Elements Monk vs Death Knight

 When the new Player's Handbook came out about a year and a half ago, I think the class that got the biggest glow-up was the Monk - many of its issues were solved, and in many cases the class was simply empowered. That being said, I've also seen a number of theory-crafters argue that, while improved, it's still around the bottom rung of the class power.

Now, one thing I think these optimizers often ignore is defensive capabilities: by changing Deflect Missiles to simply Deflect Attacks, the Monk now has one of the most powerful defensive abilities in the game, probably only second to the Barbarian's rage (even with significantly lower AC than a Fighter or Paladin in full plate with a shield, I found that a Monk wound up taking less damage even from a Marilith, whose many attacks per action dilute the single-attack damage reduction of the Monk's Deflect Attacks).

However, this series has focused on damage output, and so we shall continue to.

The Warrior of Elements is, ostensibly, the update to the Way of Four Elements subclass from 2014, but in truth, it's a totally different subclass, merely replacing the old one by sharing its elemental theme while rebuilding everything from the ground up in terms of mechanics.

The subclass is built around Elemental Attunement, which you can activate to grant you various benefits, not the least of which is that your attacks gain a much longer reach.

Now, there's a weird nuance here, and I don't know if there's been any official ruling on it, but the reach affects all of your Unarmed Strikes, which now includes both grappling and shoving a target.

If we then assume that this reach is not in any way interrupted by, well, just not being currently in the act of attacking, it should allow us to grapple targets up to 15 feet away from us, which could be a huge defensive boon, as it could effectively shut down a foe that doesn't have ranged attacks.

Assuming this interpretation is correct - that we could hold a foe and continue to strike at them while they can't hit back - we can build a character around grappling.

Notably, this might not be amazing against our boss monster, the Death Knight, because they are A: very strong and B: have legendary resistances. Still, it'd be a decent gameplan for a whole campaign, and could still wind up having an effect on the boss fight. Let's get into the build:

    Feats:

I always run into this problem: I know that feats are powerful enough that it's often fine to leave a score uncapped in favor of getting the functionality of a feat. But it bugs my OCD tendencies. And Monks, in particular, really want high Dex, high Wisdom, and high Stamina.

Now, the thing with Monks, though, is that a lot of martial feats don't really do anything for us. Great Weapon Master doesn't work with any Simple weapons, and Polearm Master's biggest boon, the Pole Strike attack, is kind of redundant with our martial arts. We don't natively get Weapon Masteries, so Dual Wielder isn't really going to help us. Crusher can be ok for us, but we already get the ability to push targets with our elemental strikes.

But Grappler is pretty great: as Monks, we can use our Dexterity to set the DCs for our grappling attempts, and we're already making plenty of Unarmed Strikes anyway. Finally, the Fast Wrestler aspect of the feat lets us drag grappled targets quite far given how fast we move (and with Slow Fall, we can even drag foes off of ledges to potentially give them fall damage while we can just absorb it).

So, we'll assume we get 17 Dex at level 1 and then bump it to 18 with Grappler at 4. And then... I think we just cap it with an ASI at level 8.

It's probably "optimal" to just take 15s in Con and Wisdom at level 1 as well and dump the other three stats, though I never really like to do that (I hate having more than one negative modifier). Instead, I'll assume we do try to get Wisdom up to 16 at the start, and have at least a 14 in Con, but we might not have utter garbage scores otherwise.

I've generally avoided talking about origin feats here - Tavern Brawler actually has a lot of redundancy with being a Monk, but it does still boost our damage a little, letting us reroll 1s. This gives d6s an average roll of 3.9ish, a d8 an average of 4.9ish, a d10 an average of 5.95, and a d12 an average of 6.96ish, so essentially giving you .4 damage per hit, and thus, with a level 10 Flurry of Blows, about 2 damage overall if everything hits. It's not nothing, but it's not huge either.

Still, the Sailor background will cover you for this feat and your preferred ability scores. I'm not going to take Tavern Brawler into account for my calculations - grabbing Tough or Alert, Lucky, what-have-you, might be more ideal depending on your campaign.

    Grappling a Death Knight:

Now, the big thing: grappling in 5.5 has the target make a saving throw - their choice of Strength or Dexterity. Normally, this is set by your Strength modifier, but Monks have special dispensation to instead base it on their Dexterity (I think there's a world in which Monks should be a Strength-based class, but overall they're probably better-off being Dex-based. I need to take a look at the Pugilist class).

At level 10, we should have a Dex of 20, which means that the saving throw DC for our grapples will be 17.

Now, a Death Knight is strong, but like Paladins, they don't actually have proficiency in Strength saving throws. Thus, they merely add their Strength to the roll. Also, while they have Magic Resistance and they also have Marshal Undead, they are explicitly not personally affected by the latter feature (which grants other undead creatures of the Death Knight's choice within 60 feet of themselves advantage on attack rolls and saving throws).

Thus, the Death Knight is actually more likely than not going to fail the save against our attempts to grapple them. On a roll of an 11 or lower, they fail, meaning we have a 55% chance to grapple them.

That's actually great news. But I also don't think that means it's likely we actually will grapple them: this is something the Death Knight will probably use their legendary resistances to get out of.

Because we have the grappler feat, there's no actual cost to trying to grapple them once per turn, and we reap a great reward if we succeed - we get advantage on our attacks against them (which is pretty great given how high a Death Knight's AC is.)

So, how do we account for this?

Well, I think I'm going to go the simplest route: the DK is always going to LR out of being grappled by us - while they do have some ranged options, like Hellfire Orb, the Fell Word legendary action, or their spells, being grappled by us and allowing us to just pelt them with elemental strikes from afar is just not acceptable.

But that's great, because if we can burn through their legendary resistances, it opens up our allies to get them with various spells and such that might be even worse for them.

    Gameplan:

We're assuming this is a major boss and we're pulling out all the stops, and that means using Flurry of Blows every turn. I think we're also going to be using our action to attack, but I will check the average damage of Elemental Burst to ensure that that's actually correct. Still, we'll be burning a Focus Point each turn to get what are now three additional attacks as a bonus action (once we hit level 10, which we are).

At this level, unless we have a magic weapon, our unarmed strikes will hit just as hard as a spear or quarterstaff or greatclub anyway, and we get the extra range for them from Elemental Attunement, so we'll just stick to them. (Also, DMs, if you're handing out magic items, give the Monk some Wraps of Unarmed Prowess. Honestly, I'd have liked to see Very Rare wraps that add damage dice as well, like a Vicious Weapon).

We have 10 Focus Points at this level. We need to spend 1 to get Elemental Attunement going, but then we have 9 left to spend on other features. We're assuming one each turn for Flurry of Blows. Our Focus saving throw - which is based on Wisdom - is only 15 at this level, but that does mean that a Death Knight has to land a 10 or higher to save against Stunning Strike, as they only have a +5 to Con saves.

Thus, I think it's actually worth it for us to spend a point on Stunning Strike each turn as well (assuming we hit) to burn through Legendary Resistances that much quicker. If we can land a grapple and a stun on turn 1, we could burn through all 3 LRs on turn 2 (though we'd have to be fairly lucky. Given that we're making 5 attacks per turn - assuming we aren't Elemental Bursting - there's a strong chance we'll land at least one attack per turn, but there's only about a half chance that the DK fails the save on any of these).

Thus, we're spending 3 FP our first turn and then 2 more for each subsequent turn, meaning we can sustain this for four turns, which is actually pretty good - few combats go longer than that. Now, we might need to use FP on other things - naturally if we get into a situation where we need to do something like Patient Defense or Step of the Wind, this "blank room" simulation no longer really applies.

    Damage Per Attack:

All of our attacks do the same damage and have the same hit chance, so this will be a pretty simple thing to calculate: We have a +9 to hit at this level, so we hit 50% of the time. Our attacks do 1d8+5 damage, or 9.5 on average, with an additional 4.5 damage on a crit. Thus:

50%x9.5 is 4.75 and then 5%x4.5 is .225, so we're looking at 4.975 damage per attack.

If we were to just leave it at that, with 5 attacks, that's a total of 24.875 damage.

That's not terribly impressive, but let's consider some other options.

    Elemental Bursting:

Because our various bonus action attacks are no longer tied to having to first take the Attack Action, we can actually replace our attacks with Elemental Burst. This costs 2 Focus Points, but lets us drop a Fireball-sized sphere of elemental energy that does, well, a Shatter's worth of damage. It deals, at level 10, 3d8 damage (we'll say Thunder as a default as that's pretty reliable, though all should work on a Death Knight). On a successful save, creatures take half damage.

Now, our Focus save DC is only 15. A Death Knight has a +6 to Dex saves (they get proficiency in Dex saves rather than Charisma, compared to a Paladin) but on top of that, they have Magic Resistance, so they'll have advantage on this save.

Thus, if they succeed on a 9 or higher and have advantage, we're looking at only a 40% chance squared, or 16% chance to actually fail the saving throw.

On a failure, they take 3d8, or 13.5 average damage, but they still take half, or 6.75 damage on a success.

Thus, this will do 13.5x16%, or 2.16 plus 6.75x84%, or 5.67, giving us a total damage of 7.83. Not only are we spending 2 FP on this, but we're also sacrificing our two regular attacks, which each do 4.975 damage on average, meaning we're about 2 damage behind.

Yeah, Elemental Burst is not bad for big groups of foes, but it's not worth it in this case for a single-target encounter.

    Burning Through Legendary Resistances:

Now, we need to talk about the nuance of advantage. In an ideal world, we can grapple the Death Knight, or stun them, and thus get advantage on our attacks against them.

Now, there's an interesting nuance at play here: a stunned target automatically fails Strength and Dexterity saving throws. While Stunning Strike is not as powerful as it used to be because it ends before our next turn (and we can only use it once per turn,) we can still use it both to give our subsequent attacks on our turn advantage as well as to automatically get our grapple off. However, we also do automatically get advantage on our next attack even if they succeed on their save, so there's some utility to trying it even if we can't get a failed save. The stun is somewhat ephemeral - it only lasts until the start of our next turn (though that's fantastic for our allies) but if we can stun them, we should then be able to automatically grapple them, and they'll notably not have an action on their next turn to break the grapple, so we will have advantage on our attacks thanks to the Grappler feat.

Stunning Strike is maybe the number one thing that a Death Knight would spend Legendary Resistances on.

So, how quickly can we burn through them?

Again, our Grapple DC is 17 while our Stunning Strike DC is 15. We'll assume we're burning both every turn. Both require us to land an attack on the target. With 5 attacks every turn and a 50% chance to miss, we have around a 97% chance to hit with at least one attack each turn, so I think we're talking really extraordinary bad luck if we don't.

If we have the opportunity to make a Stunning Strike, the Death Knight will make the save on a roll of 10 or higher - a 55% chance to succeed.

Against our one free grapple attempt per turn, the DC is higher, though they can choose to make a Dex save instead, which is actually higher for them. With a +6 against our DC of 17, they succeed on an 11 or higher, so a 50% chance.

So... what if we did something else?

What if we sacrificed our own damage to try to lock down this Death Knight on our first turn?

If we chose to, rather than attack, just try to grapple over and over on our first turn, how likely is it that they'd fail their saves?

(I'll concede here that as someone who hasn't taken a math class in about 21 years, I'm not sure if I have the tools to figure this out).

Now, we do need to land an attack to try Stunning Strike, and we also get a free grapple attempt if we hit with an unarmed strike, but only if we hit.

Ok, screw it, let's say that we just want to try to grapple the Death Knight at least to start with - to lock them down as soon as we can. In this case, we're going to make 5 grapple attempts.

With a 50% chance to fail or succeed, the chance that they don't fail on at least one of those attempts is a little over 3%. Thus, it's a little less than 97% that the Death Knight has to burn a legendary resistance.

But how likely is it that we can burn through all 3 on turn one?

Again, my early-2000s high school math skills are very fuzzy in the back of my memory, but let me imagine how to approach this:

With 5 attacks, we figure that there's a 97% chance that we get at least one failure. But if we set that failure aside, we now have 4 attacks that we'll need to have at least one failure in. Over four attacks, we've got a 93.75% chance for one to fail. Then, if we had those two failures, there are three remaining attacks on that turn, so there's an 87.5% chance that there was one failure among those.

So... uh... What does that actually tell us?

Ok, I think I've got it:

Basically, we have a 97% chance to burn through one LR. Within that 97% chance, there's a 94% chance (we're going to round) that we burn another one, so that's about a 91% chance. Then, within that 91% chance to burn two legendary resistances, we have an 87.5% chance to burn one on the other three attempts, giving us around an 80% chance to burn three.

That doesn't seem right, does it? Is the flaw here that we're accounting for the earlier saving throws multiple times? Given that we need a majority of the saving throws to fail, I'd assume that with even odds, that'd be less likely to happen than not. Or is this just a place where intuition is misleading me?

Again, let me think about this:

We figured out the chance for any one of the saving throws in a set of 5 is to fail was 97%, because every single one failing would be 50% to the fifth power, which is about 3%.

Is the next move to multiply that by the chance that we get a failure on the four remaining dice?

Ah, this is driving me nuts and it's late at night. I'm sure someone who understands basic statistics would figure this out for me in moments. But, let's just figure out one more thing:

    Damage with Advantage:

There are a lot of ways to get advantage on our attacks in 5.5, and while we don't have the Vex property to work with, if we do succeed in grappling and/or stunning the Death Knight, how will that affect our damage output?

Well, thankfully, with a clean 50% hit chance, it's pretty easy to figure out what our hit chance is with advantage: 75% to hit, and the usual 9.75% to crit. Once again, our hit damage is 1d8+5, or 9.5, and our extra d8 of damage on a crit is 4.5. So, 9.5x75% is 7.125 and 4.5x9.75% is .43875, so our average damage per attack when we have advantage is roughly 7.6.

Thus, if and when we do get advantage on all our attacks, our damage jumps up to 37.8 per turn, which is a pretty enormous jump, and I think pretty respectable.

I'm sort of giving up on how long it will take us to burn through a Death Knight's legendary resistances to accomplish this state. (I really don't feel like there's an 80% chance we get 3 failures on turn one, but I can't figure out where the logic in my math falls apart.) But not only will it greatly benefit us, it will also potentially really help protect our party. Other combatants won't get the advantage we gain from grappling the target, sure, but we can ensure the Death Knight isn't able to attack the squishier members of the party, and we can drag them through dangerous terrain (I will say, there's a bit of a rules blind spot when it comes to dragging a foe around us rather than just pulling them after us) - like pulling the Death Knight through a Spike Growth or something of the sort.

Short Adventures in Ravenloft: Darkon

 Darkon is a tough nut to crack.

Possibly the largest of the Domains of Dread (other than crazy cosmic ones like Klorr,) Darkon is also gradually wasting away because Azalin (seemingly) accomplished what Strahd could not - escaping his position as a Darklord and leaving his domain.

The problem for the people who live there is that, having failed as a domain, it's now starting to fall apart. While some would-be Darklords (unaware of the cost of taking on such a role) vie to succeed Azalin, I don't know that any of them are likely to do so.

In theory, eventually, Darkon will just vanish, its people evaporating and becoming one with the Mists (perhaps those with souls will go on to be reincarnated elsewhere in the Domains).

Darkon is so vast that you could do an entire campaign set there, but we're here for a short, 1-4 session adventure. The challenge here is that we have an embarrassment of options in front of us.

I think for our adventure, we're going to try to look at the destruction of Darkon in microcosm. I think, to let the horror really land, we're going to go bleak.

I've recently (as detailed in this blog) been re-playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. The game begins with a stark and painful scene, in which the people of the city of Lumiere gather for the Gommage, where everyone above an ever-shrinking age limit dissolve away, nothing remaining but red rose petals. Each time the age limit goes down (once a year,) anyone of that age or higher is lost. The horror is both this moment of approaching death, but also the way that the culture has just had to sort of adapt to this and normalize it.

I don't know that we're going to crib this word-for-word, but I think that the party comes to a town where people are spontaneously dissolving away. I don't think this is one of the major cities - it's a somewhat remote town in the Mistlands, maybe north of Maykle. Our village, we'll call it Vadrikar, was once one of a series of farming hubs in the region, connected to similar villages by a network of roads.

One by one, as the Mists encroached, the other villages were swallowed up, and nothing but eery silence and the consuming Shroud to be seen.

But Vadrikar was saved - a mendicant priest from the church of Ezra in Il Aluk, Father Gregor Talbot, arrived and set up a number of blessed runestones that would hold the Shroud (as the now-ravenous Mists in Darkon are known) at bay. And for years, the stones, blessed daily by the elderly priest, have kept the Shroud from approaching at all.

However, a month ago, something bizarre and terrifying began to happen: villagers, in the midst of their daily routine, would suddenly begin to dissolve, their bodies collapsing into heaps of black ash. And it seems to be accelerating - only one person "departed," (as the villagers euphemistically describe it) the first week. Two did on the second and third week. But this past week, there were three, and as the party gets to town, they see a fourth.

The general opinion, espoused especially by the village tavernkeeper, a burly human woman named Tabitha, is that Father Talbot's wards are failing. Talbot himself is sequestered at the rectory of the local church. He was already an old man when he arrived at the village, and his health seems to be failing.

The party can investigate the runestones, most of which are placed in barrows out around the village where the ashes of the dead are interred (they favor cremation in Darkon because bodies rise in undeath).

In each barrow, incorporeal undead can be found - specters, shadows, poltergeists, maybe wraiths if the party's a bit higher-level. The undead are maddened and incoherent in their ramblings, and visually, they look bizarre - great big holes where their faces should be (here I'm taking some inspiration from the appearance of the Curator in Expedition 33.)

It becomes clear to the party that these beacons seem to be drawing the undead here, the souls rooted to them, but as the spirits are defeated, they seem to fall horizontally toward the village itself, as if gravity turned 90 degrees for them (and, you know, they suddenly were affected by gravity).

Triangulating the spirits' bearings will be one way the party can discover that all of them are going toward the Rectory.

Going to see Father Talbot, they find him lying in bed with deadly poison dripping from his lips. He shows all signs of being dead, but using something like Divine Sense or Detect Evil and Good will show that he, very faintly, is actually undead.

Searching his belongings, they'll find some mad writings - Father Talbot writes, with a regretful tone, that he has been able to find only one longterm solution to the Shroud: That he must gather the people of these villages into his "ark," and when it is full, cast it through the Mists to arrive in some happier place, where their souls will live on within him.

In fact, Talbot is in the process of becoming a Lich, and his efforts to "save" the people of Vadrikar have actually been to feed their souls into his phylactery, which now sits hidden in the basement of the church rectory. The party can make their way into the hidden chamber in the basement that holds it, a reliquary holding some of Talbot's bones (we'll say maybe he was always missing a finger). It's guarded by some challenging undead creature - depending on the level of the party, maybe a Wight or a Revenant.

The downer ending we get here is that while the party is fighting the guardian, Talbot completes his transformation. He steps down into the basement, and offers forgiveness to the party, who he thinks simply do not understand the "sacrifice" he has made for these people. He takes his soul jar and teleports away, not taking any offensive action against the party. When the party emerges from the rectory, Vadrikar has been wiped out, every person in it reduced to ash.

    Now, ok, a proscribed ending - and one in which the players lose - might not sit well with your players. I honestly think this would be a very solid kick-off for a campaign. Maybe Talbot becomes the big bad that the party is chasing, or at least a major antagonist. But lest we feel like this is too rail-roady, we might give the players some opportunities to save the village.

Perhaps, for example, we have Talbot's lichy ambitions revealed earlier. He surrounds the Rectory with a Wall of Force or similar magic, but the party can disrupt his soul-siphoning runestones by destroying them at the Barrows, forcing a confrontation with the old priest while he's still mortal.

The Priest stat block is CR 2, so you could use that if the party was just level 1 or 2. You might still want to use that for him, but make sure that there are a lot of undead monsters between the party and him, because he won't last super long. I could also imagine giving him the Mage stat block, but understand that that's going to be a really serious fight before tier 2 - which might be fine. In fact, I'd be tempted to make him an Archmage given that he's about to become a Lich, but in that case, he's going to obliterate a low-level party. As such, I might play up the idea that he truly holds no ill will toward the party: the Archmage stat block mostly has offensive spells, but using Counterspell and maybe giving them an upcast Hold Person (say 7th level, which would almost certainly hit the entire party) could let him overwhelm the party without slaughtering them.

Next up, we'll figure something out for the deadly masquerades of Dementlieu.

Short Adventures for Ravenloft: The Carnival

 Now, this one's a bit of a challenge. The Carnival, as a domain, is very small, and I honestly think that its role in a larger campaign could be primarily to act as a periodic respite for the players - not quite a home base, but a way to briefly escape whatever domain they're in.

Still, it is a domain of dread, which means that it's not a good place to be, and operates on a certain nightmare logic. But it is a little different: its borders don't work the same way, and it's Isolde, not its actual Darklord, the sentient sword Nepenthe, that suffers from the domain's torments.

Thus, I think we're going to focus less on theme than on aesthetic here: the creepy, deadly carnival is a classic horror trope, with things like calliope music and clowns, which are intended to be fun and entertaining for all ages, taking on a much more sinister air (though I do think part of the appeal of these things is the vague sense of danger - there's a thrill to it).

Isolde isn't really evil at heart, so she can easily act as a friendly NPC sending people out on quests.

So, here's my pitch:

Since the release of the 2025 Monster Manual, I've been obsessed with the Haunting Revenant stat block, a vengeful spirit that possesses an entire building. Nepenthe, the actual Darklord of The Carnival, is an instrument of vengeance, so we actually do have this thematic connection.

The thing is, I don't think you should ever have a Haunting Revenant show up as just a normal monster, like a Hell House from Final Fantasy VII in that one stretch of broken freeway in Midgar. Instead, I think that you need an entire mystery built around it, and it should not be apparent that the building is a creature immediately.

So: Isolde contacts the party and tells them that something unnerving has happened: a new Funhouse has appeared on the Carnival Grounds that none of her employees recall actually putting there. This being Ravenloft, that's not entirely unprecedented, but she's seen customers enter it and no one seems to see them ever come out.

She wants the party to investigate.

Upon arriving, the Funhouse - actually a Haunting Revenant, the spirit of a clown who had worked at the Carnival back when it was under the management of Mr. Witch and Mr. Light (Van Richten's plays coy, but we find out in Wild Beyond the Witchlight that Isolde traded the Witchlight Carnival to them for this one). Bonko the Clown (I was almost going to call him Bonko the Bozo and then remembered that Bozo was just literally the name of a famous clown) had long complained about the shoddy carpentry of the stage that he performed at, but Witch and Light refused to pay to have it fixed up, and mid-performance, the proscenium arch collapsed, and a shard of wood impaled Bonko in front of a horrified audience. Bonko performed primarily for children, and his spirit was enraged by the fact that he was now a source of trauma rather than joy, and vowed with his dying thoughts to destroy the management of the carnival.

When the party arrives to see the funhouse, called "Bonko's House of Mirrors" (the name Bonko is unknown - Isolde never met the guy, so it's not a dead giveaway,) he uses the Invitation ability to draw as many members of the party in as he can.

Here, then, we actually treat the building more like a mini-dungeon. I think murderous clowns, manifestations of Bonko's rage, assault the party. We could use Performer stat blocks - probably some mix of standard Performers and Maestros, as the party will want to be at least mid-tier 2 in order to survive a fight against the revenant. I would also take a look at Space Clowns from Spelljammer as a very fitting stat block to use here. At CR 3, they can probably work quite well for a party that would ultimately be taking on a CR 10 boss monster.

Note, though, that the Haunted Zone trait is going to potentially make any combat in here harder for anyone relying on spells - it's basically a universal Counterspell that also wastes the spell slot, so encounters with the Performers/Clowns should be tuned as low-difficulty encounters, possibly even going significantly lower than the suggested XP budget.

Now, one of the challenges of using a Haunting Revenant as a dungeon is that, theoretically, the party ought to be able to attack it as soon as they realize that it's a creature. Theoretically, if no one fails the Charisma saving throw from Invitation, we might not actually get them to go inside.

That said, if they do start to attack it from the outside, it can use its Invitation ability as often as it wants.

I might even fudge it and say that they have to make it through the maze of mirrors in order to actually find a vulnerable part of the revenant (though I'd also limits its ability to attack them until they do to be fair).

I think as they make their way through the house of mirrors, the party starts to get the story of Bonko, with old black-and-white photos of his performances, and then, maybe, bizarre photos that actually depict his demise.

I think the murder-clowns might also show signs of what killed him - maybe they walk around with giant splinters of wood protruding through their heads (we could even make them undead).

How sympathetic Bonko is can be adjusted, largely by who he picks as victims. Maybe no one has actually gone in there yet if he's trying to focus his vengeance only on management and whatever goons (the party) they're employing. Indeed, the mystery might not be missing customers, but just the fact that no one seems to be able to get inside.

Either way, it should be a fun creature-as-dungeon kind of adventure, with just maybe a single combat encounter in the midst of the broader encounter with the revenant.

Next, we're going big with the vast, crumbling domain of Darkon, with its absent Darklord.

Short Adventures for Ravenloft: Borca

 Ok, confession: this is one of the settings I'm least inspired by. An oddity of a domain, Borca is dominated by two Darklords who exist in an eternal rivalry but also have different schticks. Ivana Boristi is a ruthless noblewoman who is also a master poisoner, using the gardens and greenhouses of her estate to generate toxins, while Ivan Dilisnya is a crazed man-child with an army of clockwork toys.

While they reflect opposite expressions of it - Ivana an ambitious woman underestimated because of her eternal youth and Ivan a creepy man-child who's actually quite old in appearance - both embody the weirdness and myopia of the ultra-wealthy.

And, frankly, not to get too real-world on everyone, we're sort of in an era where out-of-touch plutocrats with bizarre worldviews built on a constant feedback loop of yes-men have become real deadly menaces. Borca might not be all that fantastical when such people are calling the shots in the real world.

The ultra-wealthy, whether they be landed aristocrats or billionaire tech bros, always seem to forget that common people are actually, you know, people. They see those below their socio-economic class as "NPCs" who serve more of a statistical purpose for their own enrichment and ego than being individuals with their own dreams and desires.

I think that's what we lean into with this adventure.

These adventures are not meant to be the definitive one for each domain - I'd have used vampires in the Barovia one if that were the case. Thus, I'll focus in on a particular aesthetic and theme:

Ivan Dilisnya is a man-child obsessed with toys. He hides in his estate, affecting the identity of a little boy (I imagine that people aren't generally aware that he's really an old man). But he also makes clockwork toys to entertain him.

I think that we have the action start in a place like Lechberg, a town near the Dilisnya estate (with no real description in Van Richten's, at least). The party arrives to find the town is covered in banners and advertisements about the upcoming Clockwork Parade, a festival to bring some cheer and frivolity to the town.

The party perhaps knows an NPC from Lechberg, and is going to meet them there on the day of the parade. We'll say this is a friendly child named Sasha - maybe the party is better-acquainted with one or both of Sasha's parents.

Heralded by a clockwork jester, as well as clockwork automaton of Ivan, the parade seems pretty whimsical, but there are so many marching toys that it's had to see through them to others in the gathered crowds. In the commotion, someone who makes a good perception check sees that some of the toy soldiers are actually grabbing people from the street. Perhaps a big clockwork owlbear or something actually swallows some members of the crowd whole, but in that truly nightmarish way, no one seems to notice with all the music and entertainment.

By the time the parade has left town, dozens of townsfolk have been abducted, but many are reluctant to even mention it because they fear criticizing the entertainment that their kind lord has provided for them.

However, the party finds that Sasha was among the people taken, and they track the clockwork parade (which has notably picked up the pace significantly once out of town) back to the Dilisnya Estate.

(Alternatively, maybe the Clockwork Parade actually takes either some or all of the party members.)

There, they find that the abducted people are being forced to serve as game pieces in Ivan's games - for example, he has a chess game where the pieces are played by townsfolk who are dressed up for their role, but when a piece is taken, the person playing them is killed.

The party must fight their way through Ivan's constructs, trying to free the captured people. I think as they delve deeper, they find as well that the clockwork soldiers in the parade, who had very convincingly realistic faces, are made by grafting the faces of Ivan's victims onto the constructs.

If done at low levels, one can use things like Animated Armor to represent the Clockwork soldiers. Some might also use simple beast or monstrosity stat blocks, but with a few adjustment to make them work as constructs.

At higher levels, again, you have a lot of leeway by just taking various humanoid (or other) stat blocks and turning them into constructs (giving things like poison immunity and immunity to charm and fear effects).

Logically, this adventure probably does lead to a confrontation with Ivan, but I think that the key to making Ivan work is to start off with a sense of innocence: Ivan speaks throughout his estate through some kind of speaker system, and affects a little boy's voice - play up the idea that Ivan is actually an innocent victim in all of this whose toys have run amok. The party doesn't see Ivan until they start to realize that he isn't what he says he is (I think he becomes very possessive of Sasha, trying to turn them into his "best friend" by converting them into a special toy).

Once the party actually finds Ivan, he's not going to be much of a physical threat, but he ought to be protected by powerful construct minions - maybe even give him a Shield Guardian. If you do so, and the party is still low level, probably build the adventure with an expectation that the party doesn't defeat him, but merely has to flee the estate with Sasha and anyone else they can rescue.

Just on an aesthetic level, I think you could look to the puppets from the game Lies of P for inspiration on how to describe the "toys" that Ivan has turned his victims into.

I do see this probably as being one of the lower-level adventures in the series if you choose to string these all together as an anthology. Next, the fun and games don't stop: we're heading to The Carnival.

Reexperiencing Expedition 33's Massive Plot Point Two

 I think there are four really major gut-punches in Expedition 33's story. The game's gorgeous visuals and really satisfying gameplay might distract you from how devastatingly emotionally painful the story is. But I remember playing the game the first time, the end of Act Two forced me to set the game down for a bit and just... recover.

I don't think it's a spoiler to say that the game strongly hints that something is up. There are too many lines of dialogue, visual hints, character moments, and questions about the world itself that make you wonder if you're not getting the full story.

That being said, I remember still being woefully unprepared for what was to come in this act break.

To avoid spoiling anyone who hasn't played it yet (it's funny to think the game's still only about a year old) we'll do a spoiler cut.

SPOILERS AHEAD:

Short Adventures for Ravenloft: Bluetspur

 Bluetspur is a weird, weird domain of dread.

There's already an element of cosmic horror just to the nature of Ravenloft. Even if its iconic monsters are often drawn from more gothic and dark fantasy tropes, the nature of the setting as this kind of perpetual prison that re-shapes itself to maintain a deadly status quo means that one can never feel confident that one understands it.

Cosmic horror and psychological horror are kind of opposites - one is about the terror of the vastness beyond ourselves, and the other is about the horrors lurking within our minds. And yet, there's kind of an overlap, with madness a very common trope in it.

Bluetspur doesn't make sense. While a place like Barovia will play tricks on you, a looping road through the Svalich Wood that ought not to make sense, for example, Bluetspur just doesn't compute. A vast mountain is always in view regardless of which direction you face.

There's no map of Bluetspur, because I don't think you're ever meant to really understand where you are there.

One of the major tropes of Bluetspur is a little bit of sci-fi invading our fantasy game (I think cosmic horror is often where dark fantasy and sci-fi start to overlap: a bit of the supernatural in an otherwise rational sci-fi universe, or a bit of the alien that doesn't exist within understood hierarchies and spectrums of good and evil in fantasy,) and that is the Alien Abduction trope.

In stories like the X-Files, the experience of alien abduction is harrowing, and also frustratingly vague - people find they've lost time, the clock jumping from 10 pm to 4 am with noting to mark the jump but a flash of bright light, and then only later might they recall dream-like experiences of strange experimentation, monstrous creatures, pain and horror.

This is absolutely how Bluetspur operates - its Mind Flayer inhabitants seek a way to cure the dying God Brain, the Darklord, and travel the Mists abducting people to experiment upon. The God Brain's actions that had it taken in by the Dark Powers and its torment are kept a little vague. Mind Flayers are already very alien beings, and also horrifyingly monstrous, and so I think that of all Darklords, we need not make the God Brain into a character the players really interact with very much.

I also think that Bluetspur is so weird that we should only really see it briefly.

But this is an adventure that's supposed to be set there, and while I think you could do an adventure dealing with the effects of contact with Bluetspur in another domain, I want to actually make an adventure set there.

But it won't seem like that.

Ok, first off, the players have an abduction experience. If it's a fresh group of characters, these could all happen separately - maybe the players are from different domains, or even from outside the Mists. If they're already a party, they might have one of these experiences together - traveling down the road, a blinding light appears above them, and they all feel a moment of breathlessness and panic, but then it's gone, and the sun is now in a different position in the sky.

Personally, I'd start them off in Lamordia, as its kind of steampunk vibe feels like it plays nicely with the tropes of cosmic horror, but you could have them in other locations. Anyway, this bizarre experience can kind of be brushed aside - a mystery with no clear explanation, but that also has merely inconvenienced them, and they can head on to their next destination (we'll say Ludendorf).

However, to rip this band-aid off for you readers, the truth is that they're not in Lamordia at all. They're actually in a shared illusory reality within the alien labs of Bluetspur.

Something feels off when they get to the city - the layout of the streets is unfamiliar - but this could be written off as Ravenloft being Ravenloft. The party is en route to meet with an old friend of theirs, a Professor Schulberg. En route to the Professor's home, they are attacked on the streets by crazed people, ranting and raving and begging to be "let out." The people are showing signs of strange mutilations - we probably just want to use normal humanoid stat blocks like bandits, cultists, spies, etc.

The party then eventually gets to Schulberg's home, where they find her in a dreadful state - the professor is undergoing a terrible transformation, her body turning into some kind of aberration, like a Grick. The process is slow and painful, but she still has enough of her mind to tell the party that they need to escape. Before she can finish her explanation, her "nurse" bursts in and tries to force the party to leave so they can administer a "sedative."

The nurse, it turns out, is actually a Mind Flayer overseeing the illusory reality, and Schulberg screams, accusing the nurse of being her torturer. If the party doesn't fend her off, Schulberg's transformation is completed and she is no longer able to help them, but the Nurse will then turn their attention to the party.

Should the party slay the nurse, the illusion of being a normal humanoid breaks, and their mind flayer nature is revealed. If Schulberg is still alive, she can tell them that they aren't in Ludendorf (or wherever the adventure is falsely set) but are in the clutches of these alien beings. They need to find the exit point to this simulation, which she says can be found in a building "with the belladonna flowers." Schulberg is, at best, barely hanging onto her humanity anymore, or if the party allowed the nurse to finish their work, they'll find this information in some of the professor's notes.

Going out into the streets, the transformed, aggressive people are now fully transformed into monsters like Umber Hulks, Hook Horrors, or maybe aberrations like Chuuls. Also, the false nature of the city becomes more obvious - I like to imagine that there are street signs that have that blurry, illegible text like from early AI-generated images.

Ultimately, the party finds their way to the Nightshade Hotel (belladonna is another name for Nightshade,) and finds in the lobby a strange black stone obelisk that seems to weep an unctuous fluid. Touching the obelisk wakes them from the false reality, and they find themselves in a dark, alien laboratory (heavy on the H.R. Giger vibes).

At this point, I think the threat is less physical - the Mind Flayers here are just your basic variety, and not in great numbers, because they expect the subjects to all be sedated in the dream-state. But I think the player characters might find that they're weakened by the experiments performed on them - even starting off with a level or two of exhaustion.

Because of that, any combat they encounter in the lab should actually be pretty trivial - just like, a single Mind Flayer at a time, maybe a Gibbering Mouther made of the combined remains of other experimental victims.

The party must find their way out of the labs, and eventually finds a hatch marked with the holy symbol of Ezra (a surprisingly intelligible bit of signage in a place lacking it otherwise,) which opens up into a wall of Mist, and from there, they can escape.

More than our Barovia adventure, I think this would need to take place over the course of a few sessions unless your players can resolve things very quickly. We're also probably going to want the players to be closer to mid levels, as we want a single Mind Flayer with the entire party at two levels of exhaustion to still be a pretty trivially easy fight (we might even take away the Mind Flayer's Dominate Monster ability just to be safe).

I pitched this idea to my best friend, and he pointed out that if we were doing all these adventures as a series, setting this one ostensibly in Lamordia might be a giveaway if we also have a different adventure set there. I don't know that that would totally ruin it, but you could naturally just have it in some other setting (maybe one of the Other Domains, like Zherisia, or just a homebrewed one).

Next up, we'll have some decisions to make in the dual-Darklord realm of Borca.

Short Adventures for Ravenloft: Barovia

 I love the Ravenloft setting. I wasn't really a goth as a teenager, but having grown up in a century-old Victorian house in New England, having loved Halloween as my favorite holiday, and honestly, probably because of the Orange and Purple Ed Emberley drawing books, I've just had a lifelong affection for the trappings of spookiness.

The setting can work for an ongoing campaign, but I think it's also a setting that's uniquely useful for short-form adventures and one-shots. Each domain is a pocket-dimension floating in the Mists, and as realms of horror, you can quite easily motivate a party to simply try to escape it.

Each domain has its Darklord, an evil character, often of a monstrous nature, who is both its prisoner and its tyrant (though not always obviously in charge of the domain). The domain is a reflection of the Darklord.

The module that spun out into the full setting was the original Ravenloft adventure, in which the party had to delve into the deadly Castle Ravenloft and face the vampire Strahd von Zarovich. As the setting developed, it became canonical that his realm, Barovia, was the first of the Domains of Dread, and he is the first vampire in the D&D cosmos.

Barovia is also the most famous domain because it is the setting of arguably 5th Edition's best adventure book, Curse of Strahd, itself a kind of modernized update of the original Ravenloft module (taking into account the later expansion of Barovia to include sites such as Vallaki, Krezk, and the Amber Temple).

And what that means, then, is that if we want to do a short adventure or one-shot set there, we should probably try to go about it in a different manner than just "go fight Strahd."

Darklords are villains, but they need not be antagonists. Travelers in the Mists might be well-advised to get on a Darklord's good side. The nature of the Domains means this won't work out so well in the long run, but they are powerful.

Also, the nature of the Domains is that they are both always reverting to their miserable state but also always shifting, unbound by any sense of "continuity." They run on nightmare logic. That means that we can use familiar locations from Barovia and do something very different with them.

So, first off, I think that we probably have this adventure involve Strahd as our quest-giver, inverting his usual role. Strahd is sinister, but also charming, and can play a sense of Byronic tragedy to elicit sympathy even though it's pure manipulation. Still, he is in a position of power: the party finds themselves trapped in Barovia, and Strahd has the ability to open the Mists and allow them out (though only to another Domain).

Strahd's primary torment is his inability to claim the woman over whom he obsesses, Tatyana, who is cursed as well to reincarnate in Barovia over and over, never able to fully escape the vampire. But that's not his only interest: for countless years, he collaborated with best frenemy Azalin Rex (the disappeared lich Darklord of Darkon) to try to understand the nature of the Mists and escape from them. The two had a falling out (as tends to happen with powerful narcissists) and I think this is a good hook for what he might want:

Our MacGuffin will be a tome of secrets written by Azalin. We'll say it has insights into the Goddess Ezra, seemingly a real divinity that exists within the Mists, but also has very different natures depending on the domain (I think sometimes kind and protecting, other times evil and deathly). For the sake of keeping it vague, we'll say that Azalin wrote it in a cipher that only he and Strahd shared.

Ok, so we've got a MacGuffin - success in the adventure means delivering this tome (we'll call it "The Tome of the Silver Shield," after one of Ezra's holy symbols) to Strahd. Now, where might they find it, and who might guard it?

Barovia reflects Strahd, and I think at his core, he's an avaricious being - he slew his brother over his obsession with the woman his brother was going to marry, and it wasn't like she had expressed any interest in him. The monsters of Barovia are hungry, ravenous, and obsessive.

Naturally, vampires are the most iconic monsters of Ravenloft, and probably most of them can trace their lineage back to Strahd. (While Strahd is canonically the first vampire in the D&D multiverse, I don't know that we can be sure that every vampire is the direct "descendant" of his, as others might have been created by the Dark Powers or other entities - though those in Barovia are probably from his bloodline.) I also love that we get a bit of a variety of vampires, like the Vampire Nightbringers, which are more beastly, inhuman versions, or the Nosferatu from Van Richten's, which honestly kind of fill a similar role.

But if we want to deviate slightly from the obvious route while still living in that undead, devouring mode, I think we should use Ghouls.

Ghouls and Ghasts are an interesting form of undead. While zombies are mindless, ghouls retain a bit more humanoid intelligence. Your standard ghoul is still pretty dumb - they only have a 7 intelligence - but they're still capable of speech. Ghasts are basically smarter, more powerful ghouls - personally, I treat them as part of the same "monster family" much as vampires are grouped together.

One of the defining traits of Ghouls is that they eat corpses (necrophage? Would that be the term?) They're also violent and evil, and may very well make people into corpses - and there, I think, we have our hook.

In Van Richten's, domains are often associated with different horror subgenres. Barovia is hardcore Gothic Horror to be sure - a genre that can mean many things, but on an emotional level, it's about the fear of the dark urges that lurk within, either within ourselves or within others. Strahd is someone who has been completely overtaken and redefined by his dark urges, and so the horror is that for all of his pretense as a noble lord, he's a vicious beast that will kill you.

Still, while places like Tepest are more classically associated with Folk Horror, I think there's a bit of an element of this in Barovia, such as the bizarre festivals in Vallaki or the evil druids of Yester Hill.

    So, let's pitch this:

The party is trapped in Barovia, the misty borders closed to them. They receive a letter from Strahd, inviting them to Castle Ravenloft for a proposal of "mutually beneficial cooperation." Strahd greets them at the castle and presents them with the quest: their reward will be a "magical trinket" that will see them through the Mists (in fact, it's not magical, just a mundane object with Nystul's Magic Aura on it to make it look like it has divination magic on it).

He says that he wishes for the party to retrieve the Tome of the Silver Shield from a ruined chapel in the Svalich Woods that he will not enter because of "ancient sworn pacts and oaths." He presents the party with a map and perhaps even some funds and/or gear.

The party follows the path presented by the map, perhaps encountering some spooky monsters along the way (depending on the level, this might be giant spiders or bats or blights - not wolves, though, because I think Strahd directly commands all the wolves in Barovia).

When they come across the chapel, though, they see that it has been recently broken into, and the tome is missing, but a path of bent and broken bushes and undergrowth, which seems like it was created by a cart being pulled through the woods, leads off in another direction.

The party finds that the track leads to a tiny hamlet - basically just a couple of buildings, all of which are decrepit and run down, and look abandoned. However, there are some villagers there, dressed in thick clothing and all with high collars pulled up over their mouths (think like the poster for Brotherhood of the Wolf, or if you prefer, Bloodborne, whose look was inspired by that movie) and with very pale skin.

If they ask the villagers about the book, an individual named Luko will tell them that they took it from the chapel out of fear that it would be damaged by the elements, and that it is being stored in the Elder's house.

There would be signs that something's amiss - for one thing, a Divine Sense or similar magic would make it clear they're all undead. But the state of the hamlet would also raise some questions, and the inhabitants would not be very good at explaining away the sorry state of things.

If and when they enter the Elder's house, you could either play it quick and simple - just having them go in and find that there's a feast hall with a table covered with rotting meat, and then the ghouls swarm in on them, or you could play it slower, and have the party walk in to a room with a trapped floor that collapses, trapping them in a pit to be held for later.

Naturally, the party would need to fight their way out, but a search of the Elder's house would yield the tome.

Now, depending on the level of the party, we'd use different types of ghouls and ghasts. For tier 1 characters, we might just stick entirely with Ghouls, which are CR 1 - meaning that we probably don't want to even attempt this adventure until level 3 or so.

More likely, I think a party probably wants to be level 5 or so before they're traveling across Barovia. In that case, we could still just use Ghouls, though we start to really have to outnumber the party. Note, though, that Ghouls have an attack that paralyzes, so bumping the numbers up might wind up making the fight not super fun. At this stage, I'd probably swap in some Ghasts.

If we're at the higher end of tier 2, like level 8ish, we could consider throwing in a Ghast Gravecaller, perhaps playing the role of the Elder whose house this is. These guys are a big jump in CR, and thus XP, so you really want to use them a boss monster supported by ghast or ghoul minions.

Now, I think to make this adventure memorable, you should really play up the deviousness of the ghouls. They are not charismatic monsters (even the Gravecaller has a negative to Charisma) and so the party will very likely sense something is wrong - though you don't need to reveal the full truth simply on a good insight check, instead you can simply say that these beings seem to have another agenda.

Ultimately, this is going to lead to a big combat encounter in the hamlet - either in the streets or the elder's house. I don't know that I'd put too much energy into fleshing out the entire ghoulish community here - probably just make Luko and perhaps the Elder into fleshed-out NPCs.

One question to consider is why the ghouls took the Tome of the Silver Shield. The simplest answer is that they knew that it was the kind of thing that people would seek out, and would thus be a good lure for potential victims.

But I think it might be more interesting if we have something tragic about it: everything in Barovia leads back to Strahd, and so I think it would make sense that the ghouls were cursed into their current state by the vampire lord himself. Perhaps they are, or are the descendants of, the original inhabitants of the valley whom Strahd conquered back when he was human. Most capitulated and swore fealty to him, but these were those who remained defiant.

This would mean that, true to Ravenloft's Darklords, the terror is fundamentally the fault of the domain's lord. Maybe the ghouls are trying to find the wisdom in the tome to reverse their state.

If you have players who are sympathetic to this cause, you probably want a horror rug-pull - maybe if the players are convinced by the ghouls to at least let them try to use the tome to reverse the curse, they then discover some historical texts or clues that, well, actually, the people of this hamlet were always murderous cannibals, and that Strahd's curse was simply to force them to manifest physically their inner evil, and the ghouls always intended to eat the party one way or another.

There's a good chance that this will wind up largely boiling down to one big combat encounter. Thus, we'd want to make the arena for said encounter interesting. If it takes place in the Elder's house, see if you can put together a multi-level building. The building is in a state of rot and decay, so parts of the stairs or landings, or even just floors on the second floor might break through to the floor below. Walls might also be weak enough to be easily destroyed, so ghouls and intrepid party members might smash through them.

If the fight breaks out in the village square, you might be a little more challenged in making the area dynamic, but I think having the buildings weirdly close to one another, with tiny alleys for ghouls to hide in out of line of sight could help.

If I have the creative juices, I'm going to try to do one of these for each of the primary domains listed in Van Richten's, which means we're going to far weirder places with Bluetspur next.