My First Resident Evil

 Having watched Monty Zander's series on Resident Evil, and especially after downloading and enjoying Marina Ryan's concept album made in tandem with Zander's video essays, and to top it all off, seeing that the RE4 remake was on sale for just 20 bucks on the PS store, I decided to finally dive in.

The game was a noted departure for the series, bringing in the 3rd-person shooter mechanics (and I think popularizing them across gaming) and moving out of the Raccoon City vicinity to a remote region of Spain.

The remake looks fully modern - the dark forest into which you come across the village the game starts in feels real in a way that old games could never really pull off. But at least mechanically, I'm finding that muscle memory from games made in the 20-odd years since this came out have been betraying me - I keep trying to dodge incoming attacks (like in the Silent Hill 2 remake) only to realize that that's not a thing - if I want to not get hit by foes, I either need to keep my distance or potentially parry with my knife - which has limited durability and thus is something of a precious resource.

Anyway, I'm stuck on the first big, famous set-piece, where an entire village of infected cultist villagers comes after Leon and I believe the goal is just to survive long enough for them to abandon the fight.

The most efficient way to take out enemies, as I understand it, is to stun them with a headshot and then follow up with a contextual melee attack, which will usually take them out and even sometimes other foes nearby.

It feels honestly a little embarrassing to have needed to take a break so early into the game, but after dying four or five times to the villagers, I found my frustration overcoming my excitement. I wonder if this will be one of those things where once I come back, it'll all click into place.

But hey, my first ResE game!

Remembering Expansion Launch Events of the Past

 I've played through every single expansion launch event in World of Warcraft's history. I started playing in fall of 2006, and given BC's relatively late arrival compared with the overall expansion launch schedule (normally they come out in late summer or fall of even-numbered years, but BC didn't come until January of 2007, after Vanilla had been out for over two years) I wasn't actually max-level for it, but I was able to see and be killed by the demons assaulting major cities.

Expansion launches are big deals for WoW. They're the official closing of the book on the past two years' (or in War Within's case, only one-and-a-half, making it the shortest expansion in WoW's history) story and the big excitement-building thing for the game's next era. We get class changes (sometimes, as we're seeing in 12.0, giving us somewhat incomplete versions of the classes, especially the new Devourer spec) and in the latter years of WoW, this is when we get the various stat-squishes (or Shadowlands' level squish).

But these are ephemeral events - even if you group them all together, an expansion launch event tends to go on about six weeks, or a month and a half. If expansions come out roughly every two years, that means that these events all together make up only 1/16th of the game's overall schedule.

Furthermore, expansion events, because they're tailored to the individual expansion, are something that we truly won't experience for more than those six weeks. This creates a couple of funny incentives:

It should have some reward that is unique and can be a reminder of having experienced it, but the rewards also shouldn't be so unique that people will feel really bummed out if they missed it.

It should be memorable and fun, but it also shouldn't take too much development time, because it's only going to be going for a short time.

We've had some really exciting and memorable events, and a few that were perhaps not quite as well-regarded. I thought, as a WoW elder, I'd go down memory lane and see how well I can recall those we've gone through:

Burning Crusade:

    As alluded to before, WoW's first expansion saw Doom-Lord Kazzak, who would later become a world-boss in Hellfire Peninsula, leading demonic assaults on capital cities (I remember Ironforge was definitely one of the targets, though I can't recall if it was all six existing ones or just that and, like, Orgrimmar. Back in Vanilla, due to its convenient location and before they added Stormwind Harbor in Wrath, Ironforge was actually the real Alliance capital). Now, there was also an event at the Dark Portal in the Blasted Lands, but I was too low-level to get there at the time (by the time the expansion came out, I think my highest-level character was only 30 or so, and you needed to be 58 to go to Outland).

Wrath of the Lich King:

    Ah yes, I remember flying around Shattrath, seeing people angrily debating the recent electoral win of Barack Obama, while we had a couple quests. The Alliance, I believe, was primarily concerned with helping I think the Argent Dawn while the Horde was dealing with totally-well-intentioned Grand Apothecary Putress to try to create a cure to a zombie plague.

    The event combined what had been the patch-launch event (they did this back in Vanilla) for the Naxxramas patch (1.3 or 1.4, I wasn't playing yet) with its Scourge Invasions of various zones, but the big new thing was the Zombie Plauge, where, whether you were flagged for PvP or not, character of both factions could get infected and infect both other players and NPCs after turning into ghouls. I remember literally hiding out in the basement of the Darkshire Inn on my Warlock alt hiding out from the zombies - a bit of enforced RP that was honestly pretty cool. There were some who complained about how it disrupted gameplay, but wasn't that the point? Of course, the patch also saw the return of Varian Wrynn to Stormwind and the addition of Stormwind Harbor, which made travel to Darnassus and the Exodar much easier (you used to have to go to Menethil Harbor in the Wetlands).

    I believe there was some kind of event in major cities, which included Garrosh challenging Thrall for his role as Warchief, only to be interrupted by the Scourge.

Cataclysm:

    This was probably the biggest pre-launch event just because so much of the game changed, and it had to come in kind of two segments: first was one that fully needed the old Vanilla world, in which the Horde had an event to take back the Echo Isles for the Darkspear Trolls, while the Alliance had an event to take back Gnomeregan (I believe the Gnomes' faction in the Alliance is now just "Gnomeregan," but in Vanilla-through-Wrath, it was the Gnomeregan Exiles). We also had elemental invasions - certain areas across the world (I think excluding Outland, though there was a story quest to go meet Thrall there). Finally, there was also a quest that had you infiltrate a doomsday cult with sandwich-board signs on them that seemed to be new recruits into Twilight's Hammer.

    We also brought Magni the Titan tablets that would wind up turning him into his diamond (apparently Thraegar) form, which was interpreted as his dying until he reawakened before Legion. I think this all happened before the revamp went live, which we then had available for maybe a month before the expansion actually launched, so I remember spending a lot of time leveling up my Tauren Paladin.

Mists of Pandaria:

    I think this remains the smallest launch event. Scenarios were the exciting new feature for Mists of Pandaria, and the destruction of Theramore was a major event to kick off the expansion (and explain why Jaina went from biggest advocate of peaceful coexistence with the Horde to the Alliance's biggest hawk,) so we got early access to the Fall of Theramore scenario. And... that was it.

Warlords of Draenor:

    Things were primarily contained to the Blasted Lands, where we fought Iron Horde incursions into the zone, but we also go access to part, but not the entirety, of the revamped Upper Blackrock Spire dungeon. For those who did not play before then, UBRS used to actually be part of the same instance as Lower Blackrock Spire, as one of the old level-cap Vanilla megadungeons (LBRS is still basically a mega-dungeon).

Legion:

    Probably the best-remembered launch event, we got a few things here: first off, if you had the expansion, you could create a Demon Hunter and play through their starting experience early, hitting level 100 (the pre-launch level cap) by finishing it. But for everyone else, we got the Legion Invasions.

    These were actually a lot more free-form than what we'd get afterward. A zone, I think Hillsbrad Foothills, Dun Morogh, Westfall, Azshara, Northern Barrens, and I think Tanaris, would get invaded by the Burning Legion, and everyone in the zone could spread out and kill demons all across the zone, eventually summoning a big legion commander boss that would drop good loot.

    I don't really think it was much more than that, but something about the way it worked just... worked really well. For one thing, Legion saw massive class overhauls that brought in a lot of fun mechanics, so it was fun to test those out. But I also think that because the demons' activity across the zone was so omnipresent that you could kind of choose the style of demon-fighting you wanted. There were legion structures you could fight your way into, but also, I remember just being on a road in western Westfall and taking out a pair of felguards there - it felt like you could have both the giant epic battles and the scrappy hero-versus-the-monster fights at the same time.

Battle for Azeroth:

    This one was a little bifurcated. The War of Thorns was a multi-stage series of quests in Darkshore, which culminated in the burning of Teldrassil, and one of the genuinely most affecting uses of the UI for storytelling I've seen in the game (for the Alliance, at least) where you were tasked with saving 100 Darnassus citizens, but only given the time to get, at most, like 30 before the smoke overtook you.

    We also had some, if I recall correctly, some repeatable stuff in Silithus, fighting the other faction for control of Azerite. But the more memorable stuff was the one-and-done story quests.

Shadowlands:

    Much as the Wrath launch event took some elements of the Scourge Invasion event from vanilla, Shadowlands brought back the Zombie Plague, though I guess given how much easier it was to spread out with so many expansions having come around, it didn't feel as pervasive as the first time.

    Other than that, there was an event in Icecrown in which various Scourge rares would pop up. The biggest deal, as I recall, was that you could get a larger bag than would be available until I think Dragonflight or even War Within.

Dragonflight:

    Here, we had the elemental invasions, which were more wide-spread (I can't recall every zone they were in, but I know Badlands was the one I most often went to, also I think Northern Barrens again). I can't recall if we could create Dracthyr Evokers yet or if we had to wait for the expansion's proper launch - I'd guess the former. Naturally, we wouldn't get the Augmentation spec until later in the expansion (I'm guessing they intended it for launch but still needed to figure out how it would work).

War Within:

    Hey, fairly recent, right? This was the one with the memories of Azeroth, found in Dragonblight, Searing Gorge, and... was it Un'goro Crater? Or Tanaris again?

    I actually liked this style of event because there was real variety in the memories that popped up, with different objectives.

Midnight:

    Well, this one is currently going on. It's probably the smallest event since Mists of Pandaria, with a very short quest involving the Twilight Blade and then just the rare spawns that pop up in Twighlight Highlands. You can get a bunch of Champion level gear pretty easily, though in this new era of Delves, I mostly have Hero-level gear on the characters I really play (and that's a fair number: see name of blog).

What's interesting is that this is the first expansion in which the primary territory of the expansion will be at least partially revamped old, existing zones. While Cataclysm was a big revamp, the high-level content all took place in new zones. I think the closer parallel might be Warlords of Draenor, whose world was a glimpse into the past of Outland (though also technically an alternate universe... boy did that expansion have conceptual issues). With Quel'thalas and Zul'Aman, we're getting a fresh look at areas that were added to the game 19 years ago, and not really changed much since. (Before Cataclysm, I remember taking my Orc Warrior to Eversong and Ghostlands to level just because compared to Vanilla, the questing was better. But it truly does show its age quite a lot at this point).

Of course, showing us that revamp early wouldn't really make sense - these are not to be the leveling zones for low-level Blood Elf characters, but full endgame (for now) zones to take us to level 90.

Twilight Highlands does make a certain degree of sense given that it's the home territories of the game's most prominent big evil void-worshipping cult (though one would think after the defeat of Cho'gall that they might have vacated the area, or maybe the Wildhammer Dwarves would have kicked them out by now). Still, I'm surprised that they've limited the event to just this one zone. For Shadowlands it kind of made sense given that the rift into the Shadowlands was formed right over Icecrown Citadel, but the void invasion is coming in over Quel'thalas.

Again, there's some logic to not putting too much effort into a launch event. But this one is probably going to be less-remembered than others.

Siblings and Resonance: Control Resonance and Canon

 What is canon in a universe where a writer can re-write reality?

2019's Control was the first game from Remedy Entertainment to commit to the idea of a shared, connected universe, doing so by making direct references to the events of 2010's Alan Wake. While Remedy did have a game between those two, 2016's Quantum Break, that time-warped narrative officially belongs to Microsoft, much as Remedy's first giant hit, Max Payne, has been owned by Rockstar Games (even making a third game without Remedy's involvement). Alan Wake and Control are the two franchises that are fully owned by Remedy (I can't recall if they got the rights to Max Payne back prior to starting work on the remakes or if that's a licensing thing).

The point is, at this point, Control and Alan Wake have each had significant crossover with other another, with the FBC playing a key role in the main story of Alan Wake II.

This year, we are eagerly anticipating the release of Control Resonant, previously presented as Control 2.

The way in which Remedy makes its games and tells its stories invites you to scrutinize every detail you're presented with, and I think right of the bat that the fact that Control's sequel is not simply numbered - something previous Remedy games have done (Max Payne 2 does have the sub-title The Fall of Max Payne) - is cause for curiosity.

Resonance is, of course, pretty key to the world of Control. Both the villainous Hiss and the helpful Hadron and Polaris, are resonances, less physical beings than a kind of frequency or pattern.

While the idea of anything of any real substance merely being a resonance might seem absurd on the surface, things like String Theory suggest that this might actually be the underlying nature of matter itself: Einstein came up with his theory of special relativity that linked matter and energy (the famous E=mc^2) and String Theory suggests that the base particles of matter are actually coiled strings of energy that vibrate in a certain way.

One of the big critiques of String Theory is "so what?" - a question as to how this model actually changes our approach to what these particles do. But in the speculative fiction realms that these games take place within, one could imagine that vibrations and resonance might make reality itself a little more vulnerable to manipulation and transformation.

One of the strangest interpretations of quantum physics is the manner in which things can exist in a superposition until they're measured: a particle acts like it has all manner of "spin" simultaneously until it is measured. Some experiments have shown that a particle can interfere with itself because of this, the two versions of reality bumping up against one another until we intervene to determine the truth. And thus, there's an idea that when we do measure the spin of a particle, we're actually creating separate realities, one that is spin up, one where it's spin down.

Apologies to the physicists who could explain this a lot more accurately than I can.

Anyway, this got me thinking:

In Control, we learn that Dylan Faden was being trained to become the next director of the FBC. One of the numerous meanings of the game's title is that Jesse acted as the "Control" in an experiment - two siblings with similar parautilitarian potential, but one was subject to constant intervention and training while the other was left to her devices to mature into adulthood on her own (alternatively, Dylan being kept in captivity and away from the influence of the outside world may have been the control subject).

Of course, things don't work out with Dylan, and he plays the closest thing to an antagonist in the game, acting as the mouthpiece of the Hiss. Even before the Hiss arrive, though, Dylan's shot at directorship is over, because he's evidently killed one of the scientists working with him.

But what if he didn't?

Through the many drafts and edits that Alan Wake makes to the story that shapes his reality, we get numerous versions of events. Indeed, the scene in which Jesse spies on Alan meeting with Tom Zane in Control's AWE expansion plays out very differently when we see the same scene in Alan Wake II. But it's definitely the same scene, playing out in a different way.

Tonally, and genre-wise, Remedy has taken multiple approaches to the same idea: a multiverse. Quantum Break is not canon, again, because it's owned by Microsoft, but some of its ideas and even characters seem to have been slyly brought into the Remedy Connected Universe. Warlin Door is clearly Martin Hatch - he was even initially meant to be played by Lance Reddick, only for Reddick's death to prevent that. Door exists simultaneously in all realities, and while that can mean the truly distinct kinds of realities like the Dark Place, the Astral Plane, etc., it also might mean that he exists across alternate universes where peoples' fates are different.

In Control Resonant, we aren't playing as Jesse, but are instead playing as Dylan.

My expectation remains that we're probably going to be playing in the same canonical timeline/universe as the first game, and that Dylan, freed from the Hiss, will likely be motivated by finding his sister, perhaps without the assistance of the FBC (and even maybe its opposition). Jesse is the FBC's Director, but she has also clearly developed some friction with The Board.

However, let's also consider what seems to be happening in the game: New York, at least Manhattan, is getting twisted by weird energies and flooded with monsters previously contained by the Oldest House - things like the Hiss and the Mold (boy, the Firebreak team does not seem like it was very successful).

Unless the RCU is going to be one in which New York is either supremely fucked up or at least the Manhattan AWE becomes an enormous historical event, something has to bring the chaos there to an end. And I wonder if that means that we're going to be looking at an alternate universe.

Sequels invite twin imagery - Alan Wake II gave us two protagonists, two worlds, two "books," even the Koskela twins. Jesse and Dylan have always been foils for one another, and it's interesting that this game appears to be flipping the script, with Dylan trying to find his lost sister, rather than Jesse looking for her lost brother.

What does it mean for it to be Resonant?

Does it take place within a different universe?

In Alan Wake II's Lake House DLC, we play as Kieran Estevez, and near the end of the adventure, we have an opportunity to go to the Oceanview Motel & Casino via a lightswitch cord - something FBC agents are not only aware of but even encouraged to do when they find a cord. Estevez shows up not in the familiar lobby we see when Jesse visits it in Control, but in some other hallway that leads to a door marked with a symbol that we've historically associated with Control 2. This seems to lead into the Oldest House, and Estevez passes through a hallway that honestly looks more like the Executive Sector (with portraits of the director that show Jesse and someone else, maybe Trench, overlapping in concentric circles) but must be in Containment because there's a sign taking us into the Panopticon. There, Estevez encounters a no-longer-in-a-coma Dylan, his hair grown back, but still locked up and evidently distressed, trying to convey a message to his sister that he's "sorry" and that he "really tried."

The visions Estevez gets before she arrives back at the Lake House are clearly linked to the events of Control Resonant, with the Hiss and Mold breaking out into an Manhattan that has twisted in on itself in kaleidoscopic ways.

But there are some oddities:

In the Control Resonant trailer, we see what appears to be Jesse at Dylan's bedside, taking up the object we'll know as the Aberrant and jamming it into his chest - evidently the ritual required for him to bond with it, as she is bonded with the Service Weapon.

Now, to be fair, Dylan could just be sleeping in his cell when this happens. Given the editing, I think we're meant to believe that the containment failure, the outbreak of the Hiss and other dangerous things from the Oldest House, has already happened, and that this is an act of desperation on Jesse's part.

But if Dylan is still in a coma when this happens, a big question about the timeline opens up - Estevez's adventure takes place during Saga's - probably during the "Local Girl" chapter, as that's the one that starts right after Alan comes out of the lake and sets of the FBC monitoring station and ends with Estevez showing up to take over the investigation after he experiences in the Lake House.

There are some assumptions being made here, of course, like the idea that Estevez' visit to the Oldest House is happening at the same time - it wouldn't seem that impossible for her to have unwittingly gone to the near future. We know that time shenanigans are afoot in all of this - Saga and Alan having their distorted meetings at the Overlaps when Alan's half of the conversation is likely happening years earlier and not in the same order.

But it does feel very possible that we're looking at different realities, or at least, that the Dylans we're seeing need not all be the same one as the one we're playing.

Another note of interest: Alan has been having an influence on New York with his visitations of Alice. While we're likely meant to think of his visits to Parliament Tower initially as just Alan's projection of his home, we discover later that his visitations have been real enough to alert Alice, and affect her behavior. Even stuck in the Dark Place, he has had an influence on the real world.

Is it coincidence that Alan is from New York? Might we actually go to the real Parliament Tower as Dylan?

Anyway, we still haven't gotten any further news about Control Resonant, but the release date is some time this year. You can be sure I'll be dissecting everything we get.

Planes, Layers, and Depth

 I love Planescape as a D&D setting.

I come to fantasy for the weirdness, the otherworldliness, and Planescape invites you to play D&D in settings that take you far, far away from familiar, mundane reality, even more than the usual lands of wizards and dragons.

But it does create this odd issue:

As I've written about before, the influence of some outer plane in a campaign set within the Prime Material Plane (as most are) is one thing: a villain's entire plan might be to allow the searing fires of hell to be unleashed upon the world, and in such a campaign, the way that the Nine Hells would likely be portrayed is as some unimaginable nightmare of fire, spiky metal, and tormented souls.

In a Planescape campaign, the Nine Hells is likely to be... well, yes, filled with fire, spiky metal, and tormented souls, but also shops and inns and NPCs you might do quests for.

Planescape allows us into these outer planes, these truly separate planes of existence, but in doing so, forces us to portray them as at least slightly familiar to our regular reality.

I wrote recently about my desire to start a Planescape campaign on the Plain of Infinite Portals, the first layer of the Abyss, and specifically have it start off in the "Worst Bar in the Multiverse." The prompt for each player is to ask what mistakes they made in their past to wind up in such a place, and then have them adventure across the wasteland, in a kind of Weird West/Mad Max-like environment filled with demons.

But again, there's a version of the Abyss that ought to just be endless incomprehensible horrors, like a constant nightmare, where even glimpsing it might drive one insane.

And this got me thinking:

Planes have depth.

There's an idea in those 2nd Edition Planescape books (I think? Come to think of it, I don't have the corresponding PDFs) where the Elemental Planes can be visited by mortals, but only in the shallow depths of them - the elements mix enough in the shallows that, for example, there's air to breathe, or earth to stand on, even if you're in the Plane of Fire. But that the deeper you go into it, the more pure it becomes, and basically if you're not an actual elemental of the corresponding element, there's no real way to exist there in the deepest parts.

I think this can apply to every plane. Except, maybe, the Prime Material Plane.

Funnily enough, in my homebrew setting, the denizens of the connected part of the Shadowfell and Feywild (those parts that overlap my world) refer to the Prime Material Plane as the Flatlands. And while that was just a way of saying "it's kind of nondescript or boring," I actually think it makes a lot of sense if we think of the Prime Material Plane as not having any layers or depth - once you're in the plane, it just works according to some fantasy approximation of real-world physics (I tend to say it's real-world physics unless I call out a specific exception).

In Baldur's Gate 3, the second act takes place largely in the Shadow-Cursed Lands, which have been touched by the Shadowfell. But we do, on a major quest line, go to the actual Shadowfell, and it's portrayed as a swirling vortex of shadow, with no realistic way it could be inhabitable.

The funny thing is that the Shadow-Cursed Lands look more like the way that I'd portray the Shadowfell itself in a game I ran. But what might BG3's Shadowfell be equivalent to (not counting Hades, which does, to be fair, share a lot of vibes with the Shadowfell).

The answer, I think, is that that's "deep" in the Shadowfell, whereas the just dark, spooky version of the Flatlands (it's so much quicker to type than Prime Material Plane) would be the shallow part of the Shadowfell.

And you know what's beautiful about this? It accounts for the Domains of Dread.

While the shallow Shadowfell is the weird mirror world to the Flatlands, the Domains of Dread are deeper in the plane, perhaps not strictly corresponding to any real location in the Flatlands, but resembling them until you notice the foggy border beyond which there doesn't seem to be anything.

Unlike the "Border Shadowfell" (much like the Border Ethereal in contrast with the Deep Ethereal - see, I'm not making this up out of nowhere), the Domains of Dread are a little farther in, a little farther from familiar reality as we know it, and a little deeper into the swirling darkness and mists of nightmare logic. Perhaps deeper still than the Domains of Dread is the kind of swirling endless darkness in which gods like Shar or entities like the Dark Powers reside.

Now, the Outer Planes, at least, have what's called Layers. I think the only outer planes without them are The Outlands (the true neutral plane, which most resembles the Flatlands until you notice that each element of the landscape is perfectly balanced - a deep ocean for every mountain, a frigid tundra for each burning desert) and Limbo, the Chaotic Neutral plane, where any such structure would be anathema to what the plane stands for (arguably it either has just one layer or a constantly shifting number of them).

Planar layers are a little weird - on a certain level, it allows DMs to cordon off certain parts of the plane or focus on particular regions and vibes. Often, the deeper one goes into a plane (though in the case of Mount Celestia, unsurprisingly, the "deeper" layers are farther up the mountain) the more extreme the plane's whole vibe gets. For example, in the six layers of Carceri, the first layer, Orthrys (named for the mountain upon which the Titans of Greek myth lived, in contrast with Mount Olympus) the string of planetoids are close enough that there are structures built between them (including the palace of the aforementioned Titans - another name for Carceri is Tartarus, also from Greek myth). However, on the deepest layer, the planetoids of the plane are so far from one another that you can't easily see the next from the surface, the sense of profound isolation taken to an extreme.

But in a certain way, I think that layers and depth might not be quite the same idea: for instance, the Abyss is reputed to have infinite layers (far more than any other plane) though some argue this is just that no one has been able to count them all. Various demon lords have domains that take up one of these layers (though some, like Juiblex and Zuggtmoy share a layer, while Grazz't has three layers all to himself and his minions).

These layers are given numbers, indicating their relative order, but this order is somewhat arbitrary. While the Nine Hells of Baator and the Seven Heavens of Mount Celestia both prevent planar travel to anywhere except their first layer, forcing you to traverse all the layers between you and your destination on the plane, the Abyss requires no such travel - the Plain of Infinite Portals, the first layer of the Abyss, is filled with sink-holes that let you fall down into other layers directly (I really like making anything Abyss-related, like demonic temples, involve a deep, vertical shaft that one must descend).

Demogorgon's layer, the Gaping Maw, is not the lowest layer of the Abyss, even if he's (they're?) generally considered the mightiest of the demon lords.

So it's not a perfect, direct correspondence between the two concepts.

    Now, there's an alternate way of looking at this:

Player characters are, generally, mortal beings. While the creature types that you can play as have expanded considerably over time (Forge of the Artificer gives us our first official playable Aberration by redesignating the Kalashtar, and we also get Constructs and Fey in the Warforged and Changeling, respectively) I think we're generally meant to play these characters as being people first and weird monster second.

Thus, a way you could play the Outer Planes, or even just other planes in general, is that our perception of them is not necessarily what they are. We might see Avernus as a giant, blasted wasteland with an endless war raging across it because that's the closest comprehensible equivalent of what's going on that we can imagine. What does it mean for Lawful Evil and Chaotic Evil to clash (in a realm that is the home territory of the former) in a philosophical sense? Well, that's hard to visualize, so instead we see it as clashing armies of regimented tyrannical brutes fighting slobbering hordes of pscyho-killers.

Even fiends themselves might not truly look the way we perceive them, because it turns out that the impulse to pursue one's reckless ambition at all costs doesn't really look like anything - except in this fantasy world, where we see it as a hulking demon with giant pincer arms.

    Still, I think you can get a lot of mileage about thinking of these planes as appearing more like reality on the nearby shores, but as one delves deeper into them, the experience becomes more impressionistic, more oneiric, more abstract.

Demonic Possession in D&D

 Fiends, for those of you who haven't really read the Monster Manual that closely, is the catch-all term for demons, devils, and beings of pure evil in D&D. The cosmos in D&D is built around its alignment system, and so there's a firm distinction between the lawful evil devils and chaotic evil demons.

I actually think that DMs should pay attention to this: it's one of the really interesting quirks of D&D's monsters, and in the lore, devils and demons are at eternal war, with the neutral evil (though I guess lawful-leaning given that they're from Gehenna) Yugoloths working as mercenaries for both sides. Yugoloths were originally called Daemons. In the early 90s, TSR (the previous company to own the rights to D&D) renamed these three categories in an effort to distance the game from accusations by the Religious Right of encouraging Satanism, calling Devils Baatezu, Demons Tanar'ri, and Daemons Yugoloths. When the Satanic Panic subsided and the general culture recognized that portrayal of such things didn't mean endorsing them, they brought back the more familiar names from folklore and myth, but Daemons were probably too similar to Demons in name (they're really the same word) so they stuck with this name.

There are also plenty of other fiend types. At least in 5E, they haven't really fleshed out the fiendish inhabitants of the other Lower Planes, though we did get the three kinds of Demondand from Gehenna. Most fiends belong to the devil, demon, and (in distant third) Yugoloth category, but there are also plenty of uncategorized fiends like Succubi/Incubi, Rakshasas (which are really interesting because they're from the Nine Hells just like devils, but somehow aren't part of that hierarchy,) and Night Hags, as well as some newly-inducted fiends as of 2025 of the prime material plane, Sahuagin and Gnolls.

As a DM, how do we want to use these?

One thing to start off with is that fiends are universally evil. I think the only possible exception is things like the Fiendish Spirit from the Summon Fiend spell, which, like all such summoned beings, is Neutral. Now, I think that there's some room to play with this - if there can be fallen Celestials who turn evil, oughtn't there to be some fiends who have turned to good? However, with some changes in 2025, it does look like Celestials can be Good or Neutral, but what used to be an evil Celestial, such as some Empyreans in 2014, are now categorized as Fiends.

So, I think you could reasonably think of Celestials and Fiends as almost the same creature type - just planar outsiders (though that leaves creatures like Sahuagin or Gnolls in a funny position) but when they're evil, they're fiends.

The point, though, is that if you want players to face foes that they don't have to feel remotely conflicted about fighting and killing, Fiends are arguably the best options: unlike a monster that is evil, where evil is an adjective, fiends are evil in the sense of evil as a noun: they are made of the substance and idea of evil.

You're going to find fiends at every challenge rating. A 1st level party can easily fight Lemures, Spined Devils or Manes, Dretches, etc. And a demon lord like Demogorgon or an archdevil like Zariel can make a perfectly good campaign final boss, with tons of monsters that can fill in the gaps between.

A fight against fiends as a kind of evil army is totally valid. Simultaneously, an evil cult or other sort of enemy faction can have a fiend bound to their service in some way that acts as a powerful living weapon to use against their foes - either as a boss-like encounter, as cannon fodder, or maybe a powerful lieutenant to a mortal villain.

Fiends tend to have pretty powerful stat blocks, but I think if you use them as just monsters to stick in a dungeon room, you're not getting your money's worth out of them.

First off, I would say to look at the Monster Manual (the new one) and how it describes what kind of evil that each fiend represents. Not all of them have such evocative descriptions, but, for example, the Glabrezu, a good mid-CR demon, is described as embodying delusion and predatory guile.

I think you can characterize the demon itself as acting in this way, but you can also associate them with an NPC that holds these dark elements in them.

Fiends are generally corporeal entities (with a handful of exceptions, like Shadow Demons) that might be assumed to move and interact in the world like any other creature. But I think there's a real potential in treating them differently:

In cultures across the world, there is a belief in invisible spirits that might be benevolent or malevolent. "Unclean," wicked, evil spirits have been blamed for malicious behavior, illness, and misfortune.

Among the most popular horror movies of all time is The Exorcist, in which a demon possesses a little girl, and a pair of priests perform an exorcism to try to free the girl from her possession. The most disturbing aspect of the movie is the horrible way that the girl behaves under the influence of the demon (something that a 1970s audience was scandalized by, which only enhanced the legend of the movie).

But it creates a really interesting tension, because the demon cannot be dealt with in some straightforward manner - the body it inhabits is an innocent, after all.

Let's talk about planes:

In a certain way, planes in D&D are just other worlds - other universes, yes, but ones to which you can travel and kind of go about your business as you would on a normal world, even if the sights you see there might be surreal and alien.

Most fantasy (and some science-) fiction that concerns other planes view this in a more spiritual sense - your mind might ascend to some higher plane of existence, but merely being on that other plane means a different kind of existence beyond the physical.

I have some thoughts about the "depths" of planes that I'll probably write about in another post, but while a plane like the Abyss ought to feel very distant to someone on the prime material plane (or one should hope it is,) I think that the fact that there's no physical spatial relationship means that it can be both near and far at the same time.

We often think of a demon possessing someone in fiction in the following way: the demon, if it has a physical form at all, forgoes manifesting that physical form in favor of becoming a non-physical presence within a host.

Oddly, the only demon I can think of that possesses someone in 5E is the Dybbuk, and it only possesses corpses (as someone of half-Jewish ancestry, I love getting bits of Jewish folkore in my fantasy. I have a strong affinity for Golems, as well).

But we need not be limited by stat blocks - your Lich can for sure cast the occasional Meteor Swarm even if it's not in the stat block.

And if we want to give demons and other fiends the ability to possess people - or places - we can think of the mechanics.

(As a side note, I think giving all sorts of fiends the ability to possess targets is fine, but it might be a fun thing to give to demons specifically, as I feel like devils honestly get a little more of a spotlight in 5E and have cool ideas like Soul Coins and all their contracts.)

Now, what is this about possessing a place?

As I often do, I'm thinking of a part of Stephen King's Dark Tower series. In the first book, The Gunslinger, the eponymous hero (really very much an antihero in this volume) finds a building out in the desert that is the lair of a "Speaking Demon," which he is able to force into giving him information by finding the hidden demon jawbone in the walls. The demon can speak within the basement, but has no physical or visible form.

I think the lore mechanics for demonic possession could work the following way: while possessing someone or something, the demon itself is still in the Abyss. Demons are such an infectious presence in the D&D multiverse that summoning them is both risky and difficult. I think the likely reason a demon would try to possess something on the prime material plane would be to get a foothold there.

Now, in terms of in-game mechanics, this is pretty simple: the demon isn't a creature you can fight. If they're possessing a creature, that creature might act in a way directed by the demon, but this could also manifest in varied ways:

Most straightforwardly, a possessed person might be puppeteered by the demon, every action under the demon's control. They might attempt to cause their host to act normally to avoid suspicion.

The other options is that possession isn't direct control, but a subtle influence and even torment. A demon possessing a creature might cause them to see things that aren't there, or even take over the body from time to time and push the host's consciousness into the depths of their mind so that they lose time and wake up having done things they don't remember doing.

Now, this opens up a lot of options for you:

First, it can be tricky as a DM to let a cool villain develop, because players will often try to strike at them as quickly as possible, even trying to cut off their villain monologues in the hopes of getting off an attack before initiative is rolled (DMs, by the way: if the party is just trying to yell out "I cast Disintegrate" before you can say roll initiative without being hidden or taking the villain by surprise, you can tell them they can do that on their turn). If the demon isn't actually physically there for them to attack, you don't need to worry about losing your bad guy.

The other thing it opens up is having a really powerful demon showing up early in a campaign, before the party would be capable of facing them. Just as the possession prevents the party from killing your demon, so too does it prevent your demon from killing the party.

While you can certainly make fun villainous NPCs of any kind of demon, you could even have the possessing demon be some powerful demon lord. Given that they're not physically there, it's quite easy to make a mystery out of what demon it is the party is dealing with. And you can have fun foreshadowing things by having oblique references made to, say, Grazz't.

It's also a way to have recurring fights against the villain: a possession might be thwarted by killing the host, or by using spells like Dispel Evil and Good. But each defeat or casting out of the demon only means delaying things. Certainly, the demonic restoration feature in 2025's Monster Manual demons already gives you something of this functionality - killing them in any other plane just sends them back to the Abyss.

One way you could play this, actually, is that a possessed creature gradually (or perhaps very suddenly) transforms into the fiend, using their stat block and describing them as taking on the fiendish appearance. But easily enough, you could have a demon possessing your Bandit Captains, your Mages, or even a non-humanoid creature like a particularly vicious Hill Giant or oddly cunning Bulette.

Devourer Tuning in Recent Hotfix

 I've got to say, the Midnight pre-launch event is pretty underwhelming - just a few world quests and spawning rares in Twilight Highlands (there was some announcement that it would be "across Azeroth," but I don't think they're showing up anywhere else. As such, the pre-patch has largely been about tinkering with the various class changes, and the biggest change of those is the existence of the third Demon Hunter spec, Devourer.

I've made multiple posts about the spec and its issues, mainly that it's surprisingly difficult to actually get off Collapsing Star, the headliner spell that requires a lot of build-up to get to. Something you'd expect to do every Void Metamorphosis multiple times (given that there are talents that trigger off multiple casts in a single Meta,) it's pretty common to be unable to even get one cast of it off - you need to have a bit of luck, honestly, for there to be enough soul fragments for you to gather up 30 before your window runs out.

Now, I will say that I have, on occasion, been able to get two off in a single go, though that's very, very rare. Generally, I have to go against the talent build guidance I've found online in order to do so - rather than Soul Glutton, which lets you go into the metamorphosis at 35 soul fragments rather than 50, but which speeds up the fury loss while in Metamorphosis, I take the one that just buffs you with Haste for each fragment you pick up. Naturally, this means you're entering the metamorphosis less often, but you won't have to fight the time limit as hard to get off at least one Collapsing star.

Evidently, the final Devourer Apex Talent allows you to cast a free Collapsing Star right when you get into Void Metamorphosis, which not only gets you that free cast, but also gives you another spell that delays your Fury degradation (a key, I think, to buying yourself the time to gather another 30). I'd hope as well that other Apex Talents might increase the rate of fragment generation, but none of those are available here during the pre-patch.

However, Blizzard sent out a hotfix last night (around the time they seemed to be hit with a DDOS attack that shut down both my Alliance and Horde servers) that made a few changes. The changes do, I think, increase your soul fragment generation overall, though weirdly there's also a nerf - basically, Consume is going to create more fragments, while I think other abilities are going to generate fewer.

In practice, I haven't noticed a huge change - partially I think I'm just getting better at timing my abilities, so I'm getting off more Collapsing Stars. But I still think this is not tuned well for anything other than max level.

And sure, we spend most of our time in WoW at max level, so by the time I get a Demon Hunter to 90 (more likely my old Night Elf one, who will be sticking primarily to Havoc, but I figure I'll keep around some Intellect gear for when I want to futz with Devourer) I can check in again and see if the spec feels good.

Damage-wise, I do think that hotfixes worked out ok - naturally, my Void Elf has been getting better gear, which helps. But while balancing damage is certainly important in a game like this, I do think the spec needs to feel good to play too, and too often with Devourer I feel like I'm failing to do what the spec is meant to be doing.

Crows and Dungeon-Crawling

 MCDM successfully launched its heroic fantasy RPG, Draw Steel, which, yes, I'm still trying to get a group of players together for (though I'm up to three and will play with four! Scheduling is the next challenge,) and made news when lead designer James Introcaso moved from continuing to develop Draw Steel to the company's next original RPG: Crows.

Draw Steel, famously (though maybe not as famously as their "everything hits" philosophy,) eschews monetary rewards - you have a wealth value, but it's not meant to be the primary motivator, and you're assumed to be able to afford an inn, replace equipment, etc., with "treasure" being limited to magic items that can give you a significant boost.

The idea that Matt Colville presented when pitching Draw Steel was that there was a lot of vestigial stuff in D&D from when it was first designed to be a survival-horror dungeon crawler, but that over the past half-century, the game has come to, well, mean a lot of things to a lot of people, but broadly, the way most players approach it is to tell stories of heroic figures saving the world. Colville felt that a lot of the game's continued reliance on tracking inventory and such weighs down the goal of game meant to make you feel more like epic heroes, and so they pushed to cut that out from Draw Steel.

Crows goes the opposite direction.

Crows will work a little like Draw Steel in the sense that its central mechanic is the Power Roll - rolling 2d10, adding the appropriate statistic (though these are boiled down to just three - Strength, Agility, and Mind) and checking to see if your result is 11 or lower, 12-16, or 17+. A lot of it is different though.

The intent here is for a world that's post-apocalyptic (though I think still in a medieval fantasy sense), gritty, and desperate. You're scrounging for whatever wealth you can find in dangerous old ruins, and so the way in which you earn experience is the value of the stuff you pull up out of there. Fighting monsters might be necessary, but if you can avoid them, it's probably for the best, as you don't get anything for killing them, and they can certainly kill you - part of the design philosophy is that the monsters aren't scaled to the players. (As a side note, I hear a lot of DMs talking about building campaigns like this, which usually implies it's going to be deadlier and with fewer guard rails, but I would say that if you're going to do that, you need to also make it go the other way - if the world doesn't limit its difficulty for low-level players, then it also should not rise to meet high-level ones).

Unlike Draw Steel, Crows will be all about inventory management, and will involve such trade-offs as wearing lighter armor so that you can carry more stuff with you. Equipment can get damaged and broken, and your character's abilities are more about what kind of stuff you can use than what you can do on your own - a spellcaster character, for example, might be able to make use of magic spellbooks found in these ruins, but they won't have magic that they can just use innately.

It'll be interesting to see how this turns out: I think the intent of this sort of game, a bit like Blades in the Dark (and its variants) is for shorter-term stories, unlike the long and epic campaigns you get with D&D or Draw Steel.