An Ambition for Shorter Campaigns

 My Ravnica game has been going for over six years at this point. I never expected it to.

Ironically, I credit the pandemic, which initially disrupted it shortly after it began (I literally had my first session on March 1st of 2020, two weeks before the Covid lockdowns started). But once I became familiar with online tools like Roll20 and Zoom (later Discord,) it became logistically easier to run because no one had to drive across LA and find parking in my neighborhood (which has only gotten worse, parking-wise, in the thirteen years I've lived in this part of town).

The campaign has also gone on so long because I had so much to get through. I sped through tier 1, simply having a few one-session adventures there to introduce the guilds (usually putting two in conflict with one another, with the party acting on behalf of the Chamber of the Guildpact to resolve disputes) and to introduce the clandestine conspiracy that wound up being a Phyrexian plot to take over the plane.

Tier 2 was entirely dedicated to taking out one member of this conspiracy, a Simic doctor who had built essentially a sleeper-agent cloning facility. Then, tier 3 was all about dealing with the conspirators in each of the other 9 guilds, each of which had a dedicated adventure associated with it (though we admittedly sped a bit through the Selesnya one).

Now, if I were to do this again, I would have A: shortened each of the guild-themed adventures and B: especially gotten the party started on them earlier, probably making the Simic chapter a lot shorter and letting them take out other foes in tier 2. I ultimately wound up pushing the final conspirator, from House Dimir, into tier 4 because I just couldn't justify not letting them level up after taking out multiple major villains.

As we're nearing level 19, having spent level 18 jumping between six other planes to collect shards of the Golgothian Sylex, a canonical doomsday weapon (that actually wound up becoming part of the real plot in WotC's own Phyrexian arc, which all came out after I had come up with this plot), and the party will journey to the plane formerly known as Mirrodin that now serves as "New Phyrexia," I've been thinking about how to keep the journey through the nine layers of the plane quick and not have them stuck at level 19 for a full year.

While I think I've got the general idea there (mainly just limiting each layer to at most a five-room dungeon with one or two combat encounters, as well as not really having much happen on some of the layers, like Mirrex and even skipping the inner-most layers like the Mycosynth Lattice - we're probably finishing things at the Fair Basilica) I've also been giving a lot of thought to how I want my next campaign to go.

Basically, I have so many ideas for campaigns, and having now run basically just two campaigns over nearly 11 years of D&D, I'd like to pick up the pace a little.

So, here are the ideas I'm moving forward with:

    First, we're not going to go to level 20. I promised my players in this one that we will, and I do think seeing your character get all of its cool, endgame features is very exciting. But even though they've made a concerted effort to give us tougher foes for players to fight, the fact of the matter is that there's just too much going on at later levels, and combat gets bogged down even just because of the number of dice we need to roll, even if the players are 100% on top of what they want to do with their turns.

I do think that my campaigns will generally start at level 3 - I think players who are already comfortable with the system will get a little bored at levels 1 and 2. To be fair, you can have very epic stories at these low levels (see The Wizard the Witch and the Wild One, which ends its first season by leveling up to 2, or to an even greater extreme, Exandria Unlimited: Divergence, in which just hitting level 1 is this epic moment, as the characters prior to this have like CR 1/4 NPC stat blocks) but I like getting at least a little into the strategic crunch of the mechanics.

    Second, we're going to seriously rein in the plot. In part because of the structure of Magic's worlds, which need to operate on those five colors (and thus ten guilds in Ravnica,) there's a powerful urge to work in cycles. It would have felt weird and wrong for my Ravnica game to just really prominently feature, say, the Simic Combine and Izzet League but not really do anything with the Gruul Clans or Golgari Swarm. In another setting, though, it would feel totally fine for me to, say, focus in a lot on the Cult of the Dragon and not worry so much about the Red Wizards of Thay or the Drow of Menzoberranzan.

    Third, I tried to take some time, mostly in tier 3, to give the party adventures related to their backstories. These took up significant chunks of time, but they were also kind of bolted in to this grand Phyrexian plot. In truth, these could have been the basis for their own campaign.

Now, given the structure of the Wildemount game I've been playing in, focusing entirely on backstory-focused plots does have some pitfalls: first, it can lack cohesion - after like four or five years playing this campaign, we're still barely scratching the surface, for example, of a conspiracy called the Epistolary Discordancy, merely finding messages between people code-named "The Esteemed Colleague" or "The Respected Tutor." Secondly, sometimes a player will remain out of the spotlight for a pretty lengthy time.

So, what I might do is, at session zero (and frankly, I always feel like a single session isn't quite enough to cover everything) present my players with a broad thematic idea that they should try to write their backstories to. For example, one of the leading options for my next campaign is one set in my world's equivalent of the Wild West, and so not only would I want people to make Western-genre-appropriate heroes, but I'd also get into some of the specifics of what is going on there, including that the primary antagonists would likely be devils (basically, there's a faction there that appears to be a powerful gang of outlaws but is actually a diabolic plot to establish infernal domain on the region with tyranny, oppression, and the like).

The goal here, then, would be to encourage players to write backstories that I can naturally and easily tie into the main plot, building connections with the primary and secondary NPCs of the story so that there's real overlap between the personal and the broader plots.

In the past, I've been very open to trying to accommodate any and all kinds of characters, and while I still like to keep character options open, I'd at least like to guide peoples' hands a little more, because that will make it easier for me to weave in stories that work for them.

    Facing the Logistical Realities:

I'm planning on going back to running games in person again after the Ravnica campaign ends. This, sadly, will probably mean some of my players won't be joining the next one, and it also means we're probably far more likely to cancel games more frequently.

The truth is, in a year, you only have so many sessions (assuming you're usually meeting once a week) and I think that means I really need to pare down whatever grand ambitions I have to a few discrete set-pieces or dungeons.

The scope of my Ravnica campaign, when I step back, is actually insane. Just the Izzet chapter had the party: A: travel to another region of the plane, B: discover that there was some horrible Phyrexian experimentation being performed by the blue dragon in charge of the Automation Lab there, C: help rescue survivors after the conspiracy's forces downed a Boros airship, D: travel into a Gruul-controlled Rubblebelt wasteland with corrupted magic to find a guy with an airship fast enough to evade the flying lab's defenses, E: disable the shield generators and a number of satellite laboratories also floating above the district and then finally F: go to the Automation Lab, fight their way to the top, and kill the blue dragon.

That was all what they did at level 12. And there was comparable complexity for most of the other guild-themed adventures.

So, yeah, basically I need to let my internal editor rein me in.

Published Adventures and Setting in 5E

 5.5 has not given us a big, lengthy adventure-campaign book. This is a bit of a surprise, given that 5.0 was chock full of them. Not even counting adventure anthologies or the short (or, in the case of Spelljammer and Planescape, longer) ones within setting books, you had Tyranny of Dragons (originally published as two adventures in a sequence,) Princes of the Apocalypse, Out of the Abyss, Curse of Strahd, Storm King's Thunder, Tomb of Annihilation, Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage, Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, Critical Role: Call of the Netherdeep (which I feel got less promotion, I guess because it was mainly coming out of what I think was not yet Darrington Press,) Dragonlance: Shadow fo the Dragon Queen, Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk, and Vecna: Eve of Ruin.

So, not counting the "omnibus" re-release of Tyranny of Dragons, that's sixteen full-length adventures over a ten-year run.

5.5 hasn't gotten a single one.

Now, to be frank, this hasn't been much of a problem for me: I run my own homebrew campaigns, and the published adventures I've played in have generally gone so slow that it's taken years for us and rarely have I finished one (the only one I've actually finished was Descent into Avernus, when a friend was running it as part of Adventurer's League - we got close with Curse of Strahd).

I believe that this fall we're going to be getting the first big campaign, a Red Wizard-themed adventure, Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall.

5E firmly planted its flag in the Forgotten Realms, the setting that I think has been where most D&D content has taken place across its 52-year history. And don't get me wrong: the Forgotten Realms works great as a setting, and the consistency in using that setting has also created greater familiarity among players. Not only do we have all these published books, but in other media, like the Baldur's Gate CRPGs (as well as Neverwinter Nights) and the too-good-for-this-sinful-world Honor Among Thieves movie also take place in that setting.

Among those sixteen published adventures from 2014-2024, nine take place almost entirely in the Forgotten Realms setting, and that's not even counting Descent Into Avernus (about a third of which takes place in Baldur's Gate) or Vecna Eve of Ruin (which starts off in Neverwinter). Even Curse of Strahd kind of assumes that you're coming from the Forgotten Realms (though to say that it's not primarily a Ravenloft adventure would be absurd).

Now, it's interesting to me that after making a fairly big deal about presenting Greyhawk as a setting in the 2024 DMG, they're still returning to the Forgotten Realms with this first major campaign book.

To be frank: I don't really care very much about Greyhawk. There's not really a hook that, to me, makes me excited to play there instead of the Forgotten Realms. Yes, I know that it's the OG setting that Gary Gygax created, but nothing has convinced me that there are types of stories I could tell there that wouldn't work in Faerun.

But lots of settings are really cool!

Let's address the vampire in the room:

Curse of Strahd is, I think by a pretty wide margin, the most popular published adventure in 5E. I think others, like Tomb of Annihilation, are also popular and beloved, but Curse of Strahd is the one that I see people talk about having run multiple times (even having played most of it, I'd kind of be up for running it myself).

Why, then, have they not tried to do more Ravenloft adventures?

Curse of Strahd is an expansion/recreation of the original Ravenloft module, which I know also really transformed what a published adventure could be. I know that The House of Gryphon Hill was the second one, introducing the land of Mordent and I assume making the eponymous house the next legendary gothic dungeon. I don't know it was as popular as the first Ravenloft adventure, but it clearly must have been successful enough for them to expand out the Ravenloft setting.

There's an elegance to Ravenloft as a setting - the domains can be self-contained, and it's easy enough to motivate players to go for an eventual final boss fight, because that can allow the Mists to open up and allow escape.

To be sure, the tone of Ravenloft adventures is different - just the aesthetic of horror is not the same as classically heroic fantasy.

But clearly it's also something that a lot of players are into. Personally, I've always loved when my fantasy games go into spooky mode - from the Phantom Train in FFVI to dealing with the Scourge in the Plaguelands in World of Warcraft, I really vibe with Gothic Fantasy.

I think there would be a lot of enthusiasm for this.

And I also think that you could invigorate parts of the audience who are looking for something a little less conventional in terms of genre. I think, similarly, a big Eberron campaign could also be really exciting.

There was some fun in the 5.0 adventures seeing the continuity between them - stuff like Artus Cimber being mentioned in Storm King's Thunder and then showing up in Tomb of Annihilation - but I don't know of many groups that are just running each adventure after another (with the exception of my friends' actual play stream, Legacy of Fools!)

My Wizard vs. Death Knight

 So, I've been doing all these builds at a hypothetical campaign- or at least tier-boss fight against a Death Knight. At CR 17, these monsters would be a serious challenge for a level 10 party of an average size, but within the realm of encounter-building guidance in the DMG (a high-difficulty encounter).

It just so happens that my Wizard is, in fact, also at that threshold at the end of tier 2 (and given the campaign has been going for like four and a half years, it's about time!)

Now, I've talked a lot about hypothetical builds, with feats and all that stuff. But let me talk about my own actual character and use the spells I have available.

This is going to be simple - much quicker and easier than our previous builds. It's going to revolve around well-documented and busted spell combo, Conjure Minor Elementals and Scorching Ray.

With a bit more energy and space to get into it, let's talk about how we use these spells and how my subclass, the Order of Scribes, affects it:

Conjure Minor Elementals is a 4th level spell that creates a 15-foot emanation around you. The area is difficult terrain for your enemies, but more importantly, whenever you land an attack (spell or weapon) on a target that is inside that emanation, you add 2d8 damage from your choice of Acid, Cold, Fire, or Lightning damage (though as a Scribe, that's even less restrictive).

This spell, notably, had to be nerfed with errata after the PHB came out, because it used to scale up by 2d8 with each level up upcasting. That was nerfed to just 1d8, but this scaling is still incredibly good if we can manage to make lots of attacks.

That is where Scorching Ray comes in. This spell is a 2nd level spell that shoots 3 rays of fire at our target. Each ray does 2d6 Fire damage on a hit. When upcast, rather than increasing the damage of each ray, it instead adds additional rays.

At level 10, we have two 5th level spell slots, 3 4th, 3rd, and 2nd level spell slots, and four 1st level slots. The latter won't factor into this - we'll save them for Shield and Absorb Elements if needed.

Now, there are a couple things that benefit us as a Scribes Wizard:

First, we can always swap one damage type from a spell with that of another spell of the same level that we have in our spellbook. For example, Bigby's Hand can do Force Damage, so if we cast a 5th level spell, we can change any of its damage types to Force (though if it does multiple types in a single instance, like Destructive Wave doing thunder and... fire, I think?, you can only choose one of those to swap).

Second, we can also use Manifest Mind, which gives us a little incorporeal buddy (it can only be destroyed with a spell like Dispel Magic) that we can move around as a bonus action on our turn, and a few times per day, we can cast spells as if we were in its space instead of our own.

This should work with Conjure Minor Elementals - once cast through the Manifested Mind, the emanation will radiate out from it, rather than from us.

But let's talk pitfalls:

Against a Death Knight specifically, we're in trouble: the DK can cast Dispel Magic twice a day. This can apply both to the Manifest Mind and the Conjure Minor Elementals spell. Arguably, having it waste an entire action to do so might be worth it, but it will require us to re-cast the spell and start our rotation over again.

Another thing is that Death Knights have Lunge as a legendary action. While this only allows them to move up to half their speed, and we're also putting them in difficult terrain with our emanation, they can use Lunge three times per round, meaning that they could potentially get up to 75 feet of movement, which would easily be enough to get out of our 15-foot emanation and even beyond our ability to catch up with them.

Manifest Mind can only move 30 feet on a turn, and given its vulnerability to Dispel Magic, we might have to skip it. Thus, it'll be us and our squishiness that we need to employ within 15 feet of our target.

If the Death Knight flees (rather than just trying to attack us to break concentration - which we'll get to) we could use Phantom Steed to give ourselves a speedy 100-foot mounted speed. The Death Knight also has this spell, though. Also, Phantom Steeds are not resilient in combat - any damage dispels them.

But let's say that the Death Knight is boxed in - maybe we have allies with Sentinel (not in my current party) or just terrain that prevents them from getting away.

The Death Knight deals an average of 25 damage on a hit. That's serious damage that could take me down in just a few attacks. But assuming I have the healing to survive an assault like this, my chance to maintain concentration is thus: I have a +3 to Con saves. We have two Paladins in the party, and so especially if I'm standing relatively close to the Death Knight, I'm probably within their auras, meaning an additional +3. So, against 25 damage, it's a DC 12 Con save, and I also have Warcaster. Even if the Paladins can't use Interception to reduce the damage, I'd still save on a roll of 6 or higher, meaning only a 25% chance to fail, and with War Caster, that becomes only a 6.25% chance. Not nothing, but pretty good (I also have the Coat of the Crest, which has three charges and can give me resistance to the Death Knight's slashing damage for a round as a reaction if I get hit, which would make the damage closer to 19).

I do have Counterspell, which I've never actually used. While Dispel Magic would automatically work against Manifest Mind, I'm planning on casting CME at 5th level, so the Death Knight would have to roll an 11 or higher to successfully dispel it. If I saved my reaction for Counterspell (dubiously safe given that they're probably also coming after me with their legendary actions even if they're using Dispel Magic) my DC is 17, so with a +5 to Con, they'd have to roll a 12 or higher to save. They do have advantage, so the 55% chance to successfully prevent the spell is reduced to 30.25%.

In other words, against this monster in particular, this strategy would have a lot of potential problems. It might be diluted a bit if the rest of the party were causing other problems the Death Knight needed to be able to deal with, for sure, but given the power of this spell combo, I would probably make myself a priority target.

    But let's just imagine a world in which this all works.

Very simply, turn one, I cast Conjure Minor Elementals. Any damage it does is fine. We cast it at 5th level, so we now add 3d8 in addition to whatever our attacks do.

Turn one is just that - no damage done, which isn't amazing, but we start to make up for it quickly.

On turn two, we want to save a 5th level slot in case we lose CME for whatever reason, so we'll cast Scorching Ray at 4th level instead.

That's 5 rays. Each does 2d6+3d8 damage (again, the Fire works fine, but we can actually swap it with any of the damage types from CME because we're a Scribes Wizard and it's being cast at 4th level).

The damage on average per ray is 20.5 on a hit. Because it's all dice, we can roll in the crit chance to the hit chance to get our average damage per attack. With a +9 to hit (I rolled stats and got an 18 Intelligence at level 1, so I was able to get 20 Int with War Caster and Keen Mind - the latter maybe not being the most powerful feat, but very in-character) I'm hitting on an 11 or higher, which is 50% of the time. Add in the 5% chance for a crit and we get 20.5x55% for each ray, or 11.275 on average per ray.

On turn 2, we're doing five rays, so we get 56.375 damage. We do this again on rounds 3 and 4. At this point, we alone would have done 75% of the Death Knight's HP, so we can probably assume that the combat is over by this point. Frankly, I think 3 rounds is more likely, and we'll calculate based on that.

Because of the round of set-up we need, this does significantly reduce our overall damage per round. Over three rounds, we're looking at 37.58 (roughly).

This falls behind the Aberrant Sorcerer build, but we also didn't average that out with the set-up round. The Sorcerer does still get to do some damage on that round, and I also think the Sorcerer is in much better shape to actually maintain its spells, but looking back on that post, they do 19.95 damage on round one and 53.34 damage on rounds two and three, so their average beats us pretty handily with 42.21.

What I will say is that ours is going to scale better at higher levels, probably.

While this would be a terrible idea against the Tarrasque (which is both immune to spells that have attack rolls and also fire damage, the latter of which we can deal with as a Scribes wizard, but not the former,) if we fought that Death Knight again in tier 4 (not impossible, though he'd need a lot of minions to be a serious threat to 17th level characters, and thus we might focus more on AoE spells,) and were willing to burn a 9th level slot for CME and go down the line with all the high-level slots for Scorching Ray, we'd be shooting 9 rays with an 8th level Scorching Ray, and each would be dealing 2d6+7d8 damage on a hit, which is 38.5 damage per hit. If we somehow still don't have anything to boost our spell attacks, we'd still have a +11 to hit, so a 60% chance to hit. 65%x38.5 is 25.025, and with nine rays, that's 225.225, meaning that in theory, we'd nuke that Death Knight in one turn if we didn't lose the spell after our first turn.

Probably not what we'd actually do with our spells, though - I think using Shapechange or True Polymorph to turn into, like an Adult Gold Dragon or something might have greater utility.

Aberrant Sorcerer vs. Death Knight

 All right, we've been doing this with a lot of classes and subclasses that tend not to be big favorites of the optimizers in the D&D community. But what about a class that many argue is the most powerful in all of 5.5?

The Sorcerer is a pure caster, and while it doesn't have as broad a spell list as the Wizard nor as much flexibility (notably, it lacks the killer Conjure Minor Elementals) it also has tools like Innate Sorcery and Metamagic that lets you boost those spells to greater power.

I'm not picking subclasses based on the purely highest damage output, so I'm going to choose the subclass I'd probably be most eager to try (though admittedly, maybe less if I got to play my OG Goo-lock in a campaign that went higher than level 1.)

Aberrant Sorcerers have a lot of cool tools, and they and the Clockwork sorcerer kind of became the basis for what you get with a new Sorcerer subclass. They're also appropriate for a horror-themed campaign (though the Shadow Sorcerer, getting a revamp in the new Ravenloft book in a few days, is also very much in that genre wheelhouse).

Working kind of backwards, by level 10, a Sorcerer has two levels of subclass features. Mainly, an Aberrant Sorcerer will have Telepathic Speech, Psionic Sorcery, and Psychic Defenses, none of which are likely to affect open combat against a Death Knight (weirdly, Death Knights don't have Fear as a spell).

There are some damage spells we could consider using here, and of course Spells are going to be at the core of what a Sorcerer is doing.

Stat-wise, we're obviously taking whatever background we can get that gives us a boost to Charisma, and then with Point Buy and that bonus starting off at 17. Our other stats are probably not super relevant for this.

    Feats:

Generally, my go-to for any spellcaster is to get War Caster as soon as possible. Sorcerers are arguably less reliant on it thanks to their native Con save proficiency, but the two together make maintaining concentration all that much easier.

Spell Sniper is a possibility if we want to focus on attack-roll spells. Elemental Adept is probably better for a Draconic Sorcerer (unless it's redundant). I might go for Fey Touched just to get Misty Step taken care of (though grabbing Hex or Hunter's Mark is probably not as good as some other Sorcerer spells we might take instead).

I do think that pure casters are a little less Feat-dependent than martial characters. Inspiring Leader could be very good to help the party with survivability.

Still, even if not feat-dependent, there are enough good Charisma-boosting feats that we probably want to take another at level 8, meaning we'll have a 19 in Charisma at level 10, and thus a +4 to Charisma.

    Metamagic:

Quickened Spell is probably our best option here, allowing us to get a free cantrip in each time we use it (either quickening the cantrip or whatever other spell). Empowered Spell can also boost our damage a bit, though if we're doing that and Quickened Spell, we'll burn through our Sorcery Points pretty quickly. Heightened Spell can help us get over the Death Knight's magic resistance, but it's also very costly. Seeking Spell works for us if we are focusing on attack-roll spells, and we only burn the SP if we miss.

We'll have four options at this level, so definitely Quickened Spell, and I guess we can say Empowered Spell, and then we could actually just pick both Seeking and Heightened to free up spell choices.

    Spells:

This is the real core of it: what spells are we casting?

Generally, I think the usual plan for a spellcaster is to start up with some concentration spell at the start of combat that empowers them over the course of the rest of combat. So:

    Concentration Spell:

Jumping to 5th level spells, Animate Objects, Bigby's Hand, and then from our subclass, potentially Summon Aberration might be a good option. Bigby's Hand has an advantage that it's Clenched Fist attacks have us making the attack roll, so we should have perpetual advantage thanks to Innate Sorcery. While Grasping Hand is arguably the better option most of the time, that's a saving throw that the DK could use Magic Resistance and Legendary Resistance to avoid. Bigby's Hand does 5d8 (22.5 average) damage on a hit. Animate Objects I believe has optimal damage with a two large objects and one medium object. And that winds up being two instances of 2d6+3+Cha (so 14 average) and then one instance of 1d4+3, (5.5 average), which totals up to 33.5, but we wouldn't get advantage because the objects are the ones doing the attacks.

Notably, both spells will require our bonus action to activate them each turn, which actually makes Quickened Spell less exciting.

By contrast, Summon Aberration is a fire-and-forget spell (well, we do need concentration, but it doesn't take up any of our action economy). If cast at 4th level (we could do 5th level, but that only adds 2 damage per turn, and I think we can do better) the options vary a bit: I think in pure potential terms, the Mind Flayer option gives us the most damage, as while its attacks hit for less than the Slaad, it also has its Whispering Aura, which can (on a failed save) deal an extra 7 psychic damage.

But in the real world in which AoE damage flies around, your best bet is probably the Beholderkin, who can fly off 150 feet away (which can out-range the Death Knight's Hellfire Orb) and plink away at a safe distance. So let's go with that, honestly: The Beholderkin will do 1d8+7 damage on its two hits, or 11.5 average (and thus 23 average, but without the advantage we'd get with Bigby's Hand) but also just do its thing and let us pack our turn full of spells.

So, if we have the Beholderkin firing its two beams each turn, we're looking at a hit on a 12 or higher, which is a 45% hit chance, and then a 5% crit chance. Hits land for 11.5 and crits add 4.5, so 11.5x45% is 5.175 and 4.5x5% is .225, giving each attack an average damage of 5.4, and then we double that to 10.8 for our total damage per turn.

    Other Spells:

If we're using Quickened Spell, we can cast a cantrip with our bonus action each turn and sustain that for 5 turns (and then even potentially burn some lower-level slots to get some back, though dear lord the DK should be dead before that point).

    Cantrips:

In terms of Cantrips, Mind Sliver could certainly help the party some, but its damage is somewhat low. That said, the Death Knight's Int save bonus is only +1, making this a pretty good saving throw to target. With +4 to Charisma, our save DC is 16, but we also bump it to 17 with Innate Sorcery, so the DK has to get a 16 or higher to save against it. That's a 75% chance to fail, though because of Magic Resistance, it actually becomes a 56.25% chance instead. Our damage is only 7 on average, so it's roughly 4 damage on average when adjusted for failure chance. Mind Sliver does have a great knock-on effect that could really help the party, but if we're trying to be the big damage dealer, we might look at some other options.

True Strike, now actually a good spell, is an option: we can use a Light Crossbow, and this will deal 1d8+1d6+4 at this level, or a total of 12 on average. Now, if our DM wants to be really nasty, you could argue that this doesn't technically involve a Spell Attack, as we're actually just making a weapon attack using Charisma. If we do allow Innate Sorcery to affect it, though, and assume we get advantage, let's figure out what it does, damage-wise.

We'd have a +8 to hit, which would require us to roll a 12 or higher to hit an AC of 20, so it's a 45% chance. But thanks to advantage, that actually becomes a 69.75% chance and a 9.75% chance to crit. A hit is 12 on average, and the bonus crit damage is 8, so we're looking at 8.37 plus .78 for a total average damage of 9.15.

Sorcerous Burst is, of course, the Sorcerer-exclusive cantrip, and the math here becomes a little crazy. Sorcerous Burst can take on many different damage types - we could pick Thunder or Acid or Psychic to be safe, though actually any but Poison would work against this particular target.

On a hit, Sorcerous Burst does 2d8 damage, but if any wind up rolling an 8, we get to roll an additional die - up to 4 extra (thanks to our +4 to Charisma).

So, let's start with the non-explosive damage. 2d8 is 9 on average, and because it's all just dice rolls, we can lump in the crit chance, so we add the 69.75 to the 9.75 for the hit and crit chances and get 79.5%, so our average damage before the explosive dice is 7.155.

Now, here's where my nightmare begins:

On a hit (that 69.75% chance) we have two dice that can each roll an 8. There's a roughly 23% chance that one of those two dice rolls an 8. There is a 1.6% chance that both of them roll an 8. I think (I think) the way to do this is to basically take the average damage of a d8 (4.5) and multiply it by 23% and also 69.75%, and then double it to account for the two chances. I think. No, hold on. That's wrong.

Ok, instead, in this 69.75% of the time scenario, each of the dice has a 1/8 chance (12.5%) to wind up an 8. So instead, we just find 4.5 (1d8) times 69.75% times 12.5%, which comes to about 8.7%, giving us .39 damage. Then, we double it because it's two dice, so that's really .78.

Now, in those 8.7% chances, there is then a 12.5% chance that those extra dice also roll 8s, exploding for another 1d8. Ok, so that's very close to 1% of the time, which is great, because that's just .05 average damage (.045 to be precise, but rounded off).

I'm going to make an executive decision: the chance that you explode on the extra dice from a crit is going to add so little damage on average that it's negligible. We'll just take that .05, double it to .1, and say that we're now doing an extra .79 because of the exploding dice and call it a day, which means our average damage is now 7.945.

And thus, I think we set Sorcerous Burst aside and just go True Strike - assuming, again, we get to use advantage with it even though it's technically not a spell attack. (SB might scale better at higher levels, but for now, True Strike is the way).

OK! So, we've got our Concentration spell. We're burning two Sorcery Points each turn to get a True Strike off as a bonus action. What are we then burning as our main action on turns 2 onward?

    Leveled Non-Concentration Spell:

We've got some big AoE spells that probably do the most damage in general. Cone of Cold does an average of 36 damage on a failed save, but it's very hard to avoid hitting our friends with it (and we'd burn through SP if we do Careful Spell).

While spells of this ilk have the advantage of still doing half damage on a successful save, I'm tempted to look at Scorching Ray, which would benefit probably more from our Innate Sorcery than the single-point buff to our saving throws, and notably requires no management to avoid hitting allies. It also scales decently (though not as insanely as if we had Conjure Minor Elementals).

Given that we preserved our 5th level slots by casting Summon Aberration at 4th level, we'll have two of these to start with.

At 5th level, Scorching Ray does 6 beams, each of which hit for 2d6. Again, we have a 69.75% chance to hit and 9.75% chance to crit, and because it's all dice, we can just add that up together. 79.5% of 7 (the average damage for a single beam) is 5.565. Thus, a 5th-level Scorching Ray is going to do 33.39 damage.

To compare, a Death Knight has a +5 to Con saves, meaning they save on a roll of 12 or higher, so it's a 55% chance to fail, but with magic resistance, that becomes a 30.25% chance to fail. 36x30.25% is 10.89, though it's also a 69.75% (huh) chance to take 18 damage, so that adds in 12.555, meaning the average damage of a Cone of Cold is 23.445, so for sure we're sticking with Scorching Ray.

    Bringing It Together:

Ok, so, beginning of turn 1, we pop Innate Sorcery. We cast Summon Aberration, and then we Quicken True Strike. True Strike deals 9.15 damage, and the Beholderkin deals 10.8, so on turn one we've done 19.95 average damage.

Then, turn two, both of those things happen again, but now we're adding 33.39 damage from Scorching Ray, for a total of 53.34 damage.

We can do this on turn 3 as well, burning our second 5th level spell.

At turn 4 (and by this point we've dealt a sizeable chunk of the DK's HP on our own) we have to downgrade to mere 4th level Scorching Rays, which reduces our damage per turn by 5.565, so we're doing a pathetic 47.775 damage for the next two turns before we need to downgrade to mere 3rd level Scorching Rays.

    Conclusion:

Yeah, this blows the rest of my scenarios totally out of the water. Make no mistake, this is absolutely emptying the tank, but if you can come with all of these resources to a confrontation with a Death Knight at level 10, you can do this.

One other huge advantage to this is that you can do all of this from 80 feet away (the shortest range is the Light Crossbow). If your DM doesn't let you get advantage on your True Strike, Sorcerous Burst is going to be another option, or Fire Bolt, and I don't think it will affect the damage here by a huge amount. They'll also up your range to 120 feet - which will put you just within Hellfire Orb range, but if you can actually maintain that distance, you might draw fire away from your allies that way (also, Absorb Elements can help mitigate the damage somewhat.)

Weaving a Ravenloft Campaign

 While I've now spent over ten years running games of Dungeons & Dragons, the vast majority of that tenure has been only running two campaigns. The first, which ran from 2015 to more or less 2018 (with a sputtering bit of attempt to continue it into 2019) was in my homebrew setting and was very much an attempt to figure out how to run the game, its best stretch probably being a chapter in which the party was trapped in the Shadowfell (not the Domains of Dread, but the dark reflection of my world in a region known as Red Scar Plains, which was born from a time my best friend had a dream in which I was bothering him about a non-existent World of Warcraft dungeon by that name). Then, in 2020, literally two weeks before the Covid lockdowns started, I began a campaign set in Ravnica that I'm still running, the throughline of which has been the plot by the Phyrexians to try to take over the plane as a stepping stone to take over the entire Magic multiverse (by this point, the campaign largely takes place on other planes, though the grand finale final boss fight is intended to take place back on Ravnica).

My biggest lesson with the Ravnica campaign is that you'll often be tempted to make campaigns in "cycles," like, for example, dealing with a major villain in each guild. This will stretch your campaign out to insane lengths. While the players are level 18 at this point, it's still a campaign that's been going for over six years (the Wildemount game I'm in has been going nearly as long and we're only level 10.)

I'm probably returning to my homebrew setting for the campaign after the Ravnica one, but I've been fascinated by Ravenloft since first becoming aware of it, and of course, with the new Ravenloft book coming out, it's especially on the mind.

The setting is a very flexible one: it's actually remarkably well-suited to one-shots, where the party might be swept into the Mists and have to escape by the end of the session. It can also briefly jump in and interrupt the ongoing story of an existing campaign.

Likewise, you can do more limited adventures set in a single domain. Everyone knows Curse of Strahd, probably the most popular published adventure in 5E (and while I was able to play through most of it, I'd actually be willing to do so again. We never actually entered Castle Ravenloft, though we were level 8 and inside the Amber Temple by the time it fell apart). Curse of Strahd isn't that limited - it gets you to level 10 - but you could imagine a simpler one (more like the original module, which was more limited in scope and mostly pushed you into a dungeon crawl through the castle) that could be completed in a month or two.

Of course, the grandest, most ambitious type of Ravenloft campaign is a Mist-hopping one. As presented in Van Richten's, the domains are quite separate, but historically, the Darklords have been aware of one another and even contend with one another as rivals. Even if they didn't, the party might need to cross the Mists over the course of a campaign in order to achieve their goals: either to escape or simply protect what little corner of their nightmarish world they come from.

There is one huge question you need to figure out when you begin your campaign - a good thing to ask at session zero, which is: are the characters from Ravenloft, or from elsewhere?

While the place is a series of nightmare prisons, there are real, sentient people living there, and even if it's a bleak and scary world, there's still pockets of sustainable life. The weirdness - the nightmare logic that the place runs on - is something that the local inhabitants grow up with.

If your player characters are from Ravenloft, you have a few other questions to answer: are they from the same domain? How aware of the nature of the Mists are they?

If the PCs are from the Material Plane, are they from the same world? In our Curse of Strahd game, I and one of the other PCs was from my best friend/the DM's homebrew world, while others were from the Forgotten Realms (my Paladin and the party's Cleric were both devoted to Grave gods, but she was a worshipper of Kelemvor while I was a worshipper of Ekeroth, the latter of which I'm sure you haven't heard of because, you know, homebrew).

I do think that it's probably best if you lean a bit toward familiarity - the party need not be all personally acquainted to start, but having a little bit of a shared base of reality could be useful.

If the party is from outside the Mists (they could even be from the Shadowfell, but just not this particularly bad corner of it) the clearest goal for a campaign is that they escape.

For characters that are from the Mists, they might also wish to escape, but they also might have other goals. The key, though, is that the goal is not "saving the world." The Domains of Dread cannot be saved, because their very purpose is to torment their Darklords, and often do so by tormenting the innocents there as well.

A goal might be to take revenge on a Darklord, but this revenge is inherently going to be temporary - the Darklords always come back. I therefore think that the goals are probably better defined by personal stakes: A PC might want to find a missing loved one, to retrieve a lost heirloom, or at best to thwart a particular plot.

Another thing to really bear in mind is that not every villain in Ravenloft need be a Darklord. Consider Baron Rudolph von Aubrecker, who is ostensibly the ruler of Lamordia, even though it's actual Dr. Viktra Mordenheim whose will shapes the domain. You can play a character like this as either an aggrieved victim who might ally with the party, or himself as a deadly monster who might threaten them.

It would be tempting, I think, if you are going to have a Mist-hopping campaign, to try to hit as many of them as you can. But I actually think this can be a trap: trying to visit every featured domain in Van Richten's is going to wind up either making your campaign last several years or you'll be forced to do very limited adventures (not unlike the short adventures I've been pitching lately on this blog).

Instead, I'd say pick two or three domains to really dial in and focus on. This way, you'll have plenty of time to flesh out the relationship between the party and the domain, and to explore its various regions and locations.

Now, there are a few ways to run a campaign. My tendency has been to direct the players toward goals and challenges I've figure out for them, but if you're comfortable with it, having a more free-form campaign where the players set their own goals is also very viable here (though it might fly in the face of my "limit yourself to just a few domains" thing).

In our Wildemount campaign, my best friend/DM had us all provide a backstory, with goals and "prophecies" as described in Explorer's Guide to Wildemount. Essentially, you might come up with a short-term prophecy like "I will find the journal of my long-lost mentor," and the DM then weaves in hints and clues that eventually lead the party to that location, and later you might have "I will take part in the creation of a powerful construct with consequences that I had not anticipated." Such a pair of prophecies (there's usually a third one that describes where your character's journey comes to an end, for good or ill) could mean that your Reanimator Artificer must steal into the libraries of Castle Ravenloft to take the journal of your instructor, in which they had schematics for some powerful construct like a Colossus, and then later on, you might find yourself working alongside Viktra Mordenheim to build that thing, only for her to retain total control of it as it rampages toward Neufurchtenberg.

If all party members have these prophecy goals, you can actually get a lot of mileage in a campaign out of just taking turns (not necessarily in a strict order) helping the rest of the party follow their paths.

The key, though, is finding a satisfying conclusion: either the threads need to all weave together into a single thing or there needs to be something above all of them that connects into them, even if only tangentially. For example, maybe we plan the finale of the campaign should take place in the Amber Temple in Barovia. How does a Colossus rampaging through Neufurchtenberg relate to that? Maybe it unearths something within the city - an amber sarcophagus that must be returned to the temple. Perhaps this is necessary to keep Strahd or some other Darklord from escaping, or perhaps the Dark Power within the sarcophagus promises a path to escape if the party does this task.

Horror stories don't necessarily need to have unhappy endings: while Quincy and Lucy (and the honestly quite innocent Renfield) don't make it out of Dracula alive, it still ends with the vampire hunters successful and Mina saved from becoming a creature of the night. But to borrow an idea from Alan Wake II, for the a horror story to end well, the heroes must make a sacrifice.

I have a couple of pitches for Ravenloft campaigns. I don't think they are totally compatible.

The first actually begins in the real, modern world, or perhaps a little nostalgically in the days of my childhood, which were the 1990s. The players would play as teenagers in an American suburb, only for a slasher-style villain to begin killing off classmates. We might even use a different system like Kids on Bikes for this. Eventually, the players discover that the killer's house holds an Amber Sarcophagus within its basement, and when the killer (or perhaps the killer's evil parent who drove them to their violent ways) crosses some line, the Mists of Ravenloft come and sweep the town away, pulling it into the Domains of Dread. From there, the players are separated and spend years in different domains, developing the skills of D&D classes, and are finally reunited when the borders of the domain that was their hometown open. Still young, but with terrible memories of the experiences in their various domains, the players must fight to escape back to the real world.

The second is a bit more traditional, but is also focused on escaping the Domains of Dread. Here, we hammer heavy a theme of doppelgangers, mirrors, doubles, etc. In their travels, the party will have regular encounters with Firan Zal'honan, the archmage that Van Richten's never explicitly confirms is actually Azalin Rex, the former Darklord of Darkon, though both earlier edition materials and some very clear clues in Van Richten's indicate is the case.

I know that Horrors Within is said to answer the question of where Azalin got to, but in this version of the story, Firan knows that he was able to create a clone of some sort that would essentially be left as Darklord in his place. What he doesn't understand is why he was able to leave Darkon but not the Mists entirely, but in exchange for various dubiously moral tasks, Firan will lead the party to the Amber Temple (yes, I like this as a climactic location) and secure them the same deal: that the Dark Powers will create a copy of them.

The horror-twist, though, is that none of them will know if the copy is the one allowed to escape, or if it's the one left behind. And Firan winds up being our final boss, as he goes mad with the realization that he's the version of himself that is still trapped in the Mists, and that his escape will never come. (I literally know how I'd end the campaign: as the party emerges back into whatever world they came from, I'd ask each player: do you think that you're the original, or the copy?)

Short Adventures in Ravenloft: Hazlan

 When I first read through Van Richten's, I struggled a bit with Hazlan.

A realm of magical experimentation gone wrong, the vibe of the place felt, yes, bad, but not really "horror"-themed. It felt too bright, too open.

Then, finally, something clicked for me.

In Dark Souls III, there's an area you have to go to in kind of the latter part of the middle act of the game (it's not explicitly divided into acts, but it's where one of two major bosses you need to beat are that unlock the final, sprawling area where the penultimate boss is). The region is called The Profaned Capital, where the locals engaged in dangerous experiments to try to preserve the world by messing around with a kind of primordial chaos.

The area is potentially very short and linear - you can go to the boss there pretty directly, and you might not even realize that there is more to it. But if you do some exploring, you can find some new weapons, items, and spells. You'll also find these bizarre creatures that are like a small elephant, or maybe an enormous baby with a big hand for a head, and a creepy maw in the center of that hand that you'll only see if they use certain attacks.

And I think that's really they key: the monsters that players encounter in Hazlan should be utterly surreal and bizarre.

D&D uses the aberration creature type in a couple different ways. It's honestly a little frustrating, because some aberrations are very clearly "alien, Lovecraftian beings" like the Mind Flayer or Star Spawn, and some are "the experimental results of misguided wizards."

But this latter definition can also be used to describe some Monstrosities. Arguably, it'd be better to use Aberrations for the experiments given how Monstrosities cover such a massive span of creatures.

(Actually, Aberrations has also expanded in 5.5 to include creatures that are more or less humanoid but have some psionic powers, like Gith or Kuo-Toa.)

Regardless, I think we can focus a Hazlan adventure around monstrous experiments.

Now, in a game like Dark Souls, all but a tiny fraction of the beings we encounter are hostile and there to be fought (or fled). In D&D, you can certainly be in a hostile environment, but there are a lot more "verbs" the players have access to.

I think the party needs to get their hands on some kind of McGuffin - something that may set up a future adventure, or simply something that is desired by a quest giver who can reward them. We'll say that they are hired by one of Hazlik's apprentices, an archmage named Kytho Dree.

Dree tells the party that they're leading an expedition into an uncharted region of Moonstone Valley - last new moon, there was a massive explosion that seems to have broken through the surface and revealed what they believe is a long-lost civilization, which may hold within it powerful ancient technology.

However, there's a strange, shimmering barrier that surrounds the region - Dree postulates that it could be some sort of ancient defense mechanism for the ancient city beneath the surface. Experimentally, they've determined that living, conscious beings cannot survive crossing the barrier, but if one is rendered unconscious first, the barrier can be crossed safely (yes, this is sort of borrowed from The Southern Reach series).

Dree will lead the expedition, and will have their own assistants cast Sleep on the party.

Here, we have our first uncannily weird thing: the party is encouraged to voluntarily fail the saving throws for the spell (which you can always elect to do,) but if a party member resists it (I realize that things might be complicated if you have an Elf or other sleepless party member - adjust as needed) they will actually just fail to go through the barrier and instead be shunted into the Ethereal Plane without an obvious way to get back.

By the time the party awakens from the spell, Dree has somehow gone missing. Within the meteor-blasted valley (which I imagine looking like a more colorful version of the surface of the moon) there is, indeed, a crater that seems to have broken into the surface of the world, and only by hopping from floating rock to floating rock (or just having Fly or Feather Fall or something like that) can the party safely descend into the crater.

As they go down to the "ancient city," the party will start to see strangely familiar things: while Dree was sure that this predated Hazlik and his reign over the region, the Eye of Hazlik can be seen on the buildings and engraved in the pavement of the city.

Making their way to the center of the city, the party encounters strange monsters: Gibbering Mouthers and Nothics, probably (we're probably talking either late tier 1 or early tier 2 for the adventure level). The Gibbering Mouthers are, of course, just horrifying monsters, but the Nothics show signs of being former members of Hazlan society.

Investigating ruined buildings, they find that this city, simply called Hazlan (suggesting that perhaps this was the original form that the Domain took?) sought to transform its inhabitants to better survive the nightmare that is the Demiplane of Dread, and there is a lot of optimistic talk that their new forms will better be able to plumb the depths of the arcane.

When they reach the city's center, they find a grand plaza where there is a series of concentric rings controlling the magical energy flowing into a central conduit. If the party moves the rings, they find that fragments of Dree begin to phase into being - as if a third of their matter was separated by each of the rings.

Depending on how much your players enjoy puzzles, you could make a pretty simple one or a more complex one (maybe you can only rotate two of the rings at a time, not just a single one, and must align them correctly). Once the rings are aligned properly, Dree's body is reconstructed, but something is deeply wrong with them.

The power of the city that transformed its inhabitants has now been channeled through Dree, and while they initially look like their former self, they have only a moment of horror before their body melts into a gory sludge, before reconstructing itself into a monstrous form. I'm tempted to suggest you use a Hydra stat block, but rather than a reptilian/semi-draconic appearance, this Hydra bears a horrid, fleeing memory of Dree's face on each head.

When the transformed Dree is slain, the party awakens on the edge of the crater, which now is a simple rocky divot in the earth.

    I'll confess, this one still took me a while to figure out. I really think that in order to make the horror hit in Hazlan, you need to emphasize the weirdness of it all. Hallucinations, troubled dreams, and really going out of your way to describe the monsters in unusual ways will help sell it. Gibbering Mouthers are pretty gross and scary monsters (and feel like they should be higher CR) but I think you could also reflavor them to still bear the appearances of the people absorbed into them - maybe faces, half-familiar, seem to form and then dissipate in their ever-shifting forms.

A non-hostile Nothic NPC could also help flesh out the history of what happened here, though you run the risk of humanizing them and thus dulling the alien wrongness of the place. Perhaps instead the players could find the notes of an arcane researcher who eventually became one of them.

Now, if we're going for nightmares and losing touch with reality, our next stop on this tour of the Domains is all about that, with the dream world of I'Cath.

Hollow Warden Ranger vs. Death Knight

 So, I'm doing something a little unconventional: in a little less than a week, early access for Ravenloft: Horrors Within will open up, giving us access to the new book with its various subclasses, species, feats, etc. Among them is the Hollow Warden Ranger, which leans into a kind of spooky cryptid vibe.

I actually love the idea of a Domain of Dread with a Pacific Northwest vibe - while I'm a New Englander originally, and will always advocate for spooky stories set in the Northeast, I also do love the temperate rainforests and funky monsters of the region.

I'm going to be using the version of the subclass previewed in the recent "State of the Game" video, which should be the final version (barring some digital errata, which is rare).

Ok: Rangers are, unfortunately, generally considered one of if not the weakest class in 5E, and while we saw massive glow-ups for, for example, the Monk (even if the absolute damage output wasn't buffed enormously, their overall quality of life and survivability did get some significant boosts) most argue that the Ranger didn't quite get the love it needed.

I'll confess that it's not a class whose fantasy appeals to me tremendously - but I do think that the vibes on the Hollow Ranger could draw me to it (though I've got a ton of character concepts I'd want to play first).

Still, as I've been doing this series figuring out damage output against a Death Knight, which is a very Ravenloft-appropriate monster (Lord Soth is featured in Horrors Within, and while he's now got a bespoke, slightly-higher-CR stat block, we're on theme), largely going with classes that aren't always known for being the kings of damage output, I figured we should check in with the Ranger. But I'm more excited about this subclass than the others currently available (Gloomstalker is, to be fair, certainly a spooky option as well).

But how will the subclass affect our damage, if at all?

The core feature for the Hollow Warden is Wrath of the Wild, which allows you to transform into a kind of cryptid monster as a bonus action, expending a use of Favored Enemy to do so - notably, this no longer requires you to concentrate on Hunter's Mark (in fact, it uses up one of your free castings of it), though it only lasts for one minute (or if you get incapacitated, die, or end it voluntarily). The transformation increases your AC by 1 (and then 2 at level 11). It also allows you to make an Opportunity Attack when a creature within 5 feet of your deals damage to you or an ally.

Naturally, this latter feature will strongly encourage us to play a melee character, though the changes to Sharpshooter in 5.5 were doing that already anyway.

Still, this is going to be a source of significant extra damage, as we will probably be able to use it every turn as long as we stay glued to the Death Knight.

Finally, Wrath of the Wild lets us impose Frightened on any creatures of our choice within 10 feet who fails a Wisdom saving throw every turn - once when we activate it and again at the start of each turn. The fear effect lasts until the start of your next turn. This is not going to work on the Death Knight, but it's actually quite good generally (and again, encourages us to get into melee).

In terms of subclass spells, Wrathful Smite is the only real damage option we'll have at level 10 - given that I'm going to be building with dual-wielding in mind, we'll probably save this only for crits, as we'll normally just being making an attack with the Dual Wielder feat. (Ranger can go the Strength route and pick up heavy melee weapons, which might work well with this subclass, but I think there are other benefits to going with a Dex build and dual-wielding. Also, going one-handed and taking the Dueling fighting style is actually not a terrible idea here, though I think Dual-wielding will probably wind up doing better - even if we can probably reliably get three attacks per round thanks to those Opportunity Attacks, the benefit won't make up for missing the Dual Wielder feat attack - though a less damage-focused, more tanky Ranger actually makes some sense with this subclass).

At level 7, Hungering Might gives you a bonus to Con saves equal to your Wisdom modifier (minimum +1) and also, when you hit a creature with an attack while transformed and you're Bloodied, you regain HP equal to 1d10+Wis. But this doesn't affect our damage output (other than keeping us alive a bit longer).

I actually wrote out the entire 11th-level feature before remembering this was a level 10 build, so we'll stop there.

Ok, so let's talk gameplan:

    Weapons:

We're definitely doing a melee build here. Classically, Rangers in melee tend to go with dual-wielding (particularly a shortsword and scimitar). But what about some other options?

You can make a Strength-based Ranger, and I actually think that there are some reasons to consider it in this case: because of the reaction attacks we'll be getting, the harder-hitting the weapon, the greater value that has. If we go with a Greatsword, for example, what would we need for our stat-spread?

Well, I'd want to get a 17 in Strength and then a 16 in Wisdom to start off. We can get these and the Tough feat (which will help us survive in melee a bit better) from the Farmer background, which also feels good for a folk-horror-themed character.

Using Point Buy, we're a little stretched out here given that we want to have a 14 in Dex and then as high a Con as we can get. Grabbing 15s in Strength and Wis leaves us with 9 points left. A 14 in Dex is then another 7, so we're spending our last points just to get a +0 to Con. Not... ideal.

But let's try something a bit more off-beat. If we take the Druidic Warrior fighting style, we can pick up Shillelagh as a cantrip. From there, we'll be able to focus entirely on Wisdom as our primary stat. Now, this won't let us go with Great Weapon Master, but it will let us go with Polearm Master if we fight with a Quarterstaff. The cost is that we have to cast the spell as a bonus action, which does get in the way of getting Wrath of the Wild up.

That said, we might need a good concentration spell at the start of our first turn anyway that takes an action to cast (we'll come to that later). The Quarterstaff has Topple, which could potentially knock our target prone or at least burn through some legendary resistances. The downside is that by picking this, we're not going to get the Dueling fighting style that would complement a single one-handed weapon. Eventually, the higher damage die would make up for this (by the time it's a d12, it's doing as well as a d8 weapon with a +2 bonus).

All that said, I don't think that this is the highest damage option, which means we're probably going to have to go the conventional route and dual-wield. So, yeah, the usual Shortsword and Scimitar combo.

This also means I have to deal with Vex, though I think the math should hopefully be at least similar to what I did with the Rogue.

    Feats:

If we're dual-wielding, we'll take Dual-Wielder, though this won't come online on the first turn because we need our bonus action to activate Wrath of the Wild. Indeed, with other bonus actions like Wrathful Smite, we might consider leaving it on the table - though in any fight where we're not burning through all our resources each turn we'd probably want to have this as a free option.

At level 8, I might be tempted to just take an ASI to cap our Dexterity, because if we do go into higher levels, getting higher Wisdom will wind up being pretty useful. So, we'll just assume 20 Dex.

For Fighting Style, we're going Two Weapon Fighting.

    Spells:

At this level, we have 3rd level spells. While something like Conjure Barrage will be great in AoE situations, for single-target, I'd suspect that we're going to be best off with Summon Fey. (Spike Growth would be great if we had a lot of pushing and pulling, but that doesn't play super well with our "stay stuck to the target" playstyle.)

    Gameplan:

So, here's how we do this:

We start off on turn one closing with the Death Knight, and then we activate Wrath of the Wild. With our action, we cast Summon Fey, probably picking Fuming as the Fey's mood (/mode.)

Hopefully, the Death Knight attacks either us or an ally (though hopefully not our poor Fey because they might die immediately) and triggers our reaction attack.

Then, from turn 2 onward, we make our two attacks and then have our Fey attack if they're alive.

    Calculating Damage:

Given that they get to attack first, we'll figure out what the Fey does first.

Our Wisdom is only +3 at this level, so the Fey only has a +7 to hit. Against an AC of 20, that's only a 40% chance to hit. However, because our Fey spirit is fuming, they can start off their turn with a Fey Step to get advantage on their attacks (alternatively, if we want to keep them alive, we might have them Fey Step after their attacks to safely get out of range of the Death Knight's melee, though we lose this advantage).

On a hit, the Fey spirit gets 2d6+3+the spell's level, which can only be 3 at this level. So, it's an average of 13. Then, you add 7 on a crit.

With advantage, they have a 64% chance to hit and a 9.75% chance to crit, so that's 8.32 plus .6825, or an average of approximately 9 damage on an attack with advantage.

Without advantage, for their second attack, they have a 40% chance to hit and 5% chance to crit, so 5.2 plus .35, or 5.55 on average for the second attack.

(Oh, duh: it's a 3rd level Fey Spirit, so it only gets one attack.)

Thus, the Fey is doing, from turn one, about 14.55 damage per turn. (Actually, no, it's just 9 damage)

We assume, then, that we'll get our Opportunity Attack. Here, we have a 50% chance to hit and a 5% chance to crit. We use our Shortsword, which deals 1d6+5 damage on a hit (8.5 average) and 3.5 extra on a crit, so we're looking at 4.25 plus .175 or 4.425 average damage there.

Then, we have our second turn:

We should be able to make full use of our Nick and Dual Wielder off-hand attacks, so this amounts to four 1d6 weapon attacks per turn.

We'll attack with the Shortsword for our two main attacks as part of the attack action. The Scimitar we will only use for our Nick attack, which then allows us to use the Shortsword again for our Bonus Action Dual Wielder attack and then our reaction attack that we can expect to get each round.

Of course, Vex vexes us by making the math far more complicated. But at least we have some precedence with the Rogue, who also had a +9 to hit. Using the math we figured out from that, if we got an opportunity attack between turns one and two, we've got a 62.5% chance to hit and a 7.375% chance to crit. 8.5x62.5% is 5.31 (we're rounding it to the second decimal, which is honestly more generous than we should be) and 3.5x7.375% is .26, giving us 5.57 average damage with this attack.

Then, we have a second Shortsword attack on our turn. Our hit chance overall is now 65.625%, and our crit chance is 7.975%, so that's 5.58 plus .28, or 5.86.

Now, compared to the Rogue, we have one more attack in the middle here, our Scimitar attack. This has a 65.625% chance to have advantage. Again, let's round off for sanity. 66% of the time we're talking a 75% chance to hit and 9.75% chance to crit, and the other 34% of the time, it's 50%/5%. So, 49.5% plus 17% is a 66.5% chance to hit and 6.4% plus 1.7% is 8.1% chance to crit. That's then 5.65 plus .28, or 5.93 with this attack.

Our bonus action attack actually winds up being very simple, as we don't have a source for advantage, so it's just the same as that initial reaction, or 4.425. Then, our next reaction would be like that initial attack on this turn, or 5.57.

Whoops, forgot that the bonus action attack doesn't add our Dex. So it's just 3.5 damage on a hit. Thus, it's actually 1.75 plus .175, or 1.925

Bringing it all together:

On turn one, we only do 9 with our Fey spirit and 4.4 with our reaction attack, for 13.4 damage.

Then, turn two, we'll get 5.57 on attack one, 5.86 on attack two, 5.93 on attack three, and 1.93 on attack four, for a total of 19.3ish. Our Fey spirit then does another 9 damage, so we get 28.3 on our turn.

Then, we get 5.57 with our reaction each round, bringing us to 33.9 damage per round.

    Let's talk pitfalls:

The Fey spirit only has 30 HP and an AC of 15, so we might prefer instead to have the Fey swoop in with their movement and then Fey Step away. This takes their advantage away, so they'll only do 5.6 damage per turn, meaning we reduce our total damage done by about 3.4.

Even with 30 feet of clearance, the Death Knight could still choose to go after it - broadly speaking, if a monster diverts away from attacking you or your fellow party members, it's worth it, but the Fey could also get caught in a Hellfire Orb or some such thing as well.

Indeed, with only a single attack, we might actually just go Hunter's Mark. This would have to wait for turn two, though it would let us attack on turn one. We'd still need to worry about maintaining concentration, though we do get a nice bonus to Con saves with the subclass.

I think we can actually figure out how much Hunter's Mark would add (starting on turn two) by simply adding all the hit and crit chances together and multiplying them by 3.5. If I did that right, it's actually adding 9.6 damage per turn, roughly, which outpaces Summon Fey.

Damn it, WotC! You got me to cast Hunter's Mark!