UA: House Agent Rogue

 Ah, Menzoberranzan. One of the deadliest places in the Forgotten Realms. Center of Lolth-worship among the Drow and basically a place where deadly intrigue rules over all. A fitting place for a Rogue.

The House Agent is meant to represent the kind of fixer/problem-solver for one of the houses of Menzoberranzan that is called in when something needs to be taken care of brutally and discretely.

As with the Unlight Barbarian, there's a flavor table to roll on or pick from describing how you passed your loyalty test to your House. There's a lot of fun flavor here. How are the mechanics?

Thematically, this is a Rogue with some spellcasting, but not in the traditional sense like an Arcane Trickster. It's mainly spells that can be cast once a day, and some alternate Cunning Strikes.

Level 3:

House Insignia:

You have a magical token with the insignia of your sponsor house. Using it, you can cast certain spells (Charisma is your spellcasting ability). If you lose the Insignia, your house will get you a replacement when you finish a long rest, whether by courier or magical teleportation or whatever.

You know the Friends cantrip, and you can cast Find Familiar only as a Ritual, and can only choose the Spider form for it. You get a few other spells, each of which you can cast once per long rest using your insignia, gaining new spells as you hit higher levels.

At 3rd level, you have Charm Person. At 5th level, you have Suggestion. At 9th level, you have Hypnotic Pattern (essentially half-caster progression).

    So, on one hand, this is a lot of cool stuff to get. On the other hand, however, you could get this stuff and more as an Arcane Trickster. Sure, you get Suggestion two levels earlier and Hypnotic Pattern four levels earlier, but the flexibility of an Arcane Trickster, to me, would almost certainly be preferable.

Charming Presence:

You can take the Influence action as a bonus action, and you also gain proficiency in your choice of Deception, Intimidation, Performance, or Persuasion.

    This depends, I think, a lot on how strict your DM is about what kinds of ability checks you can make in combat. Generally the way my best friend/DM and I do it is that if you want to significantly affect a creature's behavior, like talking a foe out of fighting or just taunting them to go after you, you need to commit your full action to this, and so this feature would be pretty useful. But DMs who are less strict with the rules might make this feature, at least the bonus action Influence part, useless.

Level 9:

Backstab:

You have advantage on attack rolls against creatures that are within 5 feet of you and are Friendly or Charmed (interestingly it doesn't say they have to be charmed by you.). You also get a new Cunning Strike option:

Stunning Betrayal (costs 4d6): If your target was Friendly to you or had the Charmed condition when you hit them, they have the Stunned condition until the start of your next turn.

    I love Cunning Strike in theory, even if I think sacrificing damage on a class that already does less damage than it feels like it should is a little problematic. I will also say that the fact that they become un-stunned at the start, rather than end of your next turn, makes this a little less powerful. It's sort of a no-save stun, except you have to have gotten them into a good state to make use of it.

    One thing that might be a problem here is that DMs might not always think in terms of the Friendly/Indifferent/Hostile attitudes that are part of the rules, but might be overlooked by more intuitive roleplayers. It's something where you should talk to a DM about making sure that the meaning of these terms is clear. Flavor-wise, I think this is really fun for transitioning a social encounter to a combat encounter. But when you're sacrificing most of your Sneak Attack damage at this level, I don't know that it'll make for the kind of assassination vignette that it wants to evoke.

Level 13:

Infiltration Partner:

Your familiar through Find Familiar now has Darkvision out to 120 feet and Truesight to 30 feet.

Additionally, when you cast Find Familiar or finish a short or long rest while you have a familiar, you can grant Temp HP to the familiar equal to your Rogue level.

    30 feet of always-on Truesight for your Spider buddy is actually not too bad. Also, that Spider might actually be able to take a hit now and then if they're cushioned with double-digit Temp HP. What I'd love is if we could also give the Spider scaling Stealth bonuses - A Spider has a +4 by default, but by this level we might have as much as a +15.

Silver Tongue:

A creature's Hostile attitude does not impose Disadvantage on Charisma checks to influence them.

    Again, I imagine a lot of DMs might not even know what that means, so talk to your DM to make sure this subclass feature is actually coming into play.

Level 17:

Subtle Manipulator:

You gain an additional Cunning Strike option:

Confound (5d6): The target must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw (using your spellcasting DC, which is Charisma-based) or be Charmed for 1 minute. They can repeat the save when they take any damage to end it early.

Additionally, you can cast Friends as a bonus action, and the target no longer automatically succeeds on the save if you're fighting it or they're not a humanoid.

Finally, when a spell you cast gives a target the Charmed condition, they don't know they were charged by you.

    I mean, the benefit here is that you never run out of Cunning Strikes. And unlike Charm Person, Confound isn't going to give them advantage on the save because you just hit them.

    Here's what I'll say: in the right campaign, this could be very fun. But also, by high levels like this, a massive number of monsters are immune to the charmed condition.

Overall Thoughts:

    I really like the flavor of this subclass. But I just think, not unlike the Unlight Barbarian, that while there are some cool ideas at play here, it's A: underpowered and B: will only work in a very specific kind of campaign.

UA: Path of Unlight Barbarian

 Seems like Barbarians are getting a lot of subclasses. Let's check this one out.

One of the major throughlines of this UA is the city of Deep Imaskar, which seems to be the remnants of an ancient empire that exists in the lowest depths of the Underdark, and among their powers is Unlight, a powerful magic that helps them survive so far from the surface.

Unlight Barbarians basically have a lot of radiant-damage elements, with a flavor table (something all three of these subclasses get) that describes how their inner light manifests.

Level 3:

Radiant Rage:

This is your only 3rd level feature. When a creature hits you with a melee attack while you're raging, they take Radiant damage equal to your rage damage bonus. Additionally, you shine with 20 feet of bright light when you rage.

    This feels underwhelming. If you get hit by a ton of attacks, this could add up, but even at high levels, if a foe hit you three times in a round, that's just 12 damage. Compare this to a Zealot Barbarian who could do a bonus of up to 13.5 without taking any hits.

    The light aspect is cool, but also potentially a problem if you're trying not to draw attention to yourself (granted, the sounds of combat likely already do that). I think we just need something more here. My homebrew Inner Shadow Barbarian has the reflective damage, but also buffs to Unarmed Strikes as part of its level 3. Maybe if they bumped up the damage here, like Rage bonus plus Strength, this might feel a bit more substantial.

Level 6:

Unlight Revelation:

You gain proficiency in Perception if you don't already have it, and also gain expertise with it. While raging, you have Blindsight equal to the radius of the bright line you shine.

    One little note: I think that there needs to be compensation if you already have Perception. Maybe let you pick a different Barbarian class skill if you already have it. The blindsight is cool (and as this hints, the radius expands later on). But once again, that's something that will be situationally useful but might not come into play very often.

    Perception is great, though: it's probably the best skill proficiency to have in the game, and expertise is a way to really make it feel like you're truly good at something.

Level 10:

Infectious Unlight:

Damage you deal with Brutal Strike can be Radiant or its normal type (your choice). Also, you gain a new Brutal Strike option:

Radiant Infection: The target becomes infected with Unlight for 1 minute. While infected, it sheds Bright Light in a 10 foot radius and takes 1d6 radiant damage at the start of its turn. It can make a Con save (DC based on your Strength) at the end of each of its turns to end the effect.

    This is interesting: building on the Brutal Strike mechanic is fun. One thing I'd probably add in there is to make it so that if you infect an invisible creature with this, it no longer benefits from being invisible, which would make this a really cool feature to make the Unlight Barbarian the ultimate "hidden foe" finder (with their Blindsight to help them find it in the first place).

Harbinger of Unlight:

You have resistance to radiant damage.

    This is a pretty rare damage type for monsters to use, though often when they do, it's very high damage. But I don't think this will come up very often.

Level 14:

Brilliant Rage:

The aura of the light you shed when raging increases to a 30 foot radius (and thus also your blindsight). As a bonus action, you can force each creature of your choice within 30 feet to make a Con save (DC based on your Strength) or take 1d12 Radiant damage and be blinded until the end of your next turn (or take half damage only on a success). You can do this once per long rest, but you can expend a use of Rage to restore your use (no action required to restore the use).

    While Rage is a much easier resource to fling around now in 5.5, I don't think you can do this every turn. Mainly, I think the damage is kind of secondary - 6.5 average damage isn't much at level 14, though at least it's multiplied by how many targets you can hit. But the AoE blinding effect is actually quite nice, if you can get it.

Overall Thoughts:

    Yeah, ultimately I think there are some cool themes and a visual aesthetic to it that I like, but I just don't think there's enough going on with this subclass to get me excited to try playing it. Admittedly, I'm not much of a Barbarian player, but given the relative simplicity of the class, I really need a Barbarian subclass to give me some very cool tools to make up for that.

    I also think the power level here is overly conservative.

UA: Underdark Options

 We have a new Unearthed Arcana. While there is a bit of a backlog of tested options compared to the announced books, in fairness, we have sort of been working through them (for example, a few of the old Xanathar's subclasses are getting revamps in the World of Warcraft book).

The Underdark is, of course, a storied part of D&D lore, and an environment that they generally assume you have in your campaign setting despite having no true real-world equivalent (sure, there are subterranean biomes on Earth, but I don't think any are as extensive as the Underdark).

The UA brings us three subclasses and a "villainous feat path" similar to what we saw with Liches and Death Knights, in this case being the Path of Ceremorphosis, where you become a Mind Flayer.

I'll be honest: I'm not generally that fascinated by the Underdark as a setting, and my initial impressions of these options are not... well, I'm not blown away by them, even though I applaud the efforts to create truly new things. We'll get into them with individual posts.

We got a lot of big announcements at GenCon, but we do still have a few things that have gone through testing without an official announcement of a corresponding book - primarily the "villain" book. This, I imagine, could be for a separate Underdark-themed sourcebook or perhaps an adventure set there (which they have done before in 5.0 with Out of the Abyss, but that was a while ago now).

The Duskbloods Looks Really Cool But I Don't Think I'll Play It

 I've been a pretty consistent fan of FromSoft's games, admittedly never beating either Dark Souls game I've gotten (though I got very far in DSIII, with only the last two DLC bosses and the final boss unbeaten) but adoring both Bloodborne and Elden Ring.

When Elden Ring: Nightreign was released, I considered playing it, but ultimately decided that the kind of short match-style multiplayer system is just not what I'm into (I've been more or less a solo player in WoW of late, thanks in large part to how the game now accommodates such a playstyle with things like Delves as my endgame).

Gameplay-wise, though, Nightreign seems like far more of a fit for me than The Duskbloods, as while the former is entirely built around co-op, the Duskbloods is ultimately a competitive PvP multiplayer game (though with environmental threats to face largely as a way to earn character progression and avoid being "culled." I am also given to understand that there are scenarios not available in the initial demo that end in boss battles rather than PvP free-for-alls, but it's still built around competition with other players).

So, once again, I'm left with a game I'll probably be curious to hear a lot about, but I doubt I'll actually play it (I don't have a Switch 2 either, though that feels like an eventual inevitability. I've had every Nintendo home console starting with the SNES).

But on an aesthetic level, The Duskbloods actually looks incredible.

The game has more of a gothic look than the medieval look of Dark Souls and Elden Ring, though in contrast with Bloodborne's more "early to mid 19th century" look, this really appears more Steampunk in vibe, arguably more of an early 20th century feel.

Like Nightreign, you pick from established characters with their own built-in capabilities. Probably the most distinctive is a guy (actually, I'm making an assumption here. I don't know that they're male) in a big steampunk armor suit whose signature attack is to use rockets to shoot forward and ram into their foes. There's also evidently an event that can bring a big airship overhead that you can call upon to bombard large groups of foes.

If Bloodborne is... sort of... about werewolves, Duskbloods is far more vampire-coded, with the player characters having vampiric abilities, including the ability to bite foes and temporarily make them into allies (I assume only for the NPC ones).

FromSoft is known for re-using assets, so I wouldn't read too much into this, but many of the non-player foes that I saw in Vaati Vidya's preview looked like the Pthumerians we encounter in Bloodborne. Now, I don't think we can draw any direct lore conclusions from that - Bloodborne was a Playstation exclusive and Duskbloods is a Nintendo exclusive, so I think it extremely unlikely that there will be any canonical connection between their stories.

But thematically we might see some similar ideas. What I find interesting here is the presence of, well, kind of World War 1-era weaponry. I believe the idea of the game is that it's an era called "humanity's twilight," and massive wars like WWI felt pretty apocalyptic to those who lived through it. Again, unlike Nightreign, this game does seem to be oriented toward competition, with only one victor arising from each match, and I wonder to what extent that theme of competition winds up being part of the story as well - a world brought to perdition because of endless competitiveness.

FromSoft's combat has undergone an interesting evolution. Early games like Demon's Souls and Dark Souls had very slow, methodically-paced combat. But over time, they've pushed for faster styles of combat that still maintain the meaning and weight of each strike. Duskbloods actually looks kind of insane, with what appears to be all characters getting several in-air jumps and the ability to clash mid-air.

Anyway, it's a little frustrating that, two games in a row, I'm finding myself likely to be looking in through the window. But maybe we'll see the next single-player game from the company incorporate some of the cool ideas developed for Nightreign and Duskbloods.

What Can the WoW D&D Book Cover?

 One of the biggest questions I've had regarding the WoW book for D&D is what a single sourcebook can possibly cover amongst the elements of a 22-year-old MMORPG, one with eleven expansions, each of which brought with it zones with their own questlines, dungeons, and patches that act as kind of mini-expansions.

While the folks from Blizzard and WotC have pitched this book as allowing you to create adventures in any era of WoW, up to the present day (last week, patch 12.1, the second major phase of the Midnight expansion, just launched) I truly don't think that you could possibly cover every plot thread and worldbuilidng element that has shown up in the game in a single book. But beyond that, I'm also inclined to believe that you couldn't really cover every single expansion without giving short shrift to all of them.

So, what are the essentials?

This is a subjective question, but I'll give my opinion. Essentially, what are the expansions that had a giant impact on the overall world, and what elements within them do I think would be essential to fleshing out the world.

Vanilla (aka "World of Warcraft"):

Not an expansion, but the original game. This is an obvious one, and necessary to lay the groundwork. Blizzard was new at making an MMO, but WoW became popular in large part due to the focus on storytelling through questing (where a lot of older MMOs were explicitly grindy). Anyway, we establish the home territories of the Alliance and Horde and the conflicts they find themselves in. If there is anything guaranteed to be covered in this book, it's the overall continents of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms. And we'll have elements about the lingering impact of the Third War, from the Scourge to the Burning Legion's devastation of northern Kalimdor, then probably something about the Black Dragonflight and the devotees of Ragnaros, the Firelord.

The Burning Crusade:

WoW's first expansion feels, at least in retrospect, like it was continuing to just flesh out the world. The world of Outland, formerly called Draenor, is a big part of Warcraft lore because it is here that the Orcs come, and where the Horde was originally founded. But BC also established the lands of Quel'thalas (which is also the centerpiece of Midnight) as well as giving us the Draenei (well, an updated version of them that involved an accidental retcon, but boy I'm glad they did because I love the Draenei). Again, I suspect that a lot of the elements of this expansion will be there in the book.

Wrath of the Lich King:

Among the most popular expansions, Wrath both featured Warcraft's most iconic villain, Arthas Menethil (not the original Lich King, but the most notable one) and also did a lot to establish the lore of the Titans, god-like beings who brought order to Azeroth and also created a number of beings who would be the ancestors of a lot of the playable races (or in the case of the Earthen, who would come out far later, just directly created them). Once again, Northrend was established as part of the world back in Warcraft III, so this felt a bit like Burning Crusade just giving us something we were going to need anyway.

Cataclysm:

For the first time, we find ourselves with an expansion that is more, I think, about the specific events taking place in it than expanding the world. To be fair, we do get a bit of established lore territories, like Mount Hyjal, Gilneas, and a brief glimpse at Kezan. Cataclysm saw a massive revamp of the old Vanilla zones to update their quests and in some cases landscape to reflect both time moving on and the devastation wrought by Deathwing, but I actually think very little of what happens in the expansion is truly essential to giving us a world to play in, so this might be touched on only lightly. The main things, here, though, were the establishment of the Goblins and Worgen as members of the Horde and Alliance, respectively, the last of the non-neutral, non-"allied" races in WoW. (Allied races are basically variant races built on existing models, though... it's a little more complicated, like the Fox-like Vulpera aren't actually related to Goblins even if they use the same 3D skeleton, and the Kul Tiran Humans and Zandalari Trolls have, I think, unique skeletons. That's not relevant to the D&D book, though. What is is that the Worgen and specifically the Bilgewater Cartel Goblins become established as core populations within the two major factions).

Mists of Pandaria:

For the first time, this expansion gave us an entirely new continent that had no precedent in the RTS games, with the Pandaren even being treated as a non-canonical joke by some. However, despite the outcries that this was adding a childish element to the game, Pandaria was actually a richly conceptualized region that has left this among the most popular expansions in WoW's history. Historically, this was an expansion that saw the conflict between Alliance and Horde flare up more than we had seen before, here giving us a showcase of what happens when two Great Powers use a foreign land to fight their battles. If nothing else, given the popularity of the expansion, I expect to see the monsters and territories of Pandaria covered at least a bit.

Warlords of Draenor:

Infamously conceptually bizarre, Warlords of Draenor had the disgraced former Warchief of the Horde, Garrosh Hellscream, teaming with a rogue bronze dragon to travel to an alternate timeline version of the orcish homeworld of Draenor to form an alternate-history Horde with all the leaders from his father's generation who could use modern technology rather than demonic magic to invade Azeroth. If there's one expansion I can imagine them just kind of skipping over, it would be this one, an expansion that literally had less content than other expansions, and is commonly held (certainly I think so) as the worst WoW expansion. While it had some plot elements that led to Legion, which is my favorite expansion, we could more or less breeze past this.

Legion:

All about the Burning Legion's largest, seemingly final invasion of Azeroth, this gave us the Broken Isles (a region that was actually established as early as Warcraft II, I believe) which largely centers around the ancient Night Elf city of Suramar (the elves there forced to subsist on pure arcane magic for ten thousand years and are now known as the Nightborne). Interestingly, one of the things we might get here is some really iconic magic items, as one of the parts of the expansion was that each spec (basically subclass) got its own unique Artifact Weapon, which you'd use the entire expansion and just upgrade over the course of the expansion instead of replacing it. This also gave us the world of Argus, the home world of the Draenei (back when they were called the Eredar) and also effectively the home base of the Burning Legion. The expansion sees us deal a massive blow against the Burning Legion, and while it hasn't been explicit, it seems that the Burning Legion is more or less defeated and scattered to the winds. Again, I think that the expansion's popularity is a big part of why we might see a lot of elements from it in the book, but it's also a very big "event" in the history of the franchise.

Battle for Azeroth:

While not a very popular expansion, BFA does have some important elements to include in the D&D book. Lore-wise, it saw the culmination and ending of the Alliance/Horde conflict that flared up again starting in Legion. It adds the island nations of Kul Tiras and Zandalar, both pretty important in the grand scheme of things (Zandalar in particular is basically the oldest humanoid civilization on Azeroth, the original empire of the Trolls). We also had the Naga center-stage with the reveal of the underwater realm of Nazjatar, and got to see the nightmare demiplane city of Ny'alotha (which had been teased for years as essentially the WoW equivalent of R'lyeh).

Shadowlands:

This one's a real big question: among the least popular WoW expansions (though I personally didn't dislike it as much as many did - it suffered a lot from Covid hitting right before its release). Shadowlands takes us to another plane of reality, and therein lies the question: how much time do they want to spend fleshing out these afterlife realms that, sort of by their nature, don't really play into what's going on in the world of the living all that much? The expansion's villain, the Jailer, was meant to be the ultimate chessmaster who had been manipulating everything for eons, but he was far too flat and generic of a bad guy to really feel like he made an impact. So, to be honest, if there's one expansion I expect them to gloss over, it's... well, it's Warlords of Draenor. But if there's two, the other will be Shadowlands.

Dragonflight:

In terms of longterm impact on the game's story, it's still a little early to guess how big a deal Dragonflight will be. Praised as a "back to basics" approach for the game after the problems with Shadowlands, Dragonflight, I'd say, didn't give us anything profoundly new (though it did establish some new, complicated villains with the Primal Incarnates, expanding out the kinds of dragons we might encounter in Azeroth) and might get featured more prominently again because it was just a popular expansion.

The War Within:

The first expansion of the "Worldsoul Saga" trilogy, of which we are now on chapter two with Midnight, this did actually establish some interesting new lore: for one thing, making the Titans seem a lot less benevolent than we had previously been led to see them as (there had been hints). Mainly, we had an expansion largely taking place underground. Now, as I posted about recently, I'm fascinated by the existence of the Hallowfall Arathi, a culture of half-human/half-elf people who do not fit into the lore of the world in a way that makes sense unless they're from an alternate timeline, but that's more of a question that has been posed than one that has been addressed. We also got the world of K'aresh in this, but given that Ethereals are still not a playable race (and won't be a playable species in this book,) I honestly think they might gloss over that. Mainly, though, the idea that there's a route down to the Worldsoul of Azeroth built by the Titans feels like it could be important to establish.

Midnight:

We're still in the middle of this expansion, with the latest patch probably the last major one before the book comes out. I think we might get a bit about Quel'thalas and Zul'Aman, and the underground realm of Harandar, home of the Haranir and also the original location of Azeroth's Worldsoul before the Titans moved her is a fairly big deal. The expansion has fleshed out a bit of the elements of the Void as a cosmic force (which is related to, but evidently separate from Azeroth's Old Gods and their creations).

    But let's get real:

Frankly, I don't think even what I've tried to boil down here is going to be covered.

We don't know in quite how much detail the various dungeons presented in the book will be, but if they're even quickies like Dragon Delves, that's going to be a huge chunk of the book. All but one of them are from Vanilla WoW, meaning they're in the Eastern Kingdoms or Kalimdor. This is but one book, and I frankly think it might mean that the book will really only cover the Eastern Kingdoms, Kalimdor, and maybe Northrend (given that Azjol-Nerub is there).

If you covered those three continents and Outland, you'd have covered the main locations that were known to exist by the time WoW first came out (yes, the Broken Isles were established, but the region wasn't known to be as extensive as it wound up being in Legion).

There is plenty in those regions to make a sizable D&D campaign in, and DMs who are familiar with World of Warcraft will easily be able to flesh the rest of the setting out. What we need for the book, I think, is monsters, magic items, and player options that help thing feel like Azeroth.

If I were to run a campaign set in Azeroth, I could just pop WoW open and check the map to get a ton of specific names for locations, and probably could recall what sort of plots were going on there if I want to use them as a basis for an adventure.

Compatibility and Universes Beyond in D&D

 When the upcoming World of Warcraft book for D&D was announced, it seemed like a no-brainer: WoW is a game all about heroic fantasy, and is already built on the race/class character-building system that D&D pioneered. There's even been precedent for Warcraft-based books released for D&D, though I believe the 3rd edition (or 3.5) books were based on the original RTS games. WoW released in 2004, about halfway through 3rd edition (counting both 3.0 and 3.5,) and of course, the MMO became a far bigger, denser, and long-lived property than the RTS precedent. Way more story has been told through the MMO than the original games ever told, and the world has been expanded profoundly.

Indeed, if there's one thing I'm skeptical about with this book, it's the attempt to cram such a profound amount of lore into a single volume. There's no way that it's going to have the space to go into the intricacies of Zandalari politics, the threat of the Botani on Draenor, and the story of the Tol'vir when trying to give us the core fundamentals of the Alliance and Horde. It'll be a massive effort in judicious editing and selecting the things that are most necessary to translate into D&D terms.

Warcraft has its own cosmos with its own cosmic rules. While there are some elements very clearly inspired by aspects of D&D, like the Emerald Dream, a reality that sits to the side of the mundane world as a realm of pristine nature never adulterated by humanoid civilization, which could be argued as its equivalent of the Feywild. But making Azeroth just another world of the Prime Material Plane would probably not really work, especially if we tried to situate all the cosmic forces at play within D&D's Great Wheel cosmology. The demonic Burning Legion, for example, doesn't really fit into a clear "lawful evil" or "chaotic evil" alignment, as while demons are embodiments of the primal force of "disorder," they're also basically all members of the extremely regimented regime headed by the Dark Titan Sargeras, whose mission is to save the universe from the chaos of the Void (by destroying it before the Void can claim it).

Now, when it comes to setting sourcebooks, I'm always eager to "plunder" them for my own uses. Even though I've wound up running a Ravnica-based campaign for now most of my D&D career, I've always thought of myself as being more inclined toward homebrew settings (I've put a lot of work into fleshing out my own, which is kind of a pleasure in and of itself).

So, a big question I have is whether I can take elements from the Warcraft book and incorporate them into my own setting.

I actually think I can in many cases. For example, in my world, the continent-spanning Lupinian Empire has a corps of knights who answer directly to the Emperor (in an empire that is generally more modern and whose government is really mostly run by semi-democratically-elected Parliament). This corps of knights is called The Reapers, and are basically the "in case of emergency, break glass" option when the Emperor needs something handled swiftly and ruthlessly. Assuming it's mechanically sound, I think the Ebon Blade Paladin might be a really good fit for this.

But yeah, Warcraft is already pretty D&D-like as it stands, so it shouldn't be too hard to incorporate monsters and character options into an established world.

Star Wars might be a bit different.

There's no release date for that set just yet, and I suspect that it'll probably be a late 2027 book if not even further out. Star Wars is still, I argue, a fantasy setting, but it's also about 50% sci-fi.

Now, the good news is that I actually think this could solve some of the problems I had with Spelljammer. There's certainly something whimsical about sailing a tall ship across the stars, but I far prefer the Star Wars-style rusted spaceship aesthetic. Truthfully, you could argue that Star Wars is really a sci-fi setting with fantasy elements (maybe that's even the more popular stance). Funnily enough, Warcraft also has a lot of sci-fi elements, where there's a wide mix of technologies at play: from rough stone tools favored by the Tauren to more modern-style technology used by Goblins, and then far-future crystal spaceships employed by the Draenei.

But the presence of technology in a D&D game doesn't seem too game-breaking if you just keep it balanced (like Warcraft does - that stone-bladed axe might be a better piece of gear than that sword made out of hard light if you got it in a later expansion). Instead, where I'm curious to see things go with Star Wars is how Jedi and Sith are handled.

See, the idea of a mystic knight isn't that hard to accomplish in D&D: a Paladin, Bladesinger Wizard, Eldritch Knight, Psi Warrior, etc., might all fit. But are Jedi/Sith going to be their own separate full class? Or is this going to be bolted onto an existing one. (On an aesthetic level, you never see Jedi wearing armor, though armor in Star Wars generally seems to be pretty ineffective, as famously demonstrated by Storm Troopers).

I wonder here if the cultural ubiquity of Star Wars might be the main impediment: while WoW is certainly popular (especially among fantasy RPG nerds,) it's not nearly as universal a set of cultural reference points the way Star Wars is.

All that being said: I really hope that this will give us a good space-faring way of playing D&D. I briefly ran a Spelljammer campaign for my friends (only hit level 5,) using my homebrew world as the basis for a futuristic setting taking place about a thousand years later, and I certainly imagined far more of a Used Future aesthetic to the place, which made the party's Living Ship stick out a little awkwardly.

I might file off some of the serial numbers: maybe that Corellian Light Freighter the party gets will be instead called an ISC Civilian Transport Freighter (one of the forces in my future space setting is the giantocratic Garvox Imperium, which has a real 1970s Soviet utilitarian aesthetic). We'll have to wait and see how extensive character options really push us deep into Star Wars lore, and to what extent we can kind of extract those mechanical ideas for our own original, homebrewed "IPs."

Baseless Speculation on the Demon Hunter Ranger

 The Death Knight and Demon Hunter were World of Warcraft's first two "hero classes," which is a somewhat ironic name.

In fact, in WoW's entire 22-year history, the game has only added four full classes to the original 9-class roster: the Death Knight in 2008's Wrath of the Lich King, the Monk in 2012's Mists of Pandaria, the Demon Hunter in 2016's Legion, and the Evoker in 2022's Dragonflight. In fact, of these four, only the Monk was not a "Hero Class." Hero classes required you to have a character of a certain level (usually the previous expansion's level cap, though Death Knights only started at level 55 when Wrath raised the cap to 80). The logic here was that it would be weird to have a low-level Death Knight going around in low-level areas doing relatively low-stakes quests, and so they wanted to start them off with a fair degree of power.

The game has changed significantly since 2008, of course, including the introduction of level-scaling, so you can, in fact, now level up a low-level Death Knight in regions like Westfall (traditionally the second zone human characters go to when they move on from their starting zone in Elwynn Forest).

While Evokers were basically unprecedented in the lore prior to this, the Death Knight and Demon Hunter were both the classes of iconic characters from Warcraft III, specifically Arthas Menethil and Illidan Stormrage, respectively. WCIII had a sort of vague RPG system within its real-time-strategy campaigns, where you'd have kind of hero unit that would be leading your units in all the base-building and such, and would be a formidable force. These hero units were the major characters of the story.

While the Death Knight has plenty of precedence in lots of fantasy RPGs (and I'd argue also in fantasy media in general, with figures like the Ringwraiths from Lord of the Rings and Darth Vader both occupying that archetype,) the Demon Hunter is a bit weirder.

To be clear, there certainly are Demon Hunters, or monster hunters in general in fantasy media. Indeed, one of the classes in Diablo III is also called a Demon Hunter, but I think that it adheres much closer to the way that such a character class is usually portrayed: in Diablo III, the class is more like Diablo II's Rogue (and I guess also Diablo IV's,) with a flavor of having lots of cool gadgets and traps to fight demons, but basically being your black-clad, acrobatic, kind of Solomon Kane-like figure.

WoW's Demon Hunters have an entirely different aesthetic, strongly informed both by WoW's Night Elf culture and also the aesthetic of its demons.

In WoW, a Demon Hunter is not just someone who hunts demons. Indeed, there's actually a Hunter class, which is much closer to D&D's Ranger, typically fighting with ranged weapons and/or an animal companion, with a lot of "nature survival"-themed abilities along with their weapon attacks.

The premise of the Demon Hunter is that it's a highly specialized path that fundamentally changes you on a physiological level. Demon Hunters don't just use fel magic - they literally absorb a demonic soul into their own, becoming half-demons themselves. Demon Hunter characters typically have horns, and might have scaly skin or cracks where the bright-green Fel energy shines through.

 Part of the ritual to become a Demon Hunter involves gouging out one's own eyes. The fel energy inside replaces them, allowing Demon Hunters to see, and even see through disguises and invisibility. Thus, as a cosmetic option, Demon Hunter characters can select a number of blindfolds, or they can just let the bright glow of their fel-filled eye sockets shine unencumbered.

While the current expansion, Midnight, introduced a third specialization (WoW's version of a subclass) that both allows them to act as a ranged spellcaster and channel Void, instead of Fel magic (which is color-coded in blues and purples, as opposed to Fel's neon green and occasionally deep red,) for the most part, Demon Hunters fight in melee, dual-wielding weapons - most iconically, Warglaives, which are massive, double-bladed weapons. They are absolutely fantasy BS kinds of weapons, because A: they would weigh a ton each, and B, it would be hard not to slice your own thighs while swinging two of them around at your foes. But in a video game, they look really cool.

Anyway, the motive of Demon Hunters is to use the power of demons to fight demons - in WoW, basically all demons are part of a massive interstellar army called the Burning Legion that seeks to conquer and destroy the universe - the conflict that started the series was caused by the Burning Legion manipulating the orcs into acting as a proxy army to invade Azeroth, which they had failed to conquer 10,000 years earlier thanks in part to people like Illidan Stormrage, who basically invented Demon Hunters and was the first one.

I do think there's some logic to building Demon Hunters on the bones of the Ranger, conceptually: while very different in aesthetic from your typical Ranger (again, WoW's Hunter class is the clear equivalent,) the Demon Hunter does have a focus on taking down monsters (even if in WoW, they've obviously got to be fine at fighting any type of foe. We haven't really had demons as a major threat since Legion, which ran from 2016-2018). Ironically, this might have made them a better fit for the 5.0 Ranger, with its Favored Enemy mechanic (naturally picking "Fiend" as your first favored enemy type).

As we talked about with the Death Knight being represented by the Oath of the Ebon Blade subclass for Paladins, I suspect that Demon Hunter Rangers will also see some significant changes to the level 1 and 2 class features, as hinted at in that James Wyatt interview.

Oddly, I almost think you'd need more distinct features than the Death Knight - DKs in WoW do have some cosmetic differences, such as glowing blue eyes (at least starting with Wrath of the Lich King, the power of necromancy is often represented with a bright, icy blue, though this was more specifically the color associated with the Scourge and the Lich King, as there are several colors of death magic when we went to the realm of the dead in 2020's Shadowlands expansion) and a few partially-rotten skin textures you can pick, but it's not nearly as dramatic as the Demon Hunter customizations (which was maybe just because of 8 years of development).

There are various aesthetic things I'd really suggest should be part of the Demon Hunter subclass, and represented mechanically:

First, the missing eyes. It might be too powerful to give them a baseline 30-foot blindsight, but perhaps they can activate blindsight in a reasonable range a certain number of times per day. This could upgrade to Truesight at higher levels.

Next, their tattoos: the Demon Hunter aesthetic is classically one with a lot of skimpy clothing: Illidan would typically go shirtless. In WoW, your armor is a huge part of your character progression, but when designing Demon Hunter-specific sets, they've often made them more revealing. Demon Hunters have magical tattoos that help protect them, and thus, I think giving the subclass Unarmored Defense would make a lot of sense - Dex+Wis would work fine, just like it does for a Monk.

Then, we've got their wings. In WoW, Demon Hunters can double-jump and also pop out wings to glide down and prevent falling damage. Maybe this is a Slow Fall-like feature, or maybe we set this one aside.

Then, we have Warglaives. In WoW, this weapon type is available only to Demon Hunters (and thus is always statted-out to be ideal for them, with the addition of the spellcasting Devourer spec adding Intellect to all Warglaives in addition to the usual Agility). There's not really an obvious equivalent to them in D&D. I might be tempted to make them d8 Light weapons, though perhaps for balance they need to be d6s. The other issue is that, thanks to Weapon Mastery, we'll want to either have two types of Warglaives (one with Nick and one with something like Vex or Sap,) or Demon Hunters will, weirdly, find themselves probably not dual-wielding them, which feels wrong. (Fun fact, in the expansion that Demon Hunters were made playable in, every spec got a single weapon or set of weapons for the entire expansion that simply got upgraded over the course of it, so Demon Hunters naturally only used Warglaives the whole time. It was only later that they started to use the axes, swords, and fist weapons that they were also capable of using the whole time). (Also, ironically, when we fought Illidan in 2007's Burning Crusade expansion, he had a small chance to drop his legendary Warglaives of Azzinoth, but because that weapon type didn't exist yet and the class that could use them wouldn't be there for 9 more years, those actually just count as one-handed swords. Illidan kind of got handed the villain ball in BC, but Legion did a lot to rehabilitate him as the rash but ultimately well-intentioned anti-hero he was always supposed to be).

Now, how much of this is going to be stuff we get at level 3? No clue. I actually have far less of a sense of what Demon Hunter features will be subclass features and what will be spells we can pick up. Even more than the Oath spells for the Ebon Blade Paladin, I feel like Demon Hunters have to get more than the typical "one per spell level" subclass spells that Rangers typically get. We know Demon Spikes will be one of them (a defensive ability used by Vengeance Demon Hunters, the tank spec for the class).

Still, I think that mobility has to be a major theme - Demon Hunters have a ton of mobility features in WoW, and a big part of their overall vibe is being "speed demons," so to speak (one of the major rotational AoE abilities for Havoc, their melee damage spec, called Blade Dance, has them rushing faster than you can see in a kind of X pattern, slashing all foes in the surrounding area.)

I will say, I'm far less enamored of the Ranger class in D&D than the Paladin one, so I'm a little more concerned over whether the Demon Hunter will be appealing to play in an Azeroth-set game. But we shall see.