Into the Labyrinth

 Back in Cataclysm, they put the Halls of Origination in as one of the dungeons that released with the expansion. A 7-boss instance, it was a way longer dungeon than had come out since Vanilla. The idea was to recapture that idea of the giant old dungeons from 2004 like Blackrock Depths or Blackrock Spire (which used to be a single large instance). The thing is, the way dungeons actually were used by players by then had changed, and while we weren't really racing to finish them against an actual timer, as we can now with Mythic Plus, players didn't really want to commit an entire evening to clearing out a massive mega-dungeon, so instead, people pretty quickly turned to just doing the three (I think it was three) mandatory bosses and getting the currency rewards for completing a heroic dungeon (mythic dungeons wouldn't be a thing until Warlords of Draenor).

But in Legion, even as it introduced Mythic Plus, which requires you to get through the dungeon in a limited time, they also gave us The Return to Karazhan, the first official Megadungeon. RtK actually recreated the beloved Karazhan raid, though it redesigned some of the early fights and then kind of replaced the second half of it. We would then get a single megadungeon each expansion, with Operation Mechagon in BFA, Tazavesh the Veiled Market in Shadowlands, and then Dawn of the Infinite in Dragonflight. War Within, though, didn't really have a megadungeon, just adding a conventional dungeon with each major patch.

But War Within gave us Delves, which are sort of like dungeons, or a kind of different interpretation of what a dungeon could be.

And with the Labyrinth of Kindo'jan, we have our first Megadelve.

You'll do a main story quest to have your first foray into it. Like other delves, you choose from tier 1 to tier 11 difficulties, with comparable rewards. The map, as far as I can tell, doesn't change, but you'll encounter different scenarios in the various chambers. There are four wings based on the four Amani Loa, each of which is essentially a delve's worth of content to go through, though these are also divided into separate chambers. Clearing a chamber will unlock further chambers that you can go into, with a special challenge in each of them. For example, one area might have the spirit of an ancient Amani warlord who wants you to find the bones of his beloved raptor, and then fight the spirit of the raptor to tame it and bring it back to him. A wing will typically have two of these varied scenarios followed by a boss fight.

If you clear the entire labyrinth (which is a great way to get like, half the new special delver's journey for it finished) you'll unlock a chamber with a new nemesis boss, Kindo'jan, which I have not been able to beat yet. (I wonder if I should try it on a lower tier and see if that counts for the achievement. At this point in the season, I'm running on tier 11 for every delve). Like any nemesis, Kindo'jan is hard, with a mechanic that auto-kills you if you get hit by three clearly avoidable abilities during the fight. There are also some instant-death mechanics like winds that can blow you off the platform if you don't find the narrow safe spots.

Still, you can get a lot of rewards and a lot of vault progress with a full clear - you'll get three bountiful chests (I think that the labyrinth is going to always be bountiful) and a bunch of other rewards. There are also new curios along with new upgrades to them (they now go up to 5 levels) and a number of rewards you can find as you progress the Journey for it and unlock various Loa-barred chambers that contain things like non-consumed glove enchants.

It does feel like HP pools are a bit higher - the bosses seemed to take longer to take down than the ones in existing delves, but maybe that's just unfamiliarity. On my main, I'm a tank, so I have Valeera go DPS, and it really varies a lot whether she takes things down near-instantly or slowly chips away at them.

I don't know if Kindo'jan has any power-progression rewards, so it felt a little painful to leave an otherwise fully cleared labyrinth with him still up, but I just didn't have the patience to keep plugging away at it.

There's a new currency you can earn that will eventually allow you to purchase myth-level gear, though it appears you only get one per week, and need three to buy the piece. That's not that bad, given that I've been pretty satisfied with Hero-level gear.

Anyway, we'll have to see how satisfying it is to go back into the same area over and over - I'm certainly going to be running it a fair amount for now, but I imagine I'll need the variety of the other delves as the Labyrinth stops being as novel.

Still, it's a good choice of location for this first megadelve - an ancient troll ruin makes for a great old-school dungeon crawl.

Here's What Project Lamordia Is:

 Well, Project_Lamordia just went live on D&D Beyond, and while I initially thought I'd wait to see some reviews, I decided to be that person who actually checks a thing out and lets others know about it.

First off: what it is:

This is a $15 digital adventure pack with three short adventures that can reasonably be done as one-shots, or strung together as a sort of 1-5 or 6ish campaign (though if you actually string them together, these are going to be some quick levels).

The adventures all take place within the cavernous headquarters of Mordenheim Kinetics, a high-tech, modern facility that reimagines the domain of Viktra Mordenheim as some kind of monstrous Silicon Valley tech company (getting real Ex Machina vibes, honestly).

The booklet suggests various ways that you can place this in relation to the broader Ravenloft setting, or potentially make it a location in a "Gothic Earth" setting, which would be a kind of D&D-horror-themed version of the real world.

Personally, I think the way I would run this is just make it one version of the actual Lamordia setting from Ravenloft. Given that each domain is a nightmare realm unto itself, with differing iterations of it depending on the story that you want to tell, I think a version of instance of Lamordia in which it is this modern hi-tech version of itself doesn't break the overall worldbuilding rules of Ravenloft.

Frankly, this supplement plays into my tendencies when running D&D, where I often incorporate modern technology and genre tropes to exist alongside the dragons and knights. But I think in this case, they actually encourage you to truly commit to a modern aesthetic, with a ton of re-skinning to make things fit with the modern feel. A bullseye lantern is just a flashlight, and a greatclub might be a baseball bat.

If you already own Van Richten's and Horrors Within, there's a bit of overlap here. The Reborn are presented as an option, for example, and there are a number of Dark Gift feats, though there are also some new backgrounds worth considering.

One thing that was left out of Horrors Within that we see here is a revamp of the Survivors mechanic introduced in Van Richten's (which I was just writing about a few posts ago). The Survivors here are built for this modern setting - though I do have a few quibbles, like giving the Lamordian Mercenary a Baseball Bat (greatclub) as a weapon when I feel like if this is meant to be a private security officer, giving them something like a truncheon or nightstick instead (maybe using Mace stats) would be more in keeping with the flavor.

I've read two of the three adventures, and these truly are little 5-room dungeons (I think they have literally five rooms) that represent different floors of the expansive facility. The goal in each adventure is simply to escape the facility, but escape is not so easy given that even if you get out of the building, the fog around it becomes denser as it turns into the Mists of Ravenloft.

Some elements that I really appreciate and give it some of that modern flare: in the first adventure, the party is given a task by Viktra Mordenheim, but they only ever speak with her over a phone. Likewise, there are audio cassettes that provide important information for the quest (there is, though, I think an editing error, as the first adventure I think ought to only have one cassette, but its location is listed in two places. I'd just stick it where the text of the audio on the tape is actually written, though this other cassette could have some other spooky stuff on it.)

Again, re-skinning is the name of the game, and they handle stuff like armor by describing materials like plasteel - something that perhaps gives this a bit more of a near-future sci-fi feeling than a truly modern one (though they still use audio cassettes).

The adventures are quick, with just a couple combat encounters, but as anyone who has tried to run a short adventure intended to be a one-shot can attest, players will absolutely fill in the gaps and make what you thought you could do in a single session into a four-session thing.

While some stat blocks will look familiar if you've got Horrors Within (CEO Viktra Mordenheim, at a glance, looks nearly identical to her HW version, and Adam appears to be a Mordenheim's Monster like the stat block there) there are also some original ones, with the various Echoes and Created, as well as stats for the three von Aubrecker siblings, who are all warped researchers working at the facility.

While this thing is a quick little digital booklet - the kind of thing you'd expect to get staple-bound for AD&D or 2E back in the 80s or 90s - it does present some interesting ideas, including this Gothic Earth setting.

What this isn't really doing is a radical reimagining of the game's systems to change it for a modern setting - it relies a lot more on re-skinning (at one point, the players can find an envelope of cash which is described as 100GP - as 100 dollars.) Still, this feels like a fun experiment from the D&D team. Maybe I'll get a chance to run at least one of these adventures some day.

Titans and Worldsouls

 For a game that borrows so much from Dungeons & Dragons (making the upcoming crossover D&D sourcebook pretty simple to implement,) the cosmology of Warcraft is surprisingly light on gods.

Or... is it?

See, in D&D, with some exceptions, each setting tends to have a pantheon of usually anthropomorphic deities that cover various divine domains. Frequently there's overlap, as a god like Bahamut (the platinum dragon who is the god of good-aligned dragons) will show up in tons of different settings because he's so iconic, while his opposite number, the five-headed dragon goddess Tiamat, is basically always found worshipped on worlds where they know of Bahamut (sometimes they have different names, but canonically Paladine and Takhisis from Dragonlance are just other names for Bahamut and Tiamat, respectively. Tiamat at least is even derived from real-world Mesopotamian myths, though I don't believe she's draconic in those myths).

There's a sort of mechanical functionality to the way gods work, even, where different gods will have different domains, and thus if you make a Cleric character, you'll want to pick a deity that they worship who aligns with the domain-based subclass you want to play. (Though at a DM's discretion, you can bend this to let you worship an off-label aspect of your chosen deity).

The point is, though, that at least until the release of Chronicle shortly before Legion came out, there were only two categories of being that were referred to explicitly as gods: Elune and the Old Gods.

In the latter case, you could argue that this is actually giving them too much credit. While immensely powerful, the Old Gods were really just aberrations born from the Void, created by beings who might be better classified as gods, the Void Lords (only one of which, Dimensius, we have seen and recently killed).

Elune, though, always sat in this ambiguous space. While a cosmology of Titans and Old Gods and demons and such began to take shape, Elune never really fit into that system.

But we got a potential answer, maybe even directly, if you take it that way, in Shadowlands. When the Winter Queen worked with Tyrande to take the rescued souls of those slain in the burning of Teldrassil to create a seed for a new World Tree, Tyrande became possessed by Elune, who was referred to by the Winter Queen as her sister.

The implication here seems to be that, as the Winter Queen is connected far more with the cyclical nature of life and death than the other Eternal Ones who serve over more permanent afterlives, is that Elune might reside in the "Life Domain" that is some realm opposite the Shadowlands.

It's a bit messy, though:

Chronicle described a cosmos that has six primal forces at play: Order, Life, Light, Disorder, Death, and Void. The Grimoire of the Shadowlands reoriented these forces compared to the version we got in Chronicle, though as many have pointed out, this might simply be a different perspective on the same model (think of each force as being on the face of a six-sided die, with opposites on opposite faces).

For most of these forces, we got the force itself, a type of magic associated with it (like Fel for Disorder or Shadow for Void) and then beings that embody those forces. But it's not neat and tidy: Void has both the Void Lords and Old Gods, while Death has the Undead and Fel has Demons. There's no description of the Eternal Ones or the denizens of the Shadowlands.

    Now, to quickly take an aside here: the main reason for inconsistencies is probably that a creative department at Blizzard made up of mere mortals has to lay this track out ahead of themselves constantly to maintain a 22-year-old MMORPG. I guarantee you that Chris Metzen wasn't planning on the Nathrezim being the creation of Sire Denathrius when they were introduced in Warcraft III.

The cosmos is messier than that, and indeed, there's something almost good about that: in the real world, we often try to apply cultural equivalences to others' cultures and ideas, and that typically requires sanding down the nuances and incongruities. Indeed, something like Chronicle that tries to put the cosmos into this neat system is clearly written by someone who shares the Titans' predilection for order.

But now we get to the meat of the issue:

Worldsouls.

We know that Azeroth has a Worldsoul. In Chronicle, we were presented in what seemed to be objective fact that what a Worldsoul is is a nascent Titan, or perhaps better put, an unborn Titan. The Titans' mission to save Azeroth from the corruption of the Old Gods is presented as an unalloyed good because it is her destiny to be the greatest of the Titans, who are a force for cosmic good in the universe.

But whether it's a retcon or just shading in the details (I'd argue the former, but one I'm willing to forgive given how WoW thrives in nuance) the story now seems to be that a Worldsoul isn't necessarily going to be a Titan if it matures unimpeded. Instead, it seems that Aman'thul, the first of the Pantheon to awaken, cultivated this Titan identity and instilled Order into the others as they were born.

Now, is that inherently bad? No. I think Order is a force that can be good, but we keep seeing examples of the darker side of the Titans' efforts on Azeroth, the rigidity and intolerance for deviation from the plan, which culminates in a callous capacity to wipe out enormous populations if things aren't going quite right.

Independence from the Titans feels like a greater ambition now for Azeroth's heroes, which I think will come to a head in The Last Titan, where we're likely going to come into direct conflict with them.

But here's what I want to know:

Have we ever seen what happens when a Worldsoul... becomes something else?

Aman'thul, Aggramar, Khaz'goroth, Golganneth, Norgannon, and Eonar are the current "members in good standing" of the Pantheon. Sargeras had been their champion, but embraced fel corruption as a weapon to fight the Void, becoming an omnicidal zealot, but while you could say he's now a "Fel Titan," he was a standard, Order-based Titan initially.

Beyond these, though, we have only two other named Worldsouls apart from Azeroth.

Argus only briefly manifested in a humanoid/Titanic form, just long enough for us to kill him. He was brought forth by the Burning Legion, so was he a "true" Fel Titan? Given that, up until his arrival in the Seat of the Pantheon, his Worldsoul self seemed to be pleading with Magni to be saved from this corruption, he likely wasn't fully Fel until that moment, so... was he maybe just a standard Titan who was brainwashed similar to how Aggramar was before we knocked some sense into him?

Next, we have Telogrus. While the Worldsoul that Sargeras killed by cutting a planet in half wasn't explicitly named in Chronicle, the Void Elves off-world sanctuary of Telogrus Rift is heavily, heavily implied to be the remains of that world, so I've generally assumed with a lot of confidence that the world Sargeras killed, and thus the name of the Worldsoul within it, was Telogrus. This one never had a chance to be born, but what would have emerged would surely have been some kind of Void Titan like the Pantheon feared would happen with Azeroth if they didn't intervene and stop the Old Gods. But Azeroth/Aln'hara is reputedly a far more powerful Worldsoul than others. So: are there already some "Void Titans" out there? Is that what Dimensius was?

K'aresh also apparently had a Worldsoul, and despite the planet's destruction, that Worldsoul actually survived, which raises a whole ton of questions. While the people who would become the Ethereals/Brokers more or less did to their world what Sargeras would have to save it from Void corruption, it doesn't appear that this process necessarily means a total loss.

I was going to say the only world we've visited that doesn't have a Worldsoul was Draenor (it's the only one we explicitly know didn't have one,) but I'm given to assume that Worldsouls are actually somewhat rare in the cosmos. Thus, places like Val or Naigtal or the other places we first visited via portals in Legion probably didn't have them, and perhaps not places like Nathreza or Xorroth or that third one that is mentioned in the Portal Keeper Hasabel fight - Rancora (I just looked it up).

But I do think it's interesting that I don't think we've ever seen what happens if a Worldsoul is born without influence from the Pantheon.

One thing that I think is a really interesting bit of old lore is that the Pantheon were originally described as the "leaders" of the Titans as a people. Now, this might be some kind of retcon or even just clarification: perhaps what they meant were that the Pantheon were leaders to the Titanforged.

But it would be really interesting to know if there are Titans that aren't part of the Pantheon, beyond someone who barely lived at all like Argus or renegade former members like Sargeras.

One thing we might consider: is a Titan inherently a being of Order? Or would any Worldsoul who reached maturity/birth be considered a Titan? Did Aman'thul merely indoctrinate nascent (in this case meaning recently born) Titans? Or did he physiologically alter them to make them more like him?

And if that's the case: why did he wind up the way he did?

If there's a time when Blizzard would be well-situated to addressing some of these issues, an expansion called The Last Titan seems like a prime opportunity. But we shall see.

(Wow, now that I think about it, we actually have a lot of named worlds in the Warcraft cosmos).

Squeezing the Last Bits of Juice from Control Resonant

 I've cleared my quest log. Yes, that includes all the Tasks and World Feats and such. At this point, without going into NG+, I think the only things I have to do in Control Resonant are to get the high scores in the various SHUM III arcane cabinets (some of which I already have) and... possibly hunt down stray monsters (I genuinely don't know if they infinitely respawn, but certainly some parts of the city feel very quiet now - escorting rangers was a lot easier when I just killed everything along the path first).

I have also maxed out all of the Primary and Secondary Aberrant forms, with I believe two or three of the combo finishers also maxed, though I suspect it might not be possible to get enough Living Steel or whatever the ultimate material is required to get them all in a single playthrough.

While I did get a middle score on the Shum cabinet in Unknown (not the one in the apartment, but in a warehouse) and that gave me a pretty hefty amount of Zone XP, my guess is that you can't get any zone to 12 on a single playthrough - I believe all of mine are at 10 or 11, so I assume capping it out (I believe the cap is 15) requires going to NG+.

I'm sitting on a ton of Source, so I could go on a tour of ice cream trucks to see if I can get the materials to make all the Artifacts I have yet to craft. I know that at certain zone levels, you get new artifact recipes, so this would likely be a major progression path for a second playthrough.

Now, I believe that this game actually lets you have multiple save files, what a thought! and that starting NG+ still saves your original game separately. This is sort of ideal for me in case they add DLC. While there was no conflict in Alan Wake II when doing DLC because it was a separate game file, assuming that CR's DLC will be, like, new zones for the world (assuming we get DLC) like it was in the first game, it'll be nice to have Dylan sitting there in the post-game where the folks at the FBC actually like him now.

Still, barring some major changes in the second playthrough (as far as I know, the only change I've heard of is that the blinking lights outside the apartment with the Alan Wake teaser have a different pattern, probably sending a different message) I'm not in a rush to replay the game. Might revisit it in a year or so (I'm sure to get the Max Payne remakes, so maybe I'll be back in Remedy-obsessive mode).

Anyway, having devoured the game at this point, what are my thoughts?

I think the action gameplay is pretty satisfying, though after a certain point, outside of the Resonant bosses, it stops being particularly challenging, with a few exceptions, like the Hold the Line world feat in the Park, or in the various combat challenges in SHUM. The Resonants are the best bosses I've seen in a Remedy game, though I do think that they sort of use the best stuff early on (the Artist and Dancer are probably my favorites) and some of the later ones (the Physicist, I think, being the prime example) are a bit less impressive, design-wise. The actual final boss is also a bit underwhelming in ways reminiscent of the final fight in the first game.

I really like the relationship between Dylan and Zoe, which sort of forms the heart of this game, and Dylan's path to processing his past - not just the Hiss, but the horrible abuse he suffered in the Prime Candidate Program - makes for a strong character arc.

I do think, as I wrote before, that I think the game opens up a little too early. I don't know that the game necessarily gets much out of the open-world nature. The first game, to be fair, also had a somewhat open-world structure (ironic given that it was confined to a single building, though an enormous one). But while the real "side stories" were mostly compelling, the needs of an open world led to some repetitive and not terribly exciting content. I don't know that I needed a task in each zone to find three packages in various locations (though thank you for not making them enormous locations). Indeed, the actual tasks and world feats and such weren't that interesting, but the more hidden things, like finding the Secret Organization hideouts, made for really cool content. I think that an open-world benefits more from this kind on non-signposted stuff with a real lore reward.

Part of me wants the game to have been weirder, though when I think back, there was actually plenty of weirdness (the Underpass, for example, has a very House of Leaves-like story going on in there). Avoiding fan service is admirable, but I still feel like I would have appreciated a visit to the Oceanview Motel and Casino or something of that ilk.

One thing I felt was a smart call was to vary up the time of day and weather in some of the later zones. While it's perpetually bright day in Downtown, Central, and Western Incursion, the Evac Zone and The Park both take on a bit more character thanks to their overall different color palette. I maybe would have started this earlier by giving us more varied aesthetics in those first couple zones.

Time will tell how much of what we saw here plays into the larger RCU. One major question is whether the "masquerade" of the world of the weird is irrevocably broken - if, as Pope suggests, Manhattan will remain altered by this "patterning" even after the barrier falls, will this world simply be one in which everyone's aware that there's some insane crap going on all the time? And will that mean the FBC comes under much higher scrutiny by the government and news media?

We've only really gotten a look at the RCU from the perspectives of the Alan Wake and Control games. I know that they'd love to find a way to make Quantum Break, or some equivalent thereof, canonical, and I suspect that the Max Payne remakes might at least gesture toward being canon to the RCU (though again, my assumption is that we should just treat the stories there as the first couple Alex Casey novels with the name changed.)

There are some really impressive things the game accomplishes: I think the Shift ability could have overtaxed players' spatial awareness, but for the most part, it feels like an interesting challenge rather than a migraine-inducing motion-sickness machine. There are parts in the Underpass where I did get very turned around, but it felt like a fair challenge rather than an impassable struggle.

Again, I feel it important to note that the combat here, despite its clear distinction from the first game in that it's primarily melee, does feel like an evolution of what we got. The joy and the flaw of the first game's combat is that Launch was so good that you wound up using it more than anything else - even the Service Weapon felt kind of like "the thing you use while waiting to do more Launch." Dylan's loadout, on the other hand, feels much better-balanced, with a good mix of damage types, resource costs, and situational power that made me feel like I always had a "right move" to pick from, and the satisfaction of pulling off an execution to then wipe out waves of drones and even heavies made me feel like a real force on the battlefield. This rhythm doesn't vary that much, and maybe we could have used a bit more variation. But compared with the first game, we've got far more enemy variety here, and much more interesting visual designs for them as well. There's no "guy with gun" enemies here, which was most of what we fought in the first game. I'm not 100% convinced that the drone-style enemies serve their intended purpose - I found pretty early on that I could focus down the heavies and just clean up remaining drones once they were taken care of. Perhaps making drones more easily falterable compared to heavies would have given them a better purpose (typically by the time I faltered a drone, they'd be dead.)

But nitpicks aside, I'm really happy to immerse myself in this world again, and I hope that it sells well enough to let Remedy make their next big original game soon.

Jesse Faden at the End of Control Resonant

 Yeah, right there we're obviously talking spoiler territory.

I was pretty surprised when Control Resonant was officially announced and we learned that it would be Dylan, rather than Jesse, who would be our player character. Dylan had been the closest thing we got to a primary antagonist in the first game, serving as the mouthpiece for the Hiss, a fact that was something of a twist of the knife for Jesse, whose entire motivation in coming into this world was to find and reunite with her brother.

Dylan, of course, seems a lot better as of Resonant, and watching Gaming University's streamed playthrough after having beaten the game myself, it's remarkable seeing what a journey he goes on over the course of the game - early on, Dylan is deeply depressed and lost, and by the end of it, he's starting to feel a bit more loose and free. Indeed, his friendship with Zoe is a massive indicator of this transformation, as she's initially very cold toward him, but by the end of the game they seem like best friends.

But what of Jesse, the Director?

Well, we need to get into spoiler space here.

Crafting Survival Horror D&D for Spooky Season

 Ok, this is something I've touched on before, but I think I have a pretty solid plan:

Matt Colville has argued that D&D was originally survival horror - making it through, and out of, a dungeon was a fraught challenge where death stalked every turn. But as the editions have gone on, he argues, the game has sort of kept vestiges of that while then empowering players to be more superheroic. The result, again, he argues, is a game whose mechanics are at odds with one another, where the attrition-based gameplay is meant to give us a feeling of desperation, but the immense power we can accomplish pulls away from that.

Fittingly, MCDM has now made two RPGs, Draw Steel and Crows, which each lean into one idea or the other: Draw Steel is built to make you feel like a badass hero from level 1, while Crows is all about just barely making it out alive if you do well enough.

I think a key aspect to this is that the player characters in a survival horror game are often untrained, normal people. That's obviously not always true: Resident Evil has always had player characters who are badass elite militarized cops (though the Grace half of RE9, which I generally hear is the better half, has someone who is, yes, FBI, but is not at all a combat expert.) But in other examples of the genre, it's frequently just some person, like Harry Mason or James Sunderland (James has one notable experience of violence, but a combat expert it does not him make).

So, how do we square this with D&D?

Well, it turns out that Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft actually gave us something just for this: Survivors.

The Squire, Apprentice, Disciple, and Sneak broadly correspond to D&D's four core class archetypes (Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, Rogue) but they are significantly less powerful than even 1st level characters of each of those classes. Each of these characters are rocking at most a +1 to any given ability, they have next to nothing in terms of equipment (the highest AC of all of them is the Sneak, who gets to 13 because they get to use a shield).

I will say that I don't know whether the spellcasters are too powerful: the Apprentice has a couple spells (and ironically, because their Burning Hands action isn't part of their Spellcasting trait, they effectively have four spell slots, which is better than a 1st level Wizard). I'd be open to limiting these characters or even just ignoring them and only allowing the Sneak and Squire.

Still, much as very low-level spellcasters have to be very careful about when they use their tiny number of spell slots, perhaps this is ok.

The Survivors can actually level up, but while they get more HP, the features they gain are instead "Survivor Talents," which they get one of per level, and these are fun and flavorful, like Adrenaline Surge, in which you voluntarily give yourself the frightened condition to double your movement speed for a turn, or Desperate Scream, which can give you advantage on a saving throw twice per day, but the scream is audible to a few hundred feet.

I haven't seen these in action, but I think at the very least by lowering the characters' attack bonuses, saving throw bonuses, and spell save DCs, you create a group of people who are not really cut out to be adventurers - which then makes low-level monsters a pretty terrifying threat.

Actually, to be frank, even regular characters at level 1 or 2 have to be very careful. They key, though, is that Survivors never expect to be 5th level adventurers, let alone 20th. The entire game, using these guys, is going to be in those low, desperate levels, where the game feels like a Survival Horror one.

So: what do we put these poor sods through?

I have recently come to realize that I should use the pre-drawn maps from the Dungeon Master's Guide more frequently. These are great when you don't have an amazing vision for a dungeon layout. You take the map, and then you just decide what rooms have what in them. Honestly, you can even change the vibe of a map pretty easily, like how I took the Barrow Crypt map and turned it into a high tech underwater facility.

But here, we've got it already: the Spooky House.

Here's my twist, though: the house is actually a museum. I was watching some behind-the-scenes stuff about Widow's Bay (a show I enjoyed quite a bit - it's a horror comedy, but does truly get scary at times, at least for someone like me). In an early scene, the mayor is showing a NY Times travel writer to the island town's local museum, where hilariously over-the-top relics of the town's horrifying past are on display (the best bit: a docent showing relics of witch trials there, but describes it as a moment of pride for the town: "we found 'em, we burned 'em," which is something of an inversion of the prevailing modern take on things like the Salem Witch Trials). Anyway, it felt like a fitting setting.

I have also, since playing through Control Resonant, been a little obsessive over the brief Alan Wake easter egg there (if you don't read my Remedyverse posts, the Control and Alan Wake series both take place in a shared universe) in which the beleaguered reality-bending writer takes on an identity of a Nightwatchman.

So: the scenario I see: there's a group of people in this small town, local museum late at night. Maybe your Squire is a security guard, your Apprentice is a historian doing some research there, maybe your Sneak is a teenager who snuck in to get away from their parents.

But something in the museum has awoken.

Again, borrowing from Alan Wake, I think our predominant monsters are Shadows. Shadows are nasty low CR monsters, so we probably don't have a whole ton of them. Given that the players will be struggling to fight them, though, we're going to have the following mechanics:

Flashlights (again, an Alan Wake nod). In my homebrew setting, there's a mishmash of medieval/renaissance, 19th century industrial/steampunk, and 20th century/modern technology. I think a flashlight is totally reasonable here. Functioning essentially like a Bullseye Lantern, someone can point this at a shadow, applying its Sunlight Weakness just in any area of bright light (and perhaps removing its resistances).

But while this is a pretty great buff, we add the following downside: Usage dice.

Here, I'm borrowing from Crows (though I think this mechanic originated elsewhere). Each flashlight needs batteries (like in Alan Wake) and each turn you spend with the flashlight on in combat, you roll a usage die (say a d6, or a d4 if we're feeling mean). On a 1, the battery runs out, and the flashlight goes dark.

Batteries thus become crucial resources to find across the house. We might also have healing items (could just be standard healing potions, though maybe we make lesser healing items that give you flat amounts, or just like, 1d6 of healing).

Like any good survival horror game, the key to survival is some kind of puzzle, taking inventory pieces around the museum to get through various things. One of the reasons using the Survivors is helpful is that, while any Rogue worth their salt is carrying Thieves' Tools around, you can really force players to find appropriate keys when the Sneak doesn't necessarily carry them.

I think that one major step will be having to find fuses up in the attic and bringing them down to a fusebox in the basement, which will force the party to traverse most of the map. We might even implement some puzzles that force the party to split up.

While the Shadows on their own will probably be enough to get the party to play very defensively, I think our real horror here is a Shadow Demon, which is probably the cause of all of this. At CR 4, a Shadow Demon can one-shot any Survivor (unless they level up,) so I think that this needs to be a bit more of an implied threat that only actually strikes at them in the climax or if the players are... shall we say, leaning into the trope in which some idiot underestimates the danger they're in.

To keep this simple and doable in a reasonable amount of time, I think making a very linear set of puzzle challenges is totally reasonable here - A leads to B leads to C, etc. If we make the puzzles criss-cross the map, it won't feel like a railroad (hell, isn't this just how Resident Evil 2 works?)

If we have the time to flesh out some lore, we could plant it to be found throughout the house, but I think a real focus on the puzzles and the danger are what will help reinforce the mood of the adventure.

Who Created Whom in the Remedyverse (And Does it Matter?)

 In Alan Wake, toward the end of the game, Alan finds a manuscript page that was seemingly written not by Alan himself, but by Thomas Zane, the vanished poet who has been guiding him through his journey. It speaks to Alan's childhood, and the all-important artifact his mother provided to him that would help him deal with his nightmares: The Clicker, a switch from the cord of a lamp. Apparently this detail was taken directly from Sam Lake's own childhood, which does imbue it with a certain heft, narratively, in a game series that doesn't so much as break the fourth wall as turn it into something like MC Escher's "Print Gallery."

There will be spoilers for Control Resonant here, as well as Alan Wake II and the previous games in both series, so... just... spoilers ahead: