Analysis of the Haunting Revenant - The Haunted House You Fight

 A haunted house is a great format for a dungeon in D&D. The Death House, the intro-adventure for Curse of Strahd, is a great intro to the terrors to be found in that adventure. Likewise, the House of Lament, which serves as the sample starting adventure for Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, is another great spooky house.

But what if you wanted something a little... simpler? But also crazier?

What if the monster haunting the house was the house?

Enter the Haunting Revenant, one of the upcoming options in the new Monster Manual.

As part of the previews, we've actually got the full (I think) stat block for the Haunting Revenant. 

So, assuming this image link doesn't break at some point, we can take a look at the various important details.

At CR 10, meaning 5,900 xp, by the new DMG's (at some point I'll just start calling it the DMG) let's figure out what level this would be a reasonable solo-monster encounter. If we assume a part of 4 player characters, that means 1475 xp per person. That makes this probably a Low difficulty encounter for level 9 characters, a Moderate (leaning low) encounter for level 8 characters, and a little north of the standard High difficulty encounter for level 7 characters.

Naturally, we could make it tougher by adding some other monsters - but I'd be somewhat hesitant to do so given the singular horror of a giant house on the attack. In other words, I'd probably try to toss it at a level 7 party. Solo monsters are typically a little easier because players can just focus all their damage on the monster, and with only a single monster, crowd-control spells can trivialize the monster.

However, let's look at that list of immunities: with immunity to Charm, Fear, Prone, Poisoned... it's pretty nasty.

Probably the biggest threat that the Haunting Revenant has is its Invitation ability. In a 60-foot cone, every target needs to make a DC 17 Charisma saving throw or get sucked inside the home. While this status doesn't actually damage them, it does make them way more vulnerable. First off, the house has advantage on attacks against creatures inside of it, and furthermore, it essentially auto-counterspells any spell cast inside.

And it's not easy to get out - you need to either kill the thing or cast Plane Shift. Even at high levels, that's an expensive price to pay. And with a DC 17 for both its Invitation and Haunted Zone features, basically anyone who isn't a Charisma-caster is going to have a very rough time actually saving agains these features.

Now, it's notable that getting sucked into the revenant with Invitation is not quite like other "swallow" abilities. While the target is trapped inside, they aren't restrained or blinded or even take damage.

And that, my friends, is where we could have a lot of fun as a DM.

My first thought regarding this monster was simply for the party to find some remote house out in the woods, only for a blazing light to ignite within and then a big old monster fight to ensue. But we could have so much more fun with it!

Instead, let's imagine that the party has been hired to investigate the disappearance of some local minor nobleman - a Baron or something. The Baron has some enemies, and was not a terribly popular aristocrat, perhaps having enacted some draconian laws that saw minor criminals punished with torture or death. The party discovers that the Baron traveled to some tiny hamlet out in the woods or at the top of a hill, with a letter that implies that they were going to blackmail them or something - a scandal that the Baron would only want to resolve in person.

The party goes to the site where the Baron was supposed to drop off the payment - poetically, it's the house of one of the people he had put to death for some trumped-up charge. Maybe it's a place where the family tried to help the executed person escape, and the Baron ordered them all killed for aiding a criminal. It's a place of shame and darkness, and people just abandoned the building rather than having someone else move in.

The party arrives, finding the Baron's personal carriage, but their loyal footman (who drove the carriage) and the Baron are nowhere to be found. The party approaches the house, only for the door to eerily swing open, and they blink, and anyone who failed the Charisma save is inside the house.

But the fight doesn't start immediately (or at least, it doesn't unless the party uses a feature like Divine Sense to realize the building is undead). Instead, the party actually has some time to explore the house. They find the footman's body bludgeoned by kitchen pots or a statuette in the hall. They find the Baron's body hanging from a noose in the attic.

And then they try to leave. The door won't open. The windows are suddenly boarded over, and no matter how hard they try to pry them open, they can't. Now, perhaps, they try to draw their weapons or cast a spell to blast the door open.

And that's when you call for Initiative.

For sure, don't force them inside if they're suspicious (rather, don't railroad them if they succeed on the saving throw). But the house, at least, should look for all appearances like a normal house unless they use some divination power to determine it's not. Those inside will see the house come to life, a terrifying face appearing in the hearth, or in a stained glass window, or even forming out of the wood boards like that illustration for the Mansion on Dutch Hill in The Dark Tower Book III, the Wastelands.

While not a legendary monster, this feels like a creature you'll really want to build up to - having people talking about a spooky house well before the party actually gets there.

Now, in terms of tactics:

For a DM, the haunting revenant kind of plays itself - try to sweep as many people into it as you can each turn with Invitation, and then pummel PCs inside with Object Slam.

For players, the Invitation ability is going to be tough to deal with - with a DC of 17, if you don't have proficiency in Charisma saving throws and aren't a Charisma-based character (I think the only class that gets Charisma save proficiency but doesn't use it for spells is the Cleric, though I could be wrong) you're going to have probably only a +2 at best to that save, meaning that you're probably going to have a 70% chance or more to fail the save.

It also means that, for example, a Paladin might find themselves the only one outside of the revenant, unable to lend their aura or other helpful abilities.

Casters going to have a rough time as well - essentially hit by a counterspell on every single spell they try to cast (even if they do so in a way that normally can't be countered, such as an Aberrant Sorcerer using Psionic Spells). (Actually, it's worse than counterspell, given that it will still waste your spell slot - yeah, even if you do have Plane Shift, you've to try very hard to actually successfully cast it).

So, honestly, a Barbarian or Monk who can just get inside and wail on the house from the inside might be your best bet - with an AC of 20, it's not going to be super-easy to hit, but these classes can at least handle getting hit frequently and absorb a lot of that damage. (+9 to hit with advantage will be tough even against pretty high-AC characters like Fighters and Paladins).

Now, this being a revenant, the party either needs to use Dispel Evil and Good to keep it from getting back to them (something they won't have until level 9 at the minimum) or they need to convince it to cool it.

However, revenants are one of the unusual types of undead that are not explicitly evil. In our previous scenario, maybe we need to convince the spirit to accept that they've succeeded in taking their revenge, and that justice has been served.

And, of course, the revenant could even be an ally. Invitation, notably, causes creatures inside to have Total Cover against everything outside of the revenant. It could be a last-ditch attempt for the revenant to save the party, maybe give them a couple rounds to heal up against the actual bad guys while the revenant tanks the damage - the revenant can always pick up a new body anyway.

Seriously, I think this is a really amazing new creature that I can't wait to throw at a level-appropriate party (frankly, I'd love to work it into my Innistrad chapter of my Ravnica campaign, though it would certainly require some friends to be a threat to what will be a group of 6 level 18 players at that point).

Indeed, this is the kind of monster that gives me a lot of hope for the new Monster Manual - that, with ten years of experience with 5E, the folks at WotC have figure out how to make some really compelling and interesting creatures to terrify your players with.

Undead Preview for MM25

 I think it was probably some combination of watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer in my freshman year of college (the show finished its final season in my Junior year of high school) and then getting into World of Warcraft and finding the Undead Scourge to be my favorite villains that really cemented my love of undead monsters.

While the classic first adventure in a D&D campaign tends to involve goblins or kobolds, I've often instead used skeletons and zombies. In my original campaign, it was the second session (that one did actually start with a pair of kobolds - which I realized later was far too few for a party to fight,) and then in my current campaign, the first (official) session had the party fight a bunch of zombies that had come up from the sewers and into an Izzet power station (each of the first five adventures was themed around two different guilds, the first one being Golgari/Izzet). And now, my side-campaign back-up for the Wednesday game I'm in is starting out - by player choice, not mine, in a town called Skeleton Bay, where the harbor's dockworkers are actually a guild of necromancers who use animated skeletons to load and unload freighters.

Today, we got another video from the folks at WotC talking about the undead in the new Monster Manual.

Now, there weren't any explicit previews of new stat blocks - though I think some of those were previewed earlier, like the new Skeleton, Burning Skeleton, and Minotaur Skeleton blocks, the same time we got the Ancient Green Dragon and I believe the new Kuo-Toa.

To an extent, this was a bit of a rehash, though we got some cool new things:

Basically, most of the undead "families" of monsters are getting expanded. At the forefront, they've talked about Vampires.

Vampire Familiars are CR 3 humanoids who are basically the mortal servants of the vampires (like Guillermo in the What We Do In the Shadows TV show, though more of his early-season incarnation). This we did actually get a stat block for. Among other things, they have an attack that can deal a bunch of extra necrotic damage, but will leave the target incapacitated and paralyzed - essentially there to allow the Familiar's master to then feed on the target.

Vampire Spawn remain CR 5, though they'll evidently be getting new abilities. Then, there are Vampire Nightbringers, who are meant to sit somewhere between the Spawn and the Vampire proper. Finally, there are Vampire Umbral Lords, which take the notion of the "variant vampires" such as the more martially-affiliated version and makes it its whole own stat block, higher-CR than the standard vampire.

Revenants also got expanded a bit - we have the standard one, but there's also the Graveyard Revenant, in which the bodies of an entire graveyard form one giant mass of bodies that can attack as a whole. Another very fun idea here is the Haunting Revenant - where as vengeful spirit possesses not a humanoid body (or bodies) but a large structure, like a house. (The art here is very cool - a wooden cottage with a gash of a mouth split open and vengeful flames within).

Death Knights - a favorite of mine - get a lower-CR lieutenant called the Death Knight Aspirant, which might help bridge the gap in terms of Death Knight minions. It's always been a little tough that the standard DK minions who might benefit from its aura, for example, are mostly under-CR 1 things like skeletons and zombies that a party could wipe out with a single fireball (to be fair, you could actually use Wights or even Wraiths). Personally, I've gotten a ton of mileage out of the Skeletal Knights from the Dragonlance adventure, and I wonder if these will look a bit like those guys (who are pretty scary with their weapons that prevent healing).

In the "smarter than a zombie but still a fleshy undead creature" family - your Ghouls and Ghasts - there's a new Ghast Gravecaller, which is a spellcasting Ghast that kind of bridges the gap between these guys and Liches - one possible origin story for a Ghast Gravecaller is that it's someone who botched their transformation into a lich, or possibly someone who is in an intermediary stage before fully becoming a lich. (Jeremy Crawford and Wes Schneider joked that DMs could fake out a party of experienced players who come across an undead spellcaster and fear they've run into a lich at way too low a level - personally, I can't wait to see what the new Lich looks like with the new Monsters of the Multiverse-style format for spellcasters).

Another thing of note, as mentioned in their Dragon video, where the Shadow Dragon is becoming its own stat block (blocks?) rather than a template applied to a normal dragon, the Dracolich also appears that it will be getting its own unique abilities - which I'm 100% here for.

Just another fun thing: Crawling Claws now get a higher-CR swarm version - which is great, because a Crawling Claw is very fun, but it's CR 0, so even at level 1 is barely a challenge.

Early access on D&D Beyond begins I believe on Feb. 4th, with the actual release on the 18th.

With that release, we'll truly have all the pieces for this "5.5E" demi-edition, which is very exciting. I think what's particularly fun about a Monster Manual refresh is just that this book holds all the most classic monsters. In the ten years of 5E, we've seen the designers figure out how to really build more interesting creatures, but your classic building blocks have remained unchanged.

While I don't think we're going to be getting a legendary Death Knight, given the goal here of mostly just updating the existing creatures to play the role they're meant for better (and I realize you've got Lord Soth to draw on if you want a legendary DK) I am very excited about using these new creatures. The higher CR stuff will be great for my ongoing Ravnica campaign (which will probably still be in the dungeon they're just entering now - so we'll probably not yet be at level 18) and I'll be very excited to start some new games with all the spruced-up low-CR monsters.

Damage Types and the New Monster Manual

 One of the things that we've started to see in more recent monster designs is what might wind up being a pretty monumental change:

Since 2014, many particularly "magical" beings, from those at low levels like Ghosts and Specters to those at high levels, like Demon Lords and Liches, have had either Resistance or, in some cases, Immunity to "bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical attacks."

The idea, I think, was to make creatures that would require a magical weapon to properly fight. This is, of course, a classic notion in fantasy - that a certain monsters, especially those that are legendary and suffused with magical power, can only be harmed by a special weapon.

But it's also something that, in D&D, has been kind of meaningless.

While, again, a low-level character might find themselves fighting some incorporeal undead (or even an imp) before they get access to a magic weapon, it more or less feels like a switch flipping around level 5 or 6, where martial characters just don't really have to worry about that anymore. Very, very few creatures released in the past ten years have had blanket immunity to all bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage - this "nonmagical" distinction is tacked onto just about every creature with such resistances or immunities.

Indeed, the oddness to this is also that if they take such damage from something that isn't an attack, even with their magical invulnerability, they'll fully take, say, falling damage. There is a funny irony that the relatively humble Clay Golem is actually immune to every bit of damage the Tarrasque can do, meaning that, after probably a very long combat (given how often the Golem is going to miss the Tarrasque, especially from within its belly) the Clay Golem will always win.

That is, unless you have the Tarrasque pick the Golem up and throw it about a mile in the air (which, as a 70-foot-long creature with 30 Strength, it probably can do).

One change we saw with classes like the Monk or the Circle of the Moon for Druids, or the beast companions for the Beast Master Ranger, is that the old features they had that made their attacks "count as magical" instead just change the damage types - Force for Monks and the Ranger pets, and Radiant for the Druids.

Thus, what I suspected we would get was that monsters would simply have resistance/immunity to bludgeoning/piercing/slashing damage full stop, but that magic weapons would now deal Force or other "non-kinetic" damage types.

However, that does not appear to be the case. A +2 Greatsword will still deal slashing damage, except when it's changed by being something like a Pact Weapon for a Warlock.

How about creatures, though? Did they just get rid of these resistances and immunities? Well, not if the Fire Elemental is any indicator - as predicted, it does have resistance to Bludgeoning, Piercing, and Slashing damage, with no carve-out for magic attacks.

Meaning what? Well, it means that martial characters might find that they are, in fact, at a pretty significant disadvantage when fighting monsters of this sort - unless they can get their hands on some unconventional magic weapons.

As a note, not everything has retained its resistances. The Stone Golem only has its Poison and Psychic immunities (which are common for constructs) but nothing about bludgeoning/piercing/slashing. Likewise, the Succubus and Incubus have their "elemental" resistances but nothing you'd find on a typical weapon.

Thus, players will likely want to hold onto Flame Tongues, Frost Brands, and particularly Sun Blades, the latter of which fully converts your damage to radiant (the others will see bonuses like Rage, Strength/Dexterity, and feats like Great Weapon Master still reduced, as the primary damage is still kinetic.)

It is interesting - while spellcasters are generally considered the more powerful kind of character because of their versatility, martials are the characters who are built for single-target damage. But if you're a Barbarian with a +2 Greatsword, will you actually be able to out-damage a Warlock hitting with Eldritch Blast if you're fighting, say, an Empyrean?

Assuming the same chance to hit and crit, our high-level Barbarian might be hitting for 2d6+17 (+5 Strength, +4 Rage, and +6 from Great Weapon Master, and +2 from a +2 Greatsword) twice for a total of 48 damage, halved down to 24.

Our Warlock could be shooting four Eldritch Blasts for 1d10+5 per hit, so 10.5 four times or 42 - not reduced at all because it's Force damage.

Hell, even a Wizard could be doing nearly as good as this Barbarian with a simple Fire Bolt, dealing an average of 22 damage per hit.

I'm curious to see what the actual intent behind this design is: do martials need to be slowed down so that big boss monsters can have some time to be scary? And are we likely to see more spells and magic weapons that allow martial characters to deal other types of damage (given that we have the new DMG, I'm not sure that we are.)

I'm curious to see how often, if ever, we'll see full immunity to all three kinetic weapon damage types. I suspect we might see some with just one of them, like Ochre Jellies and their slashing immunity, but probably nothing that will fully lock out every weapon that isn't a Sun Blade or the like. Still, with such resistances remaining, it'll be something to really consider when designing adventures - make sure that you aren't totally screwing over your martial players by making a dungeon where everything's a ghost - unless you have some workaround for them.

Could D&D Use Some Different Resource Systems?

 One thing that surprised me a bit when I first got into D&D was how many classes are spellcasters. Of the thirteen total WotC-published classes, eight of them (the Artificer, Bard, Cleric, Druid, Paladin, Ranger, Sorcerer, and Wizard) have the "Spellcasting" feature. Two subclasses for other classes - the Eldritch Knight Fighter and the Arcane Trickster Rogue, also gain this feature. Finally, Warlocks have Pact Magic, which functions differently, but still similarly - though we might have to look at them again as we consider the overall subject of this post.

Unlike other RPGs I've played, D&D's spells are often available to multiple classes. Whereas classes that can play similar roles in other games might have separate but functionally similar spells (like World of Warcraft's Holy Light for Paladins and Healing Wave for Shamans,) D&D's classes share spells (the equivalent probably being something like Cure Wounds).

There is a great advantage to this, of course: it's pretty efficient. Regardless of which class you're playing, most players will know what Cure Wounds does, with the only real distinction being whether you're adding your Wisdom or your Charisma modifier to the roll (or Intelligence if you're an Artificer). (Admittedly, this is a bad example because this spell did get changed with the 2024 PHB, but you get the idea - it changed for every class.)

The recent UA for the Artificer has led to some discussion about whether the class works well. On a flavor level, of course, there are some who complain about how its machine-based aesthetics clash with classic fantasy (I couldn't disagree more - not only because I hate genre purism but also because there are plenty of examples in the genre of wondrous clockwork devices, not to mention that the Alchemist at least has none of these issues). But I think the salient point is that the Artificer is built around making magic items in a system that seems really reluctant to allow players to craft magic items.

There are rules for crafting, of course, but for those of us hoping for a deeper, more robust system for crafting magic items in the 2024 rules, the books didn't really add much - instead primarily consolidating existing rules, and doing so with rules that still require a massive amount of downtime that many campaigns simply won't have.

Instead, it feels like the game really, really prefers for players to find magic items on adventures. And that leaves you with the problem of what, exactly, the Artificer is actually doing.

The UA plays with this - by changing Infusions to Replicate Magic Item (slightly confusing as that is a type of infusion for the existing Artificer) they are able to quickly (on a long rest) produce a magic item, but it's limited in the same way that the infusions are - an item that is semi-temporary.

There are aspects of this that could be fun (an Armorer Artificer getting free plate armor at level 3 by taking the Armor of Gleaming plan, swapping that for +1 armor when they hit level 6) but also some problems that arise (can you make a +1 Thunder Gauntlet for your Guardian mode suit, and will that transfer over if you swap your armor type to Infiltrator or Dreadnaught?)

Still, I think this area of discussion might be a distraction.

Is there some more interesting way that the Artificer could distinguish itself?

The only other "alternate spellcasting" systems I've seen aside from the Warlock's Pact Magic system were the 2014 Four Elements Monk and, arguably, the Psionic Sorcery of the Aberrant Mind (now simply Aberrant Sorcerer). The Four Elements Monk was maybe the lowest-rated subclass in the game (and the new Warrior of Elements is a massive step up - but it also removes anything resembling spellcasting). The Aberrant Mind effectively lets you cast certain spells with Sorcery Points, though you can sort of reverse engineer this to simply cast with your spell slots by then using a bonus action to convert the appropriate-level spell slot into sorcery points.

Still, another thing I've seen in other games is that spells are usually fueled by a single resource - often called "Mana." More powerful spells will cost more mana, but it's the same resource. That means you can choose between casting a lot of small spells or a few large spells.

Now, the 2014 DMG has "Spell Points" as an optional rule, which effectively convert your spell slots into a number of points equal to the total combined levels of your spell slots, with each spell of a certain level costing the spell's level's worth of spell points.

There are some issues that arise with this: a high-level character could cast several Wishes in a single day in this manner. And outside of combat, a healer could get far more efficient use out of Cure Wounds by just casting it at 1st level over and over.

And yet, to me, this kind of spellcasting resource would be kind of perfect for an Artificer - imagine if the Artificer, rather than having spell slots, had a "Power Source." Their power source would be a flavorful thing - some elemental gem, clockwork capacitor, chemical battery, or even a reserve of spell catalyst fluids - that would represent the Artificer's daily ability to create spell-like effects. The amount of this resource the Artificer had would be tailor-made for the Artificer's purposes.

I also think that Artificers, who are currently forced to cast spells using artisan's tools even if the spell doesn't require a material component, should also have some exemptions to compensate - like not requiring verbal components. After all, if my spell is really a device I've prepared for the day, why do I need to call out some magic word to get it to work?

Another problem, though, that arises here is that it messes with multiclassing. Warlocks, of course, while they can be great multiclass dips, are also kind of non-interactive with the Spellcasting feature. Now, this is one of several reasons I don't like multiclassing as a thing.

While I suspect D&D will remain my primary TTRPG indefinitely, I have been keeping a close watch on MCDM's Draw Steel, and while every class' resource works somewhat similarly (there tend to be abilities that cost 3, 5, and 7 - perhaps more at higher levels) they're still decidedly distinct. But with no multiclassing in that game, that doesn't become a problem for certain character builds.

In terms of the Artificer fantasy, I, personally, am drawn more to the fantasy of an adventurer who uses technology and inventions to fight monsters and save the day than to be someone who just "makes magic items." Even for the less "gears and pistons" aesthetic of the Alchemist, I'm more excited about the moment I pull a flask of some kind of caustic liquid from my coat and tell my party to hold their breath, because this one is going to smell real nasty, than I am about the hours I spend concocting the right alchemical treatment to produce a +1 set of Half Plate.

Many of the class' features do focus on this latter thing - the Artillerist's Eldritch Cannons, the Armorer's Magic Armor, etc. As cool as it certainly is to enhance those capabilities with bespoke magic items, I think that perhaps the best path forward for the class is to think about how the moment-to-moment gameplay can reflect this "inventor hero" archetype.

What Makes a Monster?

 There are a couple of things coming with the new Monster Manual, but what I want to talk about here is the transformation of certain classic D&D monsters to have new creature types.

The two that we already know of are Goblins going from Humanoid to Fey, and Gnolls going from Humanoid to Fiend. (Actually, as of my actually finishing this post, we now have Kobolds counting officially as Dragons.)

The 2014 Monster Manual is only ten years old, but there have been a lot of developments in the culture of the D&D world that have inspired certain changes. I don't want to really delve into the "political" side of this, but I do think that there has been some reflection of fantasy's historical Eurocentric biases, and an interrogation of the very idea of "races."

In the 2024 Player's Handbook, the option formerly known as your fantasy "race" was changed to "species." It's perhaps a bit of a clinical term, but it's also unambiguous. "Race" was meant more in the convention of "the human race" than, say, Latino or East Asian.

And yet, we run into this problem in fantasy, which is that there are many people who are very human-like while not being human.

In our day-to-day experience of the real world, we've never met another species with the ability to talk and reason on anything approaching a human level of sophistication. It's possible that Neanderthals were somewhat like this, but it's also possible that we were co-fertile with them (indeed, there's some evidence that people of European and East Asian descent might be part Neanderthal) and thus they're not exactly a separate species. And yet, in the eons (maybe 300,000 years?) since modern humans first evolved and spread out from Africa and onto every other continent (not much in the way of permanent settlements in Anarctica, to be fair) humanity has developed distinct cultures and languages, philosophies and practices.

Thus, our best way to understand a world of dwarves and elves is to think of them as simply other cultures. Indeed, given the co-fertility of many of D&D's historical "races," one could argue that, in some cases, they're really more like separate ethnicities - just with more significant genetic variation (something that, beyond the cosmetic level, is actually very narrow for humans, with basically indistinguishable physical and mental capabilities).

And yet...

We also have, like, lizard people. Or Dragonborn. Sapient species who clearly have no shared ancestry with humanity. Going farther, we have Plasmoids or even Warforged and Autognomes, the latter two being fully artificial and thus don't even likely have DNA and potentially no organic materials (Warforged might have wood or leather parts, so technically organic, but not in the sense that they grew this organic material themselves).

Furthermore, because fantasy is largely predicated on pre-scientific assumptions about the creation of the world, in many cases the species of D&D were literally created separately by gods - Halflings and Gnomes might seem pretty similar, but the first specimens of each species were created by entirely separate entities, meaning no shared ancestry at all.

Through most of D&D's history, there were certain species (using the updated term here) that were just plain villainous. Even in the 2014 Monster Manual, Goblins and Orcs were all listed as chaotic evil. Both are, of course, classic fantasy monsters. In Tolkien, the two terms are basically different descriptions for the same beings (maybe making goblins somewhat smaller of stature, but I think they're pretty interchangeable) and in both cases, they are by definition evil. Now, Tolkien himself felt troubled by this premise, and came up with a potential explanation (embraced by most, including the Amazon Rings of Power show) that Orcs aren't a wholly separate species, but are actually just elves who have chosen an evil path, and their physical differences were an expression of that malevolence (it's worth noting that for much of history, beauty and virtue were assumed to be inherently intertwined - which sure makes your standard of beauty a powerful standard indeed).

And yet, despite the irredeemably evil nature of Tolkien's Orcs, many fantasy-creators have imagined an alternative - making Orcs, first, their own separate species, and then making that species a more nuanced and human-like culture, fallible, but with the potential for good. Perhaps one of the most popular examples is the Warcraft series. In the first two games of the series, the Orcs really were just bad, but in the third, with the introduction of Thrall as the new Warchief of the Horde, the Orcs were portrayed as a proud culture that was manipulated and tempted into corruption by demonic forces - it wasn't that the Orcs were free of sin, but that they didn't have to continue going down that path, and that individual Orcs could live very different lives than that of bloodthirsty warmongers.

In D&D, while there are certainly plenty of "canonical" worlds and settings, the addition of the Orc as one of the core playable species in 2014 (which, to be fair, was more of an update to 2014's core Half-Orc option) suggests that Wizards of the Coast has fully embraced Orcs as one of the nuanced, human-like peoples who can be just as heroic or villainous as any person.

Which brings us back to Goblins.

Fey, to be fair, are one of the more hard-to-pin-down creature types. At the extremes, you have Fiends, who are more or less by definition evil. Celestials, to be fair, have been broadened out to any kind of outer-planar being who isn't a fiend (something I think Pathfinder and thus possibly 3rd edition simply called an "Outsider," with fiends and celestials as more subtypes). Undead are almost exclusively evil as well. Constructs are generally neutral. But while Fey might skew toward the chaotic side of things, they can easily be benevolent or wicked.

Fey are, also, the most common creature type other than Humanoid for playable species. Indeed, prior I think to Spelljammer's Astral Adventurer's Guide, which gave us playable constructs, oozes, and monstrosities, I believe Fey were the only creature type other than Humanoid that a player could play (they experimented with making Dhampirs undead, something I think they could actually do now that healing spells no longer can't be used on Constructs or Undead).

And thus, making Goblins fey, arguably, doesn't really make for that huge of a change. It will make some spells less useful - Charm Person, for example, will no longer work on them. But Fey seem to kind of straddle a line - they're nearly humanoids in some cases, but then you have the less human-like ones, which are more like embodiments of various emotions and feelings. Fairies are, of course, a playable species, and creatures like pixies and sprites, while tiny, still feel basically like people. But then you also have things like Meenlocks or Hags, which are not just frightful and spiteful, but more or less made out of frightfulness and spite.

Goblins also hold a special place in D&D - they're basically the standard "first combat encounter." Notably, Lost Mines of Phandelver, which has stood the test of time as a really solid intro adventure for 5E, begins with a fight against goblins in a forest.

It's strange, though: Goblins are great cannon fodder for heroic adventurers to slay... until they're also one of the peoples of your setting. Again, looking to World of Warcraft, their version of goblins are certainly oriented more toward comic relief, but they're presented very much as a people with their own merits, even if their hyper-capitalist, Randian culture frequently teeters into outright villainy.

Goblins are also an oft-reprinted playable species - appearing in Volo's Guide to Monsters as well as Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica (based on Magic the Gathering, where Goblins are probably the most common "red" creature type) and of course Monsters of the Multiverse. I believe in Pathfinder (at least its 2nd edition,) Goblins are one of the core playable ancestries. Basically, after Orcs, Goblins are probably the most commonly playable "villainous" fantasy species.

In my own homebrew setting, the villainous reputation of goblinoids (here including Hobgoblins and Bugbears) is in part due to a territorial dispute in some of the main continent's most fertile farmlands. To the Halflings of the vaguely Central/Eastern European-coded Vodaskia, the Goblins were historical tyrants and oppressors, originally loyal to a green dragon that terrorized the land. But for the goblinoids, throwing off the yoke of said dragon was meant to lead to a new era of freedom and prosperity for them, only to descend once again into war against the local halflings over who had a right to the land. The most famous hobgoblin leader, called Battenspur, is seen as a historical villain by the Halflings and humans of the country, but the goblinoids see him as the great hero who will one day return, King Arthur-like, to finally establish their glorious, promised realm. My intent, as the creator of this setting, is not to give any easy answers as to whether the goblinoids are purely a blameless and oppressed minority, or if they just happen to be on the losing side of an entrenched conflict who have their share, even more than their fair share, of blood on their hands. It's very possible that adventurers in this setting could find themselves fighting against roving bands of aggressive goblinoids, but it's just as possible that the adventurers would be called upon to defend an enclave of goblinoids threatened by intolerant, bigoted vigilantes.

One thing I've always found funny is the special place of Gnolls. D&D is filled with animal-people, from Tortles to Bullywugs to Kuo-Toa (to be fair, these guys might be changing into aberrations) to Aarakocra, and so on and so forth. It's kind of a classic fantasy thing - what if *insert real animal species,* but people?

And yet, for some reason, hyena-people are just singled out as complete and utter monsters. And here, WotC is fully committing to this: Gnolls are not humanoid, not even (as I expected them to go) Monstrosities, but Fiends.

Now, the specific lore of Gnolls in D&D does link them directly to one of the Demon Lords - beings who are just shy of being full-on deities of chaotic evil (and thus are fair game for adventures to fight). Thus, it does make sense (I also wonder if this means that the Minotaur of Baphomet, which I assume will be the update of 2014's Minotaur monster, will be one as well).

Still, this comes with a seeming directive to DMs - Gnolls are not there to have a nuanced character arc, and not there for you to come up with a Gnoll culture and history beyond ceaseless carnage and brutality.

And that means that, on a fundamental level, the folks at WotC have decided to draw a line. And I think that line is, essentially, the Humanoid creature type.

I expect that we will not see a single humanoid creature in the monster manual with a specific alignment - we might see some "any non-lawful alignment" or similar options, which I think is the 2014 version of the bandit. But given that, by necessity, we're going to get some equivalent to 2014's "Orc," "Orog," and the other two or three stat blocks we got back then, I expect we're going to find some real changes there.

Indeed, especially in the case of Orcs, who, along with Drow, are among the few player-character species in the Player's Handbook who also have stat blocks in the Monster Manual, I'll be curious to see how they handle things. After all, any of the generic humanoid NPC stat blocks could, in theory, be Orcs or Drow. So, what will the "Orc" and "Drow" segments now represent? I could imagine the Drow ones being specifically Lolth-aligned Drow, and thus perhaps the Orcs could be specifically "Gruumsh-aligned" ones. We'll see.

Anyway, it's just funny because I could imagine a fantasy world in which Gnolls are simply hyena-people, and just as capable of being good guys as any other animal-folk, while Orcs could be more like Tolkien's vision of semi-demonic brutes (indeed, Orcs were originally from classical mythology, in which they were a kind of underworld spirit - they're also etymologically linked to Ogres).

Now, it's of course up to individual tables to see how much this changes the stories being told. Given the existence of fallen or even inherently evil Celestials, I think it's totally within a DM's discretion to make good-aligned fiends, for instance. (I haven't made them canonical for my setting, but after reading some of the 2nd Edition Planescape books, and finding that "Powers" - a.k.a. gods - can choose whatever plane they wish their divine realm to be in, regardless of their alignment, I had this idea of a Chaotic Good god of heavy metal who chooses to have a realm within the Nine Hells. Basically, the followers of this deity would all be kind of himbo metal-heads, and the god would have a coterie of devils who have been converted to not just good but also chaos through the power of rock - but they don't suddenly become celestials or anything - they still look like fiends because that's, well, fucking metal.)

The bigger impact, overall, though, will be that a lot of humanoid-specific spells and features are not going to be as good as they once were. Calm Emotions, for example, I think only works on Humanoids, which means you can't get a gang of angry Goblins, Kobolds, or Gnolls to calm down and talk it out. That being said, spells like Banishment or Protection from Evil and Good might actually have more applications.

I can't wait to get the new Monster Manual in hand (well, likely the digital version first).

Now, hopefully my home won't burn to the ground before that happens! (It's an anxious time for us Angelenos. I am, at least, quite far from either of the big fires, but it's a pretty stressful time nonetheless.)

A Taste of the Monster Manual to Come

With the final third of the new core rulebooks for D&D "5.5E" or "5E'24" or "6ishE" or whatever you want to call it now only a month away, the marketing blitz has begun, with an hour-long Todd Kenreck video on D&D's official YouTube page as well as a few D&D YouTubers getting a chance to preview some of the new and revised monsters.

If I were to sum up the developments as I see them, it's that monsters are looking to become scarier. Low-level monsters, like the humble Skeleton, are only getting a few little tweaks here and there. However, it looks like a lot of monster categories are getting gap-filling stat blocks. A Death Knight, for example, is meant to command a whole host of undead. But your big boss Death Knight for your tier 3 party could be surrounded by forty skeletal minions, and they'd still pretty much all get wiped out by a single Fireball.

I've found that the Skeletal Knight from the Dragonlance adventure is a pretty solid one to use as a high-level minion, but it'll be nice to get some more in-between options for iconic monsters (for whatever reason, I really like using Skeletons - I think it's the basic undead creature that skews more toward "armies of a dark lord" more than "mindless horde.")

The video is nearly an hour, so there's a lot to cover. One thing is that a lot of gender-specific monsters are being shown as no longer so exclusive - male Medusas, Hags, and Dryads were all showcased. As we saw in Scions of Elemental Evil, we also now have a very interesting change to the Succubus and Incubus. As imagined, these are no longer simply the female and male equivalents of one another, but are both available in both (or all, rather) genders, but here the Succubus is more of the threat on the physical plane while the Incubus is more of a haunter of dreams - and in fact, they're really the same fiend, able to swap which kind they are on a long rest. (Hey, is Pyramid Head from Silent Hill essentially an Incubus in this case? I don't know because I never played that game, but I was aware that it was the only masculine monster.)

There are also some changes to creature types. Gnolls, for example, are now fully just Fiends (actually much like those in Flee, Mortals!), which really hammers home that Gnolls are not just "hyena people" the way that Aarakocra are bird people or Tortles are turtle people. I'd be tempted to have a genuine hyena people who have to deal with the fact that people think they're Gnolls as a plot.

More transformative, the humble Goblin, perhaps the most iconic and classic "starter monster" in D&D, will now be considered Fey. This is actually pretty interesting - it makes it a little easier to justify Goblins as a kind of dangerous pest, perhaps side-stepping some moral questions of whether they're actually a marginalized people (though... that's a whole can of worms) but I also think really gives us a perfect "rank-and-file" fey creature we can use in just about any Feywild or fairy-centric story. As a kid, I always thought the aesthetic of Maleficent's castle from the Disney Sleeping Beauty was super cool, and her weird little minions would certainly fit as goblins. I'm curious to see if they'll do another reprint of playable Goblins as a species with the updated creature type (yes, the most recent reprint was in Monsters of the Multiverse, but we got new Aasimar, Goliaths, and Orcs in the PHB, so it's certainly possible - a part of me wishes they were bolder with creature types, such as making Goliaths giants, Dragonborn dragons, Aasimar into Celestials, and Tieflings into Fiends - though these latter two might be a little harder given things like Divine Sense and other spells and abilities that affect these creature types).

One preview we got was for Cyclopes (the plural of Cyclops, pronounced, I believe, as "sy-clo-peez,") who are given a little more of an identity as kind of mystic seers. The classic Cyclops is given a slightly different name (no longer just "Cyclops") and is still largely a melee brute, but they can knock you prone if they hit you (no save) and they also have a recharged reaction that imposes disadvantage on an attack against them while granting them advantage against the target. Still fairly simple, but it at least gives the Cyclops a bit of a more specific identity than that of any other huge brawler. There's also a new Cyclops Seer (or Diviner?) that is a CR 10 magic-using Cyclops that leans further into their divinatory powers. In my larger Spelljammer setting (that includes my primary homebrew world) there's an interstellar empire of giants, and I think Cyclopes will probably play a fascinating role in their society as kind of respected but also kind of feared mystics (especially since the Storm Giants at the top of that society are already considered mystical seers - so perhaps the Cyclopes are like speakers of contradictory truths to the prophecies of the Storm Giant sages).

The art for the monsters is also quite interesting - evidently they decided to be less dedicated to a singular art style and are embracing whatever is right for the right monster - some of the fiend illustrations are really cool and frightening. I honestly haven't used a ton of fiends in my campaigns, but I feel like it's pretty important to ensure that they're a stakes-raising presence - as embodiments of pure evil, they need to feel like they're going to be especially nasty, especially shocking in their cruelty, and probably tough to fight.

As suggested in the DMG, there are many new "titan" stat blocks that are meant to be potential final bosses for campaigns. Also, to my great joy, the Kraken actually looks like a giant cephalopod, rather than some kind of reptile-fish thing (personally, I've always liked the idea that you never actually see the central body of a kraken - just an enormous tangle of tentacles). We got some illustrations of the Colossus (the Construct titan).

I think the really important thing about the 2025 Monster Manual is that this is the final piece of the 2024 5E puzzle. Generally speaking, in most cases I think classes have gotten more powerful than they were in their 2014 iterations. In many cases, this is simply because some quality-of-life issues were fixed - like how a Devotion Paladin's Sacred Weapon was always frustrating because it more or less forced a Paladin to waste their first turn in combat to activate it, which would mean it was probably not worth it in the long run.

However, despite the broad buffs (the Paladin, I admit, might actually be slightly less powerful thanks to the Divine Smite changes) I don't think the power level for player characters was raised all that much (the Monk got an enormous buff, but they also had a long way to catch up). However, the monsters in the Monster Manual are looking a lot tougher. And between that and the DMG's encounter-building guidance, which skews for much tougher fights, I actually think we might be looking at a harder overall game.

And I'm curious to see how that works out. Feats, for example, are no longer an optional feature - but does this mean that if you aren't taking some big damage-boosting feat like Great Weapon Master or Dual Wielder that you'll not be putting out enough damage to keep up?

As always, it will be up to DMs to moderate the difficulty. The adventure I'm running in my high-level campaign is built such that the party can, in theory, get through the dungeon they're about to enter (they're in the building, but the dungeon is specifically one department of said guild headquarters) in one day... though it's a bit skewed. I'm using Flee, Mortals! for its "encounters per day" guidance, but the new DMG's encounter-building guidance - meaning that the, like, 5 "low" difficulty encounters are probably way more than the Flee, Mortals system is built for. That's fine, though, as I want to make it very clear to the party that they can retreat and regroup, like a classic dungeon delve (there are a few random encounters that will pop up if they do rest, but these will be trivial difficulty - just enough to put a little pressure on them). Still, I'm going to see how they do, and how many of these encounters they can get through without taking a long rest. They're also level 17, so I feel like I'm allowed and even obligated to put some really tough challenges to them.

But I'll have to see how these tougher monsters feel, and might need to readjust some of my assumptions. For ten years, 5E has generally been considered too easy at high levels, and even medium levels. We'll have to see if that's still the case.

Planning a Campaign That, By Design, We'll Rarely Play

 For the past three years or so, I've been playing in a D&D campaign set in Wildemount, the continent from Critical Role's second (and, in my opinion, best) campaign on the world of Exandria (the shared setting for all three campaigns). We try to play every week, but between illness (Covid and other joys) and various scheduling conflicts (most of my friends are actors, and when you get a gig, you have to skip D&D) and other factors at play, we do sometimes miss the game.

Now, I'm a bum, and so I have basically tons of free time to both run D&D and also plan for it. So, I volunteered to start a "off-weeks" game for when our DM had to cancel for one reason or another (the DM is my best friend).

The intent, here, of course, is never to usurp the Wildemount campaign. After all, this is the game in which I am the most invested in my own player character, and very much want to see him grow and follow his adventurous path (not to mention get all those sweet high-level Wizard spells! I've got the first notions of what his Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion will look like - as a Triton, it's going to have a significant underwater section).

But even while I'm pretty busy running my weekly Ravnica game (which does have a path to its conclusion, but still many chapters remaining before we hit that point) I've had the itch to A: run something in my own homebrew world and B: play with the 2024 rules.

The C:, though, here, is that I also wanted to change the way I go about structuring a campaign. Brennan Lee Mulligan, the maestro of Dimension 20, had a very good point about how he approaches structuring a campaign: the player characters are the main characters of your story. And so, the plot should involve them.

Now, to be fair, there are for sure stories about people getting swept up in a plot that goes beyond them - Frodo, after all, has little more connection to Sauron than anyone else, except that his uncle happened to steal the Dark Lord's long-lost ring. His heroism, and that of all the hobbits, is all the more heroic because they're just the innocent, little folk who have never before had all that much of an impact on history (again, barring uncle Bilbo).

Still, even within that story, you have the most archetypically heroic character of all, Aragorn, turn out to be the heir to the throne of Gondor, whose ascension to kingship marks the beginning of a golden age that lasts for centuries. Indeed, Aragorn would be the unambiguous main character in most similar tales, but Tolkien's values, which among others, stressed humility, put this greatest and most righteous of kings into the role of a supporter and ally (while I'm by no means a royalist, and in fact feel deep in my bones as an American that the idea of a king, or any tyrant being above the law, is repugnant, I do really like that the proof that Aragorn is the rightful king is not from winning battles but from healing the seemingly unhealable, reviving Eowyn and Merry after the blow-back from their strikes against the Witch King of Angmar).

All of which is to say: I have restrained myself from coming up with a "big bad" until my players hand in their character backstories.

I do actually have one of them, and so the wheels are already turning.

Luckily, my world is pretty fleshed-out, so it's not very hard for me to come up with some options of what the loose plot threads in the backstory might refer to.

I actually have to hand it to this player for giving me some very evocative story elements that are pure mysteries to him.

Here, I'll detail them, but on the cosmically-small chance that my players are even aware of this blog (for the most part I like to keep my online and personal lives quite separate,) here's a warning to said players: thar be spoilers in these here waters!