Drops: Sorrow Knight Fighter

 I think this might be the first time we've gotten a full-on subclass from D&D Beyond Drops, and this one's a fascinating one.

Hey folks, it's October! That means it's spooky season, all leading up to my favorite holiday, Halloweeen. Getting into the spook spirit, D&D Beyond Drops has unleashed a whole bunch of scary monsters, feats, and this subclass.

Sorrow Knight Fighters are attuned to the magic of the Shadowfell, with some tragedy or horror in their past that connected them to this realm of gloom and despair. The Shadowfell is probably my favorite D&D plane, and I love fighting (and running) spooky monsters in shadowy settings.

Broadly, the Sorrow Knight has some similarities with the Battle Master, but let's get specific:

Level 3:

Despairing Strikes:

You have a resource called Despairing Strike Dice, which can be used to enhance your attacks. You begin with 3 of them, which are d8s. At level 10, they become d10s and you get a fourth. At 15, they become d12s and you get a fifth. After expending them, you get them back on a short rest.

    So, this is, I think, a bit fewer dice than a Battle Master, and I think there's less versatility for your options, but it's reasonably comparable.

When you hit a creature with a weapon attack, you can expend a DSD and roll it (one die per attack maximum, though no limit on uses per turn), adding psychic damage to the attack equal to the amount rolled, and then get to add one of the following effects:

Abandoned: The target must succeed on an Intelligence saving throw (DC based on your Wisdom) or have the Deafened condition until the end of your next turn. While deafened, the target regards all creatures it can see as enemies until the end of your next turn.

    Hey, so this won't work on a Gulthias Blight, who is immune to being Deafened. Still, while deafened is a pretty weak condition to impose (it does almost nothing to hinder a foe) the "treat everyone as enemies" option is potentially useful. While it won't guaranteed that a foe will attack its allies given that you and your allies are still there to be targeted, it is something you might use on a healer or some other creature that is trying to do things to benefit other creatures. Or, you could use it on an enemy with a big AoE to ensure that they don't avoid hitting allies when going after your friends. Situational, and of course, not very useful against solo monsters, but interesting.

Dread: The target had Disadvantage on the next saving throw it makes before the end of your turn.

    This is pretty broadly useful, either setting up a spellcaster or someone else who has a clutch saving throw ability, or even just setting you up for Abandoned or one of the other options you get later on.

Solemn Gaze:

You gain Darkvision with a range of 60 ft, or if you already have Darkvision, the range increases by 60 feet.

    Nothing huge, but not bad to have.

Also, as a Magic action, you can attempt to search the mind of a creature you can see within 30 feet. They must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw (DC based on your Wisdom) or you learn an emotion that looms large in their mind, such as worry, love, hate, etc. If the target can see you, it knows you have read its emotions. You can do this Wis times per long rest (minimum 1).

    The utility of this feature depends a lot on DM interpretation. This isn't detect thoughts - you just get an emotion that looms large in them, not necessarily that they're feeling particularly strongly at the moment. In other words, I think this could add a ton of flavor to NPC interactions, but the degree to which this information is actionable is not obvious. Flavor-wise, though, it's amazing. And this is on top of the other level 3 features we're getting.

Level 7:

Dreaded Appearance:

When you use Tactical Shift, you can teleport 30 feet instead of moving. Immediately afte ryou appear, you can briefly take on the appearance of a creatures' fears, visible only to those creatures. Each creature of your choice within a 10-foot emanation muse make a Wisdom saving throw (DC based on your Wisdom) or take Psychic damage equal to a roll of your DSD (this does not appear to expend it) and is Frightened until the end of your next turn, or on a success, they take half damage only.

Once you take on this appearance, you can't do so again until you finish a short or long rest.

    Note that I think the alteration for Tactical Shift is unlimited (other than by, you know, how many times you can do that). The damage here is pretty trivial, but an AoE fear is not a bad thing to have. And we're getting that as a free carry-on with all the other benefits of Tactical Shift, so I think this is pretty good. Obviously, as we've seen a lot of features with DCs based on Wisdom, you're going to want to pump that up as much as possible with this subclass.

Level 10:

Unsettled Strikes:

You have the following new options to use with your Despairing Srikes:

Apathetic: The target must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw or have the Incapacitated condition until the start of your next turn. While incapacitated, the target can only give one-word responses when spoken to.

    Damn. I mean, the one-word thing is fine, but incapacitation can be enormous. For one thing, it breaks concentration, but obviously the bigger thing is that it prevents them from taking any actions, bonus actions, or reactions.

Lost: The target makes a Charisma saving throw. On a failure, the target is Blinded and its speed is reduced to 0 until the end of its next turn. On a success, its speed is halved only instead.

    That's not too bad either - Blinded is usually a Con save condition, and so you're probably more likely to succeed with this one. A good way to lock down an enemy and then give everyone advantage on attacks against them.

Weary: The target must succeed on a Constitution saving throw or gain 1 Exhaustion level. The effect cannot increase the target's Exhaustion above 2, and the levels from this effect are removed at the end of your next turn.

    So, this is... you see Exhaustion and your eyes go wide, but this isn't quite that. That being said, giving a foe a -2 or even a -4 to all d10 tests (and the -4 will be more likely to happen if they're already at -2 to Con saves) isn't bad. But it's only for one turn. Essentially, I wonder if I'd be more enthusiastic about this if I weren't thinking about how insane it would be to have long-term and unlimited exhaustion from this. Don't forget that it also slows a target.

Level 15:

Grim Constitution:

You have resistance to Necrotic and Psychic damage.

    Right off the bat, these aren't bad ones to have, especially if you're in a spooky Shadowfell/Ravenloft game, where you're likely to encounter both damage types a lot.

In addition, when you are subjected to an effect that reduces your HP maximum, you can make a DC 15 Con save, and your HP is not reduced on a success. Each time you make this Con save after the first, the DC increases by 5, but taking a short or long rest resets it to 15.

    Less broadly useful, but it could be good when fighting particularly undead (again, common foes in a Shadowfell/Ravenloft game). I'm surprised this doesn't just give immunity to such things. Eh, this one's not amazing, though the damage resistances are pretty good.

Level 18:

Grieving Mantle:

When you use your Action Surge, you attune yourself to the Shadowfell for 1 minute or until you become incapacitated. For the duration, you have the following:

    Before we get into the specific functions, I do kind of like how this turns Action Surge into the trigger for a "super mode" for Fighters. While this does then kind of discourage using it multiple times per combat, it's an interesting bit of tech.

Shade Form: When you are hit with an attack roll, you can use a reaction to become insubstational for a moment and reduce the attack's total damage to zero.

    Wow! Not halved, not gaining resistance. This just full-on nopes out of an entire attack. Obviously this depends a bit on how many attacks you're taking in a round, but the ability to use this if you get crit by some massive monster is really clutch, and while Action Surge is a limited resource, this means that for a whole combat you're going to be undoing one attack that hits you each round, which is quite nice.

Unwavering Resolve: You have immunity to the Charmed and Frightened conditions, and if you have either when you activate Grieving Mantle, the condition ends for you.

    Naturally if you have a Devotion Paladin in your party, this won't do anything for you, but it's still pretty nice if you don't have those bases covered.

Overall Thoughts:

    I actually think this is a pretty solid subclass. It's doing a lot of things that Fighters can't really do in most cases - indeed, some of these effects are pretty rare even for spellcasters (is "Abandoned" kind of Enemies Abound, a spell from Xanathar's?)

    You will be pretty dependent on getting a high wisdom, because there are a lot of saving throws that enemies will be making against these effects. Fighters can afford a secondary ability score a bit, but if you have a way to somehow attack with Wisdom, that could be very helpful. Taking magic initiate Druid and grabbing Shillelagh could work pretty well here, and maybe Polearm Master to enhance the power of a Quarterstaff (as the cantrip won't let you grab something that works with Great Weapon Master). Multiclassing with Druid or Ranger could also make some sense here, though if the campaign is going high enough, I'd be pretty excited to get Grieving Mantle.

    Yeah, generally I think this is a pretty solid subclass, and it drips with flavor, which is always a big positive.

Warlock Patrons of Azeroth

 The WoW D&D book is going to give a lot of guidance for player to re-create WoW classes and specializations within D&D rules. In some cases, this will be trivial: a Guardian or Feral Druid can just go Circle of the Moon (though I'd freaking love it if they create a scaling template for Bear and Cat forms we could use at any level). But in some cases, namely the Death Knight and Demon Hunter, they'll be doing some unprecedented re-works of existing classes and creating subclasses that are sort of more than subclasses and really extensive re-works of the base classes they're being grafted onto (we've only seen level 1 and 2 features for Ebon Blade Paladins, which replace Lay on Hands and Paladin's Smite - though Rune Strike, which replaced Divine Smite, is basically the same spell except it does Necrotic damage and only gets a bonus die against Celestials).

But while it could be fun to play with restrictions to require players to build characters to fit with WoW's existing classes and specs, I think think it would be more fun to take adventures in Azeroth to places you can't replicate in the MMO.

Let's consider the Warlock.

In D&D, of course, a Warlock is a character who has forged a pact with a powerful magical entity (though 5.5 broadens this a bit to allow you to draw from multiple sources, as long as they're sort of in the same category.

By contrast, Warlocks in World of Warcraft are scholars just like Mages (the Wizard equivalent,) but while Mages study in very socially-acceptable learning institutions (though for a long time, their practices were forbidden among the Night Elves,) Warlocks are scholars of forbidden knowledge, specifically the knowledge of Fel magic, which is the inherently destructive power that suffuses demons.

Warlocks in WoW have three different specializations, like most classes, but all three are still Fel/demonic magic. Affliction is the one that might be easiest to reflavor as instead some kind of necromancy, but the other two, Destruction and Demonology, are both firmly in that Fel/Demon category (Destruction focuses more on blasting foes with demonic fire and raw chaos while Demonologists summon tons of demons to attack their foes).

D&D's Warlocks, thus, have a broader array of options in where they get their magic, and so I figured what I'd do is go through each Warlock subclass and talk about what kinds of patrons you might choose.

    Archfey:

While WoW doesn't have a Fey creature type, they do have some entities that would probably fit with the Fae, most notably the explicitly named Night Fae, who are the caretakers of the realm of Ardenweald, one of the afterlives in the Shadowlands. Here, natural creatures and people dedicated to nature go to take part in the cycle of life, eventually being reborn in a cycle of reincarnation. The Winter Queen is the leader of the Night Fae. But more broadly, the Wild Gods might fit this category - Wild Gods cover a lot of animal spirits worshipped or revered by various cultures across Azeroth. The Night Elves have their Ancients (not to be confused with the giant walking trees also called Ancients, who are... also nature spirits of course, but in a less divine way,) the Trolls have their Loa (which also include some beings that aren't quite as animalistic or even associated with nature) and the Pandaren have their August Celestials. Even the Orcs have animal gods like Lo'gosh (who might actually be the same as the Night Elves' Goldrinn...?) While not necessarily as fickle and tricksy as Fey tend to be, these are probably your best equivalents.

    Celestial:

It's really up in the air which of WoW's creatures would count as Celestials, but the ones that I don't think you could argue against are the Naaru. These are crystalline beings of pure holy light that are particularly important to Draenei culture. While it's supposed to be very rare, in game we often see Naaru go through a horrible cyclical transformation, turning to the Void as Dark Naaru (who are probably more on the Aberration/Great Old One side of things). Other options potentially include, actually, the Titans or their Titanforged creations. While the Titanforged act very much like constructs, beings like Tyr, Odyn, Thorim, Freya, Mimiron, or Ra-Den (the latter of which is dead by the end of Battle for Azeroth, but then, Tyr was dead for a very long time before we brought him back during Dragonflight) I think they'd fit pretty well in this category as well.

    Fiend:

I mean, there's plenty of demons in WoW. Warlocks in World of Warcraft tend to invert the patron relationship, with demonic minions bound to serve Warlocks through contracts that make any Warlock worth their salt the more powerful person in the relationship, but bargaining with power from a powerful demon certainly feels plausible on Azeroth. I think you could play a Fiend Warlock easily enough as a standard WoW warlock (just remember that Fel fire is typically green!) Another possibility is actually Illidan Stormrage. While sort of a half-demon (though he sure looks more demonic than even the Demon Hunters who he's trained) Illidan is WoW's ultimate edgelord antihero, a firm and hard Chaotic Neutral. (Also, Critical Role fans, if you didn't know already for some reason, will be excited to know that he's voiced by Liam O'Brien!) But also a somewhat more benign source of Fel power.

    Great Old One:

Two really great categories here: The most obvious is the Old Gods. While all four of Azeroth's Old Gods are (in theory) dead in the current state of the game, we did have to kill three of them as the final bosses of their respective raids (well, there was an optional extra-hard boss in Ulduar after Yogg-Saron). But these ancient flesh-mountain monstrosities certainly fit the bill. Alternatively, you could go for something less fleshy and more cosmic with the Void Lords. The only one of these we've ever actually seen or had named is Dimensius the All-Devouring (who was the final boss of the last expansion) but I think you could lean into the mystery of what your patron is if you went with an unnamed Void Lord. (The game's current antagonist, Xal'atath, and likely the final boss of the current expansion, is a former mortal turned void-entity that was probably not a true Void Lord, but might fit this, though she'd be an absolute perfect Hexblade patron).

    Undying:

This subclass... is weird because it could just be an undead patron, but it's also explicitly not just undead beings. If you for some reason really wanted to play this not-very-good and conceptually thin subclass, though, there are tons of extremely old beings on Azeroth. Maybe you go with Nozdormu, the Bronze Aspect, leader of the dragons who manage and safeguard the timeline (or his alternate-timeline-self nemesis, Murozond).

    Hexblade:

There are a few sentient weapons, most notable of which was Xal'atath, Blade of the Black Empire, which was the artifact weapon granted to Shadow Priests during the Legion expansion, but whose resident conscious being transferred into the body of a dead elf (that we provided for her) and has now been leading a deadly assault on Azeroth with her void-creature army called the Devouring Host. Two other weapons for Legion had personalities, with Aluneth, a staff that contained a powerful arcane consciousness, and the Skull of the Man'ari, the remains of an Eredar summoner who got into demonology before it was cool on Argus and ironically was arrested by future demon lord Archimonde for dabbling in such magic. Other weapons like Ashbringer, Doomhammer, or Frostmourne might fit here, though it's dubious whether they're actually sentient (technically I guess Frostmourne might be a conduit for the Jailer).

    Genie:

WoW does have genies, but they're a pretty rare category specifically of air elementals. If you wanted to take the idea of a powerful elemental, you could possibly instead go with the Elemental Lords, of which there are conveniently one for each element. The OGs are Ragnaros the Firelord, Al-Akir the Windlord, Neptulon the Tide-Hunter, and Therazane the Stonemother. However, there's been some turnover over the course of WoW. Ragnaros is dead, and was replaced by Smolderon, though we also had to take him down as well (though this was outside of the Firelands, so I actually think he's probably still alive and still the Lord of Fire). We killed Al-Akir as well, though his son Thunderaan I believe remains the Windlord. Basically, depending on when in WoW's timeline you want to set your campaign, you might need to pick alternatives. Note that the elemental lord of Draenor, the Orcish homeland (and sort of adopted Draenei homeland, though they were only there for about a thousand years, which isn't much for a people who seem to naturally live to be tens of thousands of years old) you could pick them.

    Fathomless:

Ok, there are probably some other options here, but I think the best one is Queen Azshara. Once the radiant and beautiful queen of the Night Elves in ancient times, when her capital sank beneath the waves, she struck a deal with the Old God N'zoth to save her people by transforming them into the serpentine Naga. Azshara is one of Azeroth's most dangerous villains, but she's a pragmatic and patient one (while her royal palace in her capital, now called Nazjatar, was a raid with her as the final boss, she survived this attack and we actually wound up rescuing her from N'zoth, a decision that will probably bite us in the ass somewhere down the line).

    Undead:

Boy howdy. So, the obvious options here would be members of the Scourge. The most powerful of which is certainly the Lich King. But if you're playing in a post-Wrath timeframe, the Lich King could be Bolvar Fordragon, a heroic paladin who sacrificed his freedom to try to hold the Scourge on a tight leash, and while Bolvar certainly did some questionable things as Lich King, he was certainly more benevolent than Arthas had been. WoW does have its fair share of Liches and Death Knights. I actually think making the entire Knights of the Ebon Blade a patron could be fun, or perhaps specifically having the Four Horsemen, the Ebon Blade's most elite knights (aside from the Deathlord, the player character, of course) as your patron would allow a DM to play the varying personalities between them (this latter option doesn't totally work if you're doing the Scarlet Monastery dungeon, as I'm confident its final boss will be High Inquisitor Whitemane, who is later raised as a death knight and becomes one of the Four Horsemen, ironically "redeeming" herself by becoming an undead killing machine. Better than a religious fundamentalist!)

    Vestige:

This new subclass from Arcana Unleashed ironically might actually make you play a little more like a WoW Warlock, who generally have a minion fighting alongside them in battle. (I play a Demonology one, who would always have a minion out, but I can't remember if the other two specs even have the option to not play with one). But mechanics aside, I do think there are some options here, even if they're a bit non-obvious. We have a few dead god-like beings, such as the nascent Titan Argus, or the lost (and very much beloved - the fans got up in arms) bear ancient Ursoc. Rezan, the Zandalari Troll Loa of Kings (he's a T-rex!) died to the treachery of the Prophet Zul. It also turns out that the Titans were, actually, for most of WoW's history, already in a state of more or less death - Sargeras slew them right around the time that he founded the Burning Legion, and it wasn't until we liberated their tortured souls at the end of the Legion expansion that they were able to return to their full power.

I think that's all of them? I'm actually quite pleased that there seems to be at least one pretty good option for every subclass, and there are probably more if you go digging.

Ironically, though, I think you could argue that these subclasses almost see representation in other classes in WoW. Shadow Priests, for example, have some abilities based around the Old Gods. And actually, the lore of the Shaman class is that they act essentially a mediators and negotiators between elemental spirits, which I actually think is pretty Warlock-coded (though it seems they'll be represented more by Barbarians - which is surprising on a mechanical level but sort of makes sense as two classes really deeply rooted in ancient/primal powers).

Into the Unknown

 I realize that the title of this post sounds very much like the kind of title for a post about the end of my current gaming fixation, Control Resonant, but I'm not there yet. No, instead I've made it to what I'm pretty certain is the last major area of the game, which is the most disorientingly Escher-esque region so far.

We're in the endgame, but given that we've also just unlocked a new zone, that means that we've got tons of side quests and other optional objectives to sort through, meaning that it's not exactly a race to the finale.

We did get what feels like it might be Control Resonant's big musical moment, though I can't say that it's necessarily the match of, say, the Ashtray Maze or the Dark Ocean Summoning. For one thing, the song isn't by the Old Gods of Asgard, but it's also more or less Dylan's entrance into this final area and while we arrive in the middle of a giant insane battle, it doesn't really conclude with any serious punctuation.

To be fair, the "Take Control" segment in the first game, as beloved and memorable as it is, was also kind of transitionary, acting more as the lead-in to final revelations about Hedron and the false game over. And hell, Dark Ocean Summoning kind of only works in the worst possible way, as triumphant as it feels.

I will say that after Alan Wake II, which had Sam Lake's fingerprints all over it, the relatively small role he played in this game (I'm actually not sure the degree to which he actively worked on it at all, other than being the Creative Lead for Remedy) has left Resonant with... I don't want to say less of a signature style, but I guess one that I'm not quite as attuned to picking up on.

Once again, I want to reiterate that the game's great - it's just that Remedy leapt to among my favorite game studios when I got into them three years ago, and so I'm holding this game to the tightest standards.

Anyway, I'm going to go into a spoiler cut - not that I've advanced the plot much since my last post, or I think two posts ago - but just because I want to get into things that have been revealed so far.

Control Resonant Opens Up Too Soon

 I very swiftly became a Remedy fan upon my entry into Control, on the recommendation of a friend in early 2023. The timing, as it turned out, was fantastic, as I had plenty of time to first play through Control and its DLCs, then pick up Alan Wake Remastered, and then have Alan Wake II ready to go that October.

Control was a sort of mish-mash of genres. I don't know that I'd truly call it a Metroidvania, as while your progression through various clearance-level keycards does slowly open up the game for you, the only real ability you get that actually unlocks new areas (at least in the base game) is Hover (I guess maybe Launch as well). But it did borrow things from Souls-likes (using the Control Points as your bonfire and losing some of your Source if you died - not quite the same) and naturally built on Remedy's tried-and-true 3rd person shooter bona fides they've been using since Max Payne.

It did also flirt with the idea of being an open-world game, with plenty of side quests and even randomized time-limited events that would pop up - there Bureau Alerts that, frankly, I got tired of pretty quickly and started ignoring. Ironic, of course, that being confined to the Oldest House meant the world was anything but open.

Control Resonant is an open world game by I think any reasonable measure. And I think that it might be somewhat to its detriment.

Let me just back up here and put my comments in context: I am really enjoying the game. I'll have to finish it to decide where it ranks among Remedy's games for me, but I do think that many of its systems are actually big improvements on what we got in Control. And as satisfying as it was to use Launch in combat in the first game, Resonant has really balanced things much better so that you feel like each attack, each weapon, each power, has its own particular uses, and there are far fewer "this thing increases some minor stat by 3%, and there's a higher quality thing that increases it by 5% instead," or what Monty Zander termed "Goot," meaning "garbage loot."

My critiques here are kind of grading on a very unforgiving curve - Remedy has made some of the most amazing gaming experiences I've ever played, and so I hold their games to a very high standard.

And here, I think the issue more about the game getting in its own way.

After the initial prologue in which we exit the Oldest House, partner up with Zoe, and get Pope to agree to let us help out once outfitted with the MCD, we are sent to the Watchtower, where we get to see various points of interest marking most of the zones (or at least the first few) out ahead of us. We then get to go to the Central Zone.

But we don't really have to say there: in fact, we're practically encouraged to go to both the Western Incursion Zone and Evacuation Zone. It's not even really clear that we're meant to even spend much time in Central (though I did) before going off to these other ones.

In other words, about half of the map (I think. I've gotten at least to the intro of what I assume is the game's final zone) unfurls for us right after the game's beginning.

I know that open world games, with the freedom that they afford, have grown a lot more popular over time. Perhaps I'm just turning into the old man yelling at clouds, but I prefer a more curated experience that guides me through an area. When Breath of the Wild came and transformed the Legend of Zelda series, I was one of the very few who seemed to not really like it that much. I did like Tears of the Kingdom better, but I still prefer the model established by Ocarina of Time (or arguably Link to the Past,) where the world was vast, but we only unlocked it by bits and pieces, creating a path that would ultimately guide us through it.

Now, I'd say that Control Resonant is arguably more of a Metroidvania than its predecessor. Levitate, Shift, and even whichever power you get off The Deserter boss, are all necessary powers to reach certain areas (I can't remember if you actually need to get some kind of fire power to reach The Park, but it's sure as hell useful once you get there!)

But I think specifically this moment after you take down The Artist where about three million things become available to you is a place where a firmer hand guiding us down a narrower path could have really helped with the game's pacing.

Indeed, I think a lot of reviewers have talked about how the game gets lost in its Open World conventions, and I think a lot of responses to that have said that the game picks up a lot once you get further into the main story. I agree - I think that our dealings with Arish and our sojourn back into the Oldest House give the game emotional stakes and character development that made me feel far more invested in what I was doing.

The real side-quests have been good for world-building, reminding us and fleshing out the world of the weird that Control is all about (indeed, some of the decisions to bring back familiar foes are a little frustrating to me - I had kind of wanted the Hiss to be over and done with and for the main threat here to be something totally separate) but the way that the game frames things - like counting finding the Faults to commune with Jesse, as well as finding each zone's Resonant boss - as being "main quests" that are... only sort of main quests, confuses things a little.

I don't know. Maybe that part is fine, but I do think it would have been good to have a main story thread that would directly take us from one zone to another, and then let all the side quests and side objectives branch off of that thread.

Cosmic Battles and Revelations As Dylan Walks Down Memory Lane

 If you kind of liked Casper Darling... Control Resonant might change that.

Obviously, Darling's role in Dylan's "training" in the Prime Candidate Program always carried with it his complicity in the ethical abyss that was taking a 10-year-old orphan and locking him up in a government facility and robbing him of any semblance of a normal life. But in the first game, Darling feels in a lot of ways like the good cop to Trench's bad cop, and his efforts to prepare for the Hiss invasion give him something of a heroic characterization.

But good cop or bad, we must remember that all cops are bastards.

Let's get into spoiler territory:

Mysterious "Project Lamordia" Announced, and Thoughts on Modding 5E

 WotC released a teaser for... something called "Project Lamordia." Details are scarce as to what this will actually be, whether it's some book or other product or, as I, frankly, suspect it will be, an actual play show (and look, I watch plenty of actual play, but it's not necessarily as transformative as something we can take home and read and use in our own games).

What's interesting about it is that the setting here is altered, imagining a modern techno-thriller version of Lamordia as, rather than a vaguely steampunk-meets-Bloodborne/Frankenstein riff the setting is presented as in Van Richten's and Horrors Within, instead a company called Mordenheim Kinetics, with something about a "longevity program" seeming to be some kind of experimental medical treatment.

Horror, of course, is a genre that can exist alongside many different other genres and settings, and the trope of ethically abysmal, corporate biotech companies committing unspeakable crimes against nature is well-established (the Umbrella Corporation from the Resident Evil games probably being the most iconic example).

This got me thinking:

I think D&D has historically been very hesitant to really mess with its own rules. We saw this with the rollout of 5.5, which prioritized backwards compatibility over rebalancing. While I'm happy that my 10 years of 5.0 book acquisitions aren't washed away with a full new edition, it has also left certain classes really struggling, like Rogues, who still need to wait until level 9 for their second subclass feature for the foreseeable future.

But I also think this is one of the reasons (though not the entirety) for the disappointment I and many other felt regarding the release of 5E's Spelljammer supplement. Anticipating a way to play D&D adventures in a science-fantasy space opera setting, we instead got a version of space adventures in which you'd fight out on open decks with swords rather than shooting laser cannons or piloting starfighters. As a note, this isn't really 5E's fault - Spelljammer has always been this "fantasy in space" setting rather than a true science-fantasy setting. But... I think most players would prefer the latter.

The thing is, doing so would require actually tweaking the rules of the game, at least somewhat.

Now, I know that Starfinder 2E is built less as an independent game from Pathfinder than its first edition was, but in that case, they really reimagined the whole game from the ground up to build around sci-fi tropes. It's still science-fantasy, because there are magic/supernatural things in it, but it's more in line with Star Wars, where the bulk of the world is built on technology and aliens, and there's this mystical underpinning that is exceptional and wondrous.

Again, my prediction is that Project Lamordia is an actual play show, where if there are tweaks to the system, it's likely not audience-facing. I could be wrong, though, and maybe this will be something like an adventure or other player/DM-facing thing that gives us guidance on doing a modern-set Ravenloft adventure. We truly don't know.

However, here's a reason for optimism:

Previews of the World of Warcraft D&D book have shown that they're doing some pretty extensive work to reframe things to fit the setting. And these aren't just side-systems that might fall by the wayside in a campaign, but pretty core reworks of class features, like how the Oath of the Ebon Blade subclass for Paladins replaces features like Lay on Hands and Divine Smite to work as a WoW-style Death Knight (whether the resultant class winds up being good is another question that I don't have enough information to answer, as we really only have these 1st and 2nd level feature adjustments so far).

WoW, of course, is pretty damn close to D&D in genre, or arguably simply the same genre but with just a few different proper nouns here and there (demons don't reform in the Abyss, but the Twisting Nether, for example).

What will be interesting is when we see the Star Wars Universes Beyond book. Indeed, the Spelljammer example here is particularly salient, as I think that basically anyone 50 (maybe 60?) or younger probably thinks of Star Wars first when thinking about any example of space adventures. While I'd probably prefer to shave off the serial numbers here and have the tools to produce my own science fantasy space opera setting that isn't beholden to the lore choices of George Lucas or Dave Filoni, I'm 100% into the idea of running a D&D game in a world with rust-bucket used future spaceships rather than 17th century sailing ships (or a bunch of weird bug-shaped ships for some reason).

The Star Wars book is still a ways out, and I think probably the overall balance of the game is likely to remain more or less the same. But here are some other thoughts that this brought up:

Ravenloft is, of course, a storied and beloved campaign setting for D&D, but one of the issues you run into with it is that D&D, particularly later editions like 5E, are kind of fantasy superhero games, where player characters tend to emerge victorious against the kind of monsters they're expected to face.

5E has had two Ravenloft setting books and one of its earliest and most beloved adventures was set there. Van Richten's in particular suggests a few special rules systems, like Stress, to up the scares. But I wonder if a more comprehensive rework of the game's rules might instead serve the setting better.

I'm going to try avoid getting fully in the weed here, but this could be something as simple as adjusting encounter balance math, maybe upping the challenges of combat, or giving guidance on running encounters with monsters too difficult to defeat and where the challenge is escape instead.

But wouldn't it also be cool to make a whole separate game from D&D that works on the same principles (classes, levels, species, ability checks, attack rolls, saving throws, etc.,) but is built to function in a horror setting and adhere to its genre conventions?

Sure, this might fly in the face of the modularity that D&D prefers. But it would be an interesting experiment.

One consideration for such a "mod" would be to take D&D's general medieval/renaissance assumptions about technology and armaments and rework them for a different genre. As firearms grew more reliable, accurate, and easy to shoot quickly, people basically stopped wearing big heavy plates of metal to protect themselves. Armor is still a think for modern soldiers, of course, but I think there's actually something of a gap there, between the obsolescence of metal armor like plate or chain mail and the development of stuff like kevlar, such that a soldier from maybe the 18th century through most of the 20th was just wearing, like, a thick jacket. (I'm sure that there's nuance and complexity to this that I, who am not anything like a military historian, am ignorant of.)

While Project Lamordia is obviously reimagining that Domain of Dread as a modern, high-tech setting, I think that broadly, Ravenloft in general tends toward classic Gothic Horror aesthetics, which tend toward a kind of 18th/19th century look and feel. If I were to build out Ravenloft as its own independent game, I'd probably focus on that era to look for my genre inspirations: for example, I'd likely make firearms the default ranged weapon, and thus make A: a greater variety of them and B: them seriously cheaper than they are in 5.5, and C: easier to use for martial classes without needing a special feat (I determined early in 5.5 that ironically, the people best able to use Pistols and Muskets are Druids and Clerics who take the Warden/Protector orders, though Gunner from Tasha's at least solves the biggest problem for actual martial characters).

Likewise, I'd find a way to represent armor in a way that doesn't fall into the D&D categories of Light/Medium/Heavy, because heavy armor isn't really a thing in that era, and maybe medium isn't really either.

A few months ago (not a year ago yet, right?) I did some thought experiments on a possible game called Deathblow, that would be about sort of Gothic Horror monster hunters. Some of the ideas in that, I think, would be really good for a game like this, such as capping the max level at 5. Horror needs the characters to be underdogs for the monsters to be threatening, but I also think that TTRPGs get some of their satisfaction from character progression.

That game was meant to have a tighter and more regimented adventure structure, where you'd spend a good while investigating the aftermath of monster attacks and then determining what methods you'll need to defeat said monster, really focusing on singular climactic fights against individual epic boss monsters. But I think there's room for a less dramatic modification to D&D that would allow for a more diverse set of scenarios and stories and retain more of D&D's base rules (even being able to potentially use a lot of the same monster stat blocks) but still limit and kind of alter things enough to fit better into the distinct genre's conventions.

We'll find out about mid-October what this thing actually is, but I'm tempted to start working on this Ravenloft mod (modification rather than module).

An Underpass Resonant and Feels Like We're Getting to Plot Point Two

 The Underpass is a real change of aesthetic for Control Resonant, a void-like space that brings back the brutalist concrete of the Oldest House but with a somehow more alien and hostile structure (our ability to Shift makes it profoundly disorienting, as we need that ability to navigate it).

Once again, the Resonants - the major bosses that grant you paranatural powers - aren't really directly tied into the main story in an obvious way besides being examples of the Pattern resonance that underlies the main threat of the story. While they haven't emerged as a true enemy faction the way the Hiss and Mold are, it seems that while the Pattern is less widespread, it's far more dangerous.

Given the alienness of the Underpass, it's an area I could imagine overstaying its welcome if they put as many sidequests and objectives there as they do in the other zones, but as far as I can tell, the game seems to understand that this place shouldn't overstay its welcome. There's a Fault there and a main quest story that is more of a series of confusing puzzles involving alternate timelines and of course all that variable gravity than any difficult combat encounters, but with that handled, you're basically done other than the optional assault objectives and a few other per-zone features.

The result is that I'm leaving the place (with a few things left to do post-Resonant boss) with fond memories.

As far as I can tell, the Western Incursion Zone is mandatory if only to get you the Shift ability, and the Park appears to be entirely optional. I do wonder how much of Downtown I might have completed prior to fighting The Artist, but my recollection was that you were on a pretty linear path to get there.

Let's get into a bit more detail past the spoiler cut: Oh, also, spoilers for Alan Wake II here as well.