Baseless Speculation on the Path of Elements Barbarian from the WoW Book

 So, while technically not my first WoW character, my Tauren Shaman was the first I actually made on the correct server, so while there's a weird little level 7 (or at least he was 7 before the level squish in Shadowlands) human paladin that I then replicated on a different server and who has been my main since early 2008, that shaman has jockeyed with my Undead Rogue as my "Horde Main" since 2006.

I've always chased this idea of a Battlemage in RPGs, a class I'd for some reason assumed was a standard fantasy RPG class, but which doesn't actually seem to exist under that name in any, as far as I can tell. Truthfully, the Eldritch Knight Fighter in D&D is more or less exactly what I picture when I think of a Battlemage. But when I first encountered the Paladin class in Quest for Glory V, I imagined them as being more wizardly in nature, rather than the more religiously-affiliated version we actually see.

In vanilla WoW, Paladins were only available to the Alliance (specifically only humans and dwarves could be them,) and so when I found out my roommate was playing on the Horde side, I tried to pick the next best Battlemage-like class, which to me looked like the Shaman.

I didn't really get the talent system initially, so I actually think I invested more in the Elemental tree early on, but eventually I figured it out and realized that Enhancement was the spec I really wanted.

It's a bit of a weird name, but the idea, I think, is that the elemental magic that the Shaman uses enhances their melee abilities, focusing (at least early on) on the Shaman "weapon imbue" spells, and later giving us melee attacks like Storm Strike and Lava Lash that are sort of flavored as if we are empowering those strikes with elemental magic each time we make them.

In Unearthed Arcana, they initially gave us a revised version of the Storm Herald Barbarian, but while the flavor of that subclass was always cool, and also fits decently with the idea of an Enhancement Shaman, it's just mechanically a mess, and even with some very smart changes (like letting you pick a different storm each time you raged, rather than effectively narrowing you down to just one third of the subclass) it just wasn't living up to its promise, and I'm given to understand that the Path of Elements is going to be a totally separate subclass.

Given that another elemental subclass, the Way of the Four Elements, was demolished and replaced with the quite decent Warrior of Elements, maybe we can hope that we'll see a similar glow-up.

It is a little strange to see the WoW Shaman represented in D&D by the Barbarian, but I will say that there's some logic to it: both are tied to a kind of primordial, ancient power. Words like "Primal," "Ancestral," and "Storm" are keywords that fit quite well with either class. It's only strange because in WoW, two of the Shamans' three specializations are spellcasters. I could imagine that we might get guidance in the book that suggests that if we want to do this, we might instead look to the Druid class, maybe going for Circle of the Land or Circle of the Sea.

That said, even though the Enhancement Shaman does have mana as a resource (though in WoW, if you're not a healer or an Arcane Mage, mana is mainly there to limit only specific utility spells, as they figured out long ago that damage-focused characters don't find managing mana a fun challenge) I do think that it's actually a pretty good fit. If Fighters are the D&D equivalent of Warriors, then that kind of leaves Barbarians up for grabs (though Fury Warriors are pretty Barbarian-coded).

So, let's talk about the core abilities of an Enhancement Shaman.

The real central mechanic is Maelstrom Weapon - as you attack in melee (and in WoW, in addition to your melee abilities, melee characters will auto-attack a target, doing minor damage but also triggering things like this) you get a stacking buff that reduces the cost and casting time and increasing the damage (the latter being more relevant) of your next Lightning Bolt or Chain Lightning spell (the latter doing less damage but chaining out to additional targets, so you use it in AoE/Cleave situations). Maelstrom Weapon stacks up to 10 times, each stack doing 20%. So, if you have 5 or more, these spells will cast instantly, and if it gets up to 10, it'll hit for 300% of its normal damage. Because most spells have a casting time, it's not really practical to cast them if you're a melee character, as this will interrupt your auto-attacks, so this is a way to let a melee shaman use the class' iconic central damage spell.

(Interestingly, Lighting Bolt is an Elemental Shaman's filler spell while they wait for other spells to come off cooldown, kind of like a cantrip, but for Enhancement, it becomes one of their hardest-hitting spells through Maelstrom Weapon.)

Given the pacing of D&D combat compared to WoW, building up stacking buffs on each hit doesn't really work - there's a good chance that a Barbarian will only make 4 attacks in an entire encounter, so even if you said that after 5 hits, you could send out a jolt of lightning, there's a chance that you wouldn't even get to do that.

Depending on the subclass, some Barbarians get a boost to damage output at level 3, usually adding damage to one attack per turn, like Berserkers and Zealots. Other subclasses don't get this boost, and are focused a bit more on survival/tankiness (World Soul, and potentially Wildeheart, though the latter is more of a choice between various utility options).

Especially given the existence of the Spiritual Guardian, which I do think is Shaman-coded, though oddly more aligned with one of the "Hero Talent" trees shared by Elemental and Restoration but not Enhancement, I think Path of the Elements is probably going to be more damage-focused.

The actual math of how damage is added might be hard to predict - Berserkers add d6s equal to their rage bonus (so 2d6, then 3d6, then 4d6) while Zealots add a d6 plus half their Barbarian level - but I could imagine that they get something like the ability to add some amount of Lightning, Fire, or Thunder damage to one of their attacks each turn.

WoW is much more equal-opportunity when it comes to characters being good at single-target versus multiple-target-focused. Every class has abilities that work for both, and you might tweak your talents a bit to focus your build on one or the other, but typically there are some AoE abilities you get regardless.

I don't know if that's something they want to replicate in D&D, but I do like the idea of a Path of Elements Barbarian being able to do things like Crash Lightning, which is an Enhancement ability that strikes everyone in front of them with some nature damage (in WoW, nature is a massive catch-all for anything from lightning and thunder to poison to even beams of sunlight cast by Balance Druids). It has some knock-on effects, making some of your melee strikes hit additional targets, but that's not really how D&D is designed.

I could imagine having something like a limited-times-per-day cone-effect thing we either do as a bonus action or in place of an attack. If it's just any time we rage, it might have to be pretty weak for balance reasons, but if it's limited-use, then it has to hit really hard.

One of the major themes of Shamans in WoW (admittedly less emphasized in modern WoW, though one of the Hero Talent trees Enhancement can get brings it back in a big way) is Totems, where Shamans place an object on the ground that has some kind of effect. The Totemic hero talents I just mentioned center around putting a big Tremor Totem down at your feet, which pulses damage to nearby foes and activates again based on abilities you use. Admittedly, this might not tie into the themes they're going for with this subclass, especially if they want to see it be a little more setting-agnostic (though certainly the Demon Hunter Ranger and Oath of the Ebon Blade Paladin are going to be very setting-specific).

Anyway, I don't have a full level 3/6/10/14 breakdown here, because that seems like it would be far too specific. Still, I have high hopes for the subclass, not only letting me replicate my venerable WoW character, but also potentially giving us an actually-good elemental subclass for Barbarians.

Hold Up, Where Are the Hallowfall Arathi Actually From?

 We have a new patch that has nothing whatsoever to do with the Arathi Empire - indeed, we're presented with a different question regarding what the hell Ula'tek is, but I'm hesitant to speculate much on it because I figure that question might be answered pretty soon.

But going back to the previous expansion, there's an element to the War Within that was very, very weird:

The Hallowfall Arathi.

The Arathi (using this term for short, though part of what's weird about them is the ambiguity this creates) came to Hallowfall on some kind of holy mission, and they're our allies throughout the expansion, and are on pretty good terms with the Khaz Algar Earthen.

But so much of their story doesn't really make any sense.

In the ancient backstory of World of Warcraft, the first human civilization was the Arathi Empire, which was centered in the Arathi Highlands, a region in the southeast of the subcontinent of Lordaeron (which I realized today, looking at the updated Midnight map, is actually larger than the southern part of the Eastern Kingdoms, when in Vanilla it was only about a third of the Eastern Kingdoms area).

We know thanks to Wrath of the Lich King that humanity itself is descended from the Vrykul, created initially by the Titans as warriors to defend their installations across Azeroth. But while the once-metallic Vrykul suffered the Curse of Flesh just like the Earthen, Mechagnomes, and Mogu, they seemed to be hit by a double whammy, having many years to develop their own culture and then being struck with an epidemic of children being born far smaller and weaker (but still healthy enough to live to adulthood and reproduce).

We then know that after Tyr discovered Loken's corruption, he fled to the Eastern Kingdoms (I assume this happened after the Sundering, though if not, this might have been a journey toward "lands to the south") he traveled with several Vrykul, including those who were defying Ymiron's edicts that these tiny children be put to death. These humans would gradually forget what, exactly, Tyr was, but they would continue to revere him after he died in what is now called Tirisfal (literally "Tyr's Fall.")

So, humans have been in what would come to be called Lordaeron for a long time, but had limited contact with the elves of Quel'thalas and unfortunately a lot of contact with the Trolls of Zul'Aman, which mostly took the form of warfare.

The Arathi Highlands were where humanity carved out their first real civilization, a nation called Arathor. The humans made a deal with the High Elves to help fight off their mutual Troll adversaries - the elves taught 100 humans the secrets of Arcane Magic, and in exchange, humanity offered to help the elves fend off the Amani. Those 100 mages became the Kirin Tor, and founded Dalaran.

Now, at some point (and here my lore knowledge grows fuzzy,) Arathor broke up into several different kingdoms - the seven human kingdoms. Stromgarde occupied the heart of the old empire, and then Alterac, Gilneas, and Lordaeron took other parts of the subcontinent (Lordaeron, being the largest of these, became the name of the subcontinent as well). The descendants of the Arathi kings traveled south and founded Stormwind beyond the dwarven realm of Khaz Modan (I don't know when the humans allied with the dwarves and gnomes, but possibly due to being former Titanforged, they were inclined toward cordial relations). Some Gilneans sailed out to the islands of Kul Tiras and founded their kingdom there, and the Kirin Tor established Dalaran as a powerful city-state.

Now, Arathor was an empire, of sorts, though arguably it sort of went the opposite direction of most empires, beginning as one unified regime and then breaking up. I don't know if there's much history of conflict between the human kingdoms, though - it seems that there were enough other threats to keep them from fighting each other.

So, centuries, maybe millennia later, we encounter these people from the Arathi Empire. But... we've been to Arathi Highlands, and even recently in-lore (Arator - whose name, yes, sounds like Arathor - goes there on his soul-searching journey after the events in Eversong Woods with his father) and there ain't any weird super-religious empire there with airships flying around.

What gives?

Let's consider what we know of the Arathi (and here I again mean the ones we meet in Hallowfall).

First off, they seem to be a mix of human and elvish heritage. Most use the standard human models, but with pointed ears, though we do meet Great Kyron, who appears more elvish in anatomical expression. Why they are "Great" Kyron isn't really explained, except that they seem to be well-respected in their society.

Half-elves are actually somewhat unusual in WoW, though to be fair, that might be in part due to the lack (until War Within) of half-elf models. There certainly have always been some: Arator, for example, used a standard High Elf model when first introduced in The Burning Crusade (just remember that he's not as young as, like, Anduin. While the in-game timeline is a little ambiguous, he was an adult during BC, so he's got to be in his late 30s at least) and even his bespoke Midnight model still mostly leans toward an elvish look. We also know that Alodi, the first Guardian of Tirisfal, was a half-elf. But Outside of him, the only half-elves we got before War Within were, I think, the children of the Windrunner sisters (man, all three of them had human husbands/boyfriends, though Sylvanas and Nathanos never had kids - which is probably for the best).

Now, the humans of Arathor did have an alliance with the High Elves, one that would be formally part of the Alliance in the Second War (though the Third War and its aftermath really ruined that,) so it stands to reason that Alodi wasn't unique. But the Hallowfall Arathi seem to be basically all half-elves, suggesting that there was a far broader integration of humans and elves in their society.

Next, we have to address someone with a very important last name: Faerin Lothar.

Anduin Lothar was the best friend of King Llane Wrynn, Varian's father, who was assassinated by Garona Halforcen (under a magical compulsion, but try telling that to a traumatized young Varian seeing the woman you'd started thinking of as an honorary aunt carving the heart out of your father's chest). In the Warcraft movie, Anduin Lothar is actually King Llane's brother-in-law, and Varian's uncle by blood, and while the game hasn't confirmed that, Varian looked up to Lothar as if he were an uncle.

But it also goes beyond that: while the Wrynns have been the kings of Stormwind for many generations, it was actually the Lothars who were directly descended from the monarchs of Arathor. I don't know how Anduin Lothar wound up not being king, but politics are complicated.

Still, Lothar is a name that carries the legacy of the kings of Arathor.

And the Arathi friend we meet is Faerin Lothar.

Now, Faerin tells us that she snuck in with the Hallowfall Expedition as a child, deciding she didn't want to live the life that her family had set out for her. To me, that seems to really suggest that she was in a family that placed a lot of pressure on her to play a very important role.

We know that the Hallowfall Arathi hail from an Arathi Empire, and so to me, this oblique way of talking about her family suggests the following: I think Faerin Lothar is the heir to the imperial Arathi throne. I think she's a princess in self-imposed exile.

But exile from where?

As my best friend pointed out, the Arathi have plenty of dealings with the Khaz Algar Earthen, and trade with them. That means that they can reach the surface of the Isle of Dorn easily enough. If that's the case, why aren't they in contact with the Empire? Sure, they sort of appeared in the vast underground sea to the west of Hallowfall, but if the Empire is on the surface somewhere, couldn't they just launch their airships and restore contact?

And again, again, contact with where? Where the hell is this evidently powerful, technologically advanced, somewhat off-puttingly pious empire? Why do they call themselves Arathi when we haven't seen any tiny trace of them anywhere near the Arathi Highlands?

How do they fit into the entire story of humanity we've gotten since the Warcraft series began?

Well, they don't. And I think that's intentional.

Let me take a moment here to kind of split by thesis into two: one idea I'm presenting is something I feel very confident about, something like an 85%, 90% certainty. The next is more tin-foil-hat.

So, to stop beating around the bush:

I think the Hallowfall Arathi are from an alternate universe.

I think that the Arathi are from a timeline in which the original nation of Arathor never broke up, and that humanity remained unified under a singular emperor. I think that this empire probably expanded and absorbed Quel'thalas, integrating the high elves as equal citizens. I have no confident claims about what happened to the Trolls, Dwarves, or Gnomes who shared their continent, though I think it's possible that it won't be the most pleasant answer.

I think the Empire likely spans the Eastern Kingdoms in its timeline, and might be larger even than that. I think that the evidently magical way in which the Hallowfall Expedition arrived in Hallowfall was probably not just spatial transportation, but truly a journey to another universe - ours.

I think it's possible that Faerin left home because the Empire is not... great. I mean, "Empire" tends to have a negative connotation, given it's built on, you know, imperialism. And the piety of the Hallowfall Arathi seems to mostly be in service to fighting some truly scary foes, it also seems that it sometimes overwhelms people and turns them into dangerous zealots. (We've already seen how the Light can drive people to do bad things in Midnight - perhaps Wrath has become a major part of Arathi society). Again, the Hallowfall Arathi seem to be pretty decent, and I don't think the Empire is pure evil, but I do think that there's going to be a lot about the way that they do things that is not going to be quite the way that things work in Stormwind.

This, by the way, is the part I'm very confident in. I think that if they were truly on just some as-yet-undiscovered continent on Azeroth, they would have called them something else. Indeed, it wouldn't be that crazy for humanity to arise elsewhere on Azeroth, as there could have been other groups of Vrykul who left Northrend and went elsewhere (such as the Broken Isles. It's also pretty strongly implied that the Drust of Kul Tiras were at least originally Vrykul).

What's the more out-there theory, though?

Well, let me take you back to 2014, when we got the most conceptually bizarre World of Warcraft expansion, Warlords of Draenor. Evidently, when breaking the story for Warlords, they wanted Garrosh to somehow resurrect the leaders of the Old Horde, but they didn't want to do this via something like necromancy, to draw a distinction between this and, like, the Scourge.

So, naturally, the simpler thing to do was to have him travel A: to another planet (ok, not that crazy, we had been to Outland already,) B: decades into the past (ok, so it's like a time travel expansion with weird paradoxes?) and C: in an alternate timeline so that we don't have to address any of the weird time-travel questions, except, you know, how there are alternate timelines.

The point is, Garrosh, with the help of Kairozdormu, travels to an alternate timeline. It's not one he creates by his actions: there are differences here that that couldn't account for, such as the fact that he was never born in it. But there, he intervenes in the formation of the original Horde and persuades Grom, sort of his father but not really his father, to reject the Burning Legion and the Blood of Mannoroth, replacing this demonic power with technology from 35 years in the future. The Iron Horde, from this alternate timeline, then invades our timeline, hijacking the Dark Portal.

Now, did this make any sense as a threat? Why is this version of the Old Horde that has modern technology necessarily going to be overwhelmingly dangerous when we, also, you know, have modern technology? Eh, whatever. It was kind of a mess of an expansion.

But it did raise the following weird question:

If the Iron Horde invades our Azeroth, does that mean that there's an Azeroth out there that never got invaded by the Horde?

At the time, I think Blizzard tried to just put their hands up and say that this timeline was really just a bubble around Draenor. Perhaps less elegantly, they explained that the Archimonde we fought at the end of the expansion was, in fact, the one and only Archimonde, and that demons have a kind of special uniqueness among timelines (like Mr. Door?)

But let's set aside all that weird effort to backpedal from the weirdness of that expansion's premise: what would Azeroth look like if the Horde had never invaded?

Well, I don't know that you'd inherently have a theocratic human empire. But again, we're told that the Warlords timeline wasn't just a branch off of our own that split when Grom didn't drink the demon blood - that it was always a separate one.

And thus, perhaps its Azeroth was one in which Arathor never split up. And maybe, lacking the humbling pressures that humanity has had to bear in our timeline, the Arathi Empire became more aggressive, more rigid, more authoritarian.

The thing is, I don't think we're going to get any answers on the Arathi Empire until after the Worldsoul Saga concludes, which means probably not until around 2030 (which isn't as far away as you'd think!)

But truly, the more I think about the Hallowfall Arathi, the more I think it's one of the most bizarre curveballs that Blizzard has thrown at us, lore-wise, in the entire history of the game.

What's next? Are they going to address that girl in Blade's Edge Mountains who claims to be from England?

The Effect of Magical Ammo on Ranged Martial Builds

 D&D's 5.5 edition for the most part empowered player characters, but also made tougher monsters (and tougher combat encounter balancing,) to the point where I'm not actually sure if the game is "easier" or "harder" than it was.

But I think one archetype that truly got a nerf was ranged weapon users. In 5.0, Great Weapon Master and Sharpshooter were basically the equivalents of one another for melee and ranged builds, respectively. Each allowed you to, on each attack, choose to take a -5 penalty to your attack rolls in order to get a +10 bonus to your damage. In the vast majority of cases, this wound up giving you more damage on average, and I'd argue was even more appealing to Rangers and Fighters that picked up the Archery fighting style, as you'd already have a higher-than-usual chance to hit anyway.

Now, I don't think you can't build a ranged-weapon-focused character with 5.5 rules, but it requires taking some odd paths. Weirdly, Great Weapon Master actually works pretty well if you use a Longbow or Heavy Crossbow, which are the only two ranged weapons with the Heavy property. (It feels frustrating that Muskets don't have this,) but the feat is awkward because it buffs Strength, a stat you're not going to be worried much about if you are focusing on ranged weapons, and its Hew feature won't work with ranged attacks.

Generally, when I go into this math-heavy theory-crafting, I tend to assume that we don't have any magic items, unless it's about an Artificer (whose easy access to magic items is a class feature - which is honestly a bit tricky as a bit of design because the class becomes far more powerful the stingier a DM is with magic items).

But realistically, most campaigns I play in have plenty of magic items, and it's basically an assumption that by level 5 or 6, you should at least have a +1 weapon.

+X weapons do flatten out the difference between weapon types a bit - if you have +4 to Strength and are comparing a Longbow and a Glaive, you're looking at 1d8+4 versus 1d10+4, which is 8.5 average versus 9.5 average, or a difference of about 12%. But if you have +3 versions of those weapons, it's now 11.5 versus 12.5, which is a difference of about 9%.

Ranged weapons tend to have lower damage dice than melee weapons, but that difference becomes less meaningful the more flat damage you add to both.

The thing is, ranged weapon users actually can, potentially, double-dip with these +X bonuses, because not only can you get a +3 Longbow, you can also fire +3 Arrows with that bow, which means that overall, you're getting a +6 bonus to both attack and damage rolls.

And I think that starts to make a pretty significant difference, especially because it's affecting both attacks and damage.

If we took some character with no class features other than martial weapon proficiency and had them make attacks against the Tarrasque (an AC of 25,) someone using a +3 Greatsword who had a +5 to Strength and +6 PB would be hitting on a roll of 11 or higher, and so they'd hit 50% of the time, with a 5% chance to do an extra 2d6 with a crit. So, the normal damage of 2d6+8 (or 15) gets cut in half to 7.5, and then we add in that 5% of doing 7 more to give us an extra .35, so it's doing 7.85.

Our ranged character with a +3 Longbow and +3 Arrows is going to hit for 1d8+11, or 15.5 on average, but they're also getting a +17 to hit, so they only need to roll an 8 or higher, meaning a 65% hit chance. So, 15.5x65% is 9.75, with a 5% chance to get an extra 4.5, so toss in .225, meaning they do an average of 9.975.

Obviously, this is a bit of a vacuum. Maybe our melee person has Great Weapon Master, which adds 6 damage to each of their hits. So, that means the average goes up by 3, giving them 10.85 average damage. They're now on top.

But if our ranged character has the Archery fighting style, they now actually have a +19 to hit, so they only need to roll a 6 or higher, meaning an additional 10% of that hit damage to their average, bringing them up to 10.95, meaning they're now on top, if only by a little bit.

The rub, here, though, is that magical ammunition is not something I see a lot of DMs giving out, and I think there's a good reason for that: players are often very hesitant to use consumable magic items. It's a classic problem: if something isn't easy to replenish, players won't want to use it, saving it for when its impact is going to be biggest, but that can also lead them to actually forget they have it when they're, say, fighting the Tarrasque.

There isn't an item like "+X Quiver of Infinite Arrows," which would just allow you to count on always having such ammo available to you - though maybe there should be.

I think it's actually ideal for ranged characters to be somewhat less powerful than melee characters simply because you're not taking as big of a risk if you can fight from 120 feet away. I think the design problem in D&D with that, though, is that in a game where most classes are spellcasters, there's none of that downside if you're 120 feet away and tossing fireballs and hypnotic patterns.

Star Wars Could Give Us the Science Fantasy D&D Spelljammer Failed To

 My relationship with Star Wars is kind of funny:

When I was a kid, we were the only family I knew of that had a Laser Disc player. Laser Discs, for those of you too young to remember (though plenty of people my age might have never encountered one) were a video format that were an alternative to VHS, and basically consisted of vinyl-record-sized optical discs. This pre-dated DVDs, of course, and became totally obsolete once that technology caught on, but the point is, it was higher-quality than VHS (which was honestly kind of crap, and worse than Betamax, a different magnetic tape format that only failed to catch on because Sony made it proprietary to their own players, a mistake they learned from and thus made BluRay open source).

Anyway, that was the format on which my dad got the original Star Wars trilogy. There were several versions that came out - I think the remastered VHS set came out after these ones (the last format, I believe, before the Special Editions came out).

While I was terrified of the series after seeing the scene where the dancing girl was dumped into the Rancor pit from Return of the Jedi (and in my childlike imagination, I exaggerated the details of that scene, thinking that her liquified remains were bubbling up from the vent in the floor - something that categorically is not in any version of the movie) upon seeing it when I was maybe 6, I eventually watched the movies in full when I was maybe 9, and I became obsessed.

As I've probably written about before, I spent at least several days (I remember it being months, though I suspect it wasn't actually sustained for that long) watching and re-watching the trilogy in order, two movies per day.

I had already been a big Star Trek the Next Generation fan, growing up with that show, and I was nuts about cool spaceships (I actually remember finding Luke's confrontation with the Emperor and Vader at the climax of Jedi tedious, as I wanted to get back to the giant space battle - a very 9-year-old take on it).

Anyway, the special editions, which were released in theaters, were a big event that I went to see with my friends, and then, a few years later (though at that age, it felt like a big gap,) the Prequels came out. And... well... that was where my love of the series took a hit.

I know that there are younger Millennials and Gen Zers (and I guess even some older Millennials like me) who adore the prequels and consider it an indispensable part of the saga, but while I tried to like them at the time they came out, they just didn't have the same magic. Admittedly, I haven't re-watched them in decades, but I guess having the Lord of the Rings movies come out around the same time, I kind of moved on.

As a franchise, Star Wars is truly a mixed bag, and I think Disney's strategy of expanding it out into more and more properties using the MCU model hasn't served it very well - though there are some works within the Disney era that are quite remarkable (I have still not seen the second season of Andor, but I thought the first was incredible. I also thought the first season of The Mandalorian was cool, but the series started to suffer from being used as a platform for backdoor pilots).

Obviously, there's also the debacle of the sequel trilogy, which started out promising (while Force Awakens tread a lot of familiar territory, I liked the new characters it introduced) and its polarizing middle chapter, the Last Jedi, made some bold and interesting choices, the Rise of Skywalker basically seemed designed to please absolutely no one and kind of ruined the whole endeavor retroactively. (I don't think J. J. Abrams is interested in doing anything original, as I first learned after Star Trek Into Darkness.)

Now, I might be being kind of harsh to the Disney era of Star Wars. After all, long before the Mouse got their hands on Lucasfilm, there was a vast Expanded Universe that got retconned into its convenient "Legends" box (from which the Disney canon has sometimes plucked elements like Admiral Thrawn but not, like, Jacen, Jaina, and Anakin Solo). It's always been a world that people have wanted to play in, to flesh out.

Naturally, it's also been the setting for other TTRPGs, like Edge of Empire. So it's honestly not strange to see it as a property to be adapted for D&D. Indeed, D&D and Star Wars got their starts around the same time (D&D coming out three years before Star Wars).

But I think there's another element to Star Wars that makes it an exciting prospect for use with D&D: it is the definitive science-fantasy setting.

Now, yeah, at least in the movies, the only real "magic" of the Star Wars universe is the Force, and the only way we see that magic expressed is through the vaguely-defined powers of the Jedi and Sith, both of whom I'd argue are, well, closest to the Paladin class in D&D (I think that Darth Vader is the most iconic Death Knight in pop culture. Yes, he's not technically undead, but he's sustained by cybernetics and the Dark Side of the Force, which... is kind of close enough. And then, he's got a mask that looks like a skull and is a former champion of goodness who fell to darkness for selfish reasons... I mean, you see it, right?)

But if the World of Warcraft book is as thorough and innovative as it sounds from what I've heard in interviews, it stands to reason that the Star Wars book will also be pretty ambitious in playing with the 5E chassis to create something that works for its setting.

Indeed, I wouldn't be shocked if it turned out that by partnering with bigger companies like Blizzard and freaking Disney, the books have higher budgets than what WotC can produce on their own, and thus they might have more resources to pump into them, which could, potentially, allow them to go bigger.

Now, the World of Warcraft book is going to have a fairly easy time, given that WoW already has Paladins, Druids, Rogues, Monks, and Warlocks, and then has pretty 1:1 class equivalents like Priests, Hunters, and Mages. Even if there's no Bards in WoW, it's not like they wouldn't fit there (indeed, the Windrunner sisters' younger brother Lirath is said to have been a gifted musician, and I wouldn't be shocked if he had had some kind of magical ability with his music).

I think we could probably squeeze Fighters, Rogues, and Paladins (as Jedi/Sith) into the Warcraft setting, and maybe even broaden out the Jedi/Sith with stuff like "Jedi Knights" versus "Jedi Consular," where the Knights are more up-front melee characters and Consulars use their force powers more than their lightsabers (I think the Sith have different names, but equivalent classes in The Old Republic MMO). But, like, how do we use Druids?

I know that SW5E, the fan-made free Star Wars 5E hack, just presents and entirely separate roster of classes, some of which are more like altered versions of existing D&D classes. But you could imagine that in a true Star Wars D&D campaign, you might want to stick only to the options that are strictly for that setting.

That being said, what I'm really excited for is the opportunity to have true Science Fantasy stuff for D&D.

Spelljammer, in fairness, never really promised that. The concept was always "tall ships sailing across the stars," and while I do think there's a place for that whimsical, colorful notion, to me, the most compelling vision of space travel is one that aligns with that used future aesthetic of Star Wars.

Basically, I want my space ships to be enclosed and air-tight, but I'm fine with artificial gravity and faster-than-light travel (don't get me wrong, I loved The Expanse, but even that story eventually starts dealing with alien technology that breaks the hard-sci-fi rules it mostly restricts itself to.)

Vehicle combat in D&D is always a little tough: having a different kind of battle system for something that probably isn't going to be as central to the game as your normal battle system can, at one extreme, feel disconnected and undercooked, and at the other extreme, get in the way of the the characters' individual stories. (Another challenge is that if the whole party is in the same spaceship, that ship being destroyed means a TPK, so getting the stakes right is also tough).

But I think this would be a really good opportunity to come up with some good starship combat systems. I know that Legends of Avantris is working on that with Neon Odyssey (one solution is that the party might have multiple ships, which is honestly not unlike Luke flying around in his X-Wing while the rest of them are in the Millennium Falcon - they don't actually fly into battle that way, but you get the idea).

Beyond that, I also think that there's some fun to be had in using futuristic weapons. I'm 100% certain there will be Lightsabers in the Star Wars book. Might they just be a different weapon type, like Tridents or Whips? And might we also see Blasters, Bowcasters, and such?

Interestingly, there is, actually, armor in Star Wars, which you tend to see less of in modern/futuristic genres. That said, Jedi, despite being pretty close to Paladins as a class, are usually unarmored (I think there's an argument that they're also kind of Monks, except that they fight with a weapon. Maybe that's just the East Asian influence on the George Lucas' worldbuilding. Did you know that he originally wanted Toshiro Mifune for Obi-Wan?)

I honestly think that this is one of the weird challenges of adapting D&D to genres outside of medieval fantasy, because medieval armor is such a big part of the look of the game and how characters are imagined. (I like that in Dimension 20's Unsleeping City, they rationalized Ricky Matsui's "plate armor" as just being so hot that A: people had a hard time attacking him and B: he'd get disadvantage on Stealth checks because he drew attention because of how attractive he was.)

But yes, while I've gotten into the weeds on a lot of issues, I think we can acknowledge that, for the past 49 years, Star Wars has basically defined what space-faring sci fi is expected to look and feel like. Any space opera naturally invites comparisons to Star Wars. So, if this book doesn't get D&D to give us that quintessential sci-fi feeling, I don't know what will.

Can We Do Souls-Like D&D?

 Starting really with Demon's Souls back in 2009, the Souls-like genre was popularized primarily with the success of 2011's Dark Souls, a spiritual sequel that featured some of the most impressive puzzle-box level design and deep, deep lore that left tons up to interpretation.

While fairly niche at first, the genre grew in popularity, exploding with the massively ambitious and massively massive Open World take on the genre with FromSoft's Elden Ring in 2022. It's influential enough that other studios have either borrowed elements of the genre or just flat-out made their own that conform with basically all the defining traits of the genre.

The games have been a big influence outside of video games, and Critical Role's Matthew Mercer has cited the games as among his favorite. Daggerheart's Age of Umbra campaign frame was designed to try to capture the dark, apocalyptic feeling of these games.

But can a TTRPG really capture the vibes of a Souls-like?

I guess to approach that question, we need to define those vibes.

The gameplay mechanics of a Souls-like won't translate perfectly to a system like D&D. Ironically, the "anti-attrition" Draw Steel arguably has the best equivalent of the Souls-like healing system with its Recoveries.

Souls-likes are famed for their punishing difficulty, and while I do think that's a near-universal aspect of the games, I don't actually think it needs to be a defining one. What nearly every Souls-like game has, though, is an in-universe explanation for how you can keep playing after you die. The difficulty is basically accounted for within the game itself, and that means that your multiple attempts to get through a difficult section or boss are actually canonical.

In a strange way, this makes it more forgiving than D&D, where player character deaths can only be reversed using expensive magic (and, interestingly enough, banning resurrection has been a popular element in certain Actual Play campaigns, such as Critical Role's Campaign 4, as well as Dimension 20's A Crown of Candy (whose dire stakes and seriousness is part of the joke, because the PCs are all candy people in a world of people who are all some kind of food-person, basically Game of Thrones meets Candy Land).

How you want to approach this element of the game is open for debate: you might lean into TTRPGs' standard difficulties and make death rare, but then make it permanent. Alternatively, you might come up with a mechanic where death is frequent, but impermanent.

I think the latter is certainly more faithful to the genre, but you need to make death feel punishing in some way.

Ironically, Souls-likes make death punishing by actually making it less punishing that it would be in a traditional game. Here's what I mean:

In a classic video game, if you die halfway through a level (assuming there aren't checkpoints in that level,) you start over and all that progress us undone. In a Souls-like, the XP/Currency you've collected (which has a different name in most of its games, though it's Souls in Demon's Souls and the Dark Souls trilogy, so we'll call it that) is left near where you died. You have one chance to collect the dropped souls, but if you die on the way there, they're lost forever (I think Lies of P actually has you only lose part of them, and you can get upgrades to lose less). Even though this is arguably more forgiving, it creates a tension, because dying earlier in that level than you did previously carries a greater potential for loss.

Here's the thing, though: I don't think the kind of repetitive combat you have in Souls-likes works as well in D&D. When combat with an enemy or group of enemies might last four seconds, it's not that bad to have to fight something over and over again. But if your party needs to fight the same damned group of stone golems over and over, it's going to feel a bit tedious.

I will say that I think it could be fun to build a full game system inspired by Souls-likes, where there aren't strict classes, and instead you can build around certain stats and even certain mixes of stats (my best Elden Ring character is heavy on both Strength and Faith, for example, with weapons that scale with both).

But assuming we're using D&D as a system, I think we need to approach combat design, and adventure design in general, with D&D in mind.

That, then, leaves us the world building and tone.

I think this also offers a lot of challenges.

Again, I think you could build a Souls-like that doesn't work this way (I'm curious how One Crab's Treasure works, which seems tonally very different,) but generally, a Souls-like has the following story elements:

It's set in a world that has undergone some kind of apocalyptic catastrophe, with only bare vestiges of the civilizations that previously existed.

Our protagonist (and the player) is dropped into the world with very little in the way of context, given some vague mission whose significance isn't immediately clear.

Characters have very mysterious motivations, and use language and jargon that we need to piece together in order to glean the true meaning (and some of that stuff will never be fully explained. What the hell is Paleblood, anyway?)

There's barely any safety to be had - often we have some small hub where friendly NPCs gather after we find them in the world, but the degree to which those places are truly safe is debatable.

Most NPCs have side quests associated with them, which tend to end tragically.

They tend to have multiple endings, but the relative "goodness" or "badness" of those endings is deeply uncertain. (Though I'll certainly say I think the Lord of Frenzied Flame ending for Elden Ring is a bad ending, and I think Lies of P's Rise of P ending feels about as good as you could hope for).

Vagueness, though, needs to have something beneath it. While I'm not sure that FromSoft always has a strictly canonical interpretation for some of its story aspects (I'm half-convinced that they deliberately provide evidence for Marika and Radagon having originally been separate people and also evidence that Radagon was always an aspect of her, where there) I do think it's important that any weird details have some thought behind them.

This is, also, a very tricky thing to do in D&D, because unlike a video game protagonist who will only say things that are pre-programmed, if an NPC speaks in vague riddles, there's nothing preventing your players from, you know, asking follow-up questions.

One thing I think you can do is limit your cast of friendly NPCs to a small few. There aren't going to be multiple towns where you can buy weapons and armor; there's one friendly Blacksmith.

I actually think that a more sandbox-like approach could actually work quite well for the genre. This could let you place important progression materials in out-of-the-way places, so perhaps your Blacksmith NPC needs a magical grinding wheel of some sort to upgrade weapons to +1, which could motivate the players to travel to some "Altar of the Mining God" that is its own dungeon. (Rather than just dropping magic items, I might instead create upgrade materials that the players can collect.)

Another challenge here is that I think that a big part of the feel of a Souls-like is the sense of loneliness - though to be fair, that's not strictly the case all the time. Since Dark Souls at least (not sure if Demon's Souls did,) there have been online multiplayer elements to the games. Here, we must bow to the mechanics of D&D, which is built very much to be a co-op game.

Another adjustment I think you'll need to make is that D&D is a game where players should have multiple ways to deal with problems. In Bloodborne, you can't just talk to the wandering beast-hunters and explain to them that you're not a threat to them, no infected with the Curse of Beasts. But in D&D, there should be opportunities to resolve things outside of combat. This requires a more complex approach to quest design.

Primarily, I think the key here is tone - a surreal world, with lots of horror elements (particularly Dark Fantasy,) and a sense that defeating the villains is only half the challenge, while the other half is figuring out what, exactly, is going on, and what consequences our actions will have.

Lords of the Fallen

 Having hit a point in Cyberpunk 2077 where I'm high enough level and kitted out with such advanced Chrome that basically no fight is really a challenge anymore, and with what I imagine are a bunch of different bummer endings to choose from (I assume,) I found my attention wandering.

A couple months ago, Lords of the Fallen was one of the free PS+ games, and I decided to uninstall the absurdly enormous Diablo IV (it was over a hundred GB) to make room for it.

I've only played one non-FromSoft Souls-like game before, which was Lies of P, a game that, frankly, did an excellent job of evolving the formula and trying out new and interesting tones and stories.

Lords of the Fallen is a bit more in tune with the Dark Souls-like formula, giving us a medieval fantasy world where barely-explained elements are at play. Ages ago, the demon god Adyr was locked away, and the prison holding them is under threat. While the initial guardians of this were empowered by the benevolent (we assume) deity Orias, it turns out that in order to deal with the evil monsters assaulting the land, we need a "Dark Crusader," who walks outside of Orias' light.

The Dark Crusader carries an Umbral Lantern, which allows them to return from death, and that's our central justification for our character being able to respawn.

One of the core gameplay mechanics that sets the game apart is the Umbral, the realm of the dead that exists in parallel to the living world. When we die, or when we use the Umbral Lantern to go there, we actually transition into the Umbral. This gives us a sort of second chance at life (I believe there's a similar thing in Sekiro, the only FromSoft Souls-like I haven't played). While we can still fight enemies in the living world while in the Umbral, more monsters appear there. But there are also elements of the environment that are different in the Umbral. Bridges seemingly made of massive spinal columns will appear where there are just deadly gaps in the living world, and it seems the Umbral is devoid of water, so deep lakes suddenly become traversable depressions in the ground.

The Umbral is the most impressive thing about the game. Even when we are in the living land, we can shine our lantern into the Umbral Realm, which lets us, for example, pass through gates that are unobstructed - though funnily enough, if we happen to shine the lamp where an Umbral-only monster is, it can attack us.

The Umbral's dual role is where some of the frustration in the gameplay comes from: sometimes you'll need to shift into the Umbral in order to progress through an area, but doing so will also mean you can't get your second chance at life. Leaving the Umbral requires you to either rest at one of the checkpoints (which are flavored as reliquaries of various heroes) or to find certain nodes that allow you out, but which can only be used once until you reset things by dying or resting (the thing that, like most Souls-likes, also respawns enemies).

Combat works similarly to your standard Dark Souls, but like Lies of P, they incorporate a parry mechanic. You can block with a weapon or shield, and this will cause some of your health to become Withered - if you hit the enemy back, you can regain that withered HP. If you perfectly time your block, you won't get withered and you will wear down their stamina. Enough perfect blocks and you will stagger them to get the chance for a critical hit. (So, quite a bit like Lies of P).

Playing on the standard difficulty, the game's opening is pretty forgiving, though I've faced a few challenging areas. Right now, my biggest challenge is just navigating a labyrinthine swamp where enemies use various poison abilities - multiple times, I've found myself looping back around to the checkpoint and not sure where I'm supposed to go to proceed.

In terms of stats, there's the usual Strength and Agility, and Endurance and Vitality give you more Stamina and HP, respectively. For magic stats, there's Radiance and Inferno, with the former allowing you to cast more classical "holy" magic and the latter giving you more kind of warlocky fire magic. There is, however, a third option, which is Umbral magic, which seems to scale with both Radiance and Inferno, kind of like Pyromancy in Dark Souls III (or Death Magic and Golden Order Fundamentalism in Elden Ring).

In terms of story, I'm naturally skeptical about any perceived benevolent authorities. Indeed, after beating the second boss that got a cutscene (I've had three seemingly minor bosses) I was able to get a flashback where someone (I'm given to understand Orias) said something like "Come to Orias, grant me your flesh so I may retain my divinity," which sure seems to suggest that this Orias figure ain't the benign figure that people claim them to be.

So far, it looks like the game is a bit more linear than the likes of Dark Souls or Bloodborne, with regions leading into one another. Our first major boss leads us into our hub where NPCs gather, including, actually, the first major boss, who says she was resurrected by Orias' grace and acts as our healing item upgrader.

The game is pretty cool, but I hit a point going through that swamp area (the Forsaken Fen) where I just started to feel kind of trapped and frustrated and so told myself to take the rest of the day off from it.

I'm also playing this about as blind as I can - normally with this genre of game in particular I try to be a real completionist even on my first playthrough, but I'm just sort of letting it wash over me. I haven't yet tried out any spellcasting, though my plan is to do a mix of Strength and Radiance as my key stats (I just haven't found a weapon that scales with both yet).

Doors and What Details We Can Glean from IGN's Control Resonant Preview

 By a wide margin, my most anticipated game of 2026 is Control Resonant. Its antecedent, Control, seized me in 2023 and made me a Remedy Entertainment obsessive (the timing was great, because it got me to play Alan Wake Remastered right in time for the release of Alan Wake II). Basically, I am expecting to be obsessed and posting lore theories about it on this blog for years, so get ready.

For now, though, we are only getting some glimpses at the game, and I think the previews are focusing a lot more on the gameplay than the narrative, which makes sense - not only do they want (need) to sell it to a larger audience who might not yet be initiated into the mystery cult, but they also don't want to spoil too much of the big twists and reveals of the game.

Given how satisfying it was to control Jesse Faden in the first game, it's a real gamble to both swap protagonists and also change from a 3rd person shooter to a melee brawler. I have faith in Remedy, though - not that the gameplay will necessarily be the best, but that the gameplay will be good enough that it won't get in the way of enjoying the story. (While Alan Wake II was a huge achievement, I don't think anyone adored its take on survival horror combat. It was my first survival horror game, but I then went on to play the Silent Hill 2, Resident Evil 4, and Resident Evil 2 remakes, and... well, I think those were a bit more polished).

I did play Devil May Cry 3 way back in college, though I had to set it to the easy difficulty (which you only unlock after dying several times). I often find that action games can sometimes feel a bit weightless when you have to hit an enemy ten times or more to actually kill them, contrasted with something like Dark Souls where every strike feels impactful (and it's just a matter of actually finding the opportunity to get that hit in). But what I've seen of Control Resonant's combat seems like it's trying to give the impact of your attacks a satisfying, chunky feel. We'll see once I get it in my hands.

Anyway, IGN posted a video of some previously-unseen mission, which takes you into a spatially-warped train station. Somewhat less combat-focused (though there appear to be some Mold enemies - I don't know if we're mostly going to be just dealing with the Hiss and the Mold outside of the Resonant bosses, though Remedy games tend not to have an enormous amount of enemy variety, so I'm going to assume those will be the main ones,) the bigger challenge seems to be navigating the environment while trains shoot past at strange angles, forcing you to dodge out of the way.

It does really look like levels will make ample use of the gravity-shifting capabilities that Dylan has - I'll be very curious to see how difficult it is to remain oriented as you explore these warped spaces. In an earlier preview, as you passed through some series of replications of the same apartment, there was guiding colored light and music that helped you get out of it, and I expect the level design team will have some clear visual cues to help you understand what the path forward is.

One thing I noticed is that the strange doorways we saw in the Paranatural Manhattan trailer appear to be our fast-travel nodes. Given the game is going to have a pretty huge world, it looks like, you had to expect that there would be something like this, basically equivalent to the Resonant Points in the first game.

In terms of story, it appears that Dylan does actually have some way to communicate with Jesse while in The Gap (the weird extradimensional mental space, not the clothing store). Jesse claims that she woke him up to give him the opportunity to run, not for him to help.

I'm really curious to see how this sibling dynamic plays out. Jesse is the older sister, of course, and while there's obviously the whole "ex-Hiss" part of Dylan's backstory to process, I also think it'd be interesting to see where the points of tension in their relationship were before the Ordinary AWE. After all, even siblings who are close still have issues (my older sister and I are close, but we have our conflicts now and again).

Jesse's protectiveness is admirable, but I can also imagine that Dylan might have been sort of underestimated. I mean, after almost 20 years being raised by the FBC, he's sure to be all kinds of messed up in a lot of ways. I can imagine that Dylan might struggle with the fact that Jesse formed an image in her head of what he might have been, and not necessarily what he really was like. Dylan probably isn't really sure who he is, especially after the trauma of being part of the Hiss.

It also probably doesn't help that the FBC has affixed a device to the back of his skull with an explosive in case he becomes a danger to them.

One of the complaints I've heard about Control is that Jesse's characterization is a little inconsistent - she expresses a kind of impatience and indifference to the FBC at some points but then also seems to be fascinated by the strange paranatural world that it represents. Monty Zander, a YouTuber whose critiques I enjoy a lot, felt that "The Sibling" in Alan Wake II's Night Springs DLC, which is a kind of version of Jesse, felt more lived-in and compelling as a character.

What's going to be really interesting about Control Resonant is that, even if Dylan was a major character in Control, his role in that was primarily to be a mouthpiece for the Hiss. We didn't really get much of the "real" Dylan there.

That brings up an interesting question though: When people are changed by diseases and other things that happen to them, are they not just as much the "real" versions of themselves? I really wonder how Dylan is going to reckon with what it felt like to be part of the Hiss, and also what it feels like to no longer be connected to it. Like, I imagine that the terrifying thing about it was that it probably felt really good, even if he understands on another level that it was warping his body and bringing about apocalyptic terror.

I want to say it's like 46 days until the release?