Aln'Hara, Azeroth, and the Rift of Aln

 There are times when a piece of media so heavily implies something that you can find yourself forgetting that it hasn't technically been explicitly established.

Back in Legion, or really when World of Warcraft Chronicle Volume One was published, the notion that Azeroth was a living planet with a soul became established canon. But while there's certainly tons of stuff that Blizzard has added in and retconned (I'm deeply skeptical that the Jailer was even conceived of before the development of the Shadowlands expansion actually began) I think this idea of a Worldsoul was probably there fairly early on. When we defeat Yogg-Saron in Ulduar, back in patch 3.1, the Old God refers to the world as "this miserable little seedling," clearly implying that there's something living within that can grow into something new. Now, I don't want to read too much into that: it's not obvious that at that point they had the notion that the Old Gods were sent to Azeroth for the purpose of corrupting the Worldsoul, and the relationship between Fel and Void (or, really, the lack thereof) probably took a while to develop, which is why for so long Voidwalkers were one of the staple demons we encountered in WoW, only seeing (at least the ones that aren't Warlock minions) them reclassified as Aberrations quite recently (maybe as late as War Within? I could be wrong there). In a similar way, I imagine that it wasn't really until Chronicle came out (or rather, until they started hashing out Chronicle) that they even really hammered out the notion that Necromancy and more broadly Death Magic was its own fully separate thing in contrast with Shadow and Fel magic.

Indeed, this complicates the narrative of the creation of the Lich King: as established, Kil'jaeden originally bound Ner'zhul's soul to the armor like Alphonse Elric to make the first Lich King, and if I recall correctly, Frostmourne's origins were slightly hazy, but was likely sealed up in the Frozen Throne (or rather, the crystal that would come to be called that) along with Ner'zhul. Thus, the Scourge's necromantic magic was assumed to be a kind of derivation of the Legion's demonic fel magic. (Though I also believe that there was some dubiously canonical notion that necromancy was actually a branch of Arcane magic). Given how much I love the Scourge as bad guys, I was actually really appreciative that they were fleshed out as representing their own separate cosmic force, but the messiness of the Shadowlands expansion undercut some of this appreciation (including a total lack of even one throwaway line to explain how Kil'jaeden learned of the Helm of Domination and Frostmourne, and how he acquired it. Literally just one little reference to the demon lord investigating obscure tomes of necromancy and whispers of a shadowy realm beyond the physical would have done it for me.

(Actually, sorry, gotta rant here: I wish the Shadowlands had been something more similar to D&D's Shadowfell, a kind of dark and macabre reflection of the real world. I would have been totally fine with an entire expansion that had the gothic and spooky aesthetic of Revendreth. Mind you, WoW's take on Planescape would have also been very cool, but I just think that the way the Shadowlands fits into WoW's cosmos is just kind of unsatisfying. Are we to understand that all those people faithful to the Light went off to an afterlife that didn't really do that?)

But let's pull things back and talk about the post-Shadowlands lore, given that there's a strong chance that at least some of that stuff is going to get retconned away given its unpopularity (there are aspects of it that I do really like, to be clear, and I'm not as much of a Shadowlands hater as some people are. Warlords of Draenor remains the worst expansion).

Ok, so, we know that Azeroth has a soul, this Worldsoul that is the real living, conscious, and seemingly benevolent heart. There's something special about it that makes it the envy of all the other cosmic forces in the universe, with documented cases of the Burning Legion trying to destroy it, the Old Gods (and now Xal'atath) trying to corrupt it, and the Jailer trying to dominate/seize it. Indeed, the actions of the Pantheon actually follow a similar pattern - heavily changing Azeroth in an apparent attempt to ensure that the Worldsoul is eventually born as a fellow Titan dedicated to the Ordering of he cosmos.

Now, to back up: in Chronicle, it's flat-out stated that what a Worldsoul is is a kind of fetal Titan - that it is natural and expected that once its long gestation is completed, it will emerge as a Titan. Aman'thul is depicted, along with the rest of the Pantheon minus Sargeras, as unambiguously benevolent in his intentions.

But not to whitewash things here: our first real exposure to anything Titan-related was Uldaman, where we fought Titan creations, including Archaedas as the final boss. While this puts us into an antagonistic relation with him, to be fair, I'd argue this was a bit more of us barging in and killing him for no really good reason. But later, we saw how the Reorigination protocols callously threatened to wipe out every living thing on the surface of Azeroth during the Ulduar raid. Again, this was probably a really serious "last ditch-contingency" plan that you could forgive perhaps if the assumption would be that the alternative to setting it off would be the reestablishment of the Black Empire. We did also see how Titanforged peoples were not necessarily benevolent: the Mogu were brutal tyrants over Pandaria, and while they were clearly going against "programming," and turned against Ra-Den, it shows that the Titans' works didn't always mean the best for everyone on Azeroth.

But it really wasn't until Dragonflight - which is the first expansion of the really "modern" era of WoW - that the benevolence of the Titans was truly put into question. There's significant implication that the waters that feed the Ruby Life Pools carry with them a kind of magical indoctrination, ensuring not only that dragons undergo the physiological change from their original proto-drake bodies, but that they are inclined to uphold the Titans' vision for what Azeroth ought to be. This is the real crux of the Primal Incarnates' fight against the Aspects, the Incarnates viewing this reinforced allegiance as a corruption not unlike the Curse of Flesh from the Old Gods (the Curse of Flesh technically being more like a computer virus entered into the Titan creation forges. Interestingly, the Orcs are also flesh-and-blood despite descending from a Titanic creation, though that process and history was wildly different. Hey, do the Orcs know that they're more closely related to humans, dwarves, and gnomes than you'd expect for creatures from another planet?)

In the Emerald Dream, we find some record (I think a book of some sort written by dragons) that suggests that Aman'thul was opposed to incorporating the power of Life into their creations, fearing the lack of control from some other primal magic, though I also believe the Titans are actually quite comfortable wielding the Light.

And Aman'thul really does become this kind of centerpiece of doubt as to the Titans' ultimate motives. He is the oldest of the Pantheon, and in the mythical ancient history, once he was born, he went around and nurtured other Worldsouls until they were born as Titans, collecting this family as he did. But were they bound to be born similar to him? Or did Aman'thul help to shape them, creating Titanforged facilities and servitors on these worlds to cause them to be born as Titans and not some other thing? Is what it means to be a Titan something that Aman'thul invented as a reflection of himself?

I'll note that this might not be inherently a bad thing, but it is an act of will upon the cosmos that might have precluded other possibilities. Had there not been this intervention, might Khaz'goroth, Norgannon, Golganneth, Eonar, Aggramar, and even Sargeras been profoundly different kinds of beings?

We're told that, to begin with, Azeroth was a world of elemental chaos. Because the Worldsoul was so much more powerful than those of other worlds, the kind of fifth element (of six, actually) known as Spirit, which binds and balances the four classical elements to work in harmony, was scarce, most of it going to feed the voracious Worldsoul, and thus causing the four elements to clash in endless conflict. (Notably, Draenor didn't have a Worldsoul at all, which allowed there to be an abundance of Spirit, and for that reason, the elements on Draenor are very cooperative, its four equivalents to the Elemental Lords just chilling peacefully together in Nagrand. No wonder Shamanism came easily to the Orcs). I will say that I wonder what relationship, if any, the Primal Incarnates had with the Elemental Lords. Each of the Incarnate represented one of the classical four elements, like the Lords. But did Raszageth have a particular relationship with Al'Akir? We do see Fyrrak allied with Smolderon (the heir to Ragnaros that Shamans anointed as the new Firelord in Legion. Guess we gotta find another one).

Anyway, the elemental chaos gets taken over by the Old Gods (another group of four, though no obvious elemental theming there. I do feel like sets of four is a really common motif in WoW for whatever reason,) who force the elementals to fight in their endless wars (the elementals were doing that anyway, but maybe didn't love having these new masters) while they build their Black Empire.

This is when the Pantheon finds Azeroth, and decides to remove, and then when that doesn't work, simply contain, the Old Gods, crafting the Titanforged to destroy the Black Empire and the Manifold to repair the damage but also set Azeroth on the path to Titanhood.

Now, we finally get to what I was referring to at the start of this post:

It would seem that Harandar is the location where the Worldsoul originally sat. Harandar is a place of lush life, most of which is plants (even the dinosaurs and birds).

Now, there's a funny little question of continuity here: Harandar is where the roots of the World Trees all converge, somewhere deep below the surface of the planet (is it meant to be in its core? If so, Azeroth's geological structure is very different from Earth's, because that deep you'd be in a giant sphere of metal). The roots all kind of converge to form a cradle where the goddess Aln'hara once rested, long ago.

Here, the super-heavy implication is that Aln'hara is the Haranir name for the Worldsoul of Azeroth. There's a lot of evidence to support this. The Haranir experience of receiving visions from the goddess looks very similar to the way that the Worldsoul contacts others on Azeroth. Furthermore, the Aln Dust that we must gather to suppress the overpowering psychic voice of the goddess has a blue-and-gold color scheme identical to the color of Azerite that we encountered in Battle for Azeroth - again, I think the only reasonable conclusion we can draw is that Aln Dust is like, powdered Azerite (perhaps a different kind of Azerite, but from the same source. We can also presume that the special water from the Well of Eternity that Ilildan collected before the Sundering, and which served as the source for both the water that feeds Nordrassil and the Sunwell, was likely liquid Azerite or perhaps some kind of Azerite solution).

But here's where the continuity gets funny: my understanding is that Nordrassil was the first World Tree, and it was planted at the end of the War of the Ancients - and while that is, yes, long ago, it's still relatively recent compared to the Ordering of Azeroth, when Aln'hara/the Worldsoul was relocated to the Worldcore. Indeed, Teldrassil, itself was only a decade or two old when it was burned, created specifically to be a replacement for Nordrassil after the damage it took in the defeat of Archimonde. But likewise, Vordrassil was a project of Fandral Staghelm, when he was acting as the Night Elves' archdruid while Malfurion slept in the Emerald Dream (remember when he was one of the two Night Elf racial leaders? No? Man, I'm old,) which certainly had to happen post-War of the Ancients.

In other words, what roots actually made the cradle? Were there older World Trees that have been forgotten or lost? Were these actually the roots of G'hanir, the mother tree, from whom the other world trees were, like, graftings? G'hanir exists within the Emerald Dream, but it doesn't seem that hard for me to imagine that its roots reach out into the physical world to cradle the Worldsoul.

Next, I want to talk about the Rift of Aln.

When the name "Rift of Aln" was first introduced (I can't remember where, but it was at least part of the lore by Legion, though I think it might have been mentioned as early as Vanilla,) it was simply known to be the part of the Emerald Dream that was where the Nightmare was strongest, perhaps its origin point. The Rift of Aln is where we fight Xavius in the Emerald Nightmare raid, beyond which we find the "heart of the dream."

My assumption was that the Rift was, unlike most of the locations we saw in the Dream, not the counterpart to any location in the physical world, but a rift in the fabric of the Emerald Dream. Its vague, misty form when we face Xavius (kind of a grey void other than a lattice-like pattern above us, which to be fair, doesn't not look like the goddess' cradle in Harandar).

So I was kind of surprised when I did the quests in Harandar and found that there was, in fact, a real place of the same name on the physical plane. The Rift of Aln in Harandar looks very different, though given how empty a void the one from the raid is, it'd kind of have to be.

Now, the "Aln" part of the name makes sense: it's related to Aln'hara (I'm sure this was arrived at backwards, with the name Aln'hara created to incorporate Aln into it, and Hara linking her to the Haranir). But I also think that the Rift of Aln might actually start to give us some clues as to the nature of Azeroth/Aln'hara's unique powers that have made everyone so eager to claim her as one of their own.

The Rift of Aln is filled with weird kind of dream-creatures, beings imagined into existence by the Worldsoul. Even though she's been away from Harandar for a profoundly long time, this lingering echo of her dreams remains. And these dreams seem to be beings of great power - the Haranir who go there have to be ritually severed from their psychic connection with the Worldsoul so as not to have her lingering psychic dream-energy overwhelm their minds and drive them to madness - a madness nor born, I think, out of any malevolent intent, but just a being so beyond mortal comprehension that getting a direct feed of her thoughts would be like filling a water balloon with a fire hose.

Obviously, it's hard to gauge via game mechanics how powerful these monsters are compared to these other monsters, especially with level scaling, but we do have one pretty important example:

Ula'tek.

See, in the distant-past prologue during the quests that led us into the 12.1 content, we find that the Amani shaman, Nek'zali who summoned Ula'tek with dark, sacrificial magic says she is pulling this creature from a "Rift in the world," which to me suggests she's conjuring the kaiju-like hydra from the Rift of Aln.

Is it possible, then, that Ula'tek is, in fact, some kind of dream-creation of Aln'hara's? Ula'tek's creation may not have even been intentional - just some kind of psychic manifestation of a weird monster born out of this vast, incomprehensible mind. Was Ula'tek always intended to protect Azeroth? Or was she actually some kind of nightmare? A primordial embodiment of viciousness and terror?

Perhaps Nek'zali's ritual didn't just teleport Ula'tek from the Rift of Aln to the Coiled Isle, but might have actually given physical form to this nightmare of the goddess.

Now, tying this back together:

My belief is that Tyr's flight to what is now Lordaeron happened before the Sundering, and actually a big part of that is because of Kith'ix, whose downfall led to the rise of the Amani Empire. And generally speaking, I think that the major Troll Empires all pre-dated the Night Elf empire that would dominate ancient Kalimdor until the Sundering. (This does also mean that Azeroth's modern humans have been around longer than ten thousand years. It would be weird for such a widespread species on Azeroth to have literally not existed before many player characters in WoW were born. My Draenei Death Knight is a minimum of 25k, and don't give me any damn "space travel time dilation" stuff. The Draenei make the Night Elves look short-lived, and that is a bit of canon I will never let them take away).

So, timing-wise, we know that Ula'tek was dreamt up by the Worldsoul long ago. Maybe it was even before the Ordering, given that we don't know if the Worldsoul's dreams continue to manifest in the Rift of Aln (and I'd guess not, as I assume that the reason that location in particular is where these manifestations arise is because of its proximity to the Worldsoul's original location).

And perhaps this is the power that makes Aln'hara/Azeroth so unparalleled: this ability to dream into existence extremely powerful things might not really have precedence. Even unconsciously, Azeroth can will things into existence.

Ok, last major topic: dreams.

Azeroth's dreams manifest in the Rift of Aln. The Rift of Aln within the Emerald Dream is the core of the Nightmare, but it's also seemingly the passageway into the Heart of the Dream, where Malfurion takes us at the end of the raid.

The Nightmare itself is relatively recent - it began with the planting of Vordrassil in Northrend (the massive fallen tree in Grizzly Hills,) as a means attempted by Fandral Staghelm to seal off some of Yogg-Saron's leaking corruption. That backfired by instead allowing the Old God corruption into the dream via the tree. (I'm not going to get into why N'zoth wound up feeling more associated with the Nightmare than Yogg-Saron, because I honestly don't have much of an explanation for that).

But it seems that the association between the Rift of Aln and both dreams and nightmares (obviously both being essentially the same thing) dates back long before its association with the Emerald Nightmare.

Instead, what I would guess, is that the Rift of Aln, and Azeroth's dreams, are the basis for the Emerald Dream itself. While there's some credit claimed by the Titanforged Keepers, Freya especially, it was always left open that the Dream wasn't created by Freya so much as it may have been simply discovered by her. The origin, I would think, is actually the Worldsoul.

Which... I don't think is even very controversial a statement. But I think we're seeing these loosely-connected ideas tied together more firmly. It also, I think, makes the strategy of the Old Gods to corrupt the Dream make more sense: if the Emerald Dream is something of a direct path into Azeroth's very mind, then it's a great avenue to introduce your corruption to the world on a psychic level.

I think this might actually give us an answer to the origins of Ula'tek, but it also buttons a few things up in a way that actually makes decent sense.

Again, technically the game has never outright stated that Aln'hara is the Worldsoul of Azeroth. But, like... there's no way it isn't, right?

A Guide to Control Resonant's Combat

 Having beaten the game a while back, I've now been watching various videos and podcasts and such talking about Remedy's Control Resonant, sequel to 2019's Control and third official (and fourth actual, at least until/unless Max Payne and Quantum Break are somehow rescued from IP-rights hell and worked into it) game in the larger Remedy Connected Universe.

One of the things that surprised me was complaints about the combat feeling slow because of spongey foes. Now, certainly the big Resonant bosses have hefty health pools (and while I found the fight to be a fantastic spectacle, I do understand complaints about The Dancer's fairly trivial first phase feeling like an annoying thing to have to repeat to get to the really challenging second phase. I guess a decade of FromSoft games has made me more tolerant of such things. I didn't even known you could skip cutscenes in Bloodborne on my first playthrough, so I watched the mid-fight cutscene in Ludwig the Accursed/Ludwig the Holy Blade in its entirety about thirty times before I got him down. At least the music cue that follows is perhaps the most glorious bit of music design in all of gaming).

But fighting the Hiss, Mold, and... third, spoiler faction that comes later out in Manhattan, I honestly sometimes felt like the fights were over too soon, so this complaint about enemies lasting too long kind of baffled me.

The game lets you tweak its difficulty through numerous levers, giving you the option to change enemy health amounts, how much damage Dylan puts out, how much damage foes deal, etc. I didn't touch these, trusting Remedy to give me the intended experience. I did hit a point toward the end of the game where I was barely ever dying (indeed, by about a third of the way in, I probably only died to non-boss foes maybe three times) so if anything, I could have turned the difficulty up, but I didn't feel the need to.

So, what is my advice?

Let's start with the basics: rules that some players don't seem to have gleaned, but are right there in the game's UI if you pay attention.

First off: get every upgrade you can for the Aberrant, even with forms that you don't use. Every upgrade you get will increase the overall damage and Falter that the Aberrant deals, so ideally by the time you finish the game, you should have nearly every form's tree filled out. The Primary forms will give you a larger boost, so unless you really want to get more of a secondary form or combo finisher (for example, I used Crush, the massive hammer for my main secondary form, but invested heavily in the Drill one because Mold enemies are resistant to Crush's damage, so I would have an option to switch to) the first place to put upgrades for unused forms is in Primary. By the end of the game I had all three Primary and Secondary forms fully upgraded, and I think two combo finishers while the others had all but their final or penultimate upgrades. I suspect that if you really scour the world for absolutely every resource you can get, you can probably get all of these upgrades, but more realistically, you'll just have a few more to grab in NG+.

Second off: managing your Power is key. Your Power meter actually works similarly to how Jesse's did in the first game, as well as the Service Weapon's ammo, which is that if you fully deplete it, it takes longer to start recharging. Now, unlike in the first game, where the recharge on your Power simply took time, you'll now get more of it back by attacking foes. But just as you should try not to run out of Power, you'll also want to make sure you're using it. Combat Abilities (the magic powers you get off of the Resonant bosses, with the exception of the last one, whose thing works differently) can be very good for dealing damage and Falter, and so if you ignore these and just use your weapon attacks, you're leaving a ton of damage output on the table. Try to make sure you don't "cap" your power in combat, or if you do, be sure to start using it ASAP, even as you let off the gas once you see that you're getting close to running out.

Now, what powers you actually take can vary widely depending on your choices on your run of the game. Personally, I found that the Ignite power was really strong, and also sort of the most straightforward to manage, as it's basically a buff you put on yourself, causing your attacks to deal fire damage and build up the burn status effect on foes, while slowly draining your power. Just activating that when combat starts and then turning it off when you're about to run out of power (something you can do even in the middle of an execution animation, which is a great time to do so because that's when your damage output no longer matters). But combat abilities in general are going to be pretty powerful, which is why you have a resource to manage with them.

Ok, now, beyond these bits of "here's what the game did actually tell you, but you might have missed" things, let me talk about strategy.

Executions are the best way to make it through combat, so building up Falter key priority. The reason is that the first talent point you get, you must invest in Dominance, which gives you a brief buff after executing a foe that wildly, massively increases the damage you deal as well as the health resources that enemies drop. Not only does an execution mean the enemy you're fighting is dead, but this buff will let you tear through its buddies. Thus, I will start a fight by prioritizing Falter build-up rather than raw damage.

How do we do that? Well, Primary form attacks don't actually build any Falter on their own. Thus, we have a couple things we'll want to do either instead or along with them. We can just use our Secondary forms, making heavy attacks. Ironically, this might wind up putting out too much damage and kill our foes before we can actually execute them, though it depends on the enemy. Combo Finishers, depending on which ones you get, can also deal a lot of Falter to foes. In my experience, though, a combination of heavy attacks and combat abilities tends to be the best option for filling that yellow bar asap.

Dominance, though, only buffs secondary attacks by 50%, while it buffs primary form attacks by 100%. Thus, once you get the buff (you'll hear the Board do its weird belch/cheer/whatever sound it's making) you want to spend those couple of seconds whacking all nearby enemies with your primary attacks (I picked the Glaive as my first primary form and mostly stuck to it, meaning I could often hit several drones and even often multiple heavies with these super-charged attacks).

Now, who do we go for?

While I don't know if this was the intended combat rhythm, I found that ignoring Drones and just charging straight for the Heavies wound up being a very effective strategy. Drones are annoying, but as long as you're diligent about dodging incoming attacks and moving fast, they're minor enough that you can avoid them. Instead, once you execute a Heavy foe, swiftly killing nearby Drones with Dominance will not only go very quickly but also give you a lot of healing resources.

You need to kill the Heavies to actually bring a fight to an end, as Drones will endlessly respawn otherwise, so it's most efficient to just take them down ASAP and then clean up the Drones afterward. If you find yourself low on health, you can take out some Drones to get a bit of healing, but I really think going straight for the big guys is your best call.

Now, some specific suggestions: I took the Uppercut Surge combo finisher as my first, and this wound up being a strong choice. You can more or less keep a foe stun-locked by spamming your attacks with this, and because you and the foe are launched into the air, it becomes harder for other enemies to hit you while you're doing it. By late-game, it also does pretty enormous Falter to the foe, which is what we're trying to do. It's not as ideal for bosses, though, which tend to be immune to this sort of stunning or even forced movement, so you might want to pick up something a little more focused on just damage output (bosses can take Falter, but filling the meter just gives you a brief window of bonus damage, which is something I think I only ever accomplished on the final Resonant).

My last little bit of advice is that, while you get a clear benefit from investing in multiple Aberrant forms, it's also good to change up your loadout for the situation at hand. You can literally do this mid-combat, as long as you don't pause while in the middle of an actual weapon swing (sometimes you have to wait a second or two after for the game to decide you're finished). For example, my default was to go with Glaive, Crush, and Spin Edge, but I'd swap Crush out for Drill when fighting Mold and swap Glaive out for Strike and Spin Edge for Wide Edge when fighting bosses (and then also kind of went back to Uppercut Surge in general when I realized how much Falter it did in comparison).

Likewise, swapping Artifacts can be very helpful depending on your situation, so try to craft as many of these as you can.

Playing this way, I found my experience as Dylan Faden to really reflect the awesome power he has in-story, and no combat felt like it dragged on too long.

Midnight's Run of Tragedies

 If you haven't done the Unbinding of Kith'ix, or even heard the discourse surrounding it, you might not be aware that the events of this one-boss raid have proven controversial.

To talk about it will require us to go into spoiler territory. But we're going to be talking about stakes, trilogies, tropes, and lots of thematic ideas and concepts that go beyond the most recent mini-raid.

So, Spoilers Ahead:

Brutal Strikes and Damage Output

 In 5.5, the old Barbarian feature Brutal Critical was replaced.

The old feature, conceptually, was cool: Barbarians would get particularly nasty critical hits when those landed. But the actual math on them didn't truly do much. Even though your critical strike chance is higher if you're using Reckless Attack (or some other method,) the small chance of actually getting a crit meant that that bonus damage was hardly the equivalent to a Fighter's third attack at level 11 or a Paladin's extra d8s on everything (though it did come two levels earlier). This did give the d12 Greataxe a bit of an advantage over the 2d6 Greatsword or Maul, because the feature only added a single die from the weapon at each upgrade point - so while the Greatsword is adding a d6, then 2d6, then 3d6, the Greataxe is adding a d12, then 2d12, then 3d12.

But when I've calculated that in the past, the small chance of getting a crit meant that it wasn't really until you got that third bonus crit die that the Greataxe finally overtook the damage of a Greatsword or Maul (though I might need to look back and see if I was accounting for Reckless Attack) because the 2d6 weapons do an average of half a point of damage more with each hit.

Brutal Strikes works quite differently. But it's also kind of weird, because while it does add a d10, and later 2d10 damage to your hit, the penalty you take, forgoing advantage, means that in most cases, that extra d10's effective damage per attack (rather than hit) winds up being about a wash, and sometimes even a DPS loss.

It is all dependent, of course, on your hit chance. With a higher attack bonus or lower AC of the target (in other words, the lower we need to roll on the die to hit) that d10 starts to look more appealing. But if I recall correctly, you need to have a pretty high hit chance for that to be the case.

Thus, I think, the real way to treat Brutal Strikes is not as a means for Barbarians to increase their damage output, but more as a means to get some additional utility with the various effects you can choose.

But let's actually figure out the math:

The stakes here are established by what we stand to lose versus what we stand to gain. A miss means we lose out on the rolled damage of our weapon, the Strength bonus, the rage bonus, and any other damage added by a magical weapon or other effect.

To simplify things, we'll ignore magic weapons. Instead, let's make the following assumptions:

In 5.5, it's a bit more encouraged to take General Feats other than Ability Score Improvements, because each of these give you half of one of those anyway along with some potentially big effects. Great Weapon Master is, I think, almost always the best of these for a Strength-based character (though I do think my Eldritch Knight with a Staff managed to beat my Eldritch Knight with a Greatsword, which was surprising). As a note, though, GWM will certainly skew things a bit, because it increases our output with a Great Weapon by a whole lot, and on top of that, it really likes it when we crit, which we will be less likely to do if we forgo advantage.

Is it realistic, then, to assume that we're just going with ASIs? This would make it very easy to have a 20 Strength by level 9 (when we get the feature) and while I doubt many players would eschew those really good martial feats (GWM, Polearm Master, maybe Dual Wielder. Not sure if there are any good ones from Arcana Unleahsed for a Barbarian) the Barbarian is a class that has a lot of stats they might want to boost (it would be pretty cool to have capped both Strength and Constitution before level 20).

Going with flat ASIs will perhaps extend more grace to Brutal Strikes than it's likely to have in a real character build. If it still winds up being pretty underwhelming, that will be doubly damning proof, but it might make it look better than it really is.

Still, we'll go for that because, hey, it makes my math simpler to do.

Thus, by level 9, we'll assume we're capped out at 20 Strength. Our Rage bonus is now +3, and if we're fighting with a Greataxe (while we're no longer incentivized to go with that thanks to the loss of Brutal Critical, it is a classic weapon for a Barbarian) that means our attacks have a +9 to hit and land for 1d12+8, or 14.5 on average, with a bonus from crits of 6.5.

Enemy ACs vary, of course, and especially at these mid levels, it's not impossible that you'll fight some really low-AC minions or some really high-AC legendary monsters. So, and I hope I don't regret this, we're going to see how this goes at ACs of 10, 15, and 20.

AC 10:

Without Brutal Strike:

Ok, here we're taking full advantage of our Advantage. Because our attack bonus is so high, this is actually going to be exactly the same math as if we were attacking something with an AC of 11, because the only way we can miss is thanks to the critical failure rule for rolling a natural 1. Thus, we have a 95% chance to hit, doing so as long as we don't roll a 1.

With advantage, though, the chance of a miss diminishes profoundly, from 5% to 0.25%, or a hit chance of 99.75%. As usual with advantage and no expanded critical hit range, our chance get a critical hit is 9.75%. So, 99.75% of 14.5 is... basically 14.5, if we round to the tenths place, or I guess 14.46 if we want to get slightly more granular. Then, 6.5x9.75% is about .63, so our total damage per attack when we take the advantage is 15.09.

With Brutal Strike:

Our hit chance is still very high here, and we're adding on a d10, so the hit damage jumps up by 5.5 to a flat 20, while our crit damage becomes an extra 12. Our hit chance is now simply 95%, while crits have gone to 5%. So, 95% of 20 is... 19 (this is easy given how familiar we are with probabilities out of 20 given the die we use) and 5% of 12 is .6, so we get 19.6 average damage, with some extra utility to boot.

    Clearly, against this low AC, the advantage is not really necessary, and the extra d10 is already nearly doubling the d12 like it would on a crit. So, here, the damage favors Brutal Strikes.

AC 15:

Without Brutal Strike:

Damage numbers on hit/crit are all going to look the same, but the chances have shifted a lot.

So, now our +9 has to land a 6 or higher on the d20 to hit. That's a 75% chance, and with advantage, our 25% miss chance diminishes to a 6.25% chance, or in other words, our hit chance is 93.75% Still quite good. Crits are the same as well, in basically every sense, so we can just talk about that as the same .63. So, we take the 14.5 on a hit times the 93.75% chance to hit, and that gives us 13.59, then add in the crit to bring us to 14.22.

With Brutal Strike:

Here, that 75% chance is fully in effect. Hitting with the Brutal Strike gives us that flat 20, so we're looking at 15 damage for hits, and then our 5% crit chance gives us the same .6 from before, so it's 15.6 average damage.

    We're still ahead, but only by a little bit - and once again, we need to remember that this is a character who does not have a magic weapon and isn't using Great Weapon Master.

AC 20:

Without Brutal Strike:

Ok, the only things that change here are the hit chances, so we now need to roll an 11 or higher, which is, very conveniently, a 50% hit chance. Getting advantage turns that into a 75% hit chance. So, 75%x14.5 is 10.88 (again, we're rounding to the hundredths place) and we get that same .63 to add for the crits, giving us 11.51.

With Brutal Strike:

Now we're really at a 50% hit chance, so we take that 20 we get on a hit and turn it into a 10. Then, that .6 for crits gets tacked onto it, and now we're talking a 10.6, simple enough.

    So, what does this amount to? Well, at high ACs, the damage you get from Brutal Strikes will, even in a scenario that really favors them, not be enough to make up for the loss of advantage.

That leads us to the following:

What skews this one way or another? (Here I'm going to go more abstract because I'm too lazy to do the math on all of this.)

First off, at higher levels, the bonus damage jumps to 2d10. That will certainly help Brutal Strike look more appealing, and lowering the minimum hit chance it requires to outpace not using it (not to mention the new utility features).

But on the other hand, feats like Great Weapon Master, along with magic weapons like a Vicious Weapon or buff spells from allies like Crusader's Mantle will all work to inflate the value of actually landing hits. That d10 can start go get lost in the crowd if we're adding a d4+2d6. I suspect that even GWM on its own (especially as it scales quite well at higher levels) will overtake Brutal Strike's advantages in terms of pure damage output.

+X magic weapons have a somewhat nonobvious effect, because while they increase the damage of a hit (which would push Brutal Strike down in value,) they also increase your chance to hit (pushing Brutal Strike's value up). In fact, I suspect that the higher hit chance likely outweighs the bonus damage's effect.

    Here's what I'll say, and consider as recommendation: in all of our scenarios, the damage output is actually quite close between the two options, whichever is on top. Now, again, maybe some other scenarios will change that (I probably ought to do a GWM version of these). But I think that kind of gives us an answer regardless:

    Brutal Stirke is not going to be a major method for directly improving your damage output. The d10, and later 2d10, are there primarily to compensate you for the loss of advantage when going for the various utility options the feature provides.

    I doubt that this was the design intent: I imagine that Barbarians were meant to get a nice big damage boost, but I don't think this accomplishes it.

    That being said, the utility it provides is very nice, and while some might seem redundant with various weapon masteries, consider first that you can use them while taking advantage of a different weapon mastery, and furthermore, that if you have a weapon mastery that creates a similar effect, you can combine them to have a far greater effect, like pushing a foe 25 feet with a combination of the Push Mastery and Forceful Blow.

    Ultimately, if you want to know exactly when to use Brutal Strike or not to maximize your damage, you'll need something like a spreadsheet and also to know an enemy's AC (which your DM might not tell you - I generally let people know if they "just miss," meaning getting an attack roll 1 below their AC, or "just hit" when they hit the AC exactly, but otherwise reserve this information as a secret - though I'll also tell them if it's a humanoid in plate armor, and let them correctly conclude that they have an AC of 18). But I'd also encourage you to just kind of "feel into it," and then also possibly just think more about whether you need the utility effects of the feature for this particular fight (Forceful Blow does a lot more damage if the target is 10 feet from the edge of a cliff, after all!)

EDIT:

Ok, just because it feels worth investigating:

What happens when the bonus jumps to 2d10?

This happens at level 17, meaning we've gotten to tier 4. At this stage, I'd dearly hope that your DM has given you some really powerful magic weapons, even potentially an Artifact (the Barbarian in my longrunning Ravnica game has had a slightly tweaked version of the Sword of Zariel since about level 14 or 15, which I reflavored as being a Benalian weapon passed down by champions of Serra). Any bonuses to our damage when we hit will naturally de-value Brutal Strikes given that we're less likely to get that damage. But with Brutal Strike now dealing twice as much bonus damage, its value is obviously improved.

My conclusion when I wrote the earlier part of this post yesterday was that, given that you only stand to gain about a single point of damage in the most favorable scenarios, we really can't treat Brutal Strike as a means to improve Barbarian damage, and instead just see that d10 as compensation. A fairly equivalent feature could have allowed us to apply the secondary utility effects of the feature to a target when we attack recklessly once per turn without adding any damage if we were simply allowed to keep our advantage.

But how does that start to look when we double the d10s?

Ok, so, at level 17, we'll assume Strength is capped. It would be very reasonable to assume that we have at bare minimum a +1 magic weapon, but as usual, we'll just ignore magic weapons for the sake of this math. Again, I actually suspect that the greater chance to hit with a +X weapon favors Brutal Strike more than the +X bonus to their damage de-values it.

So, actually, then, maybe we want to pour all the benefits into this to prove my thesis that the damage boost is really not enough. So, sure, let's say you have a +3 Greataxe.

This means that, at level 17, we've got a +14 to hit, and our attacks, when raging, deal 1d12+12 damage (5 from Strength, 4 from Rage, 3 from the weapon).

Our previous AC ranges become a bit redundant - against an AC of 10 or 15, we actually have the same hit chance, because the only way to miss anything with an AC of 15 or less is to roll a natural 1. So we can just combine these two. At these levels, though, it might be worth looking into how things go if we attack an AC of 25. Only three creatures, to my knowledge, have that (the three CR 30 monsters in 5E) though technically there's one that can get higher (Sul Khatesh from Eberron has a base AC of 22, but can cast Shield at will, meaning she can effectively have an AC of 27 if the DM chooses to use that reaction every time). It seems worthwhile to give us a range, even if higher ACs will devalue Brutal Strike.

AC 15:

Without Brutal Strikes:

The damage of a hit is going to be 18.5, and a crit gets us, as always, 6.5 extra.

So, this is our 95% hit chance, but because we have advantage, we'll be getting instead a 99.75% chance to hit. 99.75% of 18.5 is 18.45, and then we have that same as always .63 from crits, so the average damage here is 19.08.

With Brutal Strikes:

Now, we add 2d10 to both the hit and crit damage, pumping hit damage up to 29.5 and crits up to 17.5.

95% of 29.5 is 28.03, and 5% of 17.5 is .88 (rounded) so we're looking at 28.91.

    Ten damage is maybe not as much as it was at earlier levels, but it's still a pretty significant boost. So, against a low AC, Brutal Strike actually looks quite worth it for the damage.

AC 20:

Ok, now we need to roll a 6 or higher, meaning a 75% chance (huh, these percentages look familiar).

Without Brutal Strike:

The 75% becomes 93.75% with advantage, so we get 18.5x93.75%, or 17.34, and then add the .63 from crits to get 17.97.

With Brutal Strike:

75% for real gives us 29.5x75% for 22.13 (sort of regretting rounding to the hundredths place, because this is a round number if we go to the thousandths) and then we get the .88 crit damage for almost precisely 23 damage.

    Our lead has shrunk, but we are still actually ahead. Guess that second d10 does help!

AC 25:

Now, we're going to need to roll an 11 or higher, so we get a 50% hit chance.

Without Brutal Strikes:

Our hit chance becomes 75% with advantage, so we can look at 18.5x75% for 13.88 damage and then the extra .63 for crits, for 14.51 damage.

With Brutal Strikes:

29.5x50% is 14.75, and then an extra .88 for crits puts us at 15.63.

    So, yeah, that second d10 does mean that we're looking at a damage boost at all ACs by this level.

    However: here's the main caveat: I highly doubt that a 17th level Barbarian will have taken nothing but ASIs. If they're fighting with a Greataxe, they've almost certainly picked up Great Weapon Master by this point.

    Now, GWM isn't going to just hand the non-Brutal Strikes option 6 damage that the Brutal Strike version doesn't get. In fact, the difference should be pretty easy to figure out, at least before we get to the Hew part of it. By this level, GWM gives us 6 more damage on a hit. 6x50% is 3 while 6x75% is 4.5. What that means is that the Brutal Strike option is now losing 1.5 damage versus the non Brutal Strike option, which wipes out the lead it had over the eschewing Brutal Strike choice. At lower ACs, of course, this isn't the case.

    Having now run a campaign in tier 4 for a couple years (note to future me: don't try to pack so much stuff into a single campaign's story) I will say that even if the big bosses will have ACs in the low 20s, most monsters that the party faces are still looking at ACs in the high teens, so we can honestly expect there to be more scenarios where Brutal Strikes does wind up a damage increase.

    I think that the harder but also more important question is whether it's enough of a damage increase. Given that Paladins and especially Fighters get a pretty massive damage boost at middle levels that they don't have to expend any resources to get nor take any kind of penalties for, I do sort of wonder if it would have been better to just give Barbarians the ability to add that d10 (and later 2d10) once on their turn with no strings attached. Indeed, if we compare this to a Paladin's Radiant Strikes, the Paladin gets, effectively, 2d8 extra damage for their two attacks (more if they're dual-wielding) every turn, which is more than the Barbarian gets with a d10. Not, sure, the utility from the Brutal Strike feature is cool - and is the main reason to use it, if you ask me - and might mean that tempering the damage bonus is required.

    But especially as the one class that truly cannot be casting spells in combat (ok, yeah, there are some weird builds out there where you multiclass Paladin and get concentration-free spells like Divine Favor) I don't think Barbarians would become suddenly overpowered by making Brutal Strike a pure benefit rather than a kind of "benefit with a cost."

    Should Barbarians do the most damage? No, actually. They're already the toughest characters to kill in D&D (believe me, the Ancestral Guardian in my campaign is basically unstoppable at this point) and I think it's reasonable to limit their damage output (this is also why I think Rogues should deal way more damage). But buffing this feature would not, I think, unbalance them.

Silver Pines

 Having heard good things about it from various sources, and figuring it was pretty cheap at only a bit over 20 bucks, I picked up Silver Pines. The game is a side-scrolling survival horror game, which in and of itself is kind of a fascinating idea. But what has really drawn me into it is the vibes and clear influences: if Alan Wake was heavily inspired by Twin Peaks, this seems to roll them both up like a katamari along with some other elements (one cheeky aspect is that you can find herbs to mix into healing items, like in Resident Evil).

A genre that really got started in the 3D era, the approach here is really interesting: the map is three-dimensional, to a point, but we move in side-scrolling vistas, moving forward into deeper fields "behind" where the previous action was, or moving outward toward the camera toward "shallower" fields. The effect means we get to explore a town that is laid out like you might in a 3D game, but where all the action is presented in a flat environment.

That, I think, does make dodging foes somewhat more of a challenge, at least on a psychological level.

The gameplay is fine - I don't really have a fully formed opinion on it yet - but what really impresses me are the vibes:

Our protagonist, a private detective (maybe) named Walker, wakes with a start in a classic old diner with seemingly no memory of how he got there. He's supposed to be looking for a musician named Eddie Velvet for a mysterious client. It seems his payment here is going to be some kind of debt wiped, though whether that is a monetary one or one of conscience remains unclear.

Thus, we're sent into Silver Pines, a small town somewhere in the Pacific Northwest (which does seem like the go-to spot for American horror - though again, it really traces itself back to Twin Peaks). There's a massive storm coming, and most of the town has evacuated, while the people still here are... weird.

After some quiet exploration with the usual convoluted Metroidvania-like backtracking needed to open up new paths, monsters start to show up - some of them are vaguely zombie-like, while there are also what seem like weird insects. Something is deeply wrong here.

The moment that really clinched my interest, though, was when we go down into a dark basement, and, upon flipping a lightswitch, the entire environment changes - we're now in the bathroom of some music club called The Rabbit Hole, and we speak with a customer and a bartender who are both deeply weird before seeing Eddie perform, only for us to wake up in the basement again once we're given a cryptic clue to Eddie's potential location.

The game has a very precise and detailed but still hand-drawn look to it, and has that kind of spooky and dilapidated aesthetic that I enjoy so much. The deeper I go, the more I question to what degree Silver Pines is a real place, and there's a real discrepancy between the behavior of some of the people you meet, which honestly makes me more worried about the "normal" people than the weirdos.

Walker's disorientation mirrors our own, and I'm not sure he even knows who he really is.

I'm playing on the recommended "survival horror" difficulty, and the game sure seems to be pretty stingy with resources, but there also aren't a huge number of foes. You do get a melee weapon, but this does get damaged as you use it, so ultimately any wasted attack does feel like a setback.

I do think it's really interesting how Lynch's nostalgia for mid-century America has generated its own kind of aftershock of nostalgia. Alan Wake borrows a lot from Twin Peaks (including more or less re-creating the RR Diner with the Oh Deer Diner,) and while I think you could simply assume Silver Pines is just looking at the same source material for inspiration, we also get televisions with weird clips from TV shows, much as we got in Alan Wake (and I believe Max Payne II, though I have yet to play that, and am honestly just waiting for the remakes coming out next year).

Anyway, I started the game a few days ago but didn't come back to it until today, but I think I'm starting to get the rhythms of it (which are, honestly, not too dissimilar to those of other survival horror games I've played recently).

Layers of Reality and Alan Wake

 As I try to honor this spookiest of months, I've been thinking about horror.

Alan Wake is probably my favorite narrative in gaming, particularly the way it is presented in the second game. While there is blood and gore to be found in the games (though more the second) the horror of it is not really concerned with the visceral and disgusting. Indeed, the "monsters" in the Alan Wake games are primarily just people who have been taken over by the Dark Presence. The most inhuman we really get with foes in Alan Wake II are the "Divers," which are sort of visually distorted, but upon killing them, their human bodies are kind of straightforwardly just... human bodies (technically there are inhuman monsters because there are Taken Wolves, but these are... seemingly at least, just wolves).

It's actually kind of interesting that Control Resonant in particular dialed up the inhumanity of its monsters - whereas the previous game had presented its Hiss foes mostly as human FBC employees who had just been driven to murderous madness, but still used guns and similar weapons, the sequel expanded on the physical warping of the Hiss to give us a far greater variety of deeply misshapen monsters.

But again, going back to Alan Wake, the monsters are more of a symptom of the larger problem: that reality itself is being made darker.

Why is it becoming darker? Well, yes, there's this idea that the Dark Presence is some sort of power or force (something the FBC would call a resonance) that infects things. But it's not actually totally clear to what degree the Dark Presence truly exists outside of Alan's writings.

Nor is it clear what level of reality we actually stand in as we play the game.

This disorientation, I think, is the key to the horror - something that is perhaps not as viscerally unnerving as a body mutilated by some alien force that is then attacking you, but one that makes you question everything that's actually going on.

Let's talk specifically about Alan's parts of Alan Wake II. As the second game, they took this idea of dualities as a central motif, including the equal parts of the game in which you play as Alan versus when you play as FBI agent Saga Andersen. While we're going to have to loop Saga into this as well, we'll start by tackling Alan's side of the story.

We'll realize later on that the stories we're jumping between are not actually happening simultaneously - Alan's chapters take place before Saga's. But that, in and of itself, is only partially true, because time itself doesn't function in strict linearity.

Here's the metaphor I'd use, and a metaphor that is nearly a literally description of what happens: look at your bookshelves. Do you have a series of books? (Ideally a trilogy?) Now, you're meant to read those books in order, from volume 1 to 2 to 3. And in most cases, the events you read about are taking place sequentially, mimicking the passage of time. But in a very literal sense, those books, the words that are printed on their pages, are all there right now. You can open to a page in book 3 and then read a passage out of book 2.

And that's literally what we do in the game: we start with the first chapter of Return, the third book in the trilogy, which describes Saga's experiences in Bright Falls and Watery. But then, we go back and read (or rather, play) through the beginning of Initiation, the second book.

In Alan's parts of the game, we wander around a bizarre, perpetually midnight-and-raining version of New York City, venturing into various memorable locations that are puzzleboxes we need to navigate. While wandering, though, we can easily and instantly jump into Alan's Writer's Room.

The implication, as I see it, is that the experience we have as Alan traversing this "Noir York City" is actually a representation of the text that Alan is writing in the writer's room. The whole city and its dangers are a work of fiction. But because the Alan who is the main character of this work of fiction is the one experiencing it, that one feels like it's all real and happening.

Now, I think the way that the three main Alan chapters are described is as if they're different drafts of the story - they all share similar elements, where he investigates the site of some terrible murder that involved Scratch and/or the Cult of the Word. And yet, the playable segments are referred to as Chapters.

So: if we were somehow to get our hands on a real copy of the finished Initiation novel (not the Return manuscript, which Alan searches for through these parts, but the book that Mr. Door holds up in their first talks how interview,) what would we actually see? Would the finished book simply be the final draft, perhaps giving us the adventure known as "Zane's Film?" Or is the writing of Initiation overall, with its multiple drafts, actually what the second book in this trilogy is?

In other words, while Alan in Noir York City is a character in that novel, is Alan in the writer's room its true protagonist? Is Initiation a book about the writing of a book called Initiation?

A few posts back, I used M.C. Escher's "Print Gallery" to demonstrate what I think is going on here: the picture, in true Escher fashion, is a visual paradox (and one that requires a blind spot in the center to function) where an image in an art gallery expands to become a depiction of the art gallery and its surroundings itself. The image contains itself.

And I think that something similar happens with Alan: if the version of him in Noir York City was merely an imagined, fictional, non-sentient homunculus, then this would all be fairly simple and straightforward. But I think that Alan, as a sentient being, is forced to exist on multiple levels of reality, his consciousness spread out and stretched over these various versions of himself. To put it another way, while his sapience (a complete logical system of thought) is duplicated for each version of himself and acts as a closed system, his sentience (his actual experience of perception and sensation) is forced to endure countless contradictory inputs. Given that at least some of his sapiences are aware that this is happening, those ones struggle with the utter cacophony of the very idea of it, and that's where we see versions of him that are falling into utter madness. The number of separate Alan's that are running simultaneously is staggering: while it's basically impossible to tell in-game, the various shadows Alan faces in his chapters (the ones that don't just fade out) are actually versions of himself, using his character model in various clothing, just with such distortion and blurring that you can't really see. Are these each fragments of his own mind that seek to disrupt the process, fearing what should happen if he finishes his project, or trying to stop him for other reasons?

Now, this layering could be a glimpse at the alien nature of the Dark Place, sure. But I think that there's a lot that implies that this is also happening in the real world.

I will say, some elements of the story do kind of pull back on the most profound and disturbing implications of what might be happening: the seemingly localized nature of Alan's reality-warping writing of Return imply that this is an alteration to a baseline, "true" reality.

In Control, there's a lot of the lore that is explained through Jungian terms. I'm going to disclaim here that I have only read a bit of Jung (part of Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious) and so I'm mostly jumping off with a lot of my own ideas.

But essentially, here's my take: the central premise of science is that there is an objective reality that exists whether we understand it or not. While that reality might be one made of rules rather than concrete matter (given that Quantum Physics demonstrates how, at least on tiny scales, things exist more in mathematical probabilities) it still holds that if you want to figure out the truth of that objective reality, you use observation of that reality to form a hypothesis, and then devise tests for that hypothesis, and if the tests do not refute that hypothesis, it is likely (or at least likelier) that your hypothesis describes reality at that level. It is a bit like Plato's Cave - there's a reality that exists, and while our senses and perceptions are flawed, we can pursue a more precise model for what those actual figures casting shadows are the better we refine our methods. Again, though: the objects that cast the shadows are assumed to be real, regardless of how well we are able to describe them from our observations.

But suppose that consciousness and perception are not merely a strange but fortuitous byproduct of organic chemistry that led to the evolution of brains, but instead, that the universe would not exist in the first place unless something were able to perceive it. And then, perhaps, the perception of reality would make reality.

I think most scientists would scoff at this, but then, they would, because science is built on the "there's an objective reality" premise. (And in fairness, I tend to align more with the scientifically-minded out there, even if I hold this latter premise as a possibility). But the world as conceived by Remedy really does seem to operate on this idea of perception shaping reality, only with phenomena we don't see in the real world (or at least that I've never seen in the real world) that make such a conclusion harder to deny.

So, like Alan with Initiation, when we play as Saga, we're playing through the text of Return. But... is what we experience merely a presentation (an adaptation, if you will?) of that text, or is it that Return as a text has somehow predicted or made this reality happen?

Indeed, this actually applies to the first game as well: Alan spends a week in the Dark Place writing Departure, and I assume that the subsequent events of the game after he wakes up in his precarious car are the text of the manuscript. (I think there's a novelization of the game, and so perhaps that novelization could be the exact text that Alan wrote.)

So: are the events of the first game (post prologue) playing out after Alan gets out of the Lake initially, or are they playing out in the words that he writes down there?

And to me, I think the really bizarre, cosmic horror of these game is that the answer is yes. That reality itself is constantly being created by imagination and creativity, sometimes of a very dark variety. Now, maybe it's not all coming from the Dark Place. Perhaps other realms, like the Astral Plane as seen in Control, are also having a profound influence on this reality. And maybe it's a two-way street. Obviously, Alan's ideas of a grimy, gritty New York like the one in his Alex Casey novels is what makes the version of New York he traversers in Initiation.

Is Alex Casey his fictional creation? Yes. Is Alex Casey a real investigator? Yes. Are the echoes that Alan finds at the various murder sites the real Casey's thoughts when he was chasing down a murderous cult in New York, or were they the monologues Alan had written in his Alex Casey pulp detective novels? Yes.

All the layers of reality and fiction are simultaneously real. And that's where the horror really comes from.

What Was Ula'Tek?

 While we got the Unbinding of Kith'ix as the true finale to this patch of Midnight, the chapter in this story ultimately revolved around the massive snake-monster, Ula'tek.

In the distant past (we're talking, I believe, pre-War of the Ancients, though WoW's timeline has always been a little fuzzy - this would have to have been after Tyr's flight from Ulduar, given that Kith'ix and Zakazj were sent by Loken to hunt the defiant Keeper down) the ancient Amani struggled to defeat Kith'ix, and a desperate priest chose to summon Ula'tek to defeat them.

Now, Ula'tek is ultimately bestial in nature (is it the only final boss of a major raid with the beast creature type?) and thus, it would seem most likely that it's some kind of Loa - perhaps a dark Loa along the lines of Hakkar the Soulflayer, who would play such a central role for the Gurubashi to the south.

And yet, every indication seems to be that there's a sharp line of distinction between Ula'tek and the Loa. Both in the ancient past and in modern day, the sort of "mainstream" Amani preferred to rely on the four patron Loa of their culture: Akilzon, Jan'alai, Halazzi, and Nalorakk, but the summoning of Ula'tek was considered an act of rejection toward the Loa, which implies that, bestial or no, Ula'tek is not a Loa, and presumably by extension not any sort of Wild God (my understanding is that Wild Gods like Malorne or Xuen would simply be called Loa by the Trolls, even if the cultures that revere them have other terms for them).

So... what is she?

I don't really have a concrete theory here, but I suppose there are some possibilities:

First: maybe she's just a powerful monster. Not deific in any way, not bound to any particular cosmic force. Just a really, really, really powerful and semi-immortal monster. But that's not terribly satisfying: after all, when we've encountered massive and powerful creatures of any sort on Azeroth, they tend to fit into the cosmology in some way. Ozumat is some sort of Old God creation, for instance. But I think we can rule that possibility out given that Ula'tek is in opposition to Kith'ix (not to say that creations of the Old Gods have not warred with one another before - hell, that was kind of their favorite thing to do back in the Black Empire days). But there's no real "psychic madness" element to Ula'tek's M.O., and we don't actually see any examples of Old God-related creatures being reptillian (primarily they're either mollusk-like or arthropods, or in the case of the Aqir, a little bit of both).

Second: maybe she is a Loa, just not one that is worshipped in the same manner. I'm deeply skeptical of this possibility because NPCs almost explicitly refute it. But also, Ula'tek never speaks, and may not even be sapient, though some of her offspring are, so... it's weird.

And... I don't really know that I have any other compelling ideas.

I'm also not terribly confident we'll ever get a concrete answer: Ula'tek was a big threat with the spreading of her venom, but plot-wise, it led us to a dark conclusion for Zul'jan and his nationalistic/expansionist ambitions and carried with it the dark twist of Kith'ix's unbinding. (Also, I was talking with a friend who pointed out that this expansion has seen us losing an NPC with almost every raid. Also, the Voidspire might be the first raid where we don't even remotely accomplish our goal, though I'd argue Sanctum of Domination at least comes very close to that).

Perhaps this will remain a mystery until some future plot development several years down the line thinks to expand upon it. Consider, for example, that 2.3's Gods of Zul'Aman patch didn't really tell us at all what was going on with Zul'jin or Malacrass' plans (and in fact, the "priests who had stolen the Loa's powers" were simply called Akil'zon, Nalorakk, Halazzi, and Jan'Alai, so there was no real reason to think we weren't just fighting the actual Loa themselves, other than the fact that they had humanoid forms). It took like 19 years to flesh all that out and find out what was actually going on in that raid. Perhaps a decade from now, we'll have to deal with some crisis involving numerous kaiju, of which Ula'tek was one.