Inner Shadow Barbarian vs. Death Knight

 Yes, I'm doing a build/damage calculation for a homebrewed subclass!

As a note, I think that I'm already altering the design slightly: I love the flavor of Raging Hurl, the 6th level feature (see the previous post for a breakdown of the subclass as a whole,) but it's a little over-designed and fiddly.

Thus, I think I'm going to go with the alternative that I proposed in that previous post and switch it to something simpler:

Level 6: Enraged Manipulation:

While you are in a Rage, creatures have disadvantage on their saving throws against your attempts to Grapple or Shove them with an Unarmed Strike.

Now, that could make my life calculating damage a little harder, given that the Grappler feat gives us advantage on attacks against grappled targets, and so we would need to figure out how likely it is that the Death Knight gets grappled by us. Luckily, we have an out: we just use Reckless Attack every turn so that everything has advantage, whether we are grappling the Death Knight or not. Grappling would still have great utility, allowing us to keep the DK from our allies and even maybe drag them off of a steed, assuming they don't Legendary Resistance out of our grapples.

Still, we'll just assume we're hitting it with our unarmed strikes, and maybe making a grapple attempt one one attack each turn with the Grappler feat, but focusing more on damage.

    Stats:

This is simple: we start off with 17 in Strength and then whatever we need for good Dex and Con. We can even kind of dump Wisdom a bit if we just want to rely on Primal Knowledge for the big Wisdom checks.

    Feats:

Here's where we're going to need to be creative. Typical Barbarian feats like Great Weapon Master, Polearm Master, and even Dual Wielding don't work with this build. Now, the obvious one to take is Grappler. We could just cap Strength at level 8, and thus be able to boost our Dex and Con more at levels 12 and 16 if we go up that high later on, but I might instead take something like Mage Slayer and then figure out whether to split an ASI at 12 or find one last Strength-boosting feat. For the purposes of this white-room test, it'd be better to just cap things, but I'm going to say we go Mage Slayer as a more realistic choice in a long campaign. Sentinel could also be a good option as further control. That means only a +4 to Strength.

    Gameplan:

Very simple: we're going to rage and then we're going to do our best to pummel this Death Knight into next week. We'll use Reckless Attack, and I'm going to assume that we're taking at least a little damage each round and benefit from Shadow Manifestation. Notably, on round one, we aren't going to get our off-hand punch or that bonus because we A: need the bonus action to activate our rage and B: don't get the damage boost from taking damage until we are raging. If we can rage prior to combat, that's great, but we'll assume we can't.

So, turn one, it's rage-punch-punch, then turns two onward is punch-punch-punch.

    Damage:

Ok, let's get that first turn. Our attacks at this level deal 2d6+7, or 14 average damage on a hit (naturally something like Wraps of Unarmed Prowess would be good to have, but we have done all of these sans magic items unless we're an artificer who can make our own). We have a +8 to hit, which would normally give us a 45% chance to hit, but we're recklessly attacking, so it's actually a 69.75% chance, and a 9.75% chance to crit. Our bonus crit damage is 7 on average. So, we're looking at 9.765 plus .6825, or roughly 10.4 damage per attack, giving us 20.8 damage on average for our first turn.

Now, turn two, things accelerate:

First off, assuming we take some damage from the Death Knight (which feels likely but not guaranteed - though more likely if we can grapple them or lock them down if we take Sentinel) we'll be adding an additional 3 damage to each attacks, so it becomes 2d6+10, or 17 on a hit. The crit bonus is the same and just as likely, so we just find 69.75% of 17, or 11.8575, and then add in the .6825 extra damage for crits, and we get 12.54 damage for our main action attacks, or 25.08 damage.

However, we then get our "off-hand" attack, which lands for 2d6+6, or 13 on average, so, 69.75% of 13 is 9.0675, and adding the crit bonus gives us 9.75 damage.

Thus, we get a total damage of 34.83, which is very respectable but not insanely outside of the range of damage outputs we've seen before (I'm pretty sure it's behind our Wizard and Sorcerer builds).

However, I realized something: we forgot Brutal Strike.

So, going back, if we assume our first attack is going for a Brutal Strike, we need to drop one of our attacks. Given that our bonus action attack hits for less than our other strikes, it's actually probably ideal for that to be the one we risk having a lower hit chance for. We can't do that on turn one, though.

So, turn one, we drop the 10.4 damage from one of our action attacks and then find what we get without advantage but an additional d10. We have a 45% chance to hit with this and a 5% chance to crit. A hit deals 2d6+1d10+7 damage, which becomes 19.5 on a hit and an extra 9 damage on a crit. So, 19.5x45% is 8.775 and then 9x5% is .45, so that attack now deals 9.225 - which is a damage loss, actually. We might still want to do it for the chance at a Hamstring Blow.

On turn two, though, we can do this with our off-hand attack. Thus, we lose the 9.75 damage to do 2d6+1d10+6 damage without advantage, or 18.5. Given that that's less than the attack on turn one, I think losing advantage really does wind up being a damage loss even with the extra d10. Against a lower-AC target, I think that would change.

But thus, we can expect to deal 25.08 damage on average on our first turn and then a very healthy 34.83 damage on subsequent turns. I'm actually quite pleased with this result, which feels in-line with what other characters can do.

The Berserker build I did does better, and even winds up getting into the 40s if they can reliably get a Retaliation attack, so perhaps there are ways I could even soup this subclass up.

EDIT: Oh duh. I forgot Graze.

Now, I realize that there's a flaw here: our "off-hand" attack doesn't add our Strength, typically, but Graze is a mastery that allows us to do our Strength modifier in damage on a miss. Perhaps there's a reason that they don't put it on light weapons!

Turn one that issue shouldn't matter: we have a 30.25% chance to miss when we're attacking with advantage, so we can add 4x30.25% to each of those attacks, giving turn one's 10.4 damage per attack an extra 1.21 damage, bringing them up to 11.61, and thus the total damage on the first turn ought to be 23.22.

That extra 1.21 can be added as well to the two regular attacks on turn 2. But how do we square the off-hand attack?

Well, here's a place where we might just buff the subclass. Maybe our bonus action attack also gets to add the Strength modifier? After all, I think this is true for the d6 option for the Beast Barbarian (who kind of presaged the Nick property). Given that we dropped it in our earlier calculation, we can very easily just add a flat 4 to the damage of our off-hand unarmed strike. (Essentially, the other 69.75% of the damage is already accounted for in our Attack action attacks, adding up to 4 with that extra 1.21). So, now we're going to basically add 2.42+4 to the total damage done on turn 2+, or 6.42.

Thus, it becomes 41.25 damage on those subsequent turns, which is quite good. Is it too good? ...Maybe, but I also think that martial characters could stand to do more damage. And this is still contingent on taking damage each round.

Naturally, you might decide to take other Masteries than Graze, but for damage output, especially against a high-AC target like a Death Knight, it's the clear winner.

And yeah, I think I will drop the "don't add your Strength modifier" thing on the bonus action attacks, because not only does it make the subclass feel cooler, it's also simplifies it!

Homebrewing the Barbarian I Want to Play: Path of the Inner Shadow

 Barbarian is a class that I've often struggled to find a fun character hook for me to want to play one. I've only ever played one very briefly when the class was more or less assigned to me when we played basically a half-session of doing the first level of Dungeon of the Mad Mage, where I think we had one combat and even that I think I only got one turn in.

I've long wanted to play a werewolf Barbarian - Rage feels like a great way to represent a lycanthropic transformation. But the subclass that most suits that archetype is the Path of the Beast, which honestly has some design problems that make it a little underwhelming.

I've also, more recently, had the idea inspired by Scratch from Alan Wake II, of a kind of emergent shadow archetype that arises when a Barbarian rages - likely the character would be a pretty unassuming figure until they got covered in a silhouette of shadow (I've always visualized this like someone taking a Sharpie and blacking them out in every frame... except that you see this in person). While the Berserker, despite being ostensibly the "generic Barbarian" subclass, actually fits this surprisingly well, the one major downside is that you really still need to fight with a weapon.

There's no really great unarmed Barbarian. So I decided to make one.

Now, caveats: I do a fair amount of homebrewing of monsters, but I don't do as many with subclasses (let alone classes, though this is just a subclass,) and none of my homebrew subclasses have ever been playtested.

I'm very aware that as an amateur designer, there's a tendency to over-engineer things. I'm aware that the final version of this would have to be pared down a little. There might be one or two many bells-and-whistles to this thing. But I think the overall concept could be really cool.

I'll provide some commentary here like I would when commenting on a UA or recently published subclass, but to explain my reasonings and also concerns about the design. As usual, these will be marked by indenting before them.

Thus, let me present you with the first draft of...

Path of the Inner Shadow

Undergo a monstrous transformation, tearing foes apart with your bare hands.

All Barbarians channel their primal rage, but sometimes, the rage becomes too volatile to control. Rarely does a Barbarian choose to walk the Path of the Inner Shadow - the subconscious monster inside chooses it for them. As rage consumes you, your body shifts into a monstrous beast, becoming a whirling nightmare of blood and death.

Level 3: Monstrous Claws:

Empowered Fists: When you attack with an Unarmed Strike, you can now deal 1d6 damage plus your Strength modifier rather than the normal damage.

    This is achievable with something like the Unarmed Fighting style, but this ought to be baked into the subclass to make it clear this is "the unarmed Barbarian."

Flurry of Claws: When you make an Unarmed Strike as part of the Attack action and are not wielding a weapon or shield in either hand, you can make one additional Unarmed Strike as a bonus action. You do not add your Strength modifier to the damage of this attack.

    The intent here is to basically give your unarmed attacks the "light" property. This is one of the really odd things about the rules, that you can attack faster with some light weapons than you could with actually no weapons (and I think is comparable to the logic of giving Monks a free bonus action unarmed strike).

Practiced Rends: Choose Graze, Cleave, Push, or Topple. Your unarmed strikes benefit from the chosen mastery when you make an attack with them. When you finish a long rest, you can choose a different mastery for your unarmed strikes.

    One of the pitfalls of an unarmed Barbarian is that now that weapons have Masteries, you're really leaving a major part of your power on the table by choosing not to wield a weapon. The selection here might need some revisions - to bring it closer in line with light weapons you'd be using while dual-wielding, we might need to swap out something like Graze or Cleave for Vex, though I kind of like getting these heavy-weapon-only masteries here.

Level 3: Shadow Manifestation:

When your Rage is active, you take on a monstrous form. This might be a hulking, vaguely humanoid silhouette, a beastly hybrid creature, or a fiendish embodiment of chaos. When you take damage, your Rage damage bonus is doubled until the end of your next turn (the damage bonus cannot exceed twice your normal rage bonus).

    This is the real aesthetic headliner here - but I wanted to find a way to boost damage for the class in a different way than Berserkers or Zealots did. If we assume you're "dual-wielding your fists" you're probably making three attacks per round after level 5 (though only two on round 1 in order to go into a rage,) and assuming you do get hit (you are the Barbarian,) you'll thus be able to add 6, then 9, then 12 damage if you hit with all of them. By comparison, a Berserker will, once per turn, assuming they're always going Reckless, get 7, 10.5, and then 14 extra damage. So, this is slightly less and won't benefit from crits, but it might be ok because I think that the later benefits should make up for it. We could just change the values here to adjust it

Level 6: Nightmare Claws:

You can deal your choice of bludgeoning, piercing, slashing, psychic, or force damage when you deal damage with your unarmed strikes.

    This is a standard thing you get with subclass weapons and the like to ensure that you don't get screwed over if a monster is immune to normal physical damage (which is rarer in 5.5, but if you're facing monsters from 5.0, for example, this will help a lot, and there are still some creatures with resistance to those damage types). I decided to put in the other damage types to let you flavor your attacks in a way that feels right to your monstrous form (and if you wanted to pick up something like the Slasher or Piercer feat).

Level 6: Raging Hurl:

When you take the attack action, if you are grappling a creature that is your size or smaller, you can replace one of your attacks to hurl the creature a number of feet equal to ten times your Strength modifier. If the creature hits another creature or object, both must make a Dexterity saving throw with a DC equal to 8 + your Strength modifier + your proficiency bonus. On a failure, the creature takes 1d6 damage for every ten feet they traveled, or half as much on a success. If the creature is hurled upward and does not hit anything, they instead take falling damage as normal.

    Of all the features I have for this, this is maybe the most over-engineered one, and probably first on the chopping block if needed. I just really feel like it'd be a fun subclass feature to be able to throw monsters around. It's also there to subtly hint to you that, hey, you might want to really invest in grappling with this subclass. A possible alternative would be to give foes disadvantage on their saves against your grapple attempts if you're raging, which would kind of come back around to the way that Barbarians used to be great at shoving and grappling when it was an Athletics check, and thus they got advantage on it because of rage. We could make this work for both shoving and grappling, actually, which gives us some of the flavor of this but in a far simpler rule. Also, the damage might be too high.

Level 10: Vicious Claws:

The damage of your unarmed strikes is now 2d6, rather than 1d6.

    It's possible this is too much. But while Wraps of Unarmed Prowess finally give us a way to boost the attack and damage of unarmed strikes with a magic item, we still don't get something like a Vicious Weapon, which can be a real important damage boost to martial characters. Maybe we could tone this down a little, like making it a d10, but honestly, I think I'm fine with this (2d6 isn't that crazy).

Level 10: Secrets of the Id:

Grappling with your inner monster has given you greater understanding of your own and others' psychology. Your Primal Knowledge feature now allows you to apply its benefits to Insight and Persuasion checks.

    I think one of the best philosophical shifts in 5.5e was to give very combat-focused classes more out-of-combat utility. While Primal Knowledge isn't going to do as much as an entire spellbook full of Wizard spells, it's a feature with real utility and I think adding these skills to it (Insight in particular) feels very thematically right for the subclass. After all, confronting and integrating our Shadow can lead to greater empathy, and you could flavor this subclass as a healing journey.

Level 14: Metamorphic Manifestation:

When you enter a Rage, you can choose between a Creeping, Fathomless, or Juggernaut form, enhancing the monstrousness of your Shadow Manifestation.

    I think we need a splashy thing for our capstone, and I also really like giving players more flexibility. Indeed, these three forms kind of correspond with three of the modifications Reanimator Artificers can give their companions.

Creeping Form: You have a climb speed equal to your speed and can move on vertical surfaces and upside-down without an ability check and leaving your hands free. Additionally, the reach of your Unarmed Strikes is increased by 10 feet.

    I think this one is probably fine as-is. Maybe we'd nerf it to a 5-foot reach extension (bringing it down to just 10 feet total) but otherwise I think this isn't going to be game breaking (but still will be cool when we grapple a foe and then climb up a wall).

Fathomless Form: You have a swim speed equal to your speed and can breathe underwater. Additionally, creatures you are grappling cannot speak of perform the verbal components of spells.

    I actually don't think that the silence effect here is that powerful - after all, Silence is a 2nd level spell, and also, most spell-casting monsters have plenty of non-spell magical effects like Arcane Burst that this doesn't affect. It's no worse than a Wizard or Sorcerer keeping several spell slots in reserve for Counterspell. And it gives the the form utility outside of those rare underwater fights.

Juggernaut Form: Your size becomes Large when you rage, unless it is already larger. Your speed is not reduced by difficult terrain. You deal double damage to objects, and you can now choose a second Mastery option for your Unarmed Strikes. The second option must be either the Push or Topple Mastery.

    It's possible that the double mastery thing should be its own separate feature. But I think we needed just a little more utility for the form that doesn't get a new movement type. Is it too many things? Possibly. Maybe we remove the Siege Monster aspect, or, again, we separate out the bonus masteries. But I think this could probably work as is.

Overall Thoughts:

    I think this would naturally push players toward the Grappler feat, which I'm totally fine with. Arguably it might even need a little more of a damage boost given that you'll be missing out on major martial feats like Great Weapon Master, Polearm Master, and Dual Wielder.

    Most importantly, though, I think that this subclass could actually fulfill both of my Barbarian class fantasies better than any existing options. I think I'll do a "vs Death Knight" calculation to see how it actually compares to my Berserker build.

    Another note: perhaps it's odd not to really interact in any way with the Frightened condition. Here, I feel a little penned in by the Berserker's design, which gives both immunity to Charm and Fear, and also allows you to inflict Fear on foes at higher levels.

    That said, there are other subclasses that have overlapped in the past. I could see giving some kind of fear immunity (possibly at level 6) and then a way to inflict fear later on (likely one of the Metamorphic Manifestation options at 14). But for now, I'm going to stick with the design as I have it now.

The State of Things in the RCU as of Control Resonant

 So much of Control Resonant's plot is shrouded in mystery. According to one of the recent trailers, an aberrant resonance appeared in Manhattan two days before the lockdown of the Oldest House failed. That's curious.

Control ends in a strange place - arguably, Jesse hasn't really accomplished a whole lot. While she was able to shut down the Slide Projector and cleanse Dylan of the Hiss, the actual Hiss "infection" of the house isn't stopped, and Dylan is put in a coma that he doesn't awaken from until far later. As we see in the previews for Control Resonant, the Hiss does make it out of the Oldest House, and is claiming victims in Manhattan. But it doesn't seem to be the primary threat here.

It's interesting because both Alan Wake and Control take place during what the FBC would classify as AWEs, but both are somewhat contained. Alan Wake's metafictional nightmare is somewhat confined to Bright Falls and its environs. Even if the ripples of it go out across the whole world, the actual shadow monsters aren't appearing anywhere but Bright Falls. Likewise, the Hiss Invasion in Control is confined to the Oldest House.

But with Manhattan, the center of America's biggest city and economic capital, warped by all of this stuff, it's hard to imagine that the rest of the world is going to continue on unaware of such paranatural things.

That said, we don't know how the game will end, so perhaps there's going to be some kind of reset of the collective unconscious that makes people forget anything that happened.

I do think it's notable that Barry's emails to Alice Wake, found in the apartment during Alan's parts of AW2, see him saying that his new friend Chester Bless encouraged him to not be in New York because something was going to happen there. When we find the Wakes' apartment all packed up and moved-out-of, the cardboard boxes that Alice's things have been packed into have "Blessed" printed on them.

To this day, I maintain that the "organization" that helped Alice regain her suppressed memories wasn't the FBC, but the Blessed Organization - as far as I can tell, the entire online discourse other than myself seems to have a consensus that she's talking about the FBC. But given Barry's connection, and her use of the word "organization," I really think that this work was separate from her visit to the Oldest House that set off Hartman, and that Blessed would be seeking out someone with a connection to a major AWE like Bright Falls.

Given this foreknowledge about something going down in New York, I think it's very likely that Blessed acted as the catalyst for the events of Control Resonant, though their goals and motives remain pretty obscure.

There are also some interesting timeline questions to consider:

Both in the announcement trailer and when Estevez meets Dylan in the Lake House DLC for AW2, Dylan's hair has grown back but is trimmed short. But when he emerges from the Oldest House in what appears to be the beginning of the game, he's got long, unkempt hair (that he eventually ties back the same way that Jesse now has it). The growth of hair would suggest several months between his acquisition of the Aberrant and the fall of the Oldest House. So what, precisely, happened when Estevez saw him?

The Lake House takes place concurrently with the story of Alan Wake II - it's likely that she goes in there while Saga is dealing with Thornton and Mulligan in Watery - which means that it's happening in the Fall of 2023. I believe that Remedy tends to set their game contemporary to their releases, so presumably Control Resonant takes place in 2026. Now, it's also totally possible that Estevez glimpsed the future, but again, there's the issue of his hair growth.

Is it possible that Dylan actually woke up years before the fall of the Oldest House? Certainly, if his meeting with Estevez didn't involve time travel, he would have been up now for at least two and a half years. But it also looks like Jesse gives him the Aberrant while he's still in a coma.

We'll have to see - the timeline here might even be an intentional mystery to tease out over the course of the game.

Interestingly, Dylan does seem to interact with Jesse, suggesting to me that we might see her earlier in the game than expected. But it also might take place in the Gap, the mental space that Dylan can escape to (and I think serves a similar role to the Writer's Place/Mind Space in AW2), meaning that he might be able to connect with her on some mental level (or even just his own projection of her) but maybe still needs to look for her.

I'm eager to see how Dylan is portrayed. Our only interactions with him in the first game were when he was brainwashed by the Hiss, and the developers have talked about how he's struggling to reckon with the things that he did under their control, and also with the horrible abuse he suffered as "P6." There's talk about how his emergence from the Oldest House is his first time actually seeing the sun since he was 10, and he's immediately called upon to fight a bunch of monsters.

I Didn't Expect to Find the Shadowlands So Cool

 Mentioned in Van Richten as one of the "other domains," the Shadowlands is a realm of chivalric knights and an evil sword called Ebonbane.

We often talk about D&D as having a default tone of "medieval fantasy," but the truth is that there's a lot of haziness around what we mean by that. The Middle Ages, after all, were approximately a thousand years (I'm sure that some historians would have differing opinions, but I generally think of it as lasting between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the discovery by Europeans of the Americas (not really counting the Vikings).

I think a lot of settings feel a little more like the Renaissance era, and certainly a lot of us (myself certainly included) like to mix in some anachronistically modern ideas that may not have cropped up until even the Industrial Revolution or later (Eberron, for instance, is meant to feel like the 1930s with all the Pulp Adventure stories told in that time).

But if we are to consider the foundations of the fantasy genre, while we certainly cannot forget things like Greek Myth, I'd say one of the most central influences is Arthurian Legend. There's something about the story of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table that feels really fundamental to how we think of fantasy.

And the Shadowlands deliberately harkens to this particular bit of legend: Ebonbane is effectively the inverted, shadow archetype of Excalibur.

Now, there's a certain aesthetic that I associate with this kind of Arthurian fantasy - I can't say precisely where it comes from, but one of deep green forests, the ground covered with moss, the woods dark with a thick canopy, and a lone knight in armor on horseback venturing through it, bravely facing whatever dangers might lurk there. I don't know precisely what the source of it is - I have a vague sense of it being linked to movies from the 60s through the 80s, though it might also be partially inspired by Disney's Sleeping Beauty, which borrowed some of its aesthetics from Medieval illustrated manuscripts.

Ravenloft covers a lot of different vibes, but it tends toward Gothic Horror. The funny thing is that in some ways, the Gothic Aesthetic was built on those in the 19th century looking back on the ruins of centuries long past with a mix of fear and nostalgia. The novel Dracula takes place contemporaneously in the 1890s, at a period in which electrification and industrialization were in full swing, but Dracula emerges in that future-oriented world as this strange and forgotten relic of a brutal medieval past, living in a drafty castle, enriched by the spoils of ancient battles and wars.

What the Shadowlands presents us with is an opportunity to really live in that medieval world. But while a classic Arthurian realm would have brave knights who do oppose the evil of that domain, the Ravenloft twist is that the greatest potential source for good is the fanatical inquisitors under the command of Elena Faith-hold. Elena is not the Darklord of the domain, though should its lord fall, she'd likely be next in line.

Instead, the lord of the Shadowlands is Ebonbane, a sentient sword.

Unlike most Darklords, who began as mortals and then had a fall from grace, Ebonbane is pure evil. Forged by cultists who opposed the heroic knight Kateri Shadowborn, Ebonbane was made out of the essences of all the evils she had defeated, and ultimately it slew her after she had gotten old and slower, then possessed her body in the hopes of doing more evil, but was then swallowed by the Mists.

Incidentally, I actually think that this makes Ebonbane a little similar to Exdeath from Final Fantasy V - in that story, long ago, a whole bunch of evil spirits were sealed within a tree. Over time, they coalesced into a single ego, and then that tree kind of grew a tangle of thorns and branches into a dark suit of armor. You spend much of the game assuming that Exdeath is some kind of evil knight.

The problem for Ebonbane, though, is that outside of Shadowborn Manor, it cannot act unless it is carried by another.

There's a lot to work with here:

First off, you can definitely fake out your players with who the actual villain of a campaign is. Ebonbane is considered a Construct while in the Manor, and can fly around like a (far more powerful) animated sword, but to go elsewhere, it needs a wielder. This can include a corpse that the sword possesses, meaning that you could easily have a figure that looks for all intents and purposes like a Death Knight of some sort, wreaking havoc across the land, burning villages to the ground, etc.

What's interesting is that the corpse isn't even considered undead: it's basically an object that Ebonbane is wielding by having the corpse wield it. A subtle hint that the party might have that there's something odd going on is that a Divine Sense might show that that moldering corpse that's walking around doesn't actually show up as undead.

The party might even fell this figure (which would be a fight against Ebonbane, using the sword's statistics) and try to figure out what to do with the evil sword the villain was carrying.

Now, the mechanics here require a little DM finesse - technically it's still the sword that the players would need to attack. But I'd extend this possession to basically let the body stand in for Ebonbane. Slaying Ebonbane makes it a +3 Longsword until it revives through Darklord Restoration, but if you don't want 1d10 weeks to pass before the Darklord becomes a threat again, I might rule that while it's possessing a corpse, maybe it drops its possession when the 50 temp HP goes away or, if that's too soon, maybe when Ebonbane gets bloodied. Presumably not being in the Manor, it would drop to the ground and appear to just be a powerful magic item.

Ok, now, how do you convince your players to try to wield Ebonbane?

Well, I think this is where Elena Faith-hold can play an important role:

In the Shadowlands, the Circle is effectively the equivalent of the Knights of the Round Table, an order of chivalric champions who are supposed to defend the good and fight the wicked. There's literally a big round table in Shadowborn Manor. The symbolism of the round table, of course, is that the order is one of equals. Thus, while Elena is a very powerful and influential member of the order, she's not its "leader" because no such role exists.

Still, she has taken the "fight the wicked" half of her charge far more seriously than the "defend the good," and even does things like feeding innocents to a dracolich to prevent the common folk from learning that the evil dragon she'd slain isn't actually gone.

In other words, she's a hatable villain that could easily feel like a major threat to the party and play the role of primary antagonist for the better part of an adventure. And it is that kind of evil that Ebonbane might present itself as the key to defeating.

So, Ebonbane can act both as a major boss fight as well as a powerful magic item. It is, also, an actual appropriate candidate for a real Hexblade patron for a Warlock (though we'll have to see if the new version in Arcana Unleashed is actually appealing to anyone given its dismal showing in Unearthed Arcana).

While Elena Faith-hold is a monstrous hypocrite, the Circle itself as a faction is still I think meant to largely be a good one. PCs might find allies amongst the knights (or even be members). But given that this is Ravenloft, these knights will likely meet tragic ends. A former ally might die trying to warn the party of the evils of Ebonbane, only for them to show up as an animated corpse wielding the blade.

Anyway, I think this domain could be an interesting aesthetic change for a general Ravenloft campaign, and could let you go for a very classical "knights & dragons" fantasy vibe that we honestly don't see very much in D&D.

It's Alive! Using Viktra Mordenheim

 As Ravenloft's Frankenstein equivalent, Viktra Mordenheim is the crafter of Flesh Golems. With a backstory that changed pretty dramatically in Van Richten's (previously she was the male Viktor Mordenehim and had a story closer to the original Frankenstein novel,) I think the key to Mordenheim is the coldness reflected in the climate of her domain of Lamordia.

More or less inventing modern science fiction with her novel, Mary Shelley's callous doctor embodies heedless scientific ambition without consideration for the consequences, and then a failure to take responsibility for his actions, to tragic results.

(As a note, I like Guillermo Del Toro, and enjoyed his adaptation, but I also felt that his choice to make the creature utterly blameless robbed the story of some of its nuance - the tragedy of Frankenstein is that if "Adam" had been given the love and affection a nascent person needs, he likely would have turned out just fine and no one would have died. But Viktor's visceral perception of him as a monster becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.)

In the case of Viktra Mordenheim, her initial creation is not simply done for its own reasons, but to resurrect her lover Elise. It does muddy the waters a little bit - her desire to recover the Unbreakable Heart that serves as Elise's core would effectively undo the recovery of her late lover.

But I think we can then perhaps see the somewhat sympathetic motivation - getting Elise back - was merely a story she told herself to justify the murders she committed in order to achieve this scientific breakthrough.

Here's my take: I think that Viktra Mordenheim's technological ambitions slot well into the kind of anti-humanist attitudes we've started to hear coming out of the Tech Bros of Silicon Valley of late. Empathy and emotions, to her, are things to overcome with efficient machinery. I think her grand ambition would be to eventually phase out natural humanoids in favor of compliant machines.

Mordenheim could start off as a friendly NPCs - perhaps if the party has an Artificer or Wizard in the group, or someone else who is technologically-minded, she might wish to perform research with them. At the very least, I think that she would be an influential figure in the scientific community, perhaps first introduced as a featured lecturer at a conference or something like that.

What I don't think you'll ever get from her is any warmth. Emotion - probably both positive and negative emotion - is muted for her. Even when the party comes into conflict with her, she would see them as bugs to be worked out, problems to be solved. Again, like most Darklords, she's a narcissist, but I think in this case it's a kind of cold materialism - she probably doesn't even consider her own emotions worth considering (hence her willingness to effectively re-kill Elise if it means recovering the Unbreakable Heart).

Thankfully, in Horrors Within, she got beefed up to CR 7, meaning she can hold her own in combat, and also now has thematic abilities. But this is a Darklord that should basically never be fought on her own. Naturally, Flesh Golems and Mordenheim's Monsters are the best minions for her (in the latter case, the minion is a bigger threat than she is,) but really any Construct would work - you could reflavor a Clay Golem as being a more advanced Flesh Golem, or you could simply say that she's not limited to using flesh as her material - again, she has no sentimentality to any particular form. Also, a Shield Guardian is a very likely part of her arsenal.

Unlike your vampires, werewolves, and ghosts, the horror of Viktra Mordenheim is not about her lurking around a corner or peering from the shadows. Her horror is in well-lit laboratory rooms, where she shamelessly engages in monstrous activities. Callously killing people to use their physical materials for her constructs, for example. But I think that the real horror, the real Gothic horror element here, is that no matter what, she will not see what the problem is even if she's called out. After all, organic life as it stands is subject to the whims of evolution or the so-called gods, and she is merely trying to create a more perfect being. She would classify the success of a civilization in its power efficiency rather than its creation of art and culture.

If the party slays her, I think she's likely to react with curiosity rather than anger, though if her work is disrupted, she might betray a hint of frustration. (It could be fun to RP her as developing a subtle eye-twitch that a good insight check realizes is her equivalent of bellowing with rage.)

My read on Mordenheim is that, unlike Frankenstein, she's incapable of the sense of horror that he feels when he sees his creation come to life. If she seeks to manipulate or influence the party, she will probably do so in a very calculated manner. If the party seems powerful enough to oppose her, she might visit friendly NPCs and transform them into constructs, being long gone by the time the party arrives to find their friends changed.

Even if she is, actually, acting on her emotions, such as anger at the party, she doesn't have the self-insight to realize that's why she's doing it. (She has a +0 to Wisdom, with just expertise in Medicine to make up for this).

Now, in terms of encounters, I think that Mordenheim is not at all a "lead from the front" kind of villain. She's far more likely to be behind a pane of reinforced glass with some controls while the party faces a bunch of constructs on conveyer belts. By the time the party actually finds her to face her down, she's also probably going to be protected by a lot of construct minions and in an out-of-the-way location, perhaps shooting down with her Lightning Rod from 90 feet away or using her legendary Static Explosion. She can cast Animate Objects once a day as a bonus action, and keeping at least one construct within 5 feet of her at all times allows her to use Redirect Attack to avoid incoming damage.

If character close on her, her Syringe is going to be a major way she deals with them, probably with a one-two of Lighting Rod (to ensure that they can't make opportunity attacks and then an appropriate serum for the given situation - Corrosive if she fears being followed, Deadly if the target is low on HP and needs healing, or Mind-Altering if the attacker is concentrating on a spell. Basically, she should be slippery. At 123 HP for CR 7, she's not going to go down immediately, but she also can't take a lot of punishment, so she's going to play defensively.

I will also say that the Syringe ability is a good "reveal" moment, if she has started to suspect the party is not aligned with her, busting out her Syringe in the middle of a social encounter could be fun (I might also temporarily give her other serum options, like one that knocks the target out).

In Van Richten's, they suggested using a stat block similar to a Spy, which I always felt was a weird choice. With a CR under 1, you truly would have had to play her avoiding combat at all costs, but while her new CR 7 form can hold her own, I'd still play her as extremely slippery. Especially in Schloss Mordenheim, have her make use of elevation and other ways to separate the party from her, and give her escape routes. There is a partial map of Schloss Mordenheim in Horrors Within - a great location for a final confrontation with her would be the Laboratory Tower, with Mordenheim perched above on the roof level while the party has to enter from the lower level.

The Abuser Hiding Within: Using Harkon Lukas

 Harkon Lukas is Ravenloft's prominent werewolf (well, more Loup-Garou, but that's just a souped-up Werewolf) Darklord. Among the classic Universal horror monsters, werewolves have less of an iconic exemplar than, say, vampires with Dracula or even mummies with Imhotep. I can tell you that Lon Chaney played The Wolfman, but I could not tell you the character's name.

But werewolves are cool, and perhaps the most straightforward expression of the central idea of Gothic Horror - the idea of a monster lurking beneath the surface of humanity.

In the case of Harkon Lukas, that hidden monster is tied to the expression of art. A famed musician, Lukas seeks out recognition and adulation, and in the act that got the Dark Powers to take him, he enacted a political coup with the help of his devoted fans (remember that fan is short for fanatic!)

In his domain of Kartakass, though, he's cursed to perpetual obscurity, known at best as someone who used to be great, but isn't considered so now. To pursue his ambitions, Lukas preys upon others with talent and presence, seeking to insinuate himself into their success as a springboard to his own, but underneath this slick and manipulative behavior lies jealousy, resentment, and enraged frustration.

Sadly, the world of art and entertainment can be filled with abusers and exploiters. Humans love to express ourselves through art, and few things are as attractive (at least in theory) as being a famed artist who has inspired and dazzled their audiences. Not only does this draw a lot of people seeking credit for others' work, but it also allows abusers who can take advantage of the people who want so desperately to be in that world. We have, in the past decade, seen numerous famed people in the entertainment world revealed as quite monstrous individuals - I know a couple of artists I considered myself a fan of were unmasked in this way, forcing one to reckon with the positive emotions and nostalgia for their work and even the respect we had for them.

It's generally a good idea for any Darklord to have them start playing an active role in the story early on. For none is this more true than Harkon Lukas. But also more than any, he should initially appear as a friend to the party.

Now, a knowledgable group of players might just know him through meta-knowledge, and perhaps even in-universe knowledge. But I think that Lukas is going to roll out all of the charms he has available to him. For one thing, I don't think he sees himself as an abuser. If the party has someone who interests him (naturally a Bard would be a prime target, but it could be anyone else who seems particularly full of life, and probably younger and more naive) he'll do everything to earn their trust.

But (frankly like a lot of Darklords,) he's ultimately narcissistic. He will genuinely think that he likes the members of the party as long as he feels that they can do something for him, and offer real assistance without any explicit strings attached.

However, once the party, and particularly if there's a particular PC he's fixated on, starts to defy him (maybe they refuse to take his gifted necklace,) there will be a sudden change. I think that he will start off just by shutting the person out, disappearing and giving the silent treatment, playing the victim. If this strategy doesn't bring them back, it starts to get a bit more aggressive.

Indeed, I think that he might go out of his way to target other members of the party with violence, claiming that they're poisoning his fixation's mind, stopping them from fulfilling their full potential.

Now, at CR 14, Lukas can be a formidable threat even to a high-tier-2 party on his own. And I think that the real horror-turn here is when his possessiveness turns violent.

While part of his torment is his loneliness and obscurity, he would also have a pack of werewolves at his command. (I'd also suggest reskinning other lycanthropes if you wanted to vary their CR). I imagine that the people he curses with lycanthropy might share in his torment - perhaps promised with elevation to heights of fame, by hitching their wagon to Lukas', those he has turned are also struggling with their creative process and fame. The result is a pack of frustrated artists who resent others more than they engage with their own craft.

The prevalence of music in Kartakass, as well as Harkon's artistic design in the book, suggests to me that the whole vibe of Kartakass could take on a lot of Southern Gothic vibes - loud music, alcohol, and humid summer nights feel fitting for the setting. Like Strahd (though I only rarely see people actually play him this way,) the temptation should always be to empathize with Harkon Lukas, to feel like the pain and self-loathing suggests some inner moral core. But whatever truth of that inner life there might be, it's also being used as a performance to get people to let their guards down. As a born Northerner, I've got a deeply-ingrained distrust for Southern so-called Hospitality, and Lukas embodies more than anything a friendly smile shrouding a ravenous, murderous hunger.

Werewolves in 5.5E have had a bit of a redesign - the curse they inflict isn't necessarily going to turn you into a werewolf, but it makes  you susceptible to this happening. I'd check in with players to make sure they're ok with this kind of threat to them - rules as written, getting turned puts you permanently under the DM's control and thus effectively perma-kills your character, though you could treat this instead as the reason to take on a Dark Gift (or perhaps the Lycanthrope Transformation from Grim Hollow Player's Guide) to represent this change, and perhaps add in some kind of compulsion to obey Lukas that might need to be removed somehow.

You could actually take some inspiration from a pretty great bit of Southern Gothic media from last year that also won Best Picture at the Oscars - Sinners has a music club besieged by vampires who wish to possess a young musician with magical powers (honestly, the character is almost exactly a College of Spirits Bard). In a similar manner, Lukas could wind up leading a siege of werewolves on a club in a very similar way - even the way that werewolves work now would re-create the manner in which the vampires in that movie turn the club's guests.

If you really want to amp up the terror of that siege, having a bunch of low-CR NPCs there to serve as lycanthropic converts if the party fails to protect them would really up the challenge.

But while that is an encounter I might even save for tier 3 (making individual werewolves pretty small threats, but numbers being a real challenge,) having the party face him on his own would still be pretty scary at levels 8-10. He has health regeneration as long as he doesn't take radiant damage (which might not be obvious to the players given that other werewolves and even the standard Loup Garou now don't have that) and he also gets advantage on attacks if the target has taken any damage.

Lukas is also built to shift between his forms frequently during combat, giving him a mix of charm abilities and raw damage. Lean into the surrealness and horror of these sudden transformations. You can also have him menace the party in beast form while he's friendly to them in his humanoid form to up the paranoia. Maybe he's stalking them as they travel across his domain, but not necessarily going in to attack - instead, his motivation for following them is to ensure that he's in the right place to offer them help and ingratiate himself.

This is a Darklord that I think would be a real challenge to play - but it might be a really fun challenge for your acting skills to play the different subtle layers of his persona. He's also beefy enough and powerful enough that you can back up the menace hiding underneath the surface with stats that make him nearly as powerful a combatant as Strahd.

The Master of Gryphon Hill: Using Wilfred Godefroy

 I believe the second Darklord ever introduced to D&D (though Azalin might have also shown up in that module,) Lord Wilfred Godefroy is the ghost of a murderous megalomaniac who continues in death to want dominion over others.

He's also one of the lower-CR Darklords in Horrors Within, at only CR 6 (I think the only lower ones are Ivana Boritsi and Ivan Delisnya, who are both 5). We actually don't have a lot of legendary creatures with a CR lower than 10, so this is kind of an exciting opportunity.

As the Darklord of Mordent, Godefroy is the hauntingest ghost of the ghost domain.

Ghost stories have to tread a fine line: they live in the uncanny, the liminal space between what is a familiar human (or humanoid at least in a fantasy world like those of D&D) person and something monstrous and terrifying.

In the past year or so I watched through the first three Netflix series that Mike Flanagan did. While the vampire one, Midnight Mass, was my favorite, the first two, The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor, which are inspired by the works of Shirley Jackson and Henry James, respectively, deal with haunted houses.

Both are houses that, like the House on Gryphon Hill, are haunted by not one but many ghosts. In the case of Hill House, at least in Flagan's version, it's the house itself that is the monster, though some of the ghosts there further its evil by drawing other souls to become trapped within it. In Bly Manor, there's a clearer genesis for the haunting, but again, it becomes something of a snowballing tragedy, as the actions of selfish and/or desperate, or even just compulsive spirits draw other souls to become trapped.

Another important point, though, to these is the gradual emergence of the horror. There's an amazing reveal in Flanagan's Hill House (I make the distinction because the Jackson novel has a very different plot) about how the house has been tricking the family all along that I'm going to avoid spoiling here (might touch on it later past a spoiler break) that I think can be a really powerful tool in a story like this.

But I think that even if you want to have a villain (especially Darklords) show up early on in a campaign, these appearances don't need to be full confrontations. Especially in a ghost story, a brief glimpse of a ghost is the right way to introduce them.

In Ravenloft, the Domains reflect and are kind of an aspect of the Darklord, and I think we can definitely pull this with Mordent and specifically the House on Gryphon Hill.

Here's my proposal:

The party arrives in Mordent at level 1, or level 3 at max - this should be the beginning of a Ravenloft campaign if not just a limited tier 1 adventure. They are welcomed by the locals, who are eager to have some capable adventurers around to help with local problems. They are given a house to act as their headquarters. But the Mists warp their perception of it:

While the party is maybe even warned not to go to the House on Gryphon Hill, and the house they are presented with is on the other side of Mordenshire or even potentially in a different town, and has a different name, the truth is that they're getting turned around: the house they are in is the House on Gryphon Hill.

It's separated enough from town that when they visit, it's not obvious that they're coming from it, but characters will have strange moments where they find themselves on the road to Gryphon Hill, periodically.

The house, as it appears to them, is well-furnished and kept up, and they have a handful of short, spooky quests while coming back to the false safety of the house. But after several days staying there, in the middle of the night, a random party member wakes up to use the restroom, and as they walk down the hall, they suddenly feel a presence behind them. They're subjected to Godefroy's Possessive Aura, and if they fail the save, they just stand there until morning comes and the party finds them as if they were sleepwalking. If they succeed, they turn around and glimpse Lord Godefroy staring at them, looking furious, before he vanishes.

Now, yeah, these aren't part of his stat block precisely - the Possessive Aura only charms a creature for a minute and reduces their speed to 0. And despite being a Ghost, Godefroy weirdly doesn't have the ability to slip into the Ethereal Plane, but I'd allow it at least in a non-combat situation.

While the party is likely to be genre-savy enough to freaking move out of the house at this point, there will probably be some compelling reasons for them to stay.

You could run this as a single horror-movie scenario that all takes place over the course of a single night, the doors locking the party into the house. But I'd be more interested in a slow-burn. Maybe other potential solutions - staying in inns, camping out on the moors - wind up being untenable. Or, perhaps, the party does relocate but needs to go back to the house. Perhaps an ally, like one of the Weathermay-Foxgrove twins, was seen entering the house.

Now, a good haunted house has a good cast of ghosts. I'd build the adventure around a number of distinct ghost characters. Especially if the party is likely to fight the ghosts, try to use different stat blocks: Shadows, Specters, Ghosts, Wraiths, etc., and even potentially non-incorporeal undead like Wights or Revenants.

Each spirit that is highlighted in the adventure should have their own distinct backstory, some distinctive visual identifier and MO. For example, in Flanagan's Hill House, there's a man in a bowler hat who haunts the house, and he follows one of the siblings who survived the house back when they briefly lived there in the 90s, always floating behind him as a metaphor for the substance addiction he now struggles with.

The spirits need not be malevolent, but their actions might terrify or even do harm to those with whom they interact. A terrified murder-victim might lash out in what they think is self-defense, and might not be able to calm down until they are assured that nothing can hurt them anymore. A rakish thief might violently defend the treasure that they sought to pilfer until that treasure is destroyed or removed from the house. None will go away simply by defeating them in combat - their stories need to be resolved in order to allow them to find peace and stop threatening the inhabitants of the house. A t

Now, Godefroy's role in this is that he's going to actively work against the party in their efforts to resolve these stories. Ghosts tend to be fixated and obsessed with particular desires, like the rest of their mind has faded and left only this compulsion. Godefroy probably understands his ghostly nature a little better than others, but the fixation remains on control, and so he doesn't want to lose the power he feels he gets by keeping these ghosts trapped and agonized.

He can certainly attack the party, but he might also attack the other spirits that the party is trying to soothe.

I think Godefroy is probably pretty aggressive. Sticking to narrow rooms and hallways, he can use his incorporeal movement to escape if his HP gets low, in case you don't want to risk relying on his Darklord regeneration to get him back. There are probably a lot of locked doors (even doors that might become locked) that could give him greater time to escape by entering a locked room, then descending through the floor, and eventually coming somewhere the party couldn't possibly pursue him.

Also, I think he'd likely employ some hit-and-run tactics. If the party is helping some Poltergeist resolve their issues, he might come in, blast the spirit with his Hunting Rifle, and then slip away.

Ghost stories are often told as the aftermath of tragedies, and Godefroy has some tools to encourage such tragic events - if he can get someone with his Possessive Aura (which admittedly isn't terribly hard to get out from if you don't mind drawing Opportunity Attacks) he can then redirect attacks against him at the charmed creature - getting PCs to damage each other could create divisions or at least guilt.

At 2900 xp in his domain (though this only adds an extra Legendary Resistance) he's theoretically a high difficult encounter on his own for a group of 5th level players. I'm honestly a little skeptical about that, as he only has 72 HP and deals 9 or 10 damage with his two attacks. He does, of course, get some more damage out of his legendary actions.

I do generally think that I'd have this whole plot primarily in tier 1, maybe letting the party do a couple adventures at levels 1 and 2 before the haunting of their headquarters becomes clear.

And then, I think, the first true full-on fight with Godefroy is where the truth of where they are gets revealed.

If you want to move on, either ending the adventure or moving on to another domain of dread, you can do that. If you want to stick around in Mordent, Godefroy is going to need some minions when he appears again.