Walkin' Dudes and Dark Wanderers

 I was very happy when the new Monster Manual gave us some higher-CR humanoid stat blocks.

They cap out at CR 12, which technically they already did with the Archmage. But along with the Archmage, there's now the Questing Knight, the Archpriest, and the Pirate Admiral. (The Bandit Crime Lord lags behind slightly at CR 11).

The thing is, in most stories, villains are people. That's largely due to the fact that in most stories, the only really active characters with agency are human beings. But even in fantasy, there are many evil kings, evil sorcerers, or other evil people working at cross-purposes against the heroes.

In D&D, if you want a "person" as your big bad monster, and you want them to be something legendary that a high-level party will be challenged by, your best bets are generally undead like Liches or Death Knights - beings who can act very much like a person even if they aren't technically humanoid anymore.

As I've often talked about, one of the key formative texts that has influenced my tastes in fantasy is Stephen King's Dark Tower series. The ultimate villain of this epic 7-book series (with an eighth "interquel" taking place I believe between books 3 and 4 that isn't really necessary to understand the series) is the Crimson King, a demonic tyrant who is half-human and half-eldritch-abomination. But the villain we spend much more time actually seeing in the story is the Crimson King's duplicitous servant (who wishes to usurp CK's role at the last second if he can pull it off,) the Man in Black.

The Man in Black, known also as Walter O'Dim, is King's most common recurring villain, appearing under different names in different stories, but explicitly the same guy. His most famous appearance is in The Stand, in which he is known primarily as Randall Flagg, though he also goes by all sorts of other names with the initials "R. F." Given his prominence in that book in particular, Randall Flagg is probably his default name, even though we eventually discover in the final book of the Dark Tower (also called The Dark Tower) that his birth name was Walter Padick, before he learned how to use magic and basically turn it against a world that had wronged him.

Flagg's characterization in The Stand is pretty interesting: he seems to be something of a shapeshifter, and can blend in with groups that are ideologically opposed to one another, always trying to stir up violence and hatred wherever he goes. In that novel, I think King probably intended him to be some inhuman, otherworldly, demonic being, even giving one of his names as Nyarlathotep (a figure from Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, the only Great Old One that cares enough about humanity to actively hate us).

But I think that the idea here is that Flagg probably isn't human anymore, wandering so long and so far and changing himself with magic to the point that he might still look like his human self (or at least like a human) but he's almost certainly not one anymore.

His defining traits, I'd say, are that he never stays put for very long (even if he does take up residence in a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas for most of The Stand) and he's a cruel bastard that sows chaos and ruin everywhere he goes.

    So, how might we approach a character like this in D&D?

First off, I think it might be wisest not to make this character your big bad. While it might be exciting to try to track them down, to hunt them and then have a good confrontation, they're basically antithetical to the idea of a lair or dungeon. The worn heels of their boots are the result of endless wandering.

Instead, I'd say that they work as a great kind of MacGuffin - a character that the players might need to chase and thus give them the impetus to travel from one location to the next. Most D&D games I've played in (well, at least the two long campaigns I've played in) haven't stuck around in the same location all that much, and are more Lord of the Rings-like travel experiences. As the opening line of the Dark Tower series says: The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed. There you go: a great way to keep the party pushing forward.

Adventures involving our Dark Wanderer would likely not really directly feature them. As another Dark Tower example, the beginning of the story (actually technically taking place prior to the opening lines, as it begins with some nested flashbacks) sees the hero, Roland (the aforementioned Gunslinger) come across a town that Flagg has corrupted by indoctrinating the town's priestess, who has then whipped the populace into a murderous fervor. Roland is forced to fight every last man, woman, and child in the town (it's a fairly dark series, as one might expect from King, especially early King). Roland doesn't even get a chance to meet the Man in Black face-to-face until the end of the first book, and their meeting is cryptic and vague. But Flagg's presence is felt there, in the hostility that greets him in the village of Tull.

One of King's favorite themes is that evil crumples when confronted - that the bad guys use fear to keep normal people complacent and compliant. Thus, I actually think it wouldn't be that crazy to simply use something like an Archmage stat block for a character like this.

The key, though, is that they're going to focus on evading the heroes as much as possible, rather than trying to kill them in a direct confrontation. Archmages have both Misty Step and Teleport, which could help them escape from a party that seeks to take them down. This is pretty consistent with Flagg as he's depicted in the Dark Tower series - he uses magic to turn Roland's bullets into duds, but he doesn't stand and fight because he'd almost certainly lose. An Archmage is actually somewhat tough (among their powers is a one-a-day 9th level Cone of Cold, which I believe does an average of 54 damage on a failed save, which ain't nothing).

But the Dark Wanderer is also a lonesome figure - they're probably not going to have a bunch of minions to protect them. Thus, they'll really prefer to lure the party into hostile situations. With their own spells, like Fly, they can go through dangerous areas with relative safety.

They're also going to likely be casting Scrying on the party frequently, which might help reinforce the idea that they remain a presence even if they're more than a day's journey away. I'd actually go out of my way as a DM to ensure that the Scrying feels like some kind of visitation. The spell itself describes the person making the saving throw as feeling that they don't know what they're saving against, only that they are made to feel uneasy, so I think having a vision of being stalked by a shadowy figure would fit the bill. Maybe the party doesn't really know what their Dark Wanderer looks like, but when saving against the Scrying spell, they see some defining feature of them - in Flagg's case, he often has glowing red eyes and cowboy boots with worn-down heels. In the Stand, in particular, he has custom buttons, like one with a smiley face with a bleeding bullet hole in the forehead.

Now, again, I think that Archmage actually works the best for something hewing quite close to the way Flagg is portrayed in the Dark Tower series. And I do think that this stat block is pretty well-suited to this kind of elusive foe.

But maybe you want to lean further into the inhuman side of things.

A Lich could perform this role, but they have far less reason to fear the party catching up with them, given they can just recover wherever their phylactery/spirit jar is hidden. I actually think a Rakshasa is an awesome recurring adversary (though arguably too powerful if they're truly intent on hunting the party, as they can planeshift right back to the same place after they die, on top of their insane magic immunity and their insane cursed touch.

An Arcanoloth can play some similarly evasive games with a party as an Archmage, and they're the same CR.

In terms of thematics, a Star Spawn Emissary could work (starting off as Lesser and only transforming if they beat that form) but I don't know that that's really what we're looking for.

Yeah, I'm actually thinking sticking to Archmage is your best bet. You can always reskin it to a different creature type if your Dark Wanderer is of a different vibe.

As always, though, I'd strongly encourage you to think outside the stat block. The kind of prophetic visions and ominous signs of the influence of a true fantasy villain aren't always covered by the game's rules. As long as these are primarily flavor and foreshadowing, there's no worry about upsetting the game balance. But I also think you can create dangerous scenarios and affliction that work on-theme.

Remember that if you make the Wanderer's primary objective when confronted by the heroes escape rather than killing the party, you can be a little nastier with those bespoke afflictions. Maybe you, like Flagg does in the 4th book, neutralize one of the heroes' primary weapons, for example. Maybe the environment shifts in some unexpected way that forces the party to focus on surviving the change (like the floor becoming quicksand) rather than pursuing.

I think it's fair game to give an Archmage any Wizard spell, and even toss in some Sorcerer or Warlock ones that Wizards don't get (which isn't a lot). For higher-level spells, be sure to match the kind of limited use that the stat block has (maybe swapping them out with spells of the same level). Archmages are assumed to have Mind Blank on them at all times, but I do feel like Maze is a fantastic one to really mess with a party.

Now, how do you ultimately deal with your Dark Wanderer?

Certainly, part of the fun of D&D is to let the players' actions dictate how things go. If they come up with the perfect plan to trap this foe and deal with them once and for all, that's probably the best scenario. But if you want to build to a set-piece encounter with them, you should figure out what their ultimate goal is. In the Dark Tower, Flagg's demise is an anticlimax meant to introduce a new, deadlier villain (though as much as I love this series, the last couple books were pretty clearly written in a rush as King was worried he would die before he finished the saga. 22 years later, he's still kicking and I kind of wish he had taken more time on it. That villain who destroys Randall Flagg is, himself, slain almost instantaneously in his own anticlimax. Actually, all the villains have pretty anticlimactic ends, which might be a point King was making but doesn't work very well, dramatically).

I'd say that, especially given that the party's going to be spending a lot of time pursuing this foe, if they can't figure out a way to ensnare them cleverly (and do try to allow for that, within reason) you should try to have this foe reach a goal and begin enacting their evil plan, to give the encounter urgency and stakes. This kind of transforms them into a stationary "dungeon boss" foe, but it's a reasonable way to end their story.

But until that final confrontation, feel free to use any trick in the book - just play fair. They already have Misty Step and Teleport, but consider spells like Project Image, Mislead, Dimension Door, Programmed Illusion, and Freedom of Movement to make them extremely hard to pin down so that they can get away from the party alive.

Further Conceptualization for How Powers Work in my TTRPG

 Once again, just to manage expectations if you're excited about this, I'm still kind of at a thought-exercise stage in the planning here.

My intent, if I were to follow through on this, would be to make a new TTRPG that plays very similarly to D&D 5E (I thought about making it a Draw Steel hack, but I really need to get some actual hours playing that game before I try kitbashing it). It'll likely use very similar mechanics, like ability scores (that's a little down the line - I'd actually love to just have the modifiers instead of the wonky 3-20 scores,) proficiency bonus, AC, HP, that kind of thing.

But one area where I'd try something that's a real departure is in how one's Powers work.

Power would be a catch-all term for things you can do on your turn, mostly by spending resources. Their closest analogue would be Spells in D&D, but with several changes:

    General Categories:

First, I'm taking inspiration from the early One D&D playtests, when they created just three master spell lists categorized as Arcane, Divine, and Primal. While this removed some of the nuance from classes - like how Artificers are Arcane spellcasters but can get healing spells that Wizards and Sorcerers can't - given that this game is starting from scratch, we don't have any previous versions of it that could be upset.

Because we're trying to shift genres from high fantasy to more of a New Weird borderland between fantasy and sci-fi (arguably leaning more toward the latter) the categories will be different, and will be based on the source of those powers. The categories, as it stands now, would be Martial Powers, which are something you gain access to through training, physical conditioning, and such, Technological Powers, which you gain via expertise with paranormal devices that you build and customize, Psionic Powers, which you gain through mind-expanding drugs and treatments and allow you to alter your environment with your thoughts, and Mutation Powers, which you gain through the warping of your physical body via mutagenic compounds or energies.

The intent in the Martial Powers is to close the "martial/caster gap" by giving mundane, weapon-based classes just as varied capabilities as the supernatural (or paranormal, as we'd call it here) classes.

These lists would be universal, so any class that has access to Technological Powers will get the same list. However, we'd also probably have fewer classes, built on the following foundation.

There's one "pure Psionic" class, the Psion, one "pure Technology" class, the Technologist, and one "pure Mutation" class, the Aberration. And there might be two "pure Martial" classes, the Soldier and Investigator. To start with, though, we'd have three "hybrid" classes: the Martial/Psionic class called the Psychonaut (or possibly Astralnaut). Then, we'd have the Martial/Technological class the Agent. And then we'd have the Martial/Mutation class, the Biohacker.

Notably, unlike the proposed Arcane/Divine/Primal spell lists, there would be no crossover here - no Psionic Power is found on the Mutation Power list, and so an Aberration and a Psion will never have the same powers.

    Resources:

Having gotten my start playing games like Mario RPG, Secret of Mana, and later Chrono Trigger, (or even, less influentially, Quest for Glory V) I was always more used to games with some kind of "Magic Points" as the fuel for your spells. There are, for sure, some advantages to D&D's spell slot system, but I'd like to at least experiment with something more along those lines.

Each kind of Power comes with its own unique resource: Martial uses Discipline, Technological uses Energy, Psionic uses Focus, and Mutation uses Integrity, each representing what gets taxed as you continue to use these powers. Each of these would have a maximum that goes up as you reach higher levels, and you recuperate them by resting (very much in line with D&D).

Hybrid classes, like the Agent, would have a lower maximum for their resources, but they'd also have two pools of resources to manage. Using arbitrary numbers, we could imagine that if a Psion has a max focus of 30, then a Psyconaut has 15 Focus and 15 Discipline.

All of the lists would have cantrip-like free options that don't cost any resources, including the Martial list (sort of like Signature abilities in Draw Steel). You probably shouldn't ever just be generically attacking, though a martial "cantrip" might just effectively be something like a weapon mastery with normal damage, much as the Slow mastery and Ray of Frost are kind of equivalent. (I haven't figured out how weapon damage works into all of this, or if this system needs something like Extra Attack).

    Power Tiers:

One of my biggest pet peeves about 5E is that spells have levels and characters have levels, and that these do not match up. You don't get 5th level spells at 5th level. So, our simple fix here is that Powers have tiers, rather than levels.

I'd envision this game only going to 10th level, but using the same basic progression as D&D, so that you'd start with Tier 1 powers, and by level 9, you'd have your most powerful, tier 5 powers. I don't have a good number yet, but I think that each class can prepare some number of powers each day, and only of tiers that they can use.

The power's tier would then determine the cost in its resource - again, I'd need to iterate a bit on the math, but my initial thought is that a power basically costs 1+ its tier, so 1st tier powers cost 2, say, Focus, while 5th tier powers cost 6.

Because you're going to be able to potentially spend all your resources on big powers, I want to ensure that there's some incentive to potentially use lower-tier powers even at higher levels to sustain yourself. (One thing about D&D's spells is that, while the damage on a Fireball doesn't go up unless you upcast it, it's still dealing more damage because your spell save DC goes up.)

For Hybrids, I'm tempted to just let them use just-as-high tier powers as the pure classes, but they'll be more constrained in their resources for those given powers. There's a danger here, of course, that Hybrids might be overpowered because they get a broader selection of powers, so we'd have to keep an eye on that.

    Thematics for Each Type of Power:

While there might be some overlap in functionality (I could see both Mutation and Technological powers restoring HP) I do want each category to have truly unique powers, to help define the class identities.

Martial:

    Martial powers would have ways for you to deal AoE damage (I think a low-tier power would be Spray-and-Pray) and then maybe some focused single-target damage. Outside of attacks, though, I think there would be some kind of momentary tactical powers, like providing covering fire (a low-damage AoE that gives your allies partial cover until your next turn) or some kind of evasive movement.

Technological:

    This would probably involve a lot of "elemental" damage, like a freezing beam or planting remote mines that can explode. As mentioned before, there might be some healing spells, and maybe something akin to the Homunculus Servant as seen in Forge of the Artificer, where you can send out a remote drone.

Psionic:

    Psionic abilities would probably have a lot of forced movement, locking down enemies with paralysis or hallucinatory illusions, and mental forcefields.

Mutation:

    Mutation abilities would probably do a lot of enhancing the body, like gaining AC from manifested scales, or giving yourself faster movement. You'd also get some offensive features like manifesting bone claws or some kind of acid-spraying gland. I think most mutations would be about enhancing yourself, but there might be some things you can grant an ally (healing might be done by spraying some kind of beneficial substance on your friends).

So, that's the general thematic pitch. The specifics are very much in the air. I think powers wouldn't be the whole thing that a class gets (otherwise there's no distinction between the Soldier and the Investigator) but it gives us a nice framework on which to build classes in a genre that doesn't have a long-established tradition of classic classes.

Speculating on D&D Books for 2026

Strangely enough, we currently don't have any announced 5E books from WotC.

I don't really know why that is - why they've chosen this particular strategy, given that in past years, we had a big line-up of upcoming publications, even years in advance.

I don't know how successful the 2024 revamp has been - I know there are a lot of people who have a bit of a kneejerk negative reaction to anything that changes what they're familiar with (not to say there can't be valid complaints about the revisions), but I suspect that if there is any friction to the adoption of the new rules it's just that 5E was so popular in the first place and tons of people have only ever played that system (technically it's my second TTRPG, as I played a bit of the Song of Ice and Fire RPG) that they don't really want to have to learn a bunch of new stuff.

Still, according to WotC the new core rulebooks sold really well, and I, personally, am a fan of most of their changes.

Anyway, last year saw the release of the Monster Manual, as well as Dragon Delves, the two Forgotten Realms books, and Eberron: Forge of the Artificer. Notably, we didn't get a long-form adventure book.

Unearthed Arcana is usually the best hint at what we can expect to come next, and I think we've got a few pretty clear categories:

Horror Subclasses suggested to me that we're going to get a new Ravenloft supplement. I suspect that, as it's a revisit to a setting already outlined in a previous 5E book (Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, which is far and away my favorite campaign setting book out of 5E) we might instead get something more along the lines of Forge of the Artificer, which is still a fairly substantial book, but rather than going into minute detail about the setting, it's more about presenting adventure ideas. I'd guess that a segment for the subclasses would probably take up around the same page count (maybe less overall) as the Artificer part of FotA, and then the rest of the book might present a few styles of adventure with perhaps some new stat blocks. Maybe it focuses on a few famous Domains like Barovia, Mordent, Lamordia, and maybe Falkovnia (though frankly, I think they could afford to skip Barovia entirely as we already have probably the most popular 5E campaign book set there). I could also see, like FotA, a revamp to the three Gothic Lineages (possibly even pulling the trigger on making Reborn truly undead... though they also kind of toyed with the idea of them being constructs, so who knows. Point is: you can now use all healing spells on those creature types).

Apocalyptic Subclasses very clearly pointed toward some kind of Dark Sun sourcebook. This is a setting that was very popular, I think, in 2nd Edition, but hasn't shown up at all in 5E yet. But we have a bunch of subclasses that go with it from UA. On top of that, I think that this would be the place where they'd introduce the Psion class. Much as Eberron gave us the Artificer, which made sense for its more technologically-advanced setting, Dark Sun has an established connection to psionics, which I think are favored because the destructive nature of arcane magic on that world. That would mean a pretty substantial player-option section (though saving a bit of room without new species - all though I think Thri-Kreen might get a reprint).

More vaguely defined are the "Arcane Subclasses," which include the four Wizard schools of magic that were dropped in the new Player's Handbook, among other ones. I don't think there's an idea campaign setting for these - the existence of magic is universal in D&D settings, and really any world of the fantasy genre overall. I'd suspect a setting-agnostic rules supplement instead for this.

If we got two setting-supplements last year (if we count both Forgotten Realms books as a single release) it's not crazy to think that we'd get two this year. A rules supplement on top of that? Could happen.

But what about adventures? Admittedly, adventures don't need as much public playtesting, and haven't historically gotten any real testing in UA. But in the early days of 5E, we got kind of themed years/season around these adventure releases. We really just haven't heard anything about them. The most recent adventure book was Dragon Delves, which tried to give us really pared-down adventures that could be completed in a session or two (I haven't run any to actually see how likely that is,) but that was the only adventure book in 2025 (though Adventures in the Forgotten Realms has, I think, somewhat more substantial adventure outlines than FotA). The last true epic campaign book we got was 2024's Vecna: Eve of Ruin.

Now, it's true that sometimes these really big adventures become too unwieldy to actually finish. If you're an adult who can play four hours a week (likely with lots of interruptions,) it can take years to actually finish one of these adventures (we're still working on Wild Beyond the Witchlight, which is theoretically one of the shorter adventures, though we have a new DM who thought it would be easier to run a combat-light campaign, while I think that combat's the easiest thing to run as a DM).

Thus, I wonder if WotC plans on releasing more short adventures as part of anthologies instead, more akin to the old school modules of AD&D.

Hopefully, some time in the next couple weeks we'll get some announcements.

An Enticing Return to Original Magic IP

 The last set I really played much of was Edge of Eternities. I actually adored that set - I love that Magic decided to go all in on sci-fi space opera, with a fun justification for it. I've always been really happiest in the borderlands between sci-fi and fantasy.

Universes Beyond started as non-Standard-legal, and I sort of shrugged at its existence, as I play primarily standard (very casually - or at least as casually as one can on Arena). One could argue that the first incursion of UB sets into standard was the Dungeons & Dragons set, but that's a grey area, as WotC owns D&D and we've already had a bit of crossover between them, such that I almost treat them as para-canonically connected (my Ravnica campaign will ultimately end as a Planescape one). The next was Final Fantasy, and especially after playing FF I-VI in 2024, I was feeling a great deal of affection for that IP.

But with Spider-Man (though weirdly scrubbed of its identity in the Arena release) and then the Avatar the Last Airbender set (a show that I really liked, having watched it along with many others when it went on Netflix around the time that the Pandemic hit) in a row, it's felt a little like these sets are robbing the game of one of my favorite of its elements - the really inventive world-building.

Having never played Lorwyn/Shadowmoor (I think I stopped playing MTGO when I got into World of Warcraft in 2006) I'm eager to check out this plane.

My understanding is that Lorwyn/Shadowmoor was kind of the first real "fairy tale" plane, and famously didn't have humans on it (humans had only actually become a creature type a few years earlier in Mirrodin). Eldraine, of course, has kind of filled that same niche, but Lorwyn certainly has its own pretty clear identity.

I was really happy to see the puppet-based intro video for the return to the plane, with a duet between the Lorwyn and Shadowmoor versions of, I assume, the same goblin (known as boggarts in Lorwyn). I remember watching it and saying "wow, this is giving real 1980s Jim Henson vibes, like Labyrinth or the Dark Crystal," only to discover at the end that the puppets had, in fact, been made and performed by the Jim Henson company.

As is my constant refrain, I do miss the block model. Lorwyn was designed as a tribal setting, where you'd build decks around, say, elves or treefolk or giants. But we don't seem to see such themes embraced as much when the themes of each set shift.

But I am certainly happy to see come back to a Magic-original setting.

If I Were to Build a TTRPG

 I am not, formally, a game designer by any stretch. My college training was in dramatic writing, primarily screenwriting. I've gravitated more toward writing prose since then. But over the past ten years, I've found myself really inspired by the possibilities of D&D, and TTRPGs in general.

The vast, vast majority of TTRPG-playing I've done has been D&D 5th Edition. It's pretty foundational, of course, as the quintessential game of that medium, and I think I'll probably be playing D&D as long as I can still find friends interested in the hobby.

I've written a lot here about Draw Steel, MCDM's alternative take on the core notion of a fantasy RPG, and still haven't gotten around to actually playing it. But I respected the audacity of really going back to the drawing board with it.

I think Draw Steel is basically built to tell the stories that most of my contemporaries seek to do with D&D, but which the folks at MCDM think 5E isn't really built for.

I am very eager to try out their new take on this kind of heroic fantasy game, but I think what I'd be interested in creating would be something that bends the genre or just kind of breaks out of its mold.

I only became aware of the term "The New Weird" a couple years ago, but retroactively, it feels like a good fit for a lot of things I've written over the years.

I discovered The Dark Tower, a fantasy series by Stephen King, when I was a senior in high school. The timing worked out that King had just published the fifth book in the series, and I want to say that the sixth game out just in time for Christmas that year, while the seventh and final (until an "interquel" 8th book years later that honestly can kind of stand on its own) book came out during my freshman year at college.

During that senior year, I started writing my own story that was heavily inspired by The Dark Tower, especially its kind of post-apocalyptic Western setting with a mysterious and dangerously magical, taunting antagonist.

Gradually, that setting would start to fill out as its own thing, becoming "Otherworld," and for several years in the early/mid 2010s I wrote a blog of serialized fiction taking place in that setting (that and this blog started around the same time).

The exact kind of tone and genre of that world shifted a lot - for one thing, I fully dropped the post-apocalyptic element, even including a human civilization that was over a hundred thousand years old. I had some ideas that there might be a bit of steampunk to it, but where I ultimately landed was that it was very much like a modern world, with similar technology and culture, though of course its own history and geography.

The key, to me, was that it have surreal elements. One of my earliest artistic influences was the computer game Myst, and I always liked the incongruity, particularly, of artificial structures seeming, at least, to grow naturally out of an environment.

Then, I think the piece that has really started to become a core thing I like to do in my fiction is a kind of mid-to-late 20th Century surreal Americana. I find a lot of potential in sun-blasted motels off of high ways going through the American Southwest, in part because when I was a kid I went on a number of cross-country road trips from Massachusetts to California, passing through the Southwestern states. I also think that the kind of "out in the desert" paranormal conspiracy theories (the fun kind, rather than the bigoted kind) were really in the zeitgeist in my childhood, with shows like the X-Files and tabloids focusing on cryptids more than celebrities (at least how I remember them).

Nostalgia's a weird, moving target. I was writing in my other other blog about the weird way in which the 80s nostalgia trend didn't really end like the ones for the 50s, 60s, and 70s did. As someone who has real-life nostalgia for the 1990s, I've always kind of resented pop culture's continuing fixation on the 80s (even though I like some of that stuff - flawed though it is, I enjoyed the final season of Stranger Things).

But I guess I don't really want to get bogged down precisely in which decade I want to focus my nostalgia. Because ultimately, I'm interested in building other worlds: My TTRPG would not be set on Earth, but just as a matter of genre convention, I'd make a world that has the feeling, vaguely, of America in the 1960s through the 1990s.

This is an era of widespread use of electronics, but while there could be something like the primitive internet, it's for sure an era before smartphones and social media.

But aside from tone, what would the game be about? What would the game have its players do?

Here's the thing: I like a game with some sense of system mastery, but that still lets you perform well if you pick thematic choices that might not be perfectly optimized on a big excel spreadsheet. I think 5E does this pretty well. I still (still! This year I intend to, one of my resolutions) haven't played Draw Steel, but I get the sense that it does this maybe even better.

What I might try to do is build a combat system that works better with theater-of-the-mind, caring less about movement speeds and ranges and focusing instead on an interplay of actions, but I'll concede that my more likely direction to take this would be something grid-based.

That then leads me to an interesting question:

To what degree would I want to truly make a new game from scratch, versus building something on the bones of what came before (almost certainly the better option for someone who has never designed a game before). And then, from there, which system to build it on?

See, I've really enjoyed watching the development process for Draw Steel. I really like the way it does character resources and abilities, how it makes martial characters feel just as interesting as spellcasters, and its push-forward momentum mechanics (Victories, primarily).

But there are elements of Draw Steel that I feel a certain skepticism toward - I actually think 5E's (or just d20 fantasy in general) binary pass/fail d20 tests are a lower-friction system than the way Tests work in Draw Steel, always with three tier results. Now, that could be just a lack of experience, and maybe after one or two sessions running Draw Steel, I'd fully internalize what a tier 2 on a moderate difficulty test results in.

In terms of finding an audience, I have to imagine that just making it a 5E hack would be easiest. And I'm certainly more comfortable with that system purely from experience.

Then, the question is how ambitious to get with it.

See, I think part of me would want it to be a familiar but fully independent game system, where no, you can't play a High Elf Druid, but you might be able to play a Mirrorfolk Agent (I came up with both species and class off the top of my head, but here's what I imagine they are: Mirrorfolk are beings who come from the other dimension we're actually seeing into when we look into a mirror, and in their natural state, they look like humanoid figures of living mercury. Agents are a class that is trained specifically to track down and incapacitate their foes, proficient with martial weaponry and minor paranormal technology. What mechanical definition does minor paranormal technology have? No idea. But I feel like they're whatever this game's equivalent of a half-caster would be).

    Monsters

I love monsters, and I would want this to be a system where you could open a big book of monsters (something both D&D and Draw Steel have in abundance).

If this were a true hack, and not just a supplement for one of these games, I'd probably use a different category of creature types.

Mutants would probably be a whole type (with lots and lots of variety).

Cryptids could also be a type (possibly taking the place of Monstrosities from D&D).

Aliens could also be one (in this case, it could be an analogue for aberrations). However, this might need to be split into more specific types. I feel like I'd want to delineate between your classic flying-saucer aliens (which would, for sure, be part of this,) eldritch abominations like something out of Lovecraft, and energy-beings like Polaris or the Hiss from Control.

Undead might actually just stay the same, to be honest. Likewise humanoid, beast, possibly construct.

I might shy away from more religious-affiliated creature types - the celestials and fiends - because I imagine this game/setting/hack being pushed a little more into the sci-fi realms, where the aforementioned eldritch abominations and energy beings might play similar roles to these kinds of creatures, but with an emphasis on their being alien rather than superior, spiritual entities.

    Classes

I really like a class-based system. I think a skill-based system can work great (the FromSoft souls-like games do this very well) but I think that classes not only enforce some diversity in character capabilities, but they also serve to inspire players to come up with character concepts based on the unique flavors they bring.

I would be inclined to try, if possible, to make new classes. D&D's classes present a very good array of classic fantasy archetypes, but given that we'd want to really make a clean break from any real fantasy orthodoxy here, it might be best to kind of make a clean break with D&D's class choices. Even if this were built on the bones of Draw Steel, several of that game's classes can be profoundly reflavored with the use of Kits, but I think there's a philosophical divide in the sources of power assumed within that game - in its case Primordial Elements (represented in the Elementalist and Fury,) Divine Power (the Conduit and Censor,) and Psionics (the Talent and Null) - that might not work so well for our purposes.

D&D, of course, also has an informal (which they toyed with making formal in the early playtests for 5.5) division between Arcane, Divine, and Primal magic. I think we could take the idea of three kinds of paranormal power and use that as a foundation to build classes.

As I see it, we ought to come up with a couple (three feels right) sources of paranormal power.

Psionics is an obvious one - playing into those Stephen King Firestarter/Carrie vibes, as well as some of its derivatives, like Eleven from Stranger Things. Naturally, if this were a Draw Steel hack, it'd be easy to go with just the Talent and the Null, though the Null, I'd argue, fits less neatly into the kind of genre we're looking at - still a possibility, though.

Technology is another source of power that I would really want to emphasize. Technology could be human- (or humanoid - we'll get into species or whatever we call them later) made, but I think that the idea here would be that this is specifically paranormal technology that requires exotic materials, and might be derived from alien tech.

The last paranormal power source is a little trickier to pin down. I'm inclined to go with Mutation. There's the potential for some overlap here with Psionics, but I think we'd get really into the weeds on how these two things differ - Psionics is purely the power of the mind to shape reality (I could go really deep on some foundational idea about conscious perception truly making reality in the first place). But Mutations are more bodily in nature.

So, then, as I see it, we basically have a class for each of these purely focused on that power source, acting as our kind of "pure spellcasters" in a world where we don't really call magic magic (though certainly there might be some people who argue that that's what it really is). Then, we have classes that combine a bit of this power with martial capabilities. And finally, we have a group of purely mundane classes that focus exclusively on the kind of skills and abilities that would all work in a totally mundane world. So, six paranormal classes (three pure, three hybrid) and then some number of mundane classes (for sure some kind of "soldier" class equivalent to the Fighter, and some kind of "sneaky" class equivalent to the Rogue. Not sure if this game needs a Bard/Troubadour class, though I might look to Starfinder's Envoy class as an inspiration for that).

    Species

When 5.5 changed the term "race" to "species," I sort of felt like it was a weirdly clinical term, where other games had gone with things like Ancestries (such as Draw Steel). In our paranormal sci-fi-adjacent game, I actually think Species works best.

Naturally, you're going to have humans. And, to be frank, there's a part of me that would want to stick to just humans. One of the consequences of making elves and dwarves playable is that you have to kind of tamp down on the weirdness of them.

Given how human-like the playable species of D&D are, I like that they aren't bound by cultural stereotypes (as someone who has a somewhat mixed background - still basically white, but I'm half-Jewish - I really cringe at broad generalizations about what a given group of people are like) but I think that when you're talking about non-humans, there's a potential for a truly different way of seeing the world and existing that sometimes gets lost in the effort to make fantasy species the analogue for different human ethnicities in the real world.

At the same time, though, making playable options all pretty much people does make them far easier to RP. My Triton Wizard I play in our Exandria-based campaign feels very much like a human, but part of that is also that he's grown up in a largely human city on the Menagerie Coast, and hasn't even been to his underwater ancestral homeland. It's very much like being an American, with ancestry back in other countries (unless you're a Native American, of course, where you have to go back to the Ice Age to trace ancestors to another continent) but not necessarily being connected to it in any deep way.

Another note, is that we don't have the tropes of classic fantasy to draw upon, and will probably need to come up with our own unique ideas. I mentioned before the Mirrorfolk, which I think is a cool concept. I think we could also very much have a Little Green Men/Gray classic alien option (though I think we might want to even draw a distinction between the two, to preserve one as the deeply mysterious and sinister abductors and the others being friendly. I think the green ones are probably the friendly ones. Frankly, these could be the "elves" of this game, as the slightly arrogant and superior-feeling but ultimately benevolent species).

I think some kind of mutant species would also be a good fit (we could take inspiration from our creature types). Likewise, some kind of undead species (I had thought about a ghost-possessed one, but that might be too similar to another concept, so we're probably talking about someone reanimated physically). Another might be something like a human host with a resonant energy being inside (honestly not unlike the Kalashtar of Eberron. Jesse Faden from Control would be kind of like this, but I conceptualize this as more like the energy being is fully in control of the body, but we could iterate on that, maybe making it more like a symbiosis).

I will say that another playable species might actually have a bit of a Fey vibe to them, perhaps combining a sort of traditional Irish fairy role (like Brownies or Pookas) with more modern cryptozoology.

    World:

So, I really prefer setting-agonstic systems. I think that one of the huge fun parts of TTRPGs is having control over the setting and the story, and a game ought to be able to work in lots of different settings.

On the other hand, giving people an example as a place to start is not a bad idea (and certainly if I were to run this, my setting would be, you know, the default one).

While I think you could probably run this in modern (or recent-days) Earth, I'd prefer to make it its own world with its own history.

Still, I think I'd want it to look a bit more like the modern world - heads of state are not kings and queens but presidents and prime ministers, and the agents of the government are likely be-suited or uniformed officers rather than armor-clad knights. This is a world criss-crossed with telephone lines and a skyline that, even in rural areas, is dotted with radio towers.

The big question, though, is to what degree the populace is aware of the paranormal. And while I think most works of this kind tend to make it a hidden secret that is unknown to all but those initiated into the world of the weird, I think the assumption for this game would be that the paranormal is well-known.

However, it's not something that is easily harnessed. If that were the case, we'd probably be forced into a kind of futuristic science-fiction world, and that's not the tone we're going for.

The Paranormal is known but not understood.

It's something people are aware of, are probably mostly afraid of, and powerful agencies have been founded to investigate and research it, but such work is dangerous and progress is very slow.

Settled regions can become catastrophically uninhabitable when a paranormal event changes them, but sometimes it just makes things weirder there. People might choose to remain in affected areas either because they can't afford to leave or because they see an opportunity for discovery and profit.

I think the powers of the world are complex and grey - heroic player characters might be government agents who are there to protect citizens from paranormal dangers, but the same government might have sinister agents with agendas to exploit the paranormal to gain power at the expense of the innocent.

If the Paranormal is known, I think that some of the other species, like the Little Green Men (might need a better name for them) might be well-known and even integrated into society.

In fact, the Paranormal might have been known for quite a long time now, and so we could have a society in which humans have known they weren't alone for even most of their history. The Fey-like playable species might be something that was seen in a more magical/fantasy context early on in the world's history, but are now understood in a more cryptozoological context, with some cultural breakthrough that saw their society open up closer ties with humanity.

Mundane foes like evil corporations or evil government agencies could certainly be a common trope here. I also think that you could easily update the evil cult trope without too much work - maybe give them a kind of New-Agey vibe or make them a big corporate cult like a certain very-litigious organization that counts many Hollywood celebrities among its members.

Of course, other-worldly threats will of course make a lot of sense here. I think I'd want to build a kind of planar cosmology, but again, keeping to that "paranormal is known but not understood" philosophy, I'd want to keep it vague. There's probably some general sense of a realm that links other worlds/universes together, but likely no obvious organizing principle between those dimensions/planes/worlds.

    Levels:

I really like that both Daggerheart and Draw Steel have a level cap of 10. It seems more manageable, and avoids the kind of massive power-inflation that you see in D&D that leaves running high-level adventures pretty challenging (if I were to pinpoint what I think makes it a struggle is that each combat encounter is far more complex, but you need just as many if not more to exhaust and challenge a party, so the "adventuring day" starts feeling really bloated).

I'm less familiar with Daggerheart, but Draw Steel certainly aims to have a level 10 character feel on a thematically similar level of power as a level 20 D&D character (arguably even more powerful).

For this, though, I might limit it so that level 10 in this game feels more like level 10 in D&D - certainly quite powerful, but still at a terrestrial level of, kind of, humility.

I don't think this is a superhero game, which high-level D&D and Draw Steel both kind of look like. I think there needs to always be some paranormal entity that is truly terrifyingly powerful. As demonstrated in Dimension 20 (I'm thinking particularly the final fights of Fantasy High's first season and Unsleeping City) you can throw very high-level monsters against a low-level party, and it will make for an epic battle. I think I'd prefer that kind of high-stakes spectacle, and fights where reducing a monster to zero hit points is maybe not really feasible, and some kind of sealing-away is all you can really manage.

    Additional Rules Systems:

Getting too complex with alternative rules systems can be a risk - we've seen how 5E has struggled a bit with how to handle vehicle combat, usually taking the safe route and just making it easier to treat vehicles as big platforms to fight with the normal rules.

I don't see vehicle combat being a huge part of this game, but I do think vehicles should be. I think a simple but substantial system for car chases and fighting from cars would be really good to have here - it would need to be simple enough that you won't be discouraged from using it, but interesting enough that you'd want to use it.

Given its modern setting, I also think that this game would probably emphasize the use of ranged weapons over melee weapons. That might then necessitate a little more complexity to the rules - melee combat inherently makes positioning a lot more important, and I think that ranged characters should have similar considerations.

If the game emphasizes ranged combat, though, you need to have some reason to encourage melee combat. In D&D (and I think Draw Steel as well) you tend to do a little more damage up in melee. I'd still want melee builds to be viable, but kind of flip which are more common and which are less common - like, having nearly all martial classes have plenty of ranged options but making a few quite capable in melee. I think the likely way to compensate the melee characters is perhaps to make them a bit better at multi-target damage (like swinging in a big arc) and certainly making them more resilient.

The degree to which this is a hack versus a wholly original system, of course, would affect how the combat system works. While I prefer the d20 pass/fail system for things like ability checks, I also like how Draw Steel does its power rolls and attacks that always hit. I actually think the solution might be as simple as just using one system for the former and the other for the latter.

I think you could maybe even just give damaging abilities a kind of roll you'd get in D&D and treat it as a hit regardless, but perhaps build abilities that have a narrower band of results (likely having a static modifier plus a die roll).

    How This Might Manifest:

I've been tinkering with the idea of getting into formal game design, and I think that the first step would be to do some kind of 3rd party supplement, so the most likely way I'd start this off is with some kind of monster and species supplement for either 5.5E or Draw Steel (or, if I had my druthers, a version for both - though I for sure would need to actually play some Draw Steel before building for it).

And if I could get that off the ground, maybe the next step would be to build out some classes and/or subclasses for those games.

If there were interest and if I attracted some collaborators, we'd see where it all went.

What would I call it? Paranormal seems too much like an existing term (though it didn't stop the creation of Cyberpunk). It doesn't really roll off the tongue, but I think for the time being, ParaWeird feels like a decent working title.

Parallel Planes and "The Crawl"

 So, I finished Stranger Things (actually, when I started writing this post, the finale hadn't aired, but I've seen it now).

The show, a pastiche of 1980s tropes, draws heavily on classic elements of D&D to name the various monsters, villains, and elements of the supernatural terror that invades Hawkins, Indiana. There's a clear love of the game built into its narrative (even if there are some anachronisms, like talk about Sorcerers in 1987 when the class didn't show up until 2000).

But one of the central elements of the show is the Upside-Down, a dark alternate version of Hawkins that is accessible only by traversing dimensional rifts. The Upside-Down is filled with deadly monsters, and while it contains the same buildings and overall landscape of the town, it's ominously covered in a perpetual storm of red lightning and meaty "vines" grow everywhere, and strange spores float in the air.

While the Shadowfell wouldn't officially be part of D&D lore until 4th edition, the Upside-Down is a pretty strong contender for a good portrayal of what it would be like.

I love Planescape as presented in 2nd Edition (especially through the lens of Tony DiTerlizzi's art, which lends it an off-beat and weird tone) with its many outer planes and inner planes. But I do think that my favorite plane in D&D lore is the Shadowfell, which, as mentioned before, did not yet exist in its lore at the time.

The Shadowfell retroactively became the home of the Domains of Dread (aka, the Ravenloft setting,) which imagines little pocket-demiplanes that are the prisons of the evil darklords, and again, while I find that setting very cool (preferring the recent 5th Edition version which does away with the singular continent that physically connects all the domains) I really, truly find the Shadowfell as a mirror-realm the most compelling option.

The Feywild, actually, works the same way, though it also has its Domains of Delight, which seem to be a kind of bright reflection of the Domains of Dread, but again, I prefer the version that is the uncanny reflection of the world that we know.

In this season of Stranger Things, the protagonists (who have ballooned to a fairly large group) have been undergoing "Crawls," named after dungeon crawls, in which former Sheriff Jim Hopper sneaks into a rift into the Upside-Down to try to locate the series' primary villain.

It got me thinking:

This is actually a pretty cool idea for an adventure.

If we reverse-engineer it and turn it into an actual D&D adventure, here's how I think you could make it work:

In your classic old-school D&D adventure, you often have some town that the party retreats to where they can relax and resupply, and then ventures to some distant dungeon, which is filled with monsters and traps and other hazards.

But here, you could make the dungeon and the town one and the same - it's just that the safe town would be in the prime material plane and the "dungeon" would be its Shadowfell reflection.

Dungeon-crawling has, to a large extent, sort of gone out of fashion in modern D&D, which tends to expect more of a globe-trotting adventure. But I think you could make something pretty fun and exciting by creating an unconventional dungeon in this way.

Here are some elements I'd consider:

    Limited Access:

In Stranger Things, the primary rift into the Upside-Down is, as of season 5, controlled by a hostile US Military operation that seeks to study and weaponize the monsters. The protagonists have come up with a system that allows Hopper to sneak in, but it's risky, and it's also difficult to track Hopper's movements, taking advantage of the fact that radio signals can transmit across the planes, but requiring persistent directional tracking of his movements.

The monsters are far less limited, able to open rifts basically wherever it's convenient for them, which means there's plenty of action in the town itself. But for our heroes, finding a way through is a big challenge.

One of the things that D&D, and particularly 5E, struggles with is enforcing its attrition-based challenges. The game is built for resource management more than overwhelming you with any individual combat encounter, but that makes it optimal for players to take a rest after every single challenge if they can.

By making the access points between the Shadowfell and the prime limited in number and at set locations, you force the party to expose themselves when they set out from them.

Having monsters on the move, then, who might be using those same access points/planar portals, creates tension, as the party will need need to scope out these places before they head back to (relative) safety, and might need to fight monsters to get back, or come up with clever plans to draw monsters away without engaging them directly.

    Adventure Structure:

I think the cool appeal to this as an idea is that, with relatively short physical travel (probably the entire scope of distance from one end of the "adventure zone" to the other is in the thousands of feet), the locations will be familiar. Similarly, going into the Shadowfell lets you go to similar locations as the ones you can scout out in the "real" world.

This is, thus, not the kind of dungeon where you're just trying to get through it and reach the deepest chamber or highest tower. Instead, I think that the structure that makes the most sense is one in which you have to do various tasks in an effective sequence.

For example, if you envision some final boss fight against the adventure's main villain, it need not be in some new location. Indeed, it might even feel particularly resonant for the final fight to take place in an important location seen early in the adventure - maybe the Shadowfell version of some temple, or even some central plaza in the town - perhaps even in the prime material side of it, if the villain's plan is to try to break through to that side.

    Time:

This is good advice for just about every adventure, but a villain who is working on their own plan the heroes are trying to stop creates some of that pressure to keep pushing forward. Make no mistake, this is always hard to pull off, and I wish basically every fantasy TTRPG was better at guiding DMs/Directors/GMs on how to create pacing that builds that pressure without threatening to make the challenge unwinnable.

But this can also overlap with the Limited Access point - if the portals are being guarded (as they are in the show) by a hostile kind of secondary antagonist faction, and maybe only open when that faction can open them, it also makes access a kind of limited resource - we can only go in at a certain time each day, and might need to be back to the portal at a specific time as well.

    Spatial Vicinity, Planar Distance:

One of the really cool ideas in Stranger Things is that some forms of electronic communications can cross between Hawkins and the Upside-Down. In D&D, long-distance communication is generally pretty limited, with Sending as a 3rd level spell that basically lets you send a long text message.

I think it would be cool in an adventure like this if there were some incentive to have the party split up, with some entering the Shadowfell and others staying on the Prime side, but perhaps moving in the same spaces (if you want to avoid splitting up the party, maybe you have NPCs who are helping them on the other side).

You could do some really cool puzzles this way - requiring some sequence of actions on both sides to clear the way somehow.

    Use the Space:

Because you're going to have the party moving around a familiar space, and perhaps one without the kind of natural barriers like big thick dungeon walls, you'll want to think very hard about what their goals are and how to make an interesting challenge of said goals.

The way I see it, you'll want to kind of work backwards from your big climax, and seed some mixture of mechanical challenges (as in: there's a gate around this one building that we need some key to open, so we first have to get it from this other building") and mystery challenges (as in: "we need to find the crystal that's dampening magic in this area").

Of course, D&D doesn't afford you the ability to ensure your players do things in the exact order you intend, so I think the best structure here is some kind of checklist of things that have to be done to bring about the climax, and let them pursue those options in any order as separate quests.

And if you break down these prerequisites into different paths through town that cross one another, you can make it feel less linear, and the players might sometimes find themselves switching from quest line to quest line as they make their efficiency-minded crawls across the town.

    Set Pieces:

Generally, as cool as it is to have random encounters, I think D&D works best when each combat feels like a set-piece. Especially because you have the opportunity to show the players the spaces where they might encounter monsters in the safe light of day in the prime material plane, you have the opportunity to foreshadow what might go down later on.

In filmmaking, often the very best action sequences take their time establishing the space. Think of the Battle of Helm's Deep in The Two Towers, or the Battle of Castle Black in Game of Thrones' 4th season finale. These are incredibly satisfying battle sequences because the audience knows exactly where each character is relative to one another, and you can really have a sense of coherence.

D&D's different, of course, and if you play with battle maps (which I would assume most people do) players can, of course, look at the map and take their time determining their character's actions. But I think that you could have a lot of fun by making the players really familiar with key locations of the town, and thus make the fights in the Shadowfell versions of those locations all the more memorable.

    Anyway, these are all kind of vague thoughts - I haven't written out an adventure like this. But it does appeal to me.

Maximizing CME as a Druid or Wizard

 So, I'm in a kind of middle ground between power-gaming min-maxxers and "vibes, man" character building in D&D. I like my characters to be powerful, because that's the fantasy of the game as far as I'm concerned. I don't do enough one-shots to actually get a chance to try out every whacky out-there build or joke character, so for a long campaign, I want a fleshed out character whom my fellow players will learn to love (or fear, as was the case with by Warlock in Descent into Avernus - very much a "glad he's on our side" kind of character) but who is also just mechanically working within expected parameters.

Broadly, the primary thing that I'm really skeptical toward is multiclassing. I think that there are for sure cases where a multiclass build makes sense for a character. In our Wildemount game, one of the two Paladins multiclassed into Warlock and it made perfect sense - the entire campaign, he's been haunted by the charred ghosts of his former comrades who were all killed in a magical firestorm at Blightshore (one of the major "don't go here" places in the Exandria setting,) and by accepting their direct aid, he's basically made a pact with them (though curiously, it seems to be a Great Old One patron, rather than Undead, as I'd have assumed. I don't really know what is going on with them, so all I do is mutter "got a light?" when the ghosts appear to the rest of the table).

Still, I generally try to build characters along a single class track unless there's a really compelling story reason. The only truly mechanical reason I'd do it is if I wanted to play a Pact of the Blade Warlock, because I think they get so, so many of their problems solved by just starting as a Fighter for their first level.

In that campaign, I've been playing a Wizard. I really can't complain at all about the class, as I've felt plenty powerful with the spells I've picked. Fireball is great unless you roll really awfully low, and even then, even if you're only getting like 14 damage out of it (which is only half of its average damage) it's still over a big enough area that that feels pretty significant if you're in a target-rich environment.

My usual go-to concentration spell is Summon Undead (while my character is a very classically heroic, quite naive young wizard who was basically just out of wizard school at the start of the campaign, his favorite professor was the Necromancy one, and so he likes summoning forth undead spirits to help,) which I think is a very worthwhile option, and if you can maintain concentration, a pretty spell-slot efficient one at that. It's also fairly versatile, with various forms of crowd control or just straight, safe ranged damage (in a fight against a bunch of humans working with a succubus, I was using Drow Poison on a Light Crossbow with True Strike, which was often setting up my Putrid Spirit to paralyze them - after I had knocked the fiend unconscious with the poison on the first turn of the entire combat, which he remained for like three rounds).

But while the Summon spells are great for sustained single target damage, I think it's pretty clear that there are ways to do bigger bursts of damage.

Conjure Minor Elementals, which in 2014 was mainly there to let you summon a bunch of Mephits or maybe an Azer or two, is profoundly different than it used to be. I've written about this spell many times before.

The "obvious" path to getting a lot of power with this spell is to use it on a character who is a melee/martial hybrid - someone who can get a lot of attacks in and thus multiply the 2d8 bonus the spell grants to your attacks as much as possible.

While I think that it's plenty powerful on a tier 4 Eldritch Knight, who get 4th level spells at level 17 and will eventually get four attacks per attack action at level 20, I think the damage winds up scaling up better with pure spellcasters. Bladesingers and Valor Bards are going to naturally want to use this (Dance Bards too, I guess). Bards, of course, will need to wait to get Magical Secrets to get this spell, as it's not natively on their list. The spell is actually only on the Druid and Wizard spell lists, though there are some subclasses (and I know for sure one or two of the Eberron Dragonmark spells of the mark) that will get it as well.

An Eldritch Knight will be able to make more attacks than a Bladesinger using this spell, but won't be able to upcast it. And with just one or two levels of upcasting, that benefit begins to fall off.

Druids, of course, can also build around weapon attacks - you can get martial weapon proficiency with the Warden Primal Order option, or you can just shape-shift, with Moon Druids in particular getting some forms that will be able to attack three times a turn.

But let's say that you really just want to stick to spells? What are the best options?

Well, the answer is pretty clear: you want non-concentration spells in which you (not a pet) are making lots of attacks. These attacks do need to be within a 10-foot range (though because my Wizard is a Scribes Wizard, I think I should be able to use my Manifest Mind to cast CME and move my floating book-spirit around while I pelt away from a safe distance and still get the damage bonus.

So, what spells?

The only cantrip I'm aware of that does multiple attacks is Eldritch Blast, so if you can get this spell on a Warlock, it'll be very good. But we're looking at the classes that get this spell natively. An attack cantrip will certainly benefit from the spell, but you're only really adding 9 damage a turn on a hit. Not really what you want for a fourth level spell (the skeletal spirit from Summon Undead is going to be hitting for like 12 twice a turn cast at 4th level).

The only Druid spells I could find that aren't concentration but call for attack rolls are Elminster's Effulgent Spheres and Syluné's Viper, each of which only allow one attack as a bonus action. This could mean, coupled with a cantrip like Starry Wisp, you could get two attacks out of this, but that doesn't seem all that exciting.

Wizards, however, I think, will feast on this:

Chromatic Orb could hit multiple times, though you'd need to have all your enemies packed tightly within your 10-foot emanation to get the benefit of the CME.

Scorching Ray is probably your first, easily accessible, really powerful option here. At its base 2nd level, Scorching Ray shoots three bolts that each do 2d6 damage, meaning that with the 2d8 bonus from CME, you're already more than doubling the damage you do with the spell. Upcasting Scorching Ray is going to add additional bolts, rather than making each bolt more powerful, which is great, because it's a further multiplier of your damage. Casting CME at 4th level and Scorching Ray at 3rd, you'll be getting 4 bolts that are each hitting for about 16 damage apiece. If they all hit, that's 64 damage.

Steel Wind Strike is the next option. This will effectively extend the range of your CME because you'll be teleporting around for each strike, and your emanation travels with you. The trick is that this only gets full damage if you can hit all five targets - it has to be spread out, not concentrated on one target like Scorching Ray can. Still, each hit will land for 6d10 (33 on average). With 2d8 added to each of those, you'll be hitting for an average of 41 each. If you can somehow also get advantage, that'll be great, because all the damage is doubled on a crit. To compare, if we were casting Scorching Ray at 5th level with a 4th level CME, we'd be getting 6 rays each dealing 2d6+2d8 (again, 16 average) and so in theory we could do 96 damage total. Against 5 targets, of course, Steel Wind Strike is doing a total of 205, but we can't concentrate it on a single target. (Also, SWS doesn't upcast). Incidentally, if were were to flip that Scorching Ray option, casting CME at 5th and SR at 4th, we're looking at 5 rays, but each is now dealing 2d6+3d8, or about 20.5 on average, for 102.5 total. So, yeah, I think if you want to build around this, you probably want to use an upcast Scorching Ray for single targets and Steel Wind Strike for situations with 3-5 targets.

One spell that you might not initially think of (I have to credit Colby over a D4: D&D Deep Dive for this one) as working with these is Contingency. This 6th level spell lets you effectively pre-cast a 1st-to-5th level spell at an earlier point that will take effect when its trigger occurs. This could be something like casting Water Breathing when you're fully submerged (not necessary for my Triton, but I get it) but in this case, it's less of an emergency than an opportunity to cheat the action economy: if you come up with a special word or phrase as the trigger, you can cast this the night (or some days) before you need it so that you can get CME running and still have your action and the ability to cast a spell with a spell slot on your first turn. For as insane as the damage of CME is, you always need to put a little asterisk there that you still typically wind up doing no damage on the first round of a fight, and so if the fight only goes two rounds, the insane damage output of these spell is effectively halved. But if you set up a contingency, you will (at least for one major fight) be able to hit the ground running.

Like Druids, Wizards get access to the aforementioned Elminster's Effulgent Spheres and Syluné's Viper, but these aren't going to be really maximal, damage-wise.

Spellfire Flare (also from Heroes of Faerun,) however, works great with this. Like Scorching Ray, it's a low level spell that adds additional bolts when upcast rather than just adding damage to the attack. Each attack does 2d10 Radiant damage, and at base 1st level, it does just one bolt. Targets won't benefit from half or three-quarters cover against it.

    Ok, so how is it, damage-wise? Do we replace Scorching Ray with this?

    The problem is that it does fewer bolts - when upcast to 2nd level (Scorching Ray's base level) it will do 2 bolts, which means that it's always one fewer shot than Scorching Ray. On the other hand, the actual bolts hit harder, for 2d10 (11) rather than 2d6 (7). At 2nd level, in fact, without CME, it's already slightly outpacing Scorching Ray with 22 average damage compared to 21.

    But Scorching Ray has an edge on number of bolts. So, if we toss in a base level CME, and then cast, say, a 4th level version of each of these, what are we looking at? Scorching Ray is doing 5 bolts for 2d6+2d8 each, so 80 damage. Spellfire Flare is doing 4 bolts for 2d10+2d8 each (20 apiece) so... 80 damage. Huh. Didn't expect to hit the level at which they were totally equal. And I guess further upcasting favors Spellfire Flare because Scorching Ray is adding 16 while Spellfire Flare is adding 20 with each further upcast.

    However, if we upcast CME as well, the balance tilts toward Scorching Ray. With a 5th level CME and 4th level attack spells, we're looking at 2d6+3d8 with 5 bolts at 4th level (102.5 total) versus just 4 bolts of 2d10+3d8 (24.5 each) for a total of 98.

    Honestly, I think the choice between Spellfire Flare and Scorching Ray is really a bit of a judgment call. If you're upcasting CME, Scorching Ray does better, and likewise if you're not upcasting Scorching Ray or Spellfire Flare very high.

    However, Spellfire Flare has two other factors that really help it: it's Radiant damage, which is far less often resisted than Fire damage (and lots of monsters are fully immune - again, as a Scribes wizard this is less important to me) but also, the ability to ignore partial cover means, situationally, you're going to be hitting more often. Truly, both are strong options, and I think it mainly depends on how much upcasting you're doing and with which spells.

Crown of Stars has the same issue as the Effulgent Spheres and Viper spells - while sustainable, you only get one attack per turn. That attack does do 4d12, but you're only increasing that 26 average by 9 with CME each turn.

And yeah, that's about it, as far as I can tell.

To review:

I think your best options for maximizing the power of Conjure Minor Elementals with spells alone are Scorching Ray, Spellfire Flare, and Steel Wind Strike.

The latter does a lot of damage on its own, but must be treated as an AoE option - you can't concentrate its power on a single target. Scorching Ray and Spellfire Flare are both really solid options, but you might need a spreadsheet to figure out which is optimal in which circumstance, as the sliding scale of upcasting will change which comes out on top. You can, of course, pick and prepare both, but I think you'll probably just want to pick one or the other.

Remember that this is for burst damage - to maintain this amount of damage round after round, you're going to need to expend a lot of spell slots. But if you really want to melt a boss quickly, it's a good way to go.