D&D As Survival Horror

 I don't know that I'll necessarily be able to run a true survival horror RPG. My friends, I think, are drawn more to the power fantasy, the high-stakes set-pieces, and the character drama.

Matt Colville has said in the past that D&D was originally a survival horror game, and MCDM's "Crows" aims to take the DNA of their heroic fantasy game Draw Steel and rework it in all the ways that will make for a tough, brutal survival horror dungeon crawler (Draw Steel famously doesn't allow heroes or monsters to miss, while Crows, at its early stage of development, will always allow for bad luck to screw you - casting a spell can potentially open a rift to hell or some such dimension and instantly kill your character, though extremely rarely).

As I've been playing Resident Evil 4's remake (which is, admittedly, a more action-forward entry in the genre, with foes often dropping ammo - a purist could make the argument that it's less survival horror than just an action game with gruesome elements) I've been thinking about that idea: D&D as survival horror.

It's not the first time I've given it some thought, but here are some ideas:

Recovery:

The adventuring day in D&D is a really important resource, and I think if there's one real failing of the 2024 DMG it's guidance on how much adventuring a party ought to get up to in a day. To be fair, I and many other DMs ignored the advice in the 2014 DMG. Complaints that 5E heroes are too powerful might not have been so strong if we were sending our players into the utter slogs that the DMG suggests on a daily basis.

Long Rests almost totally reset everything, even more in 5.5, where even hit dice expended fully recharge rather than only getting half your maximum. That means that a D&D character can more or less go hard every single day, but it also raises the following challenge: if you have a dark and scary dungeon, the optimal strategy for players is to just go in, fight something or do some other challenge, clear a room, and then leave the dungeon and rest outside.

A party might decide to rest inside the dungeon, relying on a cleared room and maybe using spells like Leomund's Tiny Hut (if the room's big enough) or Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion (if they're high-level) to prevent any interruption of their rest.

And even if they don't have that kind of fortification, DMs are forced to do some extra work to create monster patrols to assault the party while they're resting.

And even then, here's a question for you: if the long rest is interrupted with a 3-round monster fight (basically 18 seconds in-game) and the party prevails, they can continue their rest. Unless it was a truly grueling fight, do you, as the DM, feel like you've really made the dungeon feel scarier? Is it really all that much tougher? And are you going to send the same patrols of monsters against them again to show how truly nasty and scary this place is?

Let's look to Survival Horror. One of the big things in the genre (or at least in the three games in the genre I've played) is that there's no single moment that just resets your HP to full (actually, there might be, but they're relatively invisible). Recovery, of ammo and of HP, or any other resource, is something you need to work for, and every error you make - a missed shot or taking damage when you can avoid it (and the deal the games make with you is that you can avoid taking damage) means some little bit of your overall cache of resources is diminished when it might not otherwise have been.

So, what we need to do is make recovery a resource that is not so easily regained.

In D&D, an eight hour rest is what you need for a long rest. Officially, you also need to eat a pound of food per day (and drink some amount of water - a gallon, maybe?)

Let's totally rewrite that rule:

Instead, let's say that a "long rest" is a "full ration." We take time out of the equation (this might complicate things later, but we'll address it) and actually allow an adventure like this to take place over one long and terrible night. The key, though, is that "long rests" are now a consumable item, rather than an activity you can take.

Next, we ban spells like Goodberry or Create Food and Water - spells that conjure food would, of course, eliminate the scarcity that we need. Indeed, if we didn't ban these, the optimal thing would be to cast Goodberry, eat one of those goodberries immediately, and then have 9 left over with all your spell slots.

Short Rests... might be able to work as they normally do, but what I might do is institute a cap on how many short rests you can take. In Baldur's Gate 3 (not a survival horror game) you can only take two short rests before you need to take a long rest (long rests do take up resources, but in my experience I was never unable to take another ten long rests or more after any that I did take, the resources being so plentiful). Naturally, classes like Warlocks, Monks, and most Fighters get nearly everything back on a short rest. I think instituting either a one or two short rest per "full ration" might balance this right.

Difficulty:

One of the other hallmarks of Survival Horror is a certain pressure to execute things perfectly: with no regenerating health and often limited ammo for your weapons, you can't just go whole-hog on enemies with overkill and just shrug it off. You're always trying to take enemies down in the most efficient way.

But, again, the games give you the tools to do this.

Now, D&D has an element of luck, always: it's not a "skill" based game in the way that video games test your manual dexterity. The most wonderfully optimized character might get screwed by the dice.

I think the key is this:

Combat should be low-difficulty. But it should be arduous.

Now, this plays into our recoveries: If we think of the game as being divided into chapters or sub-dungeons (I do think this style of game lends itself to something of a mega-dungeon crawl) we might only let the party find sufficient rations for everyone to get a long rest (though there's certainly some potential challenge to giving them, say, only one ration at a time and forcing the party to strategize on who gets it) after completing a major chapter - to use Silent Hill 2 (remake) as an example, maybe they don't find any rations from the moment they enter Woodside Apartments until they get to the apartment where they hide in the closet right before going to Blue Creek Apartments, and then from there only getting full rations for the whole party after the first fight against Pyramid Head.

But, here's the thing:

Every individual fight they get into should be easy. Like, maybe lower-difficulty than the 5.5 DMG's "Low difficulty encounter balance" math. Like, maybe for a party of four 1st level characters, like a single Zombie.

See, there's a good chance that that single zombie isn't going to even hit anyone in the party before they kill it. A Zombie only has 15 HP (huh, they nerfed it from 2014. Never realized,) and a very low AC. But with Undead Fortitude and just the fact that a 1st level character is probably doing at the absolute most 15 damage with a hit (that's max damage on a Greatsword with +3 to Strength) there's a good chance that that Zombie might survive long enough to take a swipe or two at the party. Maybe one of those hits connects, and at that point, 1d8+1 (oh, maybe not a total nerf, this used to be 1d6) is pretty nasty for just about any 1st level character.

Now sure, there's a good chance they kill the thing before it hurts anyone. That's ideal - that's their goal. And they might favor long-range attacks to make it even less likely for them to get hit. All good.

But you throw like fifteen such encounters at them, maybe mixing it up occasionally - there's two zombies now, or the zombie's in a narrow, twisty corridor, so the only real way to get an angle on them to hit them is by getting up close - and that starts to really add up.

See, I think Survival Horror as a genre lives not in the frantic, desperate moments with boss monsters that can kill you in two hits (though that has its place). I think the genre really lives more in the moment where you're like "damn, I screwed up that fight, and now I'm totally out of ammo, my health is super low, and I'm just desperately trying to find some healing item before I encounter more monsters."

There was a specific moment in Silent Hill 2, in the Otherworld Hospital segment, where I spent a good 10-15 minutes in a state where I had zero ammo whatsoever and was probably one or two hits away from death, frantically trying to open every drawer and cupboard for that delicious health drink.

This is the feeling you want to cultivate in D&D as survival horror - the Cleric is out of spell slots, the Barbarian used their last rage, the Sorcerer has one spell slot they're saving for a Thunderwave but only if they can get three monsters in the area, otherwise it'll feel like a waste, and the Monk is sitting there with 3 HP left hoping desperately that they won't encounter any of those ghouls who have two attacks and might bypass Deflect Attack if they hit twice.

Attack Resources:

So, what about ammo?

The survival horror games I've played have all been in basically modern settings (give or take a decade or three) where the main kind of weapon people use is a gun. Diminishing ammo is a challenge for all involved, and when you look at the single shell in your shotgun and find yourself realizing that using that will only mean having to swap weapons when the monster doesn't go down in one blast, it adds tension.

In D&D, only archers (well, ranged weapon users) really ever worry about ammo. Spellcasters are pretty happy to use cantrips (though I've actually tended to use True Strike with a Light Crossbow on my Wizard since converting to 2024 rules - 1d8+1d6+5 is actually a bit better than 2d10 from a Fire Bolt) and so ranged combat is not really limited.

This is an area I'm a little hesitant to screw around with that much: I think getting rid of damage cantrips, or putting some kind of ammo-like limitation on them, would be getting a little too far into the guts of the game's balance. Cantrips are not as good as a martial character using a weapon, and that's by design (Eldritch Blast, when tricked out with things like Agonizing Blast, comes quite close - but technically it's not going to keep up when magic weapons get involved, not getting the damage bonuses of a +X weapon).

But that's actually kind of great: martial characters are supposed to be better at two things than casters: they're supposed to have better single-target damage (which they don't, really, if you start considering things like Conjure Minor Elementals) and they're supposed to be more sustainable, doing their full damage potential or near it without expending resources.

The thing is, I think that most campaigns (or at least most that I've been in) focus so much on big set-piece combat encounters that this sustainability never really has a chance to shine (and the fact that resting is relatively easy, as we discussed above, means that it's rare that players are really forced into situations that demand sustainability).

Again, in Silent Hill 2, one of the elements of the game I loved was the melee weapon (first a wooden plank and then a steel pipe). Giving the player a melee weapon that would never run out of ammo or require repairs - something that James always has available to him - gives the game's designers the license to take everything else from him: the game never has to worry too much about letting you run out of all of your bullets because you always have that back-up option (an option you're likely to actually prioritize because of the potential for conservation).

I think leaving those cantrips, leaving those martial characters with their powerful weapon attacks, gives you, as the DM, license to hold off on granting the players any recovery items. You can let the players run out of spell slots.

Timing:

Ok, here's our next thing:

In D&D, a lot of spells and other effects (like Rage) last either one minute, ten minutes, an hour, eight hours, or twenty-four hours.

I don't know that this works for us.

One minute is actually fine: the real meaning of a one-minute-duration spell is that it lasts until combat ends. Combat takes place in 6-second rounds, and so a one-minute spell will last 10 rounds in a game where combat rarely goes beyond four or five rounds (for really epic fights).

But the others are trickier: because I've never encountered a DM who actually tracks things minute-by-minute in a dungeon. Functionally, what's the difference between a 10 minute spell and a 1 hour spell? The game doesn't tell you how long it takes to search a room, or how long it takes for you to walk down a corridor.

When in combat, walking speed is typically 30 feet, which is roughly three miles an hour. Can you walk three miles worth of dungeon corridors in the time that a Charm Person spell lasts? Well, probably not, because the dungeon is full of obstacles, traps, and monsters.

I think, then, you need to start thinking about what these durations are meant to mean, much as 1 minute means "one combat encounter."

If we think about it this way, we can propose the following:

10 minutes maybe means "it'll last as long as we're in this room, doing stuff."

Now, this can be a problem, because what is a room? Are we talking about one solitary alcove with nothing but a faded fresco that is like a 10x10 foot square? That seems like it shouldn't take that whole duration. But at the same time, if it's some massive cavern with a giant insect hive in it with various monster-filled mine tunnels catacombing through the walls, that feels like it's maybe too much.

I'll be honest, I don't have a great solution here, but I think that a place to start with is:

1 minute translates to one combat encounter.

10 minutes translates to exploring one fairly large room.

1 hour means exploring a level of the dungeon.

8 hours means exploring an entire sub-dungeon (what in a normal campaign would probably be a whole dungeon).

24 hours means... probably not the whole campaign, but maybe an entire "act" of the campaign.

The key, I think, to communicate to the players, is that we're not saying that "this is the amount of time it takes to do these things." What we're doing is replacing the idea of a time-based duration with more of a "progress-based" duration. A Barbarian's Rage (in 5.5) should be able to help with some kind of jumping puzzle or some challenge that requires lifting heavy things or even making use of Primal Knowledge to do other tricky checks - but it's meant to be there to last that entire challenge, and once it's completed, the rage ends, the resource is expended.

Mage Armor is supposed to basically set a Wizard or Sorcerer up as if they're wearing +1 Studded Leather armor for the day - they invest that spell slot into having halfway decent AC. You give them a good chunk of the dungeon to enjoy it, then.

This, I think, also solves the issue with "long rests" being replaced with recovery items: if it were purely time-based, casting Detect Magic right before noshing on a recovery item would be a pretty strong move, but if a 10-minute effect is only for the room you're in, it might not be so overpowered.

Notably, some spells and effects might need to be revisited: Detect Thoughts can be used in a social encounter (and if we think of 1-minute spells as being "per encounter," that can extend to social ones) but it can also be used to detect hidden enemies, which is more of a "room searching" function, so this might require us to classify it a little differently.

Level:

I think running a game like this is definitely going to work better at low levels. For the most part, I find D&D starts to really hum in its sweet spot in tier 2, but this might be a mode of play that could make tier 1 really interesting: but only if you have full buy-in from your players and are really up-front about wanting to run a survival horror variant of the game.

The genre need not dictate difficulty: Survival Horror games are not inherently harder than other genres, and I think it's a key attitude you need to have when running something like this that the players doing well and even getting lucky is actually fine. The tension in horror is there when the characters are under threat of death: paradoxically, dying in a horror game is a release of that tension. The horror, the real juice of this thing, is if you can get them right up to the edge, like where I was with James Sunderland in that hospital, any minor thing like a mannequin hiding a little too well or a lying figure belching out bile faster than I could dodge could spell the end. And then, maybe even better, drinking that health drink and realizing that, well, I'm still out of bullets.

Out of the Castle, and Into, I Think, More Sci-Fi Territory in RE4

 The Castle, which seems to comprise kind of the second act of Resident Evil 4 (I believe of three,) is my favorite area of the game so far, but has my least favorite boss. Ramon Salazar is a little shit, but when Leon tries to get over with the fight quickly by shooting him multiple times (including in the forehead,) he returns as a giant monster with a massive set of mandibles.

Here are the things that make him an annoying fight:

There's only one very narrow weak point to hit (it only now occurs to me that he might still take damage when hit elsewhere, and I wonder if that would have made the fight easier) that is only open to target extremely briefly before he does a massive and hard-to-dodge attack. Second, he has an instant-kill attack he can do if he gets in melee. This is why I died to him like six or seven times, I think all of my deaths (except maybe one or two) came from this move.

It's a shame, because the Castle is such a very cool part of the game - gothic excess, lots of puzzles, and I've got to be honest, I didn't hate the part where we play as Ashley armed only with a blue lantern to freeze the parasites-in-armor (I know there's a name for them, like Armaradors or something).

Anyway, there's a fair amount of plot-induced losing Ashley, including right after our segment playing as her, and at this point, the escort-mission part of the game seems at least for now on hold. I'm given to understand that the remake worked hard to make her AI (remember when that wasn't such a loaded term? We're not talking LLMs here) less annoying - while she will get grabbed by enemies sometimes, it tends to only happen if you let yourself get swarmed, and she's pretty good at ducking out of the way of your line of fire.

The castle is pretty good, though there's a somewhat less exciting part at the end in which you are thrown underground into the mines below the castle, where Ramon's ancestors kept the source of the Plagas sealed - Ramon's the worst, and unleashed it for Sadler (Saddler?)

Anyway, while Ashley is missing and in the clutches of the cult, we team up with Luis, the former Umbrella scientist trying to make good. It's a brief arc, where Leon gets to have a kind of snarky banter, only for dear Luis to get knifed in the back by Leon's former CO, Krauser.

In the prologue, we're told that Leon was seemingly blackmailed/forced into joining US special forces, and one assumes that Krauser was the one that put him through his hellish training. We have a knife fight with him, which was honestly easy enough that I didn't feel that bad about reloading my save after not finishing one of the Merchant side-quests in the mines and doing the fight again.

Krauser leaves the battle unfinished, and we get a last little moment with Luis. The guy gives us a drug to suppress the progress of the parasite in Leon's body - setting the game's ticking clock back a little (though not yet for Ashley).

Anyway, we go to rescue Ashley from Salazar, but Krauser takes her on ahead while we fight the little (not so little anymore, I guess) monster.

Then, we hop in a speedboat with Ada Wong and head to some kind of island fortress. While I've barely scratched the surface of the island, it feels like a dramatic genre shift. The foes here are armed with more technologically advanced weapons, including one of those boar-mask-wearing brutes who has a freaking machine gun. Up until the point, ranged enemies have tended to have nothing but crossbows. There have been signs of technology throughout, but occasionally you can be lulled into thinking you're a 21st century soldier in a 17th century village. Now, though, a giant oil refinery looms in the distance.

And hey, this is, as I understand it, Resident Evil's classic formula: a facade of supernatural horror behind which lurks sci-fi terrors that are all too modern (even if they're pretty ludicrous, conceptually).

I'm given to understand the game is something of a three-act structure, and this marks the beginning of that third act. In retrospect, I probably would have been more thorough in the Village part if I had known I wasn't going to be able to come back. Currently I'm sitting on a super-valuable crown but don't have all the gems to fit into it. I'm also thinking of selling off some weapons I don't use very much to see if I can max out my upgrades on the ones I do - I hope the rate of money acquisition on the island ramps up (I did get what I assume to be the final Attache Case upgrade).

A Look at Silent Hill: Townfall

 Having recently been introduced to the Silent Hill series, the more psychological/Lynchian horror series compared Resident Evil's action-horror theatrics, via the SH2 remake, I've been curious about the series and other entries within it.

While Silent Hill f released only a... few months ago, I think, they already have the next game in the series announced an apparently coming out this year. Townfall, like f, takes place in a different town, this time a place called St. Amelia, which is a remote fishing town on the east coast of Scotland (there was a little documentary about the studio, Screen Burn, which is based in Glasgow, going out on road trips to real towns to base St. Amelia on, including a shot in-game that perfectly replicates one harbor-side street in a real town).

In the trailer, we're given some obscure hints at the plot: Simon Ordell is told by a woman that he can't stay in "that room" forever, and he resolves to return to St. Amelia to "set things right." He seems to wake up in the water, climbing onto a pier in the town. One thing that's particularly notable about Simon (while the game is from a first-person perspective, we'll evidently see him in cutscenes) is that he has an IV tube in his left hand, a needle sticking into the veins, and a hospital bracelet.

If I may do so, I know this series is all about its big plot twists, and my immediate thought was that Simon might be in a coma - that the exhortation for him to not "stay in this room forever" might have referred to a hospital room. Is he kind of astrally projecting to St. Amelia, then? Just putting this here in case I'm proven right.

The game makes a few changes to the formula: the action is in first person, as mentioned before. There's also a curious change to the classic Silent Hill radio. In this case, you actually have a portable television (for those kids who don't remember life before smart phones, there was a time when you could have a really crappy little TV that you could walk around with that had a tiny screen). One of the game mechanics is that you can tune the CRTV, as they're calling it, and at certain frequencies, you'll be able to detect monsters.

Among the monsters you encounter, we've seen a weird axe-headed creature wandering around. I couldn't tell if it was simply because of the perspective, but this might have been an enemy we see Simon fighting off with a thick bit of wood, though the creature looked mostly like a Lying Figure from SH2 to me (I think it might just be that if the axe-head were straight on it would be hard to see in the brief shots of it). Another monster of some sorts seems to pull its chest open, to reveal a snaking medical tube and needle, the kind used to draw blood (or, you know, to put an IV in).

From the dialogue, Simon sounded American to me, but that might have just been from a small sample size. The other character we hear is definitely British (though English, I think, rather than Scottish).

Anyway, it seems pretty cool.

Moving on to the Castle: RE4 Shifts from Folk Horror to Gothic Horror

 Given its beloved status, it's always funny to me when I chronicle my journey through a game (in this case a game's remake) that has been out for a quarter of a century or so. I was around the target audience when it came out (at least in terms of demographics) but I was scared of the gore and horror of it.

Anyway, finally experiencing Resident Evil 4 in its fancy, modern incarnation, it's been pretty interesting:

Beating the evil priest (whose name I do not recall) sent me on from the game's rural village setting in which it starts to a grand medieval castle, where I'm taunted by a creepy little in-bred (one assumes, though he's also probably got the weird Plaga parasite) aristocrat.

Actually, let's talk about that boss fight:

(Just looked his name up) Mendez has of course been an implacable force in the game - not long before we have this fight, we have a segment where we need to flee him with Ashley, starting with him only like ten feet away, and then a bunch of Genados (I don't know that I've actually seen this term used in-game yet) getting in our way. I died (or got Ashley killed or captured) far more here than I did in the actual boss fight.

The fight itself has two distinct phases, taking place in a burning building. The first allows you to climb up to a loft where his attacks can be usually pretty easily either parried with your knife or dodged with a quick evade. From this angle, you can hit the creepy parasite eye growing out of his back and then leap down for a nice critical hit if you stun him. The second phase, he sets that loft on fire and starts jumping back into the burning rafters to throw flaming debris at you and also, occasionally, barrels of explosive oil, which you can shoot to do a bunch of damage to him.

The lack of a dodge button really messes up my muscle memory - you just need to run to make sure that the debris doesn't hit you. Anyway, he'll occasionally jump back into melee range, and I found that running forward so that his attacks would go past you was the safest bet. It took two attempts to take him down, and I collected his false eye to sell to the Merchant.

Anyway, the castle has been gothic excess to the extreme, which is super fun. Resident Evil has always been more in the sci-fi horror territory, with its evil pharmaceutical megacorp Umbrella as the big bad of the first three games, but my understanding is that all of that 80s action movie stuff is wedded to these classic horror aesthetics, like the big haunted house that is the first game's setting.

Folk Horror is obviously the real touchstone of the game's first act, with these bizarre villagers burning a police officer alive and attacking Leon without warning. The various sieges (I can think of three - the opening village square, later when we meet up with Luis, and then when we're attacked by a pair of chainsaw-wielding ladies along with a bunch of other Genados) reinforce this subgenre, which always kind of plays on people with strange beliefs turning into predators stalking you as prey.

Going into the castle, in addition to throwing you into what is effectively a siege where you're the one attacking (there's a second El Gigante you have to kill with a cannon that is wearing a mask like that one Uruk-Hai who blows up the wall at Helm's Deep in The Two Towers,) but it's also here where Ashely briefly gets separated from Leon after the parasite drives her to attack him.

Gothic Horror, I think, is very much focused on the fear of becoming the monster, and Leon and Ashley's parasitic infections are, of course, terrifying because it could presage their own transformation into these horrible tentacle-headed monstrosities (oh, also, I've encountered a more powerful version of the exploding-head Genados that can do a one-hit kill, which is fun).

Anyway, there are plenty of tense set-pieces. One involves sending Ashely up to raise a bridge where you have to kill like, twenty cultists trying to capture her (a few also attack you, but that's mainly so they can drop ammo). I found myself quite good at taking them out with headshots with my handgun, but I was truly nearly out of ammo by the end of it.

In contrast with the Silent Hill 2 remake I played last year, RE4 for sure puts you in positions where you could potentially be helpless, running out of ammo and potentially breaking all your knives. I think the game is generous enough, and the enemies aren't too spongey, so that you are unlikely to hit that point. I've found that a tactic I like to use is to hit Genados in the leg and then do a melee attack to preserve ammo, but this rarely takes them out anymore. The Bolt Thrower is a decent default weapon, though the Riot Gun, my newer shotgun, is something I'd like to use all the time, it's just that there's not enough ammo.

I think I must have hit some important central location at the castle, because the Merchant shop has another elevator to his shooting gallery. Getting B grades isn't too bad, but I haven't really tried for A grades - I'm hoping this mini-game isn't too necessary.

I also unlocked more weapon upgrade ranks. I wonder if there even is enough money to get them all, but I know that the game will refund most of the cash you pour into upgrades if you sell a weapon, which I take to be an invitation to try them out. I sold my old handgun, for example, which had everything up at the previous max of 3 ranks of upgrades.

I've gotten a little more liberal with green herbs - typically I try to get a green/red/yellow combination and then pop it when I'm in dire straits to not only fully heal myself by also increase my max HP. But healing items are not super plentiful - it is a survival horror game, after all - and so I'm focusing as best I can on not taking damage.

Once Again, I Think the Abandoning of the Block Model Does the Latest Magic Set a Disservice

 Lorwyn is back for the first time since it debuted in 2007.

I actually missed it the first time. I've played Magic the Gathering in kind of three distinct periods: one from Fallen Empires through Tempest Block when I was an elementary school kid (and I guess my first year of middle school,) again briefly in college for Kamigawa, Ravnica, and Time Spiral (before a certain MMO took over my online gaming interest) and now my current era in MTG Arena once it came out for MacOS and iOS in 2020, which actually makes this current period the one in which I've played the most continuously (though I think there have been some gaps there).

Anyway, while Ice Age and Alliances had the beginnings of a block structure (much later they'd release Cold Snap to finally finish the trilogy off) Tempest, I think, was the first true Magic block, with three sets released over the course of a year that told a singular story (that of the crew of the Weatherlight journeying across the plane of Rath).

Subsequent years would hold to a similar structure, with Urza's block, then Nemesis block, then probably the most famous of them, the Invasion block (MTG's first giant climax storyline, which killed off nearly all of its important recurring characters - something WotC seems utterly allergic to nowadays - I don't think killing off characters is always necessary to establish the stakes and import of a plot, but boy did the March of the Machines really pull its punches after feinting toward killing off a number of planeswalker characters - frankly, it feels kind of weightless, even if I'm glad to have a post-post-Mending ability to see non-planeswalkers go to other planes).

Invasion block was followed by Odyssey and Onslaught block, establishing a new cast of characters and sticking with the bold mechanical themes established in Invasion (where Invasion was the multicolor block, Odyssey was the graveyard block and Onslaught was the first major tribal block,) the next block, Mirrodin, which coincided with the new card frames that technically debuted in 8th edition (and MTG's 10th anniversary) gave us a new plane that was connected to its central theme: artifacts.

The next several blocks had this recurring concept: a new plane, and on that plane, a new mechanical theme, with Kamigawa's legend-focused mechanics and Ravnica's two-color guilds.

Most blocks were three sets - you had the initial establishment of the mechanics, and then an evolution of those mechanics perhaps with a few more added in, and then a third set that often remixed the mechanics that had been brought in.

Lorwyn came in following Time Spiral and took the tribal theme from Onslaught block (Fallen Empires did it first!) and actually came in as a four-set block, which itself was two smaller two-set blocks. Lorwyn, we discovered, was only half the plane, while Shadowmoor was its dark reflection. The same tribes existed in both halves of the plane, and so there was cohesion between the sets, but there was a dramatic shift in tone - such as the tight-knit Kithkin, who were basically like Hobbits in Lorwyn, becoming xenophobic hive minds in Shadowmoor.

Cut to 19 years later, and we get a return to this plane, with an excellent Jim Henson-company-produced puppet music video. But for the past several years, Magic has not done blocks. Instead, each set is essentially independent. Even in cases where there have been sets taking place on the same plane one after another, like Innistrad's Midnight Hunt and Crimson Vow, there weren't really any mechanical throughlines that held between the two.

I've talked in the past about how I think this leads to a homogenization of the standard format over the years. In the next three years, you can be pretty confident that there's not going to be continued support for a Kithkin-themed deck to grow and develop. Indeed, within this same standard format season (which was expanded to three years a couple years back) we had Bloomburrow, a world of anthropomorphic animals that also had a tribal theme, but it's not like there are a lot of "Mouse matters" cards that have come out since then, so if you've got a Mouse tribal deck, it probably hasn't changed a lot since 2024.

But I also think that a world like Lorwyn/Shadowmoor kind of demands to be represented in multiple sets. As someone who didn't play the block back in the day, when I look through my cards, I don't really register which side of the divide they're on. Yes, there's a cool cycle of legends who will swap which half of their world they're on each turn if you spend a little mana, but it all kind of gets lost in the shuffle.

And, again, because we've got so many other sets (including a number from other IPs - I was excited for the Final Fantasy set but in retrospect feel like that was a devil's bargain) it further dilutes how much immersion I feel in any given plane, from both a mechanical and flavor standpoint.

I will say, we've gotten some amazing original settings, and we wouldn't have seen so many of them had it not been for this shift. But there's a part of me that also would love if we had spent, say, a year in Eldraine, a year in Ikoria, a year in Duskmourn, and maybe we were still looking forward to the space opera of Edge of Eternity.

I realize I'm shouting into the wind here: MTG apparently has been raking in tons of cash with the influx of Universes Beyond into the standard format - I think the game made something like a billion dollars in the past year or something.

But the older I get, the more I wish that companies weren't motivated purely to maximize profits. I think the world we live in would be a lot better if the endeavors (business or otherwise) that people took on were to make the thing that was truest to their creative goals. I've always been blown away by the Magic creative team's ability to come up with all these exciting fantasy worlds and characters to populate them, and I just wish that they got the time they needed to breathe.

New Control Resonant Trailer Has Topsy-Turvy Urban Gravity-Shifting

 

Well, it's coming out this year, but we don't know when this year.

Our first trailer dedicated to just gameplay, we're given a glimpse of what Dylan's journey across a warped and weird Manhattan will look like.

A few takeaways:

I get the sense that Resonant might be a little more action-focused - Dylan seems to have to fight off a number of monsters en route to his mission objective, and while that certainly happened with Jesse, the first Control game was, I felt, more about exploration interrupted by bursts of action.

We see what appears to be Hiss (or maybe Hiss/Dark Presence hybrids, as the monsters seem to be more inhuman like Emil Hartman was) as well as some Mold Infected along his route.

Dylan is seen shifting weapon-types rapidly throughout combat. While I'm sure this is a developer with intimate knowledge of the systems trying to show it all off, I'm curious to see how fluidly we can play.

It's said to be an "early" mission in the game, and Dylan already has a lot of abilities, including what seems to be the ability to hover (a pretty late-game thing for Jesse).

The Shift ability that they showcase allows Dylan to hop to surfaces that aren't parallel to his own ground and change gravity - we see him hop onto a wall, making that "down" for him, and when he fights a foe, it seems he has the ability to shift them off of that plane of gravity to send them falling sideways.

Enemy design looks like it's getting a lot more diverse, which is awesome (though I suppose we'll see as the game goes on).

"Resonants" appear to be the game's major bosses. In the announcement trailer we saw some posters for what looks to be some kind of dance show called "Parting," and that seems to then be the focal point for this actually rather human-looking boss.

We see signs for a Casino, a Hotel, and a Theater in similar neon lights. Casinos aren't a think in New York, but it does make me think of the Oceanview Motel and Casino, the Place of Power from the first game, and of course its Oceanview Hotel seen in the Dark Place (which... maybe is the same place? Honestly, if not for the familiar name, the Hotel in Alan Wake II might have seemed no more notable than Caldera Street Station or Poet's Cinema).

We seem to have a friendly woman on the radio named Zoe. Is she an FBC agent? I don't remember any Zoes in previous games.

The game's UI seems to retain a lot of its look from the first game - I'm eager to see all the environmental storytelling and document-hunting that I enjoyed so much in the first game.

Symmetries seem to be a major motif - the road leading to the dancer Resonant is mirrored, with smears of blood creating symmetrical patterns that look almost like an intentional design.

Anyway, I'm really excited to have more morsels of this game, one that I've been really looking forward to since playing the first game three years ago (and I'm a newbie, others have been waiting seven years! Not quite the same wait as we had for Alan Wake II, but still!)

D&D's Warlock and the "Dark Mage" Archetype

 Arguably, this could also be considered a Diablo post, given that the inspiration for this was the announcement of the new Warlock class for not just Diablo IV, but also Diablo Immortal and even Diablo II (which has a relatively recent remaster - they're not just rolling this out for a 26-year-old game out of the blue).

Anyway, when not viewed through the lens of any particular RPG system, the terms Wizard, Sorcerer, Mage, and sometimes Witch and Warlock are more or less interchangeable, though I would say that the latter two carry a certain tonal connotation.

When I was growing up, Witch and Warlock were more or less the feminine and masculine, respectively, terms for the same thing: a kind of dark spellcaster (this isn't particularly historical: while I believe most of the victims of, say, the Salem Witch Trials were women, there were some men also accused and executed, so "witch" is not strictly a female term). But I think that in this era, at least outside of the hyper-religious communities, there's been a real reclamation of the term "witch" to connote a kind of feminine mystical power that pre-dates patriarchal cultural impositions. The fact that witches are typically women, of course, has always carried with it this kind of implication that it's a power that doesn't fit neatly into the patriarchy, and so embracing "witchiness" as a rebuke to a culture that denies power to women makes a bit of sense.

Warlocks, on the other hand, being either ungendered or even masculine in connotation, can kind of safely live in that "truly dark" connotation.

The irony, then, for D&D players, is that Warlocks are not, actually, strictly "Dark" in the same sense.

D&D defines its spellcasters more by the manner in which the magic is attained and practiced than its aesthetic and association with any particular supernatural alignment. While the Warlock does, probably, have more dark-coded features (things like "Agonizing Blast" or the Pact of the Tome giving you a "Tome of Shadows") you can actually quite easily play an angst-free Warlock, such as one with an Archfey patron that might be, say, a benevolent fairy court, or even an angel.

Warlocks, rather, leave the door open for a darker, more cynical or scary source of power, in part because the assumption is a transactional relationship with one's patron. You can play a John Constantine-type character with a Fiendish patron while still being a good guy - you've worked out a deal in which you get that power, but it's possible that this deal had you outsmarting them, rather than submitting in some way to them. In other words, you might not have a soul bound for the Nine Hells through some infernal contract.

While I think that the direct relationship with your patron is a really exciting and interesting one for RP reasons, I also think that the relationship need not be totally direct: I think a Warlock who has uncovered a connection, or even stolen relics or secrets from their patron in some way can work well too: the key is that the Warlock has taken power from elsewhere - unlike a Sorcerer, it's not a superpower inherent to them (though I think you can blur the line a bit - if a Sorcerer didn't inherit their powers from their ancestry but got it by being exposed to some sort of energy, they could have a somewhat similar backstory to a Warlock).

The one challenge here, and one that I think can be tough to figure out as a new player, is that Warlocks are not an intelligence-based class.

In a lot of other fantasy RPGs, the warlock archetype is often depicted as the one who discovers secret, forbidden rites and rituals, magic that is banned by more respectable mages, and that it is the secrets that a Warlock knows that are really the thing that sets them apart from other casters, both in terms of capability and also social acceptability.

The truth, though, is that that archetype, the "Dark Mage" archetype, is honestly better handled by, well, the Wizard in D&D. Wizards are, of course, the "classic mage" class, and probably better than any other class fit that standard "magic user" archetype, with spellbooks and scrolls and such.

And so, our Dark Mage, the one that hold all these arcane secrets that are forbidden, for instance, by any reputable magical institutions (or are maybe only granted to those initiated into its innermost circles, in the case of a perhaps corrupted institution) is more, in D&D, of just a Wizard who picks nasty spells to learn. Certain subclasses lean into this: the Necromancer Wizard, of course, is a pretty classic "Dark Wizard," (though I'd argue the Necromancer is a slightly different archetype than the Warlock - you'll note that they are different classes in the Diablo series).

I do think Eldritch Invocations are meant to represent some of those "dark secrets" that the Warlock has access to, and indeed the entire strange nature of their spellcasting, unique compared to all other classes, is meant to make it feel truly different and transgressive, in a weird way. But the nature of the class, being a Charisma caster, means that it feels like it's less aligned with that "I know dark and hidden secrets" as a source of power.

Warlocks do have a handful of unique spells, some of which can be pretty good (obviously Eldritch Blast is designed to be the best damage cantrip in the game, though its benefits of course don't necessarily kick in until you invest in souping it up a bit).

In the early "One D&D" playtest, they toyed with the idea of changing which stat Warlocks used for spellcasting depending on their Pact Boon - Tome would actually not even get Charisma as an option, having to choose between Wisdom and Intelligence (my very first D&D character I came up with, with a Tome written into his backstory, would likely go Wisdom).

I honestly don't know that 5E really has the mechanics to fully embody, on a class-design level, this "Dark Mage" archetype. But the good news is that you can pretty easily accomplish it simply through RP, backstory, and flavoring your spells.

Frankly, a Conjuration Wizard (wonder when we'll see the revised subclass actually printed for 2024 D&D) could be a very good demonologist-type, perhaps picking up Summon Construct to start off with some kind of frightening-looking effigy and then getting Summon Fiend in tier 3, flavoring a spell like Fireball as hellfire and just having all their spells involve dark runes and blood on an aesthetic level.