have.

The earliest date associated with Blessed is 1968, when the PO box related to Blessed Pictures and the deadly fondue fountain delivered to the studios of America Overnight was opened, evidently never used prior to 2016, when both the ActionMaxx Camera and Fondue Pot altered items passed through it. This was four years after Broderick Northmoor became FBC Director in 1964. Northmoor was the first Director to be appointed by the Board, rather than by the government (presumably it had previously been a presidential appointment, but given the FBC's supposed role as more or less handling logistics for transporting materials for other government agencies, I imagine that this was usually one where the president just signed an appointment and moved on to other tasks).

If we were to guess that the Blessed Organization first started to take form around the time that that PO Box was purchased, maybe after a year or two of planning involving the acquisition of disposable assets like a burner PO Box, might it have happened as a response to this change, with the Board essentially taking over the bureau?

Is it the Bureau that is their target? Or is it the Board? Or, alternatively, might it be some kind of contingency? The Board has shown itself to be quite shady and willing to sabotage its own people (like Marshall) if they step out of line. Could it be maintaining Blessed as some kind of contingency?

Right now, of course, the details in the trailer are really mostly just to lay out the premise and hint at broad ideas, and this kind of detail is either not going to be in that first trailer or we lack the context to really understand what hints we're receiving.

I think the key detail is Chester Bless' foreknowledge of chaos in New York. (Also crazy to me that he's still going by that name - unless he's taunting the FBC in some way).

It looks to me like Dylan is not particularly interested in representing the FBC's agenda (given how the bureau's initials are painted over on his poncho,) so I wonder if the Blessed Organization might wind up being a faction we interact with in the game.

Control Resonant has been described by Remedy as something of an open-world action RPG, leaning more heavily into the RPG elements that the first game hinted at. What if we're able to do "quests" for them, if we aren't just going to be fighting them.

So yeah, if you were hoping for definitive answers here, I have none to give. But I'm just trying to squeeze every last drop of info out of what we've got so far.

What Role for Jesse In Control Resonant?

 In my most conservative imaginings about what Control 2 might be, I thought it was possible we'd still be in the Oldest House, just different parts of it, dealing with another crisis. The Oldest House is an incredible setting, and you could do a ton of things there.

But I'm also rather relieved that that doesn't seem to be the case. While it doesn't seem likely we're leaving New York City (though that doesn't count going through various alternate dimensions - arguably we might go very far) it seems that Control Resonant will see the weirdness contained within the Oldest House break out into the rest of the world, needing someone to do something to prevent it from destroying the whole world.

It looks, honestly, like a pretty tall order.

Jesse Faden, of course, was the hero and player character of the first game, and I think most of us were fairly confident that we'd be gunning around with Jesse and her suite of powers, blasting away with the Service Weapon in the sequel.

But the Director of the FBC appears to be taking on a different role in the second game.

In Control, Dylan was Jesse's initial objective - she hunted down the FBC in order to find her long-lost brother. For seventeen years, the two had been separated after they survived an AWE in their hometown of Ordinary, Maine. Jesse and Dylan had been the unwitting instigators of the event, discovering an OOP in the form of a Slide Projector that opened doorways into other worlds. By the time the FBC arrived several days later (September of 2002, while the AWE had happened in August) the town's adults had all vanished, and there were only 17 kids remaining (some having evidently been transformed into strange monsters, or the case of the Fadens' friend, a dog - genuinely, the events in Ordinary seem like something out of Stephen King, particularly the childhood segments of IT). Jesse and Dylan were going to be taken in by Trench and Darling (who were both on-site for this investigation) but Jesse managed to run away.

And as a result, the two kids had very different lives. Jesse bounced between foster homes and wound up kind of a drifter while Dylan was put into a strange program to groom him as an appropriate successor to Trench as Director of the FBC.

Dylan's conditioning under the Prime Candidate Program was... not great. He apparently killed one of the researchers and developed a great deal of resentment toward Dr. Darling and more or less everyone else, even Jesse, because he had been told that she could visit him whenever she wanted, and of course she didn't. They didn't tell him that she was actually looking for him all this time.

In other words, the FBC is, like, not great. Even figures like Darling, whom I think we're meant to like, have done some incredibly unethical and shady things. Jesse's ascension to Director is a sudden and bizarre twist in things - she literally walks into the building moments before her predecessor blows his brains out (I'm assuming he's forced to do this by the Board, who probably sensed his infection by the Hiss by that point but needed to have a proper successor lined up).

Jesse comes in quite heroically, excited to enter this new world of strangeness, but also eager to find her brother and resolve the whole crisis.

But Control's ending was... well, it wasn't a true resolution to the crisis. The Hiss are still there, and as we see in the new trailer, the Hiss are still there, and now spilling out into the outside world. As Dylan's narration suggests, trying to keep it all contained has still allowed it to "worm" its way out (as in "you are a worm through time," a phrase that I think is more like someone being able to view time as a spatial dimension, a bit like how we see the pigeon at the start of the trailer).

In the Foundation DLC, we get our clearest evidence that the Board is also not so great - they arbitrarily limit Jesse's power in such a way that would prevent her from getting her mission done, forcing her to receive the other power from The Former, and then the Board has the chutzpah to get pissed off at her for doing this. It's clear that they really liked Northmoor because he was the first director that they could really control, and that Trench was fine up until he got ruined by the Hiss. But Jesse remains independent, skeptical of the FBC's mission and practices. In an ideal world, she's a reformer.

But can the FBC be reformed? I suspect that Jesse might feel, after what will be seven years as Director, trapped in the same damned building, that it's not looking like it can be reformed.

Jesse is described as "gone rogue/fishing." Gone rogue has a pretty clear meaning - she's not taking the Board's orders anymore. Gone fishing is kind of a funny term - it can mean just sort of slacking off (which could mean a less aggressive version of going rogue,) but fishing is also a kind of hunt. Going fishing for clues or evidence or a lead could imply that she's on a mission to discover some new truth that her normal day-to-day practices might not allow her to find.

The point, though, is that as the remaining Faden sibling, Dylan is now being asked to step up. "You're up," the message says.

What is Dylan's mindset? We saw him when he was infected with the Hiss, a sort of mad, sinister monotone. Dylan said he liked being part of the Hiss, presumably because it was an escape from being the FBC's captive. When Estevez finds him in the Lake House (or rather, via the Oceanview from the Lake House) he seems to be trying but failing to do something that Jesse wanted him to do. Just what is that?

I re-watched the trailer with my resolution turned up to the max (Youtube set it to a default 480p, which clouded some of the text). One thing I noticed is that the kind of battle-poncho he's wearing has the letters FBC on the back, but smeared over with black paint, as if he's cutting ties with the Bureau, which would make sense.

I think even if Dylan is now willing to fight against the Hiss rather than trying to spread its influence, there's no love lost for the FBC - his antipathy toward them pre-dates the Hiss. This is a man who has experienced terrible abuse at the hands of the Bureau.

Jesse hasn't suffered as much under the Bureau's influence, but especially when being in charge of it doesn't seem to give her the power to fix its deeper problems, it stands to reason she might be working against its (read: the Board's) agenda.

We, of course, saw Alan Wake II give us two primary player characters (and all different characters to play in the DLCs). I think it's very possible that we'll be playing as both Faden siblings in Resonant, but I also think that we might just play as Dylan. The game's been described as a "sibling" to the first game, and while in the first, Jesse sought her brother, in this, one of our main goals is to seek after her.

Alan Wake II had a big motif of doubling and mirrors, and I think we might also see that here - like how we see the same side of a street mirrored in the opening sequence of the trailer.

Dylan has spent a lot of the intervening years since the first game in a coma. What has Jesse become in the meantime?

A few more notes:

I don't know what, if any, significance the fact that the cafe in the beginning of the trailer has: The awning says 665 Coffee Drinks - I assume it's meant to be 665 Thomas Street, which is both the street the FBC is on and also the number is Remedy's recurring in-joke, "the neighbor of the beast." Tom Zane occupies room 665 at the Oceanview Hotel (though again, in a weird way because the actual room is just a kind of empty square, and the apartment where we actually see him is created with a projector).

Also, the memos on the desk outside of Dylan's containment unit put the FBC's address as 43 Thomas Street, whereas I believe it was earlier established to be 34. Another case of mirroring? Or could the FBC have changed offices? We don't know how long containment has been breached, and who within the Oldest House is still alive.

There are a number of visual shifts, including the font that we get The Board's messages subtitled with. This could be merely a stylistic update, but I find it worth looking at. The folks over at Gaming University argue that the word choice doesn't seem to match the Board, and they speculate on whether this is actually Jesse sending messages (one theory on who the Board is is that it's all the former Directors of the FBC, though count me as a skeptic toward that one).

New Expedition 33 DLC Takes Us to Verso's Drafts

There's free COE33 DLC!

I've played through a fair amount of it - apparently being level 99 on every character might be a little overpowered even for a DLC.

The DLC brings with it a number of new enemies - I found a Chromatic Nevron on a floating island that I had either just never happened to see or might have been added.

The main event, though, is a large new area east of Lumiere called Verso's Drafts. It's decidedly more colorful than Renoir's Drafts, even to the extent that it might take you a moment to adjust to the insane color palette of this region.

The exact nature of the place is a bit of a spoiler for those who haven't finished the game, but basically, think of the kind of playground that a little kid would come up with, filled with children's toys and candy.

The area isn't, as far as I can tell, terribly linear, with a lot of challenges and new enemies to fight. Again, though, having just idled around in Renoir's Drafts trying to farm the chroma to buy everything in the game, my entire party is level 99, which is pretty overpowered except for what I assume is the DLC's final boss.

There are new weapons, new Pictos, and lots of new costumes. Hey, were you also kind of sad Monoco never got a Baguette costume? Well, turn that "whoo" into a "whee," because they've got you covered.

I suspect there are a lot of hidden things here - there's a simple game of hopscotch you can find to get a costume piece for Verso, but then in another nearby area there are hopscotch squares hidden around, and I suspect you'll get another piece if you can find them all and hop onto them in order.

I've faced what I assume is the DLC's final boss (if only because there's a lot of buildup to it and it has an elaborate cutscene) twice now, both times getting it to the end of its second phase, at which there's an evidently very precise Gradient Counter you need to pull off, which has insta-wiped me both times.

Expedition 33 released this the same day as the Game Awards (yesterday as of this writing) when it basically swept the awards, winning Game of the Year as well as several other awards. While the highlight for me regarding the announcements was the trailer for Control Resonant, I really love Expedition 33, and I'm happy to have an excuse to jump back into it. It's crazy to think that I only even found out about the game earlier this year - it kind of came out of nowhere to take the gaming world by storm (and has, of course, provoked a bit of a backlash to its popularity).

Anyway, I'm a big fan of free DLCs, even if we can't expect them to be, like, Shadow of the Erdtree-level big and complex. Even if it's considered a "small" game, Expedition 33 feels big and expansive, and like one of those games you will always be able to dig a little deeper into and find a little more. Now there's an invitation to continue that exploration.

CONTROL Resonant Announced

 This is not a drill. The sequel to 2019's Control, a game I didn't play until 2023, has an official announcement trailer.

And boy, does it look like things are going to be a bit different.

Broad strokes (before I re-watch the trailer and start and stop it to gather every freaking detail I can):

First, most shockingly, it looks like we're playing as Dylan Faden, Jesse's brother, whom she was tracking and looking for in the first game. Dylan became the sort of voice for the Hiss as he allowed it into himself after an entire childhood and early adulthood under the FBC's attempts to mold and shape him and his parautilitarian powers to serve as the appropriate successor to Zachariah Trench.

In Control, Jesse finds herself chosen as the FBC's new Director by the mysterious and inhuman Board, and is forced to fight across the enormous and labyrinthine and "bigger on the inside" Oldest House, the paranatural brutalist office building hidden in plain sight in New York City. Jesse fights against the Hiss, an infective resonance from another universe that takes over people like an infection, and ultimately cuts them off from their home dimension, but things are still pretty dire by the end of it: the Hiss is still in the Oldest House and able to keep replicating, and that means that the building must remain on total lockdown. In Alan Wake II, it was confirmed that the FBC hasn't heard from HQ since 2019 (four years by the point of that game). People don't even know that Jesse has become Director outside the building, and Dylan, the only person to survive being cleansed by Jesse, has been in a coma.

We did get a glimpse of Dylan in Alan Wake II's Lake House DLC, but what it seems to indicate is that Dylan, no longer wanting to be part of the Hiss, is nonetheless still somehow affected by it, and seems to be working as hard as he can to keep it contained, but he's failing.

And now, it looks like containment has been breached.

All right: let's get into the trailer. If you haven't watched it already, please do. Then, you can follow along as I re-watch it and make note of everything I notice.

After a brief shot of Dylan in his containment unit, we see some kind of circular pattern in the sky - something reminiscent of Polaris, the entity in Jesse's head that has guided and protected her, but clearly different. Also, very celestial and even angelic or god-like (take note of this, as it's a motif).

We then see a NYC street cafe, and watch as a coffee cup (of course coffee, it's Remedy) duplicate itself, and then a pigeon do likewise, forming, notably, a kind of swirling vortex of feathers that looks very much like a "biblically accurate angel." The feathers recede, and we see a Manhattan folded in on itself like something from Inception or Doctor Strange.

Our next shot shows another city street, but infected with a familiar hazard: the Mold. A big sign like the kind you'd see warning of construction on a freeway reads "Do Not Ingest" alternating with "Resist The Urge," while guards or, more likely, mold zombies, wander.

Next, we see another street filled with red light and Hiss Agents floating in the air. (Might be coincidence, but it's Remedy, so I'll mention it: this alley looks like the one where Alan first encounters Dark Place Casey in Alan Wake II.)

Then, most tellingly, we see the front entrance to the Oldest House in bright daylight. The front doors have been smashed open, with bodies and trails of blood down its front steps.

Then, indoors, we see Dylan's containment chamber, and what looks possibly like Jesse sitting on a couch, observing him. She gets up, grabs something off of a desk - it's a long rod of some sort, seemingly made of blackrock. A childhood photo of the Fadens is underneath it, along with a scratched pen-drawing of some kind of concentric circles and eye-like shapes, a file on the Slide Projector OOP, and some other FBC redacted memos I can't quite make out.

Jesse takes the rod over to Dylan and seems to stab him in the heart with it.

A burst of energy, Dylan's eyes open wide. He awakens and walks out of the containment unit into a surreal landscape where a strange structure awaits him. An entity - likely the Board, but it doesn't sound like it used to, greets Dylan (with different hair than the previous scene - maybe the trailer is edited to disorient us and these aren't in sequence with one another?) says "RISE AND SHINE," and then "THE SIBLING HAS GONE ROGUE/FISHING." Dylan looks down, and then he's in a subway station (I think it reads "Home Street Station," though the "home" in it is obscured on both sides somewhat). Dylan seems to shake off whatever sheathe is on the rod he now carries, and it reforms in his hand as some kind of melee weapon. The Board (we think) says "YOU'RE UP." Dylan walks up to find a street full of vaguely humanoid monsters, and the rod in his hand transforms into a massive war-hammer, which he brings to bear against the creatures as the city is twisted into a kaleidoscopic vision behind him.

We then see some action-shots (presumably of gameplay) of Dylan fighting across a surreal and twisted New York, with what looks like a pretty enormous variety of new enemies and bosses.

We get a warning from Jesse to close out the trailer: "Pace yourself. It's gonna get weirder."

    There's a bit more information on the official website:

The game sees the FBC release and deploy Dylan to deal with the chaos that has broken out into Manhattan. Our villain is only known as a "mysterious cosmic entity," and Dylan journeys out both to save the city (and world) while also trying to find his sister.

His weapon is not the Service Weapon, but something new (though similar) called The Aberrant. It looks like we'll be able to shift it between different forms depending on our needs as the situation demands. In an article on the Playstation website, folks from Remedy described the game as something of an open-world action RPG. I'm curious to see what they mean, exactly, by that. In some ways, despite being confined to one building, Control was also built in this open-world RPG structure, even if its gameplay was that of a 3rd-person shooter (though one that I think was interested a bit less in the shooting specifically than the broader action.

Dylan looks like he'll be playing very differently - at the very least, he's far more of a melee fighter. I wonder how much, if any, of Jesse's arsenal from the first game will make it into Dylan's catalogue of capabilities.

I'm honestly a little surprised that we won't be playing as Jesse - there's a pretty profound perspective shift, but if there's anything I have faith in Remedy doing more than anything, it's telling a compelling story.

I think we can probably gather that Jesse and the Board are not getting along so well after the events of Foundation. But was it Jesse who broke containment in the Oldest House, or was it Dylan when we encountered him during The Lake House DLC as Estevez?

While it sure seems The Hiss are going to be part of this game, I also kind of get the impression that they're only one of many problems in the city (we saw the Mold, but also possibly some new, other things). Does this have anything to do with the Blessed Organization? It was such a compelling hinted-at antagonist in the first game (and again in Alan Wake II).

The most exciting thing is that the game is due to come out in 2026 - about two years earlier than I had even hoped it would come. Unless it somehow comes out in the first half of the year, I'll still have to wait until my 40s to play it, but only just barely! There's other big new out of the Game Awards as well, but this was the biggest one on my list.

EDIT:

Just tossing in more specific details - not sure how relevant these all are.

Ok, some more scrutiny: the first shot of the twisted city we get after our pigeon/angel thing shows us a partially-mirrored street, which is evidently Thomas St. The name Thomas in Remedy is a pretty important one, as Thomas Zane, or whatever being claims that identity, has shown up in Remedy games as early as in Death Rally. Obviously, his role become a lot more bizarre and mysterious in Alan Wake II, where Tom Zane, the Finnish auteur filmmaker appeared as a decidedly less benevolent force than the poet we knew as Thomas Zane in the first Alan Wake game had been.

Another closer look at the papers on the desk when Jesse picks up The Aberrant to stab Dylan/bestow it upon him seems to be a report on the Ordinary AWE.

The strange twisted-steel structure that Dylan approaches early on seems to be similar in pattern on the weapon Dylan holds, though I don't think it's quite the same.

The Board (assuming it is the Board) sounds different. This could be just an updated sound design compared with the first game in 2019, but we also don't see the inverted black pyramid. In the first game, The Board claims to be broadcasting from "The Other," and I actually think that pyramid might have been The Other - an intermediary or even just a device the Board uses. Perhaps it sounds different because it's speaking to Dylan in a different way.

Dylan's hair is inconsistent. While comatose, it's long, but when we see him step out and meet with the giant metallic structure (that is maybe what the Board is using to communicate with him) he's got shorter hair, closer to what we saw in The Lake House. Obviously, it's all had to grow back since the events of Control, when all of his hair fell out, but six years seems plenty of time for that to happen.

There's what feels like a jump-cut from Dylan observing his weapon to his appearance in the subway. There are posters in the subway for something called Parting (broken up into PA, RT, and ING, if that's relevant). Underneath, the poster says "One night only," and then "Sunset." Now, I actually briefly thought that this might imply that this subway is actually in Los Angeles (we have a major street here called Sunset Boulevard - you've probably heard of the movie named after it) but when Dylan exits the station, the format of the subway sign is unmistakably the NYC metro.

Subway stations are, of course, a common location in Remedy games, from Max Payne to Alan Wake II.

As a note, before exiting the station, Dylan seems to shake the bloody blades from the ends of his bifurcated weapon before allowing one half to meld back to the other half.

Once again, my best guess at the name of the station is Home Street Station. So, it's not Caldera St. Station from Alan Wake II or Roscoe Station from Max Payne. There's graffiti on the signs, one depicting a big ring and the other that seems if anything to say "grok," or maybe "brok." Not sure if there's any relevance there.

What's almost certainly more relevant is the giant glowing ring in the sky above what seems to be an army of Hiss. The ring, and the shape surrounding it, actually seems reminiscent of the Former, though in a more blindingly bright, almost angelic form.

If I had to guess, I imagine there's going to be a lot of pseudo-angelic imagery with the monsters in this game. First of all, there's a lot of reason to believe that the otherworldly entities we encounter in Control, such as the Board, would have been thought of (I won't even say mistaken as, because it's more of a matter of perspective than truth) gods or other supernatural entities. Second, and this could look either foolish or completely obvious depending on whether they actually show up, it would tie into the name of the Blessed Organization. We have practically zero sense of what the agenda of the Blessed is, but I would not be shocked if they have some religious framing for their actions.

It does look like we're going to be fighting a lot of Hiss - they might be our meat-and-potatoes bad guys, though it also looks like they're a little more warped and distorted (not, like, those specific enemies form the first game) and some are a bit less humanoid in appearance. But I think we're going to have other things to deal with. The real show-stopper appears to be some kind of boss that looks like a floating face but throws various metal or stone things at us - not appearing to be Hiss at all, given that the color scheme is far more yellows and browns.

It's clear that we're going to be facing down a lot of surreal and weird stuff (surreal is how you hook me - I love the design of the Nevrons in Expedition 33, and Control going in with more diverse enemy design is going to probably be a big win).

The trailer's last shot, post title card, actually might be Jesse, rather than Dylan, floating in toward a strange ring-like pattern that looks very much to me like an eye, its colors violets, reds, and blues. This doesn't look like Polaris, but it also doesn't look like the other things we've been seeing.

I'm really curious to see what role Jesse plays in this game. While it's a very exciting direction to take Dylan in for this game, I'm also very fond of Jesse, and controlling her in the first game felt so damned good.

Alan Wake II gave us two playable protagonists (and then a bunch of others in the DLCs,) and so part of me wonders if we'll be able to play as both Dylan and Jesse, but giving them very different styles of combat. I don't want to pin my hopes to that - as far as the material we have so far implies, the whole game is going to be Dylan's - it has been described as a "sibling" to the first game.

The strange possibilities hinted at in the first game surrounding Jesse and Dylan could very easily be something explored here. Dylan, in his Hissed-out state, seems to experience different realities as dreams, and in one of them, there's only a single Faden, named Jesse Dylan Faden (both siblings have names that could be a girl's or a boy's).

We likely won't get any clear details until the game's in our actual hands, but Remedy is committed to this interconnected universe - and Control and Alan Wake have both already had crossovers. I'm super curious to see if Darling's actions in the Dark Place play into this, if Alan's ascension to a "Master of Many Worlds" does, and even how the Old Gods of Asgard could play into all of this (interesting that Dylan gets to turn his weapon into a massive hammer. I know that the Service Weapon is implied to have been Mjolnir in some past iteration. What is the history of the Aberrant?)

I really have to say that, apart from chaos spilling out into Manhattan, this is very different from what I expected the game to be like. There is, of course, a bit of a knee-jerk of concern that it looks so different from the first game, but different can be very good if they have good ideas behind those differences.

And hell, Control might be one of my favorite games of all time, but it was not without its flaws. The gun was probably too weak compared to the Launch power, and as Monty Zander's critique noted, it was filled with "Goot" (or Garbage Loot). If we get a progression system that's more interesting and granular, it could be really awesome.

I just hope that, amidst all the monster fighting, we get tons of exploration, environmental storytelling, and lore documents to continue building out this incredibly cool world. Believe you me, I'll be following this game closely.

EDIT 2:

Oh, it's definitely not "Home St. Station," it's "Thomas St. Station," which makes sense given that the first intersection we see with the Atlantis Cafe at the start is Thomas Street. This is actually a real street in Manhattan, a pretty short one in Tribeca. Notably, this is the street upon which the AT&T Long Lines building stands, whose towering concrete form with no windows was a major inspiration for the Oldest House. I would not be surprised if in the Remedy universe, this building is The Oldest House, so we might now have a canonical location for the FBC HQ. (Evidently the canonical address of the Oldest House is 34 Thomas Street, which would put it just across the street from this building, which is 33.) But note in the linked Wikipedia article the entrance to the building, which clearly served as the inspiration for the Oldest House's entrance.

It might, thus, be a bit of serendipity that the building happens to be on a street that shares its name with the the RCU's most enigmatic individual.

Also, the address at the Atlantis Cafe? 665, obviously.

Deep Lore Considerations: Three Kinds of Magic

 This is a post about D&D, but I thought I'd first mention one of the works that inspired me to consider this pretty in-depth topic: Dark Souls.

In Dark Souls, there are three kinds of magic your character can choose to pursue: Sorceries, Miracles, and Pyromancies. There are basically two main "spellcasting" stats you can choose to level up in Dark Souls - Intelligence and Faith. Each kind of magic requires the proper implement to cast them (held in the hand that might otherwise hold a weapon) and generally speaking, the staves that you use for Sorceries scale in power with Intelligence, and Miracles require a talisman, which tend to scale with Faith. Likewise, most spells have a minimum requirement in their respective stat to cast them. Pyromancies, in the first Dark Souls, actually didn't scale with anything - you got a Pyromancy Flame (treated as your spell catalyst) that you could upgrade like you might a weapon, but didn't scale with stats. In DSIII, they had the flame scale with both Intelligence and Faith, so you could actually dabble in the other kinds of magic, but to optimize your pyromancy, you needed a balance that would make hitting the high requirements for high-level sorceries or miracles tough.

In D&D, there are three kinds of spells - but it's three kinds in two different ways.

In the early "One D&D" playtesting, rather than having individual class spell lists, instead each class got access to the master "Arcane," "Primal," or "Divine" spell list. In practice, this was more or less the Wizard, Druid, and Cleric list, respectively, but it meant, for example, that Warlocks and Sorcerers were going to get all the spells a Wizard could, and that Paladins could get all Cleric they had the slots to cast, but also that all Paladin spells were now Cleric spells too (meaning a Cleric could easily summon a mount with Find Steed as early as 3rd level).

Ultimately, they pulled back on this concept - while I liked the way it future-proofed any later class additions (the Artificer would just get any new Arcane spells) I also understand that it took away some of the cool uniqueness of class-specific spells, like Armor of Agathys for Warlocks or all the smites for Paladins. But the flavor of these three kinds of spells is, I think, really fascinating: they really laid it all out: Divine Magic drew on the energies of the Outer Planes (the realms of gods and the afterlives), Primal Magic drew on the energies of the Inner Planes (like the Elemental planes, but also the Feywild and Shadowfell) and then Arcane Magic drew on the interconnecting energies, found in all planes but especially the transitory planes of the Astral and Ethereal planes.

But there's another triad within D&D's spellcasting that is a mechanical distinction: Of the core 12 classes, 8 are spellcasters, and two of the non-spellcasters have subclasses (popular and good subclasses) that turn them into spellcasters. Artificers, as the thirteenth class, skew things even farther toward spellcasting. Each of these classes uses one of three ability scores as their spellcasting stat: Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma.

And these two triads don't really neatly line up. The "Primal" spellcasters, to be fair, use Wisdom, but then so does one of the "Divine" while the other uses Charisma. Intelligence is only found among "Arcane" casters (Wizards, Artificers, and the Rogue and Fighter subclasses) but the Bard, Sorcerer, and Warlock are all Charisma-based.

Now, I think these all make sense for the various classes - Clerics, Druids, and Rangers are kind of opening themselves to some force bigger than they are in the world and I think are less the source of their magic than the conduit for it. Wizards, Artificers, as well as Eldritch Knights and Arcane Tricksters, have a kind of dispassionate intellectual understanding of the underpinnings of magic, treating it more like science or technology (though I'll note that the likely upcoming Psion class is going to complicate this a bit). Charisma, as a spellcasting stat, is a little hard to pin down. For Paladins and Sorcerers, I see it as a means of asserting their will, just believing something so hard that you make it real. Warlocks and Bards can also be interpreted this way, but I think you can also tie their spellcasting more closely to actual skills linked to Charisma - Warlocks might be played as constantly cajoling and entreating their patrons to cast every spell, making every cast something like a Persuasion (or Intimidation or Deception) check, while Bards might be seen as trying to nail the perfect emotional impact of a Performance check with each spell. I think it's easier to group them all together as that "force of will" style of spellcasting (the Warlock having been granted the power from their Patron and not needing direct intercession after the initial grant of power, and the Bard focusing their entire charismatic presence to effect the spells into existence).

I don't think these separate triads are mutually exclusive as a foundation on which to build deep lore. Going back to the FromSoft catalogue, the Sorcery/Miracle/Pyromancy triad actually gets some exceptions. Sometimes, you'll find a Miracle that actually requires some Intelligence to cast, or a Talisman used for casting Miracles that will scale with Intelligence as well as Faith (and even sometimes better with Intelligence). In Elden Ring, which is a separate cosmos but borrows a lot of the core mechanical ideas from Dark Souls, the "Fundamentalist" Incantations (Incantations being the equivalent of Miracles) are always balanced equally between Intelligence and Faith for scaling, representing that this movement sought to find a rational understanding and justification for its religious teachings, or perhaps approached the existing articles of faith with a rationalist, scientific approach. (There's a cool irony in Elden Ring that the Fundamentalists are profoundly opposed to the world's equivalent of the undead, but that you also find a number of Death Magic Sorceries that also scale equally in Intelligence and Faith, so actually a character who's really good at one will be equally good at the other).

Think about ways you might use this and reflect it in your game's lore. Consider how you might hint at certain worldviews or certain truths that aren't immediately apparent.

One thing I really like to do is present religious traditions in which priests are not necessarily Clerics. In my homebrew setting, there's a God of Glory, who has historically been thought of as a god of warriors, but the truth is that he's actually the god of heroic, epic storytelling. As a result, his priests are primarily more like Bards than any other playable class - it's not that he wouldn't have clerics, but that the priesthood generally are Bards, honoring him and spreading his worship by sharing tales of heroism and glory. (I think the hidden truth is that he's not terribly concerned whether a story is fictional or not, so long as it stirs the hearts of those who hear it).

This can be an open thing: an aspect of the religious tradition that draws upon unconventional sources of magic. The truth is that gods in D&D are extremely diverse in their natures and vibes - you can have a physical being who is just powerful enough to be a source of divine power that might even live on the Material Plane, or some ineffable, formless force in the cosmos. Notably, at least in 2nd Edition Planescape, gods - or "Powers" as they're referred to in both an effort to fend off the accusations of the Satanic Panic (which is also why we devils were called baatezu, demons were called tanar'ri, and daemons were called yugoloths, though that stuck for some reason) and also a way to show how the way that Planar people framed their understanding of the cosmos - were not bound to any given plane, and free to make their divine realms in whatever plane that suited them. Asmodeus, who in modern D&D is treated as one of the most powerful gods and pretty much literally the devil, only in a polytheistic world where there's not some all-powerful creator god to whom Asmodeus is a clear inferior, in 2nd Edition is referred to as a lesser deity because even if he's in command of all devils across the entire Nine Hells, he doesn't get to pick where his realm is. Essentially, Asmodeus is the supervisor of the building while the deities who choose to be in the Nine Hells of Baator are the rich folks with luxury condos there. The plane itself is more powerful than he is, and the gods/powers who have realms there other than him are more powerful than the plane. (Tiamat is a complicated story, but I think the intent is that while he's got her in some kind of technical snare, in a fair fight Tiamat would kick his ass).

It makes sense for a religious order to use divine magic, but if a god can have its realm elsewhere, they might find it easier to draw upon other sources. A god who dwells in the Feywild might be more likely to have Druids as their priests, for example.

Another thing you could have a lot of fun with here is some kind of false religion. The priests of this faith might actually use Arcane magic to simulate as best they can the kind of divine magic that one expects from gods, but the priests are actually wizards or artificers. Indeed, the Divine Soul sorcerer might further complicate these ideas. In a current actual play show (which I'll be vague about to avoid directly spoiling things, though one look at the character's stats kind of gave it away) there's a character who is presented as a Cleric and is truly, genuinely devout, but it turns out that even he's not aware that what he really is is a Sorcerer (Clockwork Soul, judging by the use of a Restore Balance use). The magic, as it turns out, was granted to him by infusing him with the blood of a celestial ancestor (he's also an aasimar who assumed he was human) and so rather than being a conduit for some other being or force, that power has become a part of his own innate power.

But can we go the other way?

While mechanically it's not easy to fake Divine or Primal magic via the Arcane given that you tend not to get any healing spells (though Artificers and Bards can get their hands on them - notably in earlier editions Bards were linked more to Druidic magic). But I think that you could play some fun games with so-called Arcanists who are actually drawing upon Divine or Primal magic.

One of the things that inspired me to write this was a video talking about the Cathedral of the Deep, a location in Dark Souls III where worship turned from the conventional (though also corrupted and sinister) Way of White to the worship of "The Deep," a vague (in classic FromSoft fashion) space represented by deep waters where the dregs of humanity ultimately settled. (Honestly, I think it could even be a metaphor for storing radioactive materials under water given how broad the interpretations of these games can go.)

To a large extent, the Deep-worshippers are probably just evil-aligned divine spellcasters, which is perfectly common in D&D with clerics of evil gods. But there's a common theme in FromSoft's games where secret, esoteric knowledge is often gained by looking at divine magic via an arcane lens, or vice versa.

In particular, I think that esoteric mysticism and alchemy can kind of blur the lines between these things. Truthfully, I think that a scholastic organization that might be looking into ancient practices and such might stumble upon divine magics that call upon some dangerous force, like a bunch of wizards who uncover some channel to the power of a banished god and wind up worshipping it. Indeed, this doesn't even need to be sinister: maybe the forgotten god was forgotten because of some evil act, and it might be a good thing to bring them back into the open.

It's a bit of a shame that the rules of D&D don't really support the "Pyromancy" style of stat spreads you find in FromSoft games. You'd probably need to have a very different style of game, focused on building out skills rather than having individual classes. But I do think you can at least play in that conceptual space of blending styles of magic when it comes to the Arcane/Divine/Primal divide. What does it mean when a subclass opens up the ability to cast a spell you normally wouldn't get? Is a Light Cleric calling on their god to intercede and cast the typically-Arcane Fireball spell, or are they approaching the idea of a Fireball spell in a totally different manner than a Sorcerer or Wizard would?

In terms of plot, what would be the ramifications of a group of wizards learning how to cast spells like Mass Cure Wounds or Revivify using their style of magic (already you can imagine this with Artificers building devices that can do this - though only Battle Smiths get the former). Would this be seen as blasphemous? Stealing the power of the gods in some Promethean manner? Would support for organized religion plummet if scholars of the Arcane could reproduce miracles? Or would a more enlightened society now dedicate themselves to a kind of grand-unified magic theory to bridge the gap between magical traditions and understand them holistically?

Of course, this categorization can also leave some interesting questions open: if magic tends to sort itself into Arcane, Divine, and Primal magic, then why is it that there seem to be so many more avenues toward Arcane magic? And why are Clerics and Druids so similar to one another?

Truly, especially if you look at the 2024 revision for these classes, many class features are pretty clear analogues (in the playtesting, they even wanted to make Wild Shape uses into "Channel Nature," which I actually think would have been more elegant, just letting Wild Shape be the default use of it akin to a Cleric's Divine Spark or Turn Undead). Maybe make this mechanical element into an in-universe topic of discussion. Perhaps some scholar comes up with an idea that suggests that Clerics and Druids are actually the same thing, practitioners of "Planar Channeling," which might earn some ire from a society in which clerical and druidic tradition are considered very different (maybe your isolated wood elf community considers clerics to be bringers of calamity and disaster to the pristine natural balance, or your urban, godly society of aasimar have a Manichaean disdain for any reverence of the physical world, and see the druids as worshipping the false material world).

All manner of conflict and intrigue can spring from the ways in which magic is divided in a game like D&D. And the fact that it always seems to come in threes aids in this - giving you a system that will never really reach balance, and thus fuel your drama and stories endlessly.

DM Etiquette: The Shield Spell (And Calling Out Attack Rolls)

If you play D&D, you're likely aware of the awesome power of the Shield spell. It's a 1st level spell available to Sorcerers and Wizards (though a few subclasses of other classes can get access to it as well) that lets you, as a reaction, give yourself a +5 to AC after you are hit with an attack, potentially causing the attack to miss. The AC bonus lasts until the start of your next turn, so it can potentially protect you from subsequent attacks as well.

This is one of the all-time great spells, because a +5 bonus is a pretty significant one - it essentially subtracts 25% from your opponent's chance to hit you.

And I think it's even a fair argument to say that it might be too powerful. After all, especially at higher levels when you might not be using your 1st level spell slots on anything else, a caster with this who doesn't often need their reaction will effectively have a +5 bonus to their AC.

Now, the other reason it might be considered overpowered (though I'll spoil my own opinion here and say I don't think it is) is dependent on what is essentially the question at the center of this post, which is:

    Does the DM need to actually tell you what an enemy got with an attack roll when they announce that they've hit your character?

DMs will often mark certain information about their player characters to speed up gameplay. Passive Perception, for example, is a useful one to have because it's a passive, static effect and especially because you might not want to tip off players that there's something that their characters haven't noticed lest they (consciously or not) metagame it.

Players' AC is often another bit of information that some DMs will hold onto, allowing combat to move a little faster by letting the DM quickly and easily know if their monsters have landed a hit - if the Druid has an AC of 15, and I have a monster with a +4 to hit, I'll know that that 9 on the die ain't going to do it.

However, the practice that I see most DMs use (and that I tend to) when attacking with monsters is the following sequence: you announce that "this Troll is going to attack you," then you roll the d20, and then you say "ok, that's a 19." The player then tells the DM whether the attack hits or not, and if it does hit, the DM then rolls damage and announces how much.

But when that player has the Shield spell, I sometimes see DMs instead say, simply, "and that attack hits." The player is then forced to guess whether the attack was within 5 of their AC. If it is, and they cast the Shield spell, they are protected from the attack, but if it isn't, the spell is a waste.

Is this fair practice?

My answer is no, but let me tell you the reasons:

    1. There's an imbalance in information.

Players do not know the armor class of monsters they're fighting. They might be able to infer it - an enemy knight with a greatsword and plate armor probably has an AC of 18, but there are tons of monsters that have "natural armor," which is the (2014) Monster Manual's way of saying "we don't have a justification for this AC other than it just seems right for the balance of this creature." (The new monster manual doesn't bother justifying AC, but will often list the equipment the creature has if they're getting it from something a player might be able to salvage, like a suit of plate armor.) A DM isn't expected to reveal the AC of their monsters to the player, and thus, the players need not "reveal" their characters' AC - meaning that the DM having access to that information is a matter of gameplay convenience, and an excuse to conceal information.

    2. Narratively, a character should be able to tell if they're getting hit with a lucky blow or a dead-on strike.

If someone is swinging a sword at you and it just manages to catch you on the shoulder, that's going to look different than a swing that hits you right across the abdomen. Shield represents, to me, a short-duration force-field that is trying to push an incoming attack off-target, and that'll obviously be more effective against a glancing blow than a precise hit (taking less energy to change an incoming weapon or projectile's trajectory than to stop it dead). It's actually just a matter of geometry, where the angles of a spherical forcefield are going to be better at deflecting the farther it is from hitting dead-center. And I think that's 100% what is being narratively represented by an attack that is at or just above your AC versus one that is well over your AC.

    3. There is a tendency toward arbitrary action on the part of the DM.

I only ever seem to see DMs tell their players they hit them without saying the result of the attack roll when the player has this spell. Now, sure, if the player can't do anything about it, what's the difference? But it's just kind of, well, suspect when a DM suddenly shifts this policy in order to draw out erroneous expenditures of the spell.

    4. If the spell was intended to sometimes be wasted, it would have you cast it before the attack roll is made.

This, I think, is my most clear-cut point: some features, like a Barbarian's Brutal Strikes, force you to make a decision with some risk that it won't do anything. If you cast Disintegrate, there's a chance your big 6th-level slot is going to be wasted if the target succeeds on its saving throw, with a reward for the risk being that it does a massive amount of damage. But there are other features that are clearly designed to always work: a Paladin's Smite spells are always going to work if the spell is successfully cast (unless the target is immune to the damage it deals). You get to decide whether to cast it after you have already hit. And yes, as a first-time DM when the Paladin one-shot crit-smited my Spectator dungeon boss who hadn't even gotten a turn yet, I scoured the rules to confirm he could actually do that, but that's just it: that's what the spell (or at that time, class feature) does. And this is what Shield does.

    Every table is different, and if you believe this spell is overpowered and want to impose some kind of nerf on it, that's up to you and your players. Again, I don't think it is - it's a good spell, but it doesn't end a combat or invalidate entire gameplay challenges (like how Goodberry makes any kind of food management - if you care about that kind of thing - unnecessary). What it does is just give your players a little more longevity, and while you might want to scare them with dangerous combat, PCs are designed to win. We don't need to make an attack roll to successfully heal a target with Cure Wounds, and we don't need to make an ability check to Misty Step out of a monster's grapple. And we don't have to guess at the monster's attack roll to know when to use Shield.

Candidates for Classic Aliens in D&D

 When I was a kid, aliens were big.

In the 1990s, we had shows like the X-Files, we had movies like Independence Day, Men in Black, Mars Attacks, or the somewhat more high-minded Contact.

Stories about aliens, UFOs, and abductions had, of course, become pretty popular during the 20th Century. H.G. Wells' 1898 novel The War of the Worlds was a couple years shy of the 20th Century, but established a lot of the (scarier) alien tropes.

The truly bizarre thing about aliens is that it's actually perfectly rational to believe that they exist. The universe is utterly, staggeringly enormous, and especially as astronomy has determined that stars having planets orbiting them is the norm, rather than an exception (as had previously been hypothesized,) it means that there must be a staggering number of planets out there in our galaxy (itself almost incomprehensibly huge on a human scale and yet just one of staggeringly many in the cosmos,) and so if life was able to occur here on Earth, there's basically got to be life out there.

And yet, any direct evidence of such life is, so far, missing, other than deeply dubious unconfirmed accounts from individuals whose experiences could be interpreted with much more mundane explanations, assuming that the experiences weren't wholly fabricated fictions.

(As an aside, I think it's important to note that the human brain is capable of making us perceive things that aren't there - human perception is a fuzzy thing that our brains try to organize a lot of stimuli into a coherent narrative, and sometimes the narrative it creates isn't consistent with the objective reality. My skepticism here is not intended as an insult to so-called witnesses' intelligence, and for what it's worth, it's not even really if alien abductees' experiences were real or not, because if we can't confirm with solid evidence that they actually happened, there's not really anything we can do about it.)

I've always been fascinated by the intersection of science fiction and fantasy. To a large extent, the two genres are twins, sharing nearly all their "genre DNA." The difference, I think, is one of perspective - whether you think that there's a rational way one can comprehend the mechanism behind the extraordinary, or if there's an inherent mystery (in the deeper, religious sense of the word, rather than "something you can solve if you investigate it successfully").

The "Paranormal" is a term that kind of just means "supernatural," but with a more sci-fi connotation, suggesting perhaps that, well, this isn't supernatural because it is ultimately explainable, it's just that it's so radically outside of the familiar territory of existing scientific theory that it may as well be magic.

One of my favorite video games of recent years, Control, looks into this distinction in a really interesting way, and we can follow a somewhat hidden side-plot in which a controversial memo, the Tennyson Report, argues that the paranatural (the game's term used in place of paranormal, but meaning roughly the same thing) is just the supernatural in rationalist drag - that the game's eponymous bureau is stubbornly clinging to a rational, scientific way of thinking when what they are dealing with is just full-on magic.

Aliens come in various varieties in fiction. I think we can roughly break them into three categories:

1. Star Trek Aliens:

    Star Trek Aliens are basically just other people. Vulcans, Klingons, Bajorans, etc., are just basically the equivalent of other human nations and ethnicities. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry wanted to tell allegorical stories about cultures and natures interacting, and so decided to make his aliens relatable by making them only superficially alien - most indicated only by some makeup and sometimes prosthetics, and even imagining a world where it was perfectly possible for them to interbreed, with the iconic Spock actually being half-human (though like Elrond in Lord of the Rings, who is half-human and half-elf but comes off as far more elvish, he clearly identifies far more with the Vulcan side of his ancestry).

    In D&D, we already kind of get something like this with the many humanoid species (indeed, many Star Trek species can be put into a practical one-to-one comparison with classic fantasy races, with Vulcans as elves, Klingons (Next Gen and onward) as orcs, even Romulans as dark elves. I might be getting a bit of chicken-and-egg confusion here, but Ferengi even work quite well as analogues for Warcraft-style Goblins, though the Star Trek ones came first).

    In a Spelljammer game, where you're literally traveling from planet to planet, the "aliens" are just the people on other worlds. The funny thing is that if you're using the established fantasy world of D&D, because each tends to have a pretty diverse mix of species and cultures, you're actually likely to find "aliens" far more like you than some beings from your own planet. If you're a human from Waterdeep, you probably have way more in common with a human from the city of Greyhawk than you do with a drow in Menzoberranzan.

2. Lovecraftian Aliens:

    Admittedly a lot of Lovecraft's creatures weren't even from another planet - just far-distant eras of Earth (the then-fairly-recent theories that our species has only existed for a tiny sliver of our planet's history I imagine was part of what inspired Lovecraft's existential terror at the vastness of the cosmos). But both the vastness of time and the vastness of space allow for beings that are basically the opposite of Star Trek aliens - they're utterly inhuman, and so unlike any other creatures we're familiar with that they can be terrifying.

    The aberration creature type is largely there to represent these kinds of beings - Gibbering Mouthers are more or less Lovecraft's Shoggoths (though a bit lower CR than I'd think for such beings - the Kobold Press books have a CR 17 or something Shoggoth that seems far more in keeping with the creatures from At the Mountains of Madness). Beholders and Mind Flayers are D&D's most iconic aberrations, though I think both are arguably a little too human-like to fit with the Lovecraftian notion (depending on how the DM plays them).

3. Classic Aliens:

    Here, we find what I think of as something of an intersection between the aforementioned. Classic aliens, as I see it, are the kind from UFO fiction (and folklore). There's a sense that they represent a culture, that they are somewhat humanoid in form, but they are just far more technologically advanced than we are. These are the Little Green Men, or the Greys, who will conduct mysterious experiments on abducted humans. These are the creatures going around in flying saucers. They are "people" in some sense, but their motivations, methods, and mindsets are never understood.

    While they can certainly take on different forms in different pieces of media, there's a kind of form that they always seem to kind of gravitate back toward: big, tall heads with large, all-black eyes, tiny slits of nostrils with a flat nose, and either a small mouth or no mouth at all. Different properties will play with this form in various ways to give it something of their own spin - Starcraft's Protoss, I believe, are meant to evoke this kind of alien. Indeed, some earlier folklore involving fairies and demons have described similar forms, and UFO believers will point to this as evidence of a long history of alien visitation, though a counterargument is that this form basically describes the basic pattern hard-wired into the human brain of what a face is roughly shaped like, and that we might thus be primed to see these, either when not getting a good look at a real person's face, or that we might see a face when we see something coincidentally making this general shape.

    There are a number of candidates here among D&D creatures. Indeed, I would not be surprised if different creators at different periods of D&D's history wanted to make the "classic aliens" and as such, we have a few options. So, let's look at them.

Gith:

    The Gith were considered humanoid up until the Spelljammer and Planescape books re-categorized the stat blocks at least (for Githyanki and Githzerai, respectively) as aberrations. But of all aberrations, the Gith are very clearly the most people-like (we even have a Githyanki party member in Baldur's Gate 3).

    And yet, they do check a lot of the boxes: Green (or Yellow, but both in a kind of green-yellow range) skin, very flat noses with somewhat slitted nostrils, slightly pronounced foreheads. The Githyanki are infamous as pirate-raiders on the Astral Sea, but the Githzerai might actually fit the UFO-alien tropes even better, as their Adamantine Citadels come to worlds of the prime material plane, landing in remote locations to remain hidden and conduct their business without interference.

    Again, while more human-like than other aberrations, their way of life is very different than it is for Primes. The Githyankis' hostility and the Githzerais' secrecy both lend themselves to the "mysterious alien" tropes.

Doppelgangers:

    While the playable Changelings align more with fairy-tale tropes, their monster manual counterparts are implied to be far stranger. While they can imitate humanoids, their true form is almost precisely the "Greys" trope. While not generally associated with extra-planetary travel, these creatures would fit perfectly within the paranoid alien invasion tropes, like They Live or the alien bounty hunters from The X-Files.

    They're monstrosities, but that's such a catch-all creature type that I think it works totally fine. I honestly think it would be cool to get a larger variety of these doppelgangers to make them a true "monster tribe," for a campaign with a lot of paranoia.

Mind Flayers:

    The truth is that the Mind Flayers, while clearly inspired by Cthulhu from Lovecraft's oeuvre, nearly fit this trope to a T, except for the tentacles. Grey skin? Check. Do they abduct people? Check. Do they do weird experiments on living subjects? Check. Do they have bizarre flying ships that can travel to other worlds? Check.

    Honestly, the only problem with using Mind Flayers as your classic aliens is that they're so well-known and iconic as D&D monsters that they come with a lot of D&D-specific lore baggage that will distract from using them as your aliens. You could just use Mind Flayer stats and re-skin them as classic Greys (maybe make their tentacles some kind of psionic pull and their brain-devouring something they do with a tool rather than their mouth). Or just play with players who don't know a ton of D&D lore.

Ultroloths:

    This one might seem like it's coming out of left field, but have you seen the art for the Ultroloth? (Even more in the 2014 Monster Manual). I mean, that's our guy, isn't it? Its mind-bending abilities are also very in-keeping with the tropes of the classic aliens.

    The challenge, though, is that Ultroloths come from a less sci-fi-compatible creature type - the fiend is more of an inherently fantasy monster. Likewise, Ultroloths will naturally work alongside (or command, more likely) lesser Yugoloths, who don't conform with those classic alien tropes in the same way (hell, the next Yugoloth down in the hierarchy is an Arcanoloth, who usually looks like a big fox-man wizard).

    Once again, re-skinning is an option, though at that point, it doesn't really matter what the monster looks like.

These, to me, are the most obvious and straightforward candidates to take on your "spooky saucer-men" aliens. And yes, stealthily or not-so-stealthily, this has been part of my Post-Industrial D&D series - I love the idea of a D&D campaign taking place in the fantasy-world equivalent of the American Southwest (or Pacific Northwest) in the fantasy-world equivalent of the late 1940s-1990s.

Taking Another Look at the Reanimator Post-FotA

 Ok, yeah, I'm a bit fixated on Artificers at the moment.

When I was playing Curse of Strahd, I came up with an idea for a back-up character should my klutzy (7 Dexterity) Paladin meet an unfortunate fate. With Van Richten either about to come out or having just came out, I had the idea of playing a Battle Smith Artificer from Lamordia, with the idea that his steel defender was actually something like a flesh golem (Lamordia being the domain of Viktra Mordenheim, the setting's equivalent of Victor Frankenstein).

Back in May of this year, we got a UA for "Horror Subclasses" that included various reprints and revisions (among them the Necromancer Wizard and Undead Patron Warlock - both subclasses I'd be eager to try). But we also got a brand new Artificer subclass that more or less goes the Frankenstein route, giving you a battle pet in the form of a Reanimated Companion.

Naturally, this will draw comparisons with the Battle Smith as the other subclass with a pet (the Artillerist is nearly like that as well, though its "pet" (or pets at level 15) are objects with less autonomy). The Reanimator doesn't got the martial route that the Battle Smith takes, remaining a more dedicated spellcaster like the Alchemist, Artillerist, and Cartographer.

I did my analysis of the subclass back when the UA came out, so I'm not going to just reiterate the entire argument I made then. We had gotten a UA of the revised Artificer by then, but I think my recent investigation into the final version of the FotA Artificer has given me a few special things to focus on that we can address here:

Spell-Storing Item Spell to Store in an Item:

For damage-output, the spell-storing item can create a massive increase if we have a good 3rd level damage spell to plug into it. The Reanimator, thankfully, does get such a spell! It's Lightning Bolt, which it shares with the Armorer.

Lightning and Frankensteinian flesh constructs are, of course, a classic combination. In a vacuum, I think that there are arguments to be made regarding whether Fireball or Conjure Barrage is the better spell for this feature, but I think Lightning Bolt probably falls into a happy third place in either case. The line shape of the spell makes it very hard to hit more than two targets with it, though it's also easier to avoid friendly fire with it than Fireball (the real appeal for Conjure Barrage is that it's both easy to hit lots of targets and it also automatically avoids friendly fire, its only mark against it being the somewhat lower damage).

Still, that third place is a coveted position compared to the options the Alchemist and Cartographer get, so we can count this possibly on these merits alone as being pretty good.

Level Five Damage Bump:

While Spell-Storing Item can be our main tier 3 damage boost, each Artificer also gets a boost to damage output at level 5, either via Extra Attack or some kind of bonus to our spell damage. Reanimators get something similar to Alchemists - you get to add your Intelligence modifier to a roll from a spell, but it's conditional: in this case, the spell needs to be either evocation or necromancy (put a pin in that) and your companion must be alive and within 120 feet of you. You can also cast spells from your companion's space. And then, finally, the companion gets two attacks when commanded rather than 1.

I actually think that, given that later bonus, this might wind up being quite good.

Let's talk about the spell boost first:

As we've observed, the Artificer spell list's only directly damaging spells are cantrips. And I believe the entire Reanimator spell list is just Evocation and Necromancy (at least, for certain, the ones that deal damage). Thus, the only thing we need to look out for is cantrips that aren't of those schools. The only damaging cantrips that aren't in those schools are Thorn Whip (Transmutation) and True Strike (Divination).

So, just steer clear of those cantrips and you'll be fine. The main benefit of True Strike (other than taking advantage of magic weapons) is to be able to add your Intelligence to the damage, so you'll just be using something else.

For the companion's sort of extra attack feature, we should note that its Dreadful Swipe does a little less damage than a Steel Defender's Force-Empowered Rend - it does 1d4+2+your Int, while the Steel Defender does 1d8+2+Int, but with two attacks, it clearly overtakes the other subclass' option.

Extra Attack is generally going to outpace cantrip scaling, but we can at least close the gap a little with a feature like this one - a Battle Smith using a 2d6 weapon with +4 to Int at level 5 is going to do two attacks for 11 apiece, or about 22, plus the steel defender's attack for 1d8+6, or around 10.5, so 32.5 (this is assuming everything hits).

For a Reanimator using, say, Fire Bolt, at level 5 we'd get 2d10+5 from the spell (16 average) and then 1d4+6, or 8.5, twice, for 17, giving us a total damage output (again, assuming all hits) of 33. Honestly pretty damn close, and slightly better for the Reanimator.

The one downside is that the Companion is slightly less resilient, with a lower AC and HP than the Steel Defender. The good news, though, is that the companion has some damage resistances, and it can also be easily healed via lightning damage. We can do this via Witch Bolt as early as 3rd level, or with lightning bolt later on (a second reason to put it in the spell-storing item). Jolt to Life, the feature that lets Spare the Dying deal a little lightning damage to nearby creatures, could also be used to give a little bit of healing to our pet by just having it elect to fail the saving throw.

I wonder, though, if in an actual printing, if the subclass will get the usual 2d6 healing from Mending that the Steel Defender and Eldritch Cannons do.

One thing to note is that if we hand off our Spell-Storing Item to a Homunculus Servant, it won't get the boost from our Intelligence. That boost can be very nice when spread over all the targets of a big AoE. If we line up an amazing shot (and perhaps get our Companion in there as well for healing) we might just have our Homunculus hand over the item for the turn to get it off, but I still think we can go with a standard protocol of letting the homunculus shoot off the lightning bolts.

    I was a bit worried about power level in my initial review, but I do think this "hack" (which might be considered more just the new SOP for Artificers) raises the overall power of the class (at least for 3/5 and with this 4/6 of the subclasses) enough that I'm not terribly worried that this won't prove itself decent at the very least.

    I also hope it's a sign of future inclusion for Artificer subclasses, spells, and other items when other rules-expansion sourcebooks come out.

Building My Summoner

 Who knows if I'll ever be able to play this character - it would be a very difficult task to get my players to try a similar-in-premise TTRPG from D&D even if I were tired of 5E, and I'm not. I get excited about all the campaigns I have not yet had a chance to run, from an existentially terrifying Ravenloft game (think doppelgangers and being unsure whether you're truly you) and a big Planescape game that I only really know starts in a dive bar on the Plain of Infinite Portals in the Abyss, to another Ravenloft campaign that starts with all the players being teenagers in the 1990s in America before getting sucked into the Domains of Dread, to the vast number of concepts I have for a game set in my own homebrew setting (including my grandest ambition - a Chrono Trigger-style time-travel campaign). Realistically, if I'm ever likely to actually play Draw Steel as a PC, I've got to introduce it to my players as a Director and hope they fall in love with it to themselves not fall back on 5E as the game they want to run, or I've got to seek out some randos online.

So, ask me in like fifteen years.

All that being said:

I had to come up with a build now that the Summoner has come out.

As it stands, my initial ambitions for Draw Steel characters were probably most focused on the Shadow (which feels like the most raw-damage-focused class) and maybe a Talent or Fury who focuses a lot on forced movement (which feels like the most exciting robust system in this compared with D&D).

The Summoner is daunting - the idea of controlling so many minions, picking how each of them move on every turn, makes me worry that my turns would take ages to actually complete. And yet, I think there was a concerted effort in the class design, as well as the advice around how to play said class, that it might not actually be that bad.

And so, I wanted to toss out a kind of first draft of how I'd want to build a Summoner.

This isn't going to be an exhaustive build - I'm not going into every single Perk or Skill I pick, or even much of my background. Mainly I'm looking at class options, but before we do that, I think I want to go into how, narratively, at least, I'd want to build my backstory.

To start, yes, we're going with the Circle of Graves. Ever since I started playing World of Warcraft, the undead have been my go-to fantasy monsters (while WoW has tons of big scary bad guys, the Scourge were always my favorite). But I also feel like there's something kind of tragic and romantic about the undead - there's a potential within them for a kind of mourning of the passing of time, the passing of ages gone past. The undead, after all, generally used to just be people, and I think you could play into that idea of reaching through time to call upon these spirits of from a world now gone. Human melodrama is baked into the undead, whether they are undead out of a need for vengeance and justice, or if the drama is coming from our reaction to seeing these figures transformed.

In Diablo, Necromancers are actually the generally-heroic priests of Rathma, the oldest proto-human born directly of the angel Inarius and the demon Lilith. While both the angels and the demons are incapable of understanding the nuance of a human existence (demons are worse, but angels aren't great either in that setting) Rathma seems to embody a kind of grim pragmatism in the preservation of humanity.

So I'm tempted to imagine this summoner as a kind of spiritual character - not devoted to a god or saint, but to the passage of mortal life and respecting the ages that have gone past.

We're not going to sugarcoat his raising of the dead as purely clean ghostly spirits - I think he has a comfort in the visceral and horrid aspects of death and decay - but I do think that his general practice is a kind of caretaker/protector. I imagine that he is a member of an order that goes to comfort the sick and dying, and adheres to a strict code of conduct regarding how the dead are to be treated. He summons forth the undead, but I think it's a kind of consensual summoning. It's explicit in the rules that summoned minions (of any subclass) are soulless, and more just extensions of the Summoner's spirit and will, but I think that when he calls them forth, it's a calling forth that asks the souls of the departed to make use of their remains or forms.

Now, how does one wind up in a vocation such as this?

I think my Summoner is the victim of some terrible tragedy - some extremity of cruelty that left him a lone survivor of whatever society he was born into. Whether by monsters or by mortals who may as well have been monsters, his survival was one of sheer luck - maybe he was out in the woods gathering firewood when the raiders came to wipe out his village. Events of mass death like this don't tend to give survivors some clear-cut reason for why they were spared, and one aspect of survivor's guilt is that one is left searching for a reason that doesn't exist, or is utterly arbitrary.

It's said that trauma is a fracture in the truths that make up one's identity, and I think that's very much what my Summoner experienced. I think he was young, but not quite young enough to have the mental flexibility to rebuild after all of this happened - I imagine he was probably fourteen or something, on the cusp of adulthood, but the nature of the adulthood he was expecting was to just have a simple life as a villager, maybe trapping out in the woods or working on a farm - and then, everyone he had ever known was all dead in a terrible afternoon, from his parents and siblings, his friends, the girl he liked, the village priest, everyone.

And then, someone like the kind of person he will be, a Summoner, arrives to survey the damage and seek out the perpetrators to bring them to justice. This summoner finds him and shakes him out of whatever reverie he's fallen into. The summoner sees him to safety, but in doing so, allows the perpetrators to escape.

His entire life upended, our hero turns to his rescuer and, seeing their power, asks to be taught how to call upon the dead, thinking that he might be able to bring back his family. But his new master explains to him that it is more complicated than that, and that the process of learning to call forth the dead is a spiritual one.

Our hero is not turned away by this, and his master takes him on as an apprentice within their spiritual order. Our hero takes on a new name as an initiate in this order, and over time, learns the philosophical and spiritual practices that allow him to do as his master does.

But all the while, what he struggles with is the order's insistence on exterminating the ego and any personal stakes in the fate of the world - his job is not to use his powers for self-empowerment or enrichment, nor to pursue any personal vendettas, but to serve all mortals - all those who will one day die.

Thus, by the time our campaign begins, our Summoner, now taking the name of Altarus (or something to that effect - just a cool, vaguely Latin-sounding name), goes forth as a kind of errant summoner of the Circle of Graves to do just as his master had done.

Outwardly, he's just as solemn and, er, grave, as members of his order are expected to be, but there's an inner fire of passion that his training has led him to suppress that might get him into trouble, especially if he comes across those who slew his village.

    Phew, that's a lot of backstory. Let's get to the mechanical ideas!

So, again, I don't want to go through every skill choice and perk - mainly I want to look at the major class feature and ability choices.

Subclass:

Well, obviously we're going Circle of Graves.

In addition to telling us which minions we can pick, this also comes with two features at 1st level: Dead Men Tell All Tales, and Rise!

Dead Men Tell All Tales is similar to the D&D spell Speak with Dead, giving you the opportunity to interview a corpse that died within the last week. Corpses need not tell you the truth, and you can only maintain the feature for multiple questions if you keep succeeding on medium reason tests (tier 2 is a success with consequences).

Rise! lets us turn fallen creatures into new signature minions, though only if we can organize them into one of our squads (but breaking our minion limit). It's a triggered action, but a free triggered action if the fallen creature is a minion already. (This really gives us that Necromancer feel).

Formation:

I honestly find all the options here tempting, but especially with a bunch of signature minions, the stamina boost for Elite Formation will mean a lot - remember that excess damage to our minion squads will go over to us, so if my Skeletons (spoilers) have 5 Stamina rather than just 2, I'm going to be taking much less damage when some Hobgoblin Burning Witch is dealing 8 fire damage to my dudes.

Thanks to Rise, I expect that I'll always want to have one of my squads populated with signature minions (though it'll be in playing that I find out if that's sustainable at high levels).

That being said, if I went with Horde formation, I could get four more minions out, potentially. In an extreme scenario, I could get 12 Skeletons instead of 8, which would be 24 total Stamina for the squad, though Elite gives us 40 total... basically I think this is a balance between damage output and survivability.

You can swap this as a respite activity, so I might give each a try.

Quick Command: Focus Fire!

Each seems like it could be useful. However, I think that, having some versatile Skeletons in my minion mix, it might not be hard to get the full bonus of Focus Fire! to give an ally a big boost in damage. While I don't know quite whether I'm building for damage output or battlefield control, this might inspire me to move more in one direction (going the other way, Halt! could be fun, though I suspect that one is more situational).

Signature Minions: Skeletons and Shriekers

Ok, now the real meat of things. Because we get to pick two Signature Minions out of three options, we're really choosing what we're excluding. I'm going to go with Skeletons and Shriekers. I'd actually initially intended to get Husks instead of Shriekers, but it occurred to me that Skeletons and Husks have slightly similar roles: both make it harder for foes to move, either by slowing them or punishing them. Shriekers deal twice the damage of the other two options, so they'll be good when I just need to pump out the DPR (if you figure you're getting 3 for free every turn, that's basically 6 guaranteed sonic damage every turn). Skeletons, though, can form living, or, well, unliving walls that will slow foes with difficult terrain and also damage them. I think plugging up a narrow corridor with skeletons could be very powerful, and at worst, I can make a wall of skeletons around me to protect myself (Skeletons are equally good in melee or at range).

I had originally intended to take Husks over Shriekers - they're a little more mechanically interesting, and their ability to strike together to gain a higher potency for their slow effect is nice. They also have more Stamina and thus might last longer, but we're already getting some bonus stamina from Elite Formation - 3 Stamina versus 1 or 2 is proportionately less impressive when it's actually 6 versus 4 or 5.

3-Essence Minions: Grave Knight and Stalker Shade

Ok, I'll confess that this is partially based on aesthetics. While described as zombie warriors, the art for Grave Knight (assuming I'm looking at the right one) feels way more skeleton. But I also think they've got the highest damage potential, and I might be able to make use of the bleeding that they can inflict.

The Stalker Shade has the benefit of a great deal of mobility, and its Shadow Strike lets it get away from foes safely.

Now, I will say that the Zombie Lumberer can really block off some of the battlefield with their size 2 heft, so I could imagine swapping the Shade for the Zombie.

5-Essence Heroic Ability: Explosive Parade

I'll confess that I'm a little torn between this and Summoner's Sword. This one will likely do 8-12 damage on its own, and if you use the forced movement to knock them into something, potentially 4-6 more damage. But if you also have a bunch of minions already and you just want to burst something down, you could get even more damage out of it. Basically, this feels versatile and also pretty dramatic.

Summoner's Sword could, in theory, do R+16 to R+20 damage if you're totally surrounded by allies. If you get three signature minions per turn, that could add up pretty fast - though you won't be able to do this and Call Forth on the same turn. If we assume that you're only getting the bonus from the three free minions on the turn you use this, we're talking R+6 to R+10. I really need to get a better sense of how many minions are likely to survive a turn before deciding if this is an amazing single-target damage option or if it's always going to be somewhat underwhelming.

Summoner's Dominion Feature:

Not a choice at this point, as this is just determined by our subclass, but we'll be summoning the Barrow Gates probably early on each combat. It'll be a very good battlefield hazard, frightening foes and also increasing the fortitude of our minions, who are already a little tougher from Elite Formation. It's already size 2 and the fear effect has an effective radius of 3 squares, so we're talking about a 7x7 square of fear-inflicting.

5-Essence Minion: Phase Ghoul

A tough call here - I think that the damage potential for both Accursed Mummies and Ceaseless Mournlings might outstrip the Phase Ghouls, but I like the insane mobility that the Phase Ghouls have. The Mummies are probably my second choice here, given the AoE potential they have (Mournlings do too...). Honestly, I think this comes down largely to whether we need more battlefield control or speedy dudes to attack elusive targets.

Summoner Kit Ward: Snare Ward

We are getting into territory where I think I really do need to get some experience playing the game to get a sense of how powerful these are, but I like that this will work against foes both near and far - if they come up and smack me in melee, I can pull them away from me to potentially get to safety (and it's a free triggered action, so even if I get swarmed, I might be able to pull them all off of me). But if a foe is attacking me from afar, I can at least potentially slam them into one of my nearby minions is punishment.

7-Essence Heroic Ability: Cavalry Call

I liked Essence Funnel, but the I don't love that sacrificing minions for the ability prevents you from gaining the Essence or other effects (and I have a few minions who have on-death effects). Cavalry Call at least gives me fresh new minions that last just for that turn, so I'm not really giving anything up other than the 7 Essence to use this. Using Shriekers, we're getting a total of 12 damage out of this, and we could get the compelled movement to a strong potency against three targets.

Subclass Features: Channel and Dread March

These are some little bonuses. Channel lets us basically perform a seance with a spirit of the dead, with the potential risk of being possessed. Dread March lets us and our minions ignore difficult terrain, and also lets us finish our turn even if we should have died during our move action (like if we took lethal opportunity attacks). While I hope that's not going to happen to my summoner, personally, this actually lets my minions move around a ton while drawing all the opportunity attacks they can and still be able to do what they meant to do, so it makes things a lot more flexible.

7-Essence Minion: Phantom of the Ripper

If we're really going for damage output, I think the Phantom wins out. We summon two at a time for 7 essence, fly them through our target (which causes it to take 3 corruption damage and get a bane on their next strike,) and ideally leave the phantoms in flanking position around the target, thus giving their attack an edge, which causes Plunge of the Knife, their ability, to deal 3 more damage, so we're now looking at 11, 16, or 20 damage (and potentially slowing the target). The other Phantom only gets to add their free strike damage to this, which is 8, so it's more like 19, 24, or 28 damage. But when you factor in the damage from their "ripping phase", you toss two instances of the aforementioned 3 corruption damage (one for each phantom) and that becomes 25, 30, or 34 damage.

I'd considered the False Vampire (which would have some synergy with Grave Knights' bleed attack, though I'm still likely to keep one squad for signature minions). But I think that even at level 10 with a +5 Reason, if both False Vampires successfully restrain their individual targets, you're getting 8 each from free strikes (16) and then 5 acid from the creature starting their turn restrained (10 total) for 26, which is less reliably barely over the tier 1 result for the Phantom's game plan.

(The Zombie Titan is impressive, and it'd be cool to have a size four minion out on the board, but I think it's far more about battlefield control than damage output).

This is actually our last choice point for our minions. It's obviously very party-dependent, as we'd want to shore up whatever the party was lacking, so I could imagine going in a more battlefield-control orientation. I don't really have a great sense yet of how much damage a character is expected to put out at each level, and I do wonder a bit whether Summoners are even made to pump out the DPR or if they really need to play a different role. That said, killing your foes is, as they say, the best crowd control.

We're actually only level 5 at the time we make this choice, so let's see what the back half of our adventuring career has in store for us!

9-Essence Heroic Ability: The Champion Slams the Earth

The fun thing about most of these abilities is that you can use any of your minions as the origin of the ability, so even though they're generally burst abilities or short-range, you effectively add your Summoner's Range to the range of the ability.

This one I think would do the most damage, and can potentially lock down creatures by preventing them from standing. The ability can also take on the damage type that your champion deals, and I think here I'll need to look into something: my reading has generally been that untyped damage is the most reliable - that foes might have some immunity to, say Corruption (though our Avatar of Death champion can also do Holy with its free strikes). Is there any instance in which Corruption overcomes an immunity that untyped damage doesn't? Some monsters simply have damage immunity X, but my interpretation was that that was immunity to all kinds of damage. If it's only untyped damage, then, well, they probably should have given untyped damage a type (like they do in D&D with bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage).

Anyway, as a 4-cube ability, you could theoretically hit as many as 16 foes (or I guess even 64 if you've got flying foes who are vertically stacked). It's probably very unlikely that you'd actually hit that many, but I think it's not unreasonable to think you could get 3 or 4 in one of these.

Subclass Feature: Kill the Pain

Another automatic gain from our subclass, we're now protected from excess damage done after wiping out one of our squads (which would seem to point us away from Leader Formation, as it's a bit redundant). Minions also get to ignore damage rolled as a d3 or d6 from environmental effects when we're not winded.

The latter part I truly do not have the experience to know how often it will come up. But I could imagine with the first part possibly leaning into a different formation option.

I hadn't mentioned this, but at level 4 our minion maximum grew to 12 (everyone gets this) and thus, if we took Horde Formation, we'd be able to get 16. I don't know how easy it actually is to get that many minions, as minions can die so easily.

Platoon Formation has the most direct boost to our damage, but I'm also not entirely sure that it's going to amount to all that much - it lets us add our Reason score to the damage one target takes when a squad uses an ability. Abilities and Free Strikes are not the same, though, so this would only apply, I believe, to our Grave Knights.

Our minions do get higher Stamina as we level, so Elite Formation is also potentially losing some value, proportionately, so I might be tempted to go Horde formation (especially given that, at this point, I've probably gotten more used to commanding so many minions).

Portfolio Champion: Avatar of Death

Thanks to our subclass, we get a specific Champion, which works pretty differently from the rest of our minions. Functioning almost like our 9-Essence Minion, but without the restrictions on squads or minion caps and such, the Avatar is obviously expensive to get out, but quite a massive impact on the battle. I'm particularly curious about its ability to instantly kill (or reduce to 0 stamina, at least, which is often the same thing) winded non-leader/solo monsters with lower Presence with a free strike. This feels best suited to taking down really tough non-boss monsters, where we might have a lot of Stamina to chew through. The potency is weak here, but would definitely be worth spending some surges on. Meanwhile, its main signature ability hits up to two targets within 2 squares and deals 9, 12, or 14 to each and inflicts bleeding (the bleeding also instantly-kills a still-bleeding target at the end of the encounter. I'd say avoid using it on someone you want to interrogate, but we can also speak with the dead, so maybe we don't really care). If we only have one target, we get to add our Reason to their strikes (which I think means that their Free Strike value of 9 is effectively actually 9+R, or 13 at this level).

11-Essence Heroic Ability: 10,000 Minions

I'll concede that there are other abilities that could theoretically wipe out more foes (though I think I Abjure Thee, which wipes out all enemy minions, might come too late in the battle to have as big of an impact as it seems it should). 10,000 Minions is just absurd, though: until you're dying, the entire battlefield is considered teeming with minions (I imagine zombie hands reaching up out of the ground and ghostly spirits flitting through the air). Enemies that end their turn in an affected square take 5 damage, which can't be reduced. You know, an affected square, as in, all of them. Also, this naturally makes Minion Bridge much easier to use, as you can treat up to 10 such squares as eligible minions for it (meaning it's nearly as good as a 10-square teleport as a maneuver.)

    And there we go! Obviously, once again, this is a theoretical build. I'd need to play for a while to get a real sense of where the class and subclass' strengths lie. If pure damage-dealing should be left to the Shadows and Elementalists, we might focus a lot more on snagging enemies and gumming up the works, or even just putting everything into defensive abilities.

    But I also suspect that the Summoner will be a fun class for players who like to GM games, and are accustomed to moving a lot of guys around on the board. Especially given Draw Steel's minion rules, the players are typically outnumbered in fights, but the Summoner can turn the tables and give the heroes the numerical advantage.