Stealing Eldraine Concepts for my Homebrew D&D Setting

Throne of Eldraine, the latest Magic: the Gathering set, is in some ways ironic. By drawing upon Arthurian legend and fairy tales, it is essentially pulling from the very foundational stories that the fantasy genre is build upon. What makes that ironic is that the genre has evolved so much over time, and particularly with the massive creativity they have at Wizards of the Coast, coming up with worlds like Ravnica or Zendikar, that this "back to basics" look at fantasy feels oddly novel.

I mean, there's literally a piece of equipment called "shining armor" that synergizes with Knight creatures.

Anyway, my D&D homebrew world tends to buck fantasy conventions where I can. The initial concepts I had for the setting were ideas about the pros and cons of imperialism and nationalism, ancient futuristic technology, and cosmic horror, none of which really play into the "knights serving righteous kings" style of fantasy.

That being said, there is a region in my world that is, basically, your classic fantasy setting. The human kingdom of Wolfengard is the heart of the continent-spanning Lupinian Empire (yes, there's a bit of a wolf theme with them.) There is one major way in which this rather conventionally western-European medieval kingdom is distinct from other settings, which is the fully legal practice of necromancy. Blame it on my love of Black in Magic. (One could also list the existence of trains and other industrial-era technology as being a rather big change from classic fantasy, but these innovations are meant to have been happening very rapidly over the last twenty years.)

Magic loves doing its five-color cycles, and I'll confess I'm a sucker for them. In Eldraine, there are five castles that each have an order of knights affiliated with them. My understanding is that, despite each representing a different color, they are not in conflict with one another, and are instead faced with challenges from the fey creatures in the wilds of Eldraine.

Wolfengard is a land of knights and courts. It has a king and dukes and all that stuff. So I decided to pull a few ideas from Eldraine.

For example, Castle Vantress, the blue castle, seems to be an order of knights who are also kind of wizards, and their castle is patrolled by constructs, some of whom look like giant locks with a big keyhole. That imagery is super cool to me, and so I created a region in Wolfengard ruled over by a city called Lochlain (which I realize sounds a ton like the Black castle, Locthwain) with, you guessed it, a knightly order of wizards who rule it.

Wolfengard borders a region primarily populated by Wood Elves to the west called Alenach, where there's a ton of Fey. Thus, I created another region in that area called The Brooklands, which is basically a land of quaint, beautiful little villages that the child protagonists of a fairy tale would live in. These are woods filled with fairies and lots of greens and purples, with glowing lights at night. While its major city isn't quite as directly taken from Eldraine, I did want it to feel like a magical place that one could imagine common people would be excited to go to. Faeroyal is basically a big castle in the middle of the forest and the only city in the empire where Half Elves are the majority population. (Given that in my setting there's plenty of racial mixing, I'd say half elves are those with over 25% human and over 25% elvish ancestry. The emperor is considered human despite having an elvish grandparent, and his children are a quarter djinni.)

Anyway, Magic has always been a huge influence on my fantasy tastes, and even though Eldraine is filled with direct references to classic stories (not unlike Innistrad, actually, though a lot lighter in tone) I do feel like it's given me some fun ideas.

I'm now imagining that a new campaign in this setting could actually do the "start small and work your way out" style they recommend in the DMG, perhaps starting the Brooklands.

Forsaken... By Sylvanas

You can probably trace my affection for the spooky, macabre, and dark to the fact that when I first started playing Magic: The Gathering, picking up a 60-card Revised Edition box (after having gotten a single Fallen Empires booster that didn't do much for me on its own,) I found a Royal Assassin in that box. This little 1/1 creature that cost 3 mana had a terribly nasty ability: tap to destroy target tapped creature. Those two little skulls and one generic mana in the cost set me on the path to become a pretty happy black player in that card game.

But this post isn't about Magic. It's about WoW.

If you were to break down the various factions in World of Warcraft, the Forsaken would be a shoe-in for the best representation of Black as it works in Magic. Undead? Check. Ruthlessly resourceful? Check. Self-interested? Check.

So naturally, given that I associate so strongly with that branch of fantasy (my own homebrew D&D setting has the central kingdom of its massive empire be a place where necromancy is legal and employed regularly,) it makes sense that I'd be a big fan of the Forsaken.

The thing is, the way Magic works, Black is not necessarily evil. It's very rare that it's good, per se, but it's not inherently cruel - and often its value of self-interest finds itself standing up against authoritarian systems. Sure, that backfires any time someone decides it's in their self interest to be an autocrat, but there's plenty of opportunity to have vampires, necromancers, and even demons who are... kinda sorta... the good guys.

And the Forsaken also give that opportunity.

When WoW began, the Scourge was a major power in the world. You felt their presence ubiquitously throughout the three northern zones of the Eastern Kingdoms, and when Quel'thalas was added, their presence in the Ghostlands was also central. Hell, they even played a role in the plot of the Barrens, using the Quilboar to undermine the young New Horde.

The Forsaken thus had something to compare themselves to. Sure, they were undead, and ruthless and deadly, but they had free will and they had allies. Yes, even in the opening voiceover when starting an Undead character (something you can experience again now with Classic) it's explicit that joining the Horde is an alliance of convenience, but in practice, Undead characters were just one of the races the Horde had available.

As I've said many times, the Forsaken have always felt more like their own mini-faction, branched off from the Horde more than, say, the Night Elves were from the Alliance. And that was even reflected in how you'd start with only neutral (though not 0/1000) with the other cities. But while the Horde has generally valued 100% loyalty to the Warchief, Sylvanas has run the Forsaken to first have 100% loyalty to her, and then to defer to the Warchief when she did.

When she became Warchief, there was no longer any conflict there, but the rest of the Horde, once again as they had under Garrosh, began to question their loyalty to the Warchief.

What makes the "Reckoning" cinematic interesting to me is that Saurfang managed to get Sylvanas to admit in front of a massive crowd - including her own loyal Forsaken - that whatever loyalty she demanded of others, she has not held it for them.

Even going back to Confucius, there's a general principle in leadership that leaders must be loyal to those from whom they expect loyalty. Sure, you might be in charge and expect them to obey you, but the only reason you ever earned that position is that people trust you to look out for their best interests.

Sylvanas made it very clear that the entire Horde, including the Forsaken, are just tools to be used by her, and discarded if they no longer help her achieve her goals. And that actually flies in the face of what she's been insisting for years. In the quests in Silverpine, Sylvanas explains that her rather horrific use of the Val'kyr to raise fallen humans her armies slay is a desperate attempt to keep her people from dying out. But now, it seems quite apparent that her reason for that was not to keep the other Forsaken safe from an endlessly diminishing population that would eventually be unable to hold back the living humans wishing to reclaim their territory, but instead to simply provide her more cannon fodder.

I think the Forsaken have been so lockstep in loyalty to her because they believed that even if she would betray and use the Horde, she was still fighting for them.

And that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. Her destruction of the Undercity, I think, was the breaking point, though clearly many needed to hear her say it out loud.

To be clear, this is not a universal thing. Some Forsaken remain loyal to her, and are pragmatically playing at reform so as to survive in a post-Sylvanas Horde. She has not been killed - indeed, she more or less just left of her own volition. While that might not be a good look, it means that the loyalists have reason to keep the faith, expecting that when her plans come to fruition, they'll be positioned to help and be rewarded.

But I don't think we can simply say that the Forsaken have all just become secret traitors in the Horde's midst. If I were one of them (and my Horde main is,) I'd be furious with Sylvanas. The Forsaken know betrayal - their own crown prince was the one who massacred them and damned them to this undead existence.

While I don't know if it will continue to be central to the plot of BFA (I suspect not, as we'll be focusing on N'zoth in 8.3,) Sylvanas has not been taken off the board - she's just in a very different position now.

And while I'm sure there will be ongoing plot for Sylvanas loyalists - I'm curious to see if people will be forced to just sit with the decision they made earlier in this expansion for the years to come or if there will be new chances to "respec" your loyalty - what I really want to see is what happens to the Forsaken now that their Queen has abandoned, or, you know, forsaken them.

Frankly, I'd love to get a Forsaken NPC - either someone like Lillian Voss or maybe a new character - who dedicates themselves to hunting her down and killing her. I want to see the rage that the Forsaken had for Arthas turn on Sylvanas.

I want to see Sylvanas reap what she's sown. She's taught an entire society to dedicate themselves to the destruction of their enemies. And now she's made herself that society's enemy.

MTG: Arena: Hoping for a Mac Version

So, Magic the Gathering: Arena looks a lot like, basically, Magic done in the style of Hearthstone. Rules-wise, it's got all the complexity of Magic, but the manner in which one plays and earns cards is like Hearthstone.

I played Magic Online in college, which was the older translation of the game to the digital realm. While I imagine I've still got my account floating around out there, it required me to boot up Windows using Parallels, and while I could do that now, I'd really prefer that Wizards of the Coast just make a Mac client for the game.

While I enjoy Hearthstone, it has always been a kind of consolation prize kind of game compared to Magic. Magic was, in many ways, my first real fantasy influence (ok, maybe Myst and Disney cartoons really hold that spot,) and the core concepts of the game have remained dear to me.

Arena seems great, and so I'm hoping that we'll see a Mac client soon.

I've watched streams of the Beta and now the live version, and here's how I understand it working:

Like Hearthstone, communication is limited between opponents. Similarly, card trading itself is set aside in favor of earning the ability to get specific cards you want as you earn more packs. And you can apparently earn packs simply by playing, which removes one of the key reasons I've been hesitant to get back into the game.

I can imagine if a set I'm particularly excited about comes out I can dump some cash at the start, but I like the idea of gradually working toward the cards I want to get to fill out a deck. I also think I'd be more eager to try stuff like limited if there isn't a cash buy-in.

There were rumors a year ago that there would be a Mac client by the time the live version came out, but that's clearly not the case. I had hoped for years that they'd come out with a Mac version of MTG:Online, which never happened (as far as I know) so I'm a little hesitant to get my hopes up. But we'll see.

I could use a PC emulator or boot camp, but it's quite a hassle, and I don't know that I want to get Windows just for this one game.

Fractures for the Alliance in a Time of Peace

One of the things I love about World of Warcraft is the way that the "monstrous" races are actually just people. And clearly, Blizzard loves this as well. As Saurfang notes in the first of this patch's cinematics (the one with in-game assets,) the Horde was founded in a fundamentally corrupt way - it was an instrument created by Gul'dan for use by the Burning Legion. And the Horde has never really reckoned with that fact. They want to be something better - a force for good in the world that can make Azeroth a safer place - but the sins of the past drive them to keep failing, new atrocities echoing old ones. The burning of Teldrassil is, arguably, the worst thing the Horde has done since the destruction of Draenor. And as much as they'd like to pin the blame on that for Sylvanas individually, the truth is that everyone who marched on Darkshore was, at least in part, complicit. They may not have known quite how far things would go, but when Sylvanas ordered the tree to burn, there did not seem to be a lot of hesitation among the many shamans and other Horde soldiers fired the incendiary attacks.

When Saurfang recounts his litany of the Horde's sins, Anduin speaks of the Alliance's. But the names he comes up with, Arthas and Daelin, ring a little false.

Arthas was absolutely poised to be one of the Alliance's most important leaders, but his fall to evil was, I'd argue, more of an individual one. The Alliance as an institution did not drive him to take up Frostmourne - indeed, his father even attempted to recall him from Northrend, feeling that things were going too far and that it would be more useful for him to stay behind and fight the Scourge where they were.

Daelin, I will grant, was acting in his full capacity as an Alliance leader, but at that point, he was blinded by misunderstanding, believing that he was saving his daughter from a foe that, up until that point, he had only seen as demon-blood-crazed monsters. Daelin was wrong to fail to see the humanity in the Horde, but I don't think that's an institutional problem with the Alliance as much as it is a personality failing.

I tend to play Alliance characters for a few reasons - I found a good guild on the Alliance side, I have characters of the classes I like to play on that side, and to be honest, I just kind of like the Alliance aesthetic better - blue's my favorite color and I'm sort of bored by all the red and spikes one gets with the Horde.

You can usually feel a lot more unambiguously heroic as an Alliance character, but the other side of that coin is that the Alliance winds up not really getting terribly interesting stories.

This is the second time that the Alliance has worked with rebels within the Horde to stand against a tyrannical Warchief who had utterly destroyed a major Alliance territory. In terms of pure "my side is stronger than your side" comparisons, it doesn't look great for the Alliance, given that both times they've had to team up with part of the Horde to face down the remaining part of the Horde. What's odd about this particular instance is that, prior to the confrontation that ends the war, the Alliance was supposed to be winning - yes, they lost some ships in Nazjatar, but the narrative post-Dazar'alor was supposed to be that the Alliance was really winning on all fronts. Did that advantage really go away after Nazjatar? If so, no one told me.

But I think that the more important imbalance is in the nuance of the story. Both Mists of Pandaria and now most of Battle for Azeroth have seen internal conflicts in the Horde center-stage, while we really haven't seen the Alliance every struggle to define itself in the same way. And while if this were real life, it would probably be comforting to know that the Alliance has this kind of unity and integrity, for telling a story as one does in a game, it's frustrating to basically have us playing supporting characters to a more interesting story.

Now, I do think that there are elements being introduced to give the Alliance more nuance. Tyrande's crusade of vengeance against the Horde is currently limited to Darkshore. She basically isn't returning Anduin's calls, but she hasn't struck out against him in any way.

But her embrace of the Night Warrior suggests that we could see a far more brutal and feral Night Elf High Priestess. The real question is whether this will ever lead to any real internal conflict.

See, Anduin is an idealist - he embodies the sort of values that one wants to see in the Alliance (at least, if you were actually living in it.) And while there's been a lot of talk about his struggle to earn the respect of the other leaders, the truth is that people pretty much do follow his lead, even if he's still a young man amongst truly ancient people (I don't know what his canonical age is. If he was eleven in vanilla, he'd be 26 now, assuming time passes at the same rate... though it might not.)

Tyrande is low-key defying Anduin, but she isn't striking against him. We don't really have any reason to think that any Alliance leader wants to harm another one.

Would it be more interesting if we did?

Admittedly, one doesn't just want to see a repeat of the same sort of plots that the Horde goes through tacked onto the Alliance. And I don't want to see Anduin killed off to create this sort of crisis. Similarly, the main way in which they've had Warchiefs go bad is by drumming up conflict with the Alliance - both Garrosh and Sylvanas gained power by pushing war against the Alliance. The thing is, when they aren't fighting the Alliance, the Horde usually feel pretty much just like good guys.

I think the Alliance has taken on a lot of new members who could bring about serious conflict. Before BFA even came out, they pulled in the Lightforged Draenei and the Void Elves. Talk about a potential conflict! These are two peoples literally imbued with opposite primordial forces of the cosmos. Yet we haven't seen any real drama erupt from that. Consider also the Dark Iron dwarves, long the "bad dwarves." And then you've got the Night Elves committing themselves to this dark aspect of Elune - a being we still don't understand at all - and you've got a lot of pieces in play to create some conflict.

But when are those pieces going to move into play?

8.3, 9.0, Factions and Old Gods

For some reason, I see a lot of people speculating that there will be no 8.3 - that the end of the War Campaign is the end of Battle for Azeroth.

Now, I'll always preface any of my predictions with the statement that I'm often wrong about these things. We're now actually only about a month out from Blizzcon (plus a week or so) and are starting to get into the period where trademark hunting could tell us something.

Two major plots have been going on in BFA. The wound inflicted by Sargeras has been threatening to kill the nascent Titan Azeroth, and we have been collecting Azerite - essentially her congealed, magical blood, we think - to empower the Heart of Azeroth, which we're then, presumably, going to channel back into her to heal her.

However, at the Eternal Palace raid, we discovered that, in some manner, Magni had been manipulated into having us do this. Was the Heart of Azeroth ever going to heal the planet? And furthermore, has he even been hearing her all this time?

That'd be the really big twist, though given that he was able to hear Argus - a world that, while deeply corrupted by demons, was not suffering the same kind of void corruption Azeroth has - it seems like his ability to commune with the Titan is legitimate (the ritual that turned him into the Speaker was found at Ulduar, which suggests it's legit Titan magic, though on the other hand, Ulduar was under Yogg-Saron's control for a long time.)

But while this crisis sparked the war between the factions, in a lot of ways the Alliance/Horde war has been a kind of separate issue.

As I said earlier, the war ends not with a bang, but with an ellipsis.

In theory, the war between the factions is over. But there are many, many ambiguities:

First off: is it though? Most of the Alliance is on board with Anduin, and over time, most of the Horde got on board with Saurfang. The latter's martyr-like death in the name of peace has inspired even some former Sylvanas loyalists to embrace the idea of peace (her dismissal of her people as "nothing" probably didn't help keep them from doing so.)

But Sylvanas is not dead, and she does still have loyalists. Sylvanas' faction within the Horde has simply been pushed underground, but it's evident that she's still expecting to come out on top here, and some player characters are now on that side of things.

Meanwhile, Tyrande was notably absent from the attack on Orgrimmar. It stands to reason that she is not going to forgive the entire Horde for their genocidal attack on Teldrassil simply because their leadership has changed. As history has taught us, "just following orders" is no defense for war crimes.

What I can imagine is an official detente between the factions - an end to open hostilities. But we'll see fracturing in both factions - Tyrande's faction will wage a guerrilla campaign against the Horde and Sylvanas will manipulate things behind the scenes. (I feel like there's something to say about the fact that Blizzard has chosen two of its most prominent female characters to be the agents of continual bloodshed, but I think that's a bigger topic than this cis straight dude is ready to bite off in this post.)

Next, we also don't know who is even leading the Horde at this point. Saurfang was sort of setting himself up to be the next Warchief, bringing with him the heroic reputation of an old veteran combined with the wisdom of recognizing how wrong the Old Horde had been (essentially being what Thrall had hoped Garrosh would be.) But Saurfang has earned his honorable death, finally (incidentally, this was something that felt so inevitable that I didn't even register it as a surprise. Just "oh yeah, here's where it happens.") And that leaves a leadership vacuum.

Now, Thrall is a pretty obvious choice, given that he had the job already. Indeed, aside from the utter disaster of naming Garrosh his successor, Thrall actually did a very good job as Warchief, establishing Durotar, giving the Tauren the safety of Mulgore, and really transforming the Horde from invading... well... horde into a global superpower.

That being said, the shame of Garrosh has always been a massive weight on his conscience, and lost him a tremendous amount of credibility. While his ascension would be a pretty direct way of indicating a restoration of the promise many of the races of the Horde joined under, one wonders to what extent the general populace is willing to give him a new chance.

Of course, if things are to really change, one also wonders if the Horde needs to undergo serious reformation. At this point, the Horde has had Blackhand, Doomhammer, Thrall, Garrosh, Vol'jin, and Sylvanas as Warchiefs. You have three pretty unambiguously evil ones, two pretty clearly good ones, and one that was a pragmatist that was complicit in a bunch of evil even if he wasn't necessarily evil personally (a kind of Lawful Neutral leader of a Chaotic Evil - at the time - faction.)

Is it really such a good idea to have some individual who is given infinite authority without checks and balances? I don't want to get too much into modern politics in a video game blog, but it does seem to me that stable societies are the ones that put a check on individuals in power in the name of preserving the institution for future generations. Even the good warchiefs occasionally abused their power. Maybe the Horde needs to restructure itself and not continue operating in a way that freaking Gul'dan of all people established.

But let's talk about practicality. What is going to happen in-game?

Again, we're just over a month from Blizzcon, at which we are almost certain to get the next expansion announced. In fact, in most expansion cycles, we'd be looking at the final patch of the expansion coming out within the next couple months - before the end of 2019. But we don't know what 8.3 will entail, and some have speculated that there won't be one.

To which I say: hogwash. Blizzard has never given us a final patch without telling us first. Even 6.2, which ended Warlords after a mere two raid tiers, was still announced as the big finale to the expansion. I am very skeptical that they would pull the rug out from under us. They're not going to release an expansion without a beta, which means there's no freaking way that 9.0 is going to drop this year.

Plus, it is pretty obvious that we're building to a confrontation with N'zoth. I think some people don't want to believe that because we haven't spent enough time building up to him, and I think that's a valid critique.

N'zoth is the most interesting of the Old Gods. In part, that's because we actually heard about him before the expansion (gamestate? Vanilla wasn't an expansion, but... you get it) in which we fight him. But also, I love the sorts of villains who manipulate things behind the scenes. My favorite guild in Ravnica (a setting for Magic: The Gathering that last year also became an official D&D setting) is House Dimir, which intentionally lets itself be perceived as the weakest and smallest of the guilds - just a bunch of couriers, postal workers, librarians, and private investigators - when in fact it's a massively powerful network that has spies embedded in all the other guilds.

N'zoth always intentionally made himself out to be the weakest of the Old Gods, holding the least territory during the Black Empire and weathering assaults from the forces of C'thun and Yogg-Saron. But all along, he's been the one who has had the most ongoing plots. The very fact that he seems to have usurped the entire Emerald Nightmare from Yogg-Saron demonstrates that he's actually probably the most powerful of the three remaining Old Gods. And given his propensity for making his seeming defeats work out in his favor, I even think he wants us to come kill him.

In fact, with the war out of the way, 8.3 has a great opportunity to focus the remainder of this expansion on the cosmic stakes in a really exciting and lore-heavy way. What does N'zoth ultimately want? What might he do?

To a large extent, I think the fantasy genre is basically supernatural horror, but in which people can actually fight back against the monsters (the Ringwraiths from Lord of the Rings, for example, are totally horror story monsters.) And so I think we could get a lot out of really delving into the cosmic horror of N'zoth. We've fought two Old Gods. The first was in Ahn-Qiraj, which Blizzard later stated was a former Titan facility (my headcanon, though, retcons that, saying that Ahn-Qiraj was actually C'thun's capital city before the Titans came, which I think is supported pretty well by the art we've seen of the Black Empire) and the second was in a Titan facility that still looked very Titan-y.

If we go to Ny'alotha to fight N'zoth, I want to see a total nightmare city - I want to see Blizzard's take on R'lyeh. I want to see madness and mutation that we need to fight valiantly against.

I think we need a really good 8.3 to send off Battle for Azeroth. The expansion has been a mix, certainly, but there's still potential here for really interesting stuff. I don't think it should be written off like Warlords was.

So, What of the Alliance and Horde?

Big spoilers. If you haven't finished the War Campaign quests that went live today, read this later. The quests can easily be completed in less than an hour.

There are very big questions raised in the end by the cinematics. I've also done some research, finding out what epilogues the essentially three factions provide.

Spoilers Ahoy!

Hexblade Warlock to Level 2

I'm playing in Descent into Avernus in an Adventurer's League setting (though a friend who's in all of my home games is DM'ing) and, given that I don't know when I'll be able to play my sweet baby boy Great Old One Warlock, I've decided to play another Warlock and not worry about making him a somewhat similar build.

While the GOO 'lock went Variant human to get Moderately Armored (well, more that the story felt best with a human character and I figured I'd take advantage of the higher AC,) the new one, Old Knox, has a Hexblade patron, and thus basically gets that (as well as martial weapon proficiencies) for free.

While Hexblades are clearly built to support a melee-based Warlock (to the extent that I kind of feel like it makes other patrons' Bladelocks feel wimpy in comparison) I've decided that I'm still going to focus on an Eldritch Blast build. The Hex Warrior changes do, however, mean that I don't need to find another cantrip to deal with targets that get into melee range - if they get too close, I just pull out a bonded weapon and smash it into their skulls for the same attack bonus and nearly as much damage (right now, given the starting equipment, I've only gotten enough gold to upgrade my armor to Scale Mail and shield, and I've still just got a handaxe. If I can get enough before we leave Baldur's Gate, I'm going to try to buy a longsword, battleaxe, or warhammer - longsword's probably the most expensive, but also feels like the best fit flavor-wise.)

The one combat encounter we've run, we were seven party members fighting seven pirates, and I killed three of them with single hits to each, just using Hex and Eldritch Blast or the Handaxe.

For level 2, I've taken most obviously useful invocations: Agonizing Blast and Repelling Blast.

Agonizing Blast, I like to think, basically makes you a ranged fighter with more powerful spells than an Eldritch Knight. Indeed, the fact that you get four Eldritch Blast attacks at level 17 makes the Fighter's 4 attacks at level 20 feel kind of underwhelming. But the point is that now, you are no less capable of dealing damage with attacks than a Fighter with a bow, at least before we start talking about magic weapons and such.

Repelling Blast, however, gives you your own magic sauce to serve with your damage. This invocation scales quite profoundly. First off, any time you hit, it simply happens. That means that even some gargantuan, legendary creature cannot save against it. As long as they don't have a wall to stop them, Repelling Blast will do what you want it to do. Enemies need to be very wary of cliffs. This can also be used to rescue other players - if your wizard or sorcerer is stuck in melee with a creature, you can knock it back, creating a window for the character to escape without worrying about opportunity attacks. And given that this happens each time you hit, as Eldritch Blast levels up, you'll eventually be able to move a target a potential of 40 feet with it.

Now, let's talk spells.

I began with Hex and Armor of Agathys - both Warlock staples. Certainly at low levels, Hex is a nice thing to buff your damage - being able to deal 1d10+1d6 damage to those pirates might explain why I was killing them so efficiently (that's an average of 9 damage per attack, and Bandits have an average of 11 health, so I guess I was a little lucky on damage rolls.)

Level 2 is the last time I'm limited to 1st level spells, so my options are somewhat narrow. Hexblades get access to Shield and Wrathful Smite. The latter seems cool, but given that I'm far more of a caster, I don't really see myself using it much. Plus, it's concentration, and certainly at these levels, I imagine I'll want to save that for Hex.

Shield has been fantastic on my Eldritch Knight character, but he's also built far more to be a tank. The Warlock is a ranged caster, and while some defense is useful, I like the damage potential of Armor of Agathys (and its scaling - eventually dealing 25 damage every time someone hits you while it's still up.)

So ultimately, I went simple and picked up Charm Person. It's not concentration (unlike, say, Cause Fear,) and seems like it could be useful situationally.

Looking ahead, I think at level 3 I'm going to take Shatter to have some AoE abilities early on. The really big question will be what Pact I take.

Pact of the Blade I think is out, given that I'm not really going to be melee-focused. Eldritch Blast is better than any ranged weapon I could summon at this point (and I think that might require another invocation.)

So it's between Tome and Chain.

Of course, Tome, with Book of Ancient Secrets, allows you to learn ritual spells, including Find Familiar. So in a way, it feels foolish. On the other hand, there are some Chain-specific invocations that might be good to have.

Tome does give more Cantrips, though, which is nice. Thankfully I'll have another week after tomorrow to figure that out.

EDIT: I think I'll be going with Chain. In part, this gives me Gift of the Ever-Living Ones, which causes any healing to be maximized while I'm within I believe a hundred feet of my familiar. The other reason is that I'll be able to summon an Imp (ironically, I could make my familiar a Celestial Imp - technically, the familiar is just a spirit who takes on a form I choose, and he'll just conveniently look like a devil despite not being one.) As an Imp, he gets Devil's Sight, and so I can just have him sit on my shoulder and swap to "camera two" to benefit from that. Next, the Imp can transform into various shapes, including a rat, raven, or spider. Other than movement speeds, the stats remain the same, and at a base of about 10 hit points, that's better than a lot of familiars.

The Fourth War

War nomenclature in the Warcraft series has always been a little funny. Obviously, the truth is that the First through Third Wars were just the first three games. But while the first two were the first two wars between the Alliance (or what would become the Alliance) and the Horde, the third was really against the Scourge and the Burning Legion.

And given that there was a whole huge war that spanned from the middle of Wrath questing through the end of Mists of Pandaria - a longer war than the current one - it's a bit funny that they've decided to call the conflict at the center of Battle for Azeroth the Fourth War.

So: today 8.2.5 came, and we got the conclusion to the War Campaign. What does it mean? Well, let's go into spoiler territory.

Link's Awakening

I never had any Gameboy. The Switch is really the first mobile gaming platform I've ever had (not counting an iPhone, which to be fair is actually a pretty substantial part of that field.)

The first Zelda game I ever got was Ocarina of Time - I would later get Link to the Past in college, despite having had an SNES since I was 10. While now, 21 years later, being first introduced to a game series at 12 feels pretty lifelong, I nevertheless felt like a bit of a newcomer.

Zelda is, I'd argue, Nintendo's most prestigious franchise. While Mario is obviously the headliner, he's also far more saturated - you can expect multiple Mario games per console generation. With Zelda, you tend to get one or two. The Wii U (which I think already stands as Nintendo's "forgotten console") technically had Breath of the Wild (that's the platform I have it on,) but much as Twilight Princess was a launch title for the Wii despite also being available on the Gamecube, Breath of the Wild feels more tied to the success of the Switch.

Zelda games are events. And as someone for whom Ocarina of Time is pretty hardwired into me as one of the most important games I've ever played, it's been kind of sad for me to say that I actually haven't really loved a Zelda game since Twilight Princess. Skyward Sword was too repetitive and disconnected - even if it had some really cool ideas - and Breath of the Wild is one of those games that has me feeling like I've gone insane given how passionately people love it when, to me, it abandons a ton of the things that I feel makes Zelda games Zelda games.

So it's kind of interesting to play Link's Awakening.

Released on the Gameboy, this was the fourth Zelda game, between A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time. In a lot of ways, the game was an attempt to shrink down the style established in Link to the Past to a game that can work on the Gameboy. It's actually kind of funny to me to think now that, given how different the original Zelda was and especially how different Adventure of Link was, that LttP and Link's Awakening are actually the only 2D Zelda games of what I think of as the "classic Zelda" style (actually, that's not necessarily true, given the other Gameboy games that came out later, like Oracle of Ages/Seasons and such, which I have not played but could also be of that style.)

The remake of Link's Awakening is sort of fascinating, then, in that (I'm given to understand) it really, quite purely, just recreates the 1993 game as it existed, but with modern graphics, sounds, and a few control elements to make it easier to play (taking advantage of the larger number of buttons to give the sword and shield dedicated inputs, for example.)

In the classic Zelda vein, you're presented with a world that you get to explore more fully as you gain new items. The sword lets you cut through bushes, there's a feather that lets you jump over holes, and, and you get bracers that let you lift rocks out of the way.

The map is very grid-like, in that old style, but given how very easy it is for the Switch to load the entire map, they do away with the one-square-at-a-time transition between locations except when it makes sense to do so - like if there's a chamber with doors.

Now, I'd been given to understand that Link's Awakening had a very weird, even Lynchian, tone to it, but so far I've only seen a couple of hints at that. I'm two dungeons into the game, having just opened up a third (but I need to find a way to get to its entrance.)

In terms of challenge, it's definitely not too bad - and I wonder if the smoother controls on the Switch have made it easier than it would be on the original two-button Gameboy.

But in terms of the recreation, the art style of the remake is utterly charming. The world is rendered in plastic-toy-like simplicity - a modern take on repetitive sprites of the early 2D era. But also portraying it almost like a play-set with your camera looking down toward it, the foreground and background blur slightly. The soundtrack has some classic Zelda music, but it's also arranged simplistically, giving it a light tone in keeping with the art style.

As someone who is a bit nostalgic for older Zelda games and on top of that never played the original version of Link's Awakening, this is actually pretty ideal for me.

Naturally, I'll be looking forward to Breath of the Wild 2 with interest (unless they change the name, this would, I think, be the first Zelda game to be a part two of something that's technically already a part X.) It's not that I disliked BotW, but I think I just missed some of the elements that it cut out - and felt like for all the freedom that the game gave you, it also made things feel a little more like a generic open-world game than Zelda is supposed to be.

Homebrewing Kick: Lesser Death Knights and Ancient Mechs

My homebrew setting has a couple elements that maybe don't set it apart in terms of their presence, but in their prominence.

It is a setting with a fallen, technologically advanced civilization. It's also one in which there is basically a massive undead army that is currently leaderless and confined to a place in the center of its largest empire with a low population. It also has a great deal of aberrations, with a strong cosmic horror element (that might just have something to do with the fall of that ancient civilization.)

I've brewed up a couple of stats for the final dungeon of the adventure my players are currently on, but I've also been working on a few other elements.

First off, with the undead hordes and elite skeletons, I also wanted to brew up a Death Knight I can throw at a tier two party. Conceptually, what I came up with were "Scourge Knights," named obviously in reference to Warcraft's undead Scourge. Given how the Death Knight is based on the idea of a paladin of great renown breaking their oath, I wanted to make a distinction for these lesser versions. Thus, my lore is that when a Death Knight slays a paladin, they can sometimes capture the soul of that paladin (involving a magical item called a Soul Lantern.) The Death Knight then tortures the soul until they agree to serve the Death Knight, at which point the soul is released to manifest as a corrupted, undead lieutenant.

Splitting some of the Death Knight's abilities and coming up with some new ones, the first of the two varieties here is Scourge Knight Captains - which can lead contingents of undead and retain the Death Knight's more defensive capabilities. The other is Scourge Knight Executioners, who wield greataxes and have a feature that makes it far easier for them to get to their foes.

The Captain and Executioner are CR 10 and 9, respectively, allowing you to throw them at a party far earlier than the CR 17 Death Knight.

The really big project, however, has been my Ancient Mechs. These are basically robots that patrol the post-apocalyptic wastelands that were never rebuilt following the fall of that ancient civilization. These mechs fight mutants and aberrations, but sometimes mistake the "Scrappers" who try to salvage the lost technology for their targets.

There are several varieties of mech, ranging from the small Scavenger Mechs that are designed to sort through piles of rubble and find useful material (and are the ones I imagine as being cute and probably puppeteered by the Jim Henson company) to the Huge Assault Mechs, which have powerful cannons, a shielding force field that reduces incoming damage, and even a miniature nuclear strike capability.

What unites the design of these creatures is their use of Power Cells. Essentially, each of their main actions requires power from their batteries. And they will continue to operate until they run out of juice. However, given that these power cells involve some magic, they will regenerate on their own over time. Because power cells are interchangeable, other creatures can swap out a power cell if the mech is out of energy, and so NPCs (or even potentially players) who find a way to reprogram these mechs to work for them can keep their mechs working if they have a supply of fresh power cells. Naturally, the bigger ones come with more cells, but they also have abilities that drain more power from them.

Inspired by these mechs, I also started detailing the town of Gonquista - the only major settlement in the post-apocalyptic wasteland part of my setting - giving it a number of factions and important figures heavily (heavily) inspired by Mad Max.

Homebrewing Tougher Undead Hordes

There's nothing quite like an army of skeletons and zombies to let the party know that you're the bad guy. But if you're a DM like me, you might find yourself feeling like there are certain gaps in terms of stat blocks for undead you can throw at your party.

Basically: there's a knife's edge balance when it comes to big swarms of undead, or really any mass combat situation. There are rules for how to run this - essentially averaging out damage over how likely a large number of foes are going to hit your party members.

But there are only a couple of true zombies in the Monster Manual. You can certainly run an encounter with a mass of them, but I find that, while fights against really big gangs of bad guys can be a lot of fun (I ran a one-shot that involved I believe 14 enemies against three party members with two allied NPCs) it can also get tedious and slow.

Taking zombies and skeletons as the absolute classic undead armies, I've homebrewed up a couple of stat blocks.

I started with the harder one, which is zombies. Taking inspiration from the Bar Brawl from Creature Codex (by the Kobold Press - an excellent 2nd party supplement, along with their earlier Tome of Beasts,) rather than just having you send, say, 20 zombies at your party, I've made a swarm.

Conceptually, I started by simply multiplying the zombie stat block 9 times, essentially treating a 3-by-3 square as one Huge-sized swarm. As it turns out, 9 zombies is not really that impressive. And given that the 5-ft square is implied to be a space occupied by a hero who really wants full freedom of movement, it's also not quite as dense as I wanted for this swarm.

So I bumped that up to 20.

Next, I bumped the hit die up - swarm hit dice are calculated based on the size of the swarm, not the individual, so even though it's made up of medium undead, the swarm itself is Huge, meaning it gets a d12 hit die. That wound up being helpful, as it put the health in a better range for what I wanted - an average of 190.

The AC is still very low - like a standard zombie, it's 8. But if your hero can hit a single zombie, it seems fair that they should have an easy time hitting a swarm of them.

Naturally, the swarm has the standard swarm abilities - it can't regain HP, it can't get temporary HP, and (and here's the nasty part) it can occupy other creature's spaces. Oh, and it can squeeze through any space a medium sized creature could, for obvious reasons.

In terms of damage, I gave it multiattack, hitting three times (it's a lot of zombies after all.) I also boosted the damage, treating each attack as if three zombies were hitting you at once (literally just multiplying the zombie's slam attack three times.) That means that on a given turn, 9 of the 20 zombies, effectively, are striking out, which seems fair. Those big hits allow this slow, easy-to-hit mass to feel scary.

Given that the whole point of a Cleric's destroy undead is to clear out hordes of zombies and the like, I wanted to throw clerics a bone, so to speak, and so the horde has a feature that causes them to take significant damage if they fail a Turn Undead save against a Cleric who's level 5 or higher.

So it was mostly done, but I wanted to give it something scary - a little extra juice.

So I created an ability called Overwhelming Lurch. This is when the zombies get all 28 Days Later and speed forward, trampling over party members. The creatures hit with this need to do a strength saving throw or get knocked prone and grappled - it's supposed to be that nightmare moment where someone gets engulfed by the mob of undead. It's not a terribly difficult DC, but low Strength characters are going to be in a really tough spot. Meanwhile, your beefy paladin or barbarian or fighter can laugh as they revel in this new target-rich environment.

The Massive Zombie Horde is CR 6 - enough to be pretty scary on their own to early tier 2 parties. But here's the thing: there ain't anything saying you can't use more than one of them! To peel back the curtain a little, I've got a town that is totally filled with corpses my party is going to come across in their current adventure, and my hope is to push them to certain locations within the town, so they're probably going to encounter more of these than they're supposed to fight. The hordes are slow, though, and for all I know the party will just kick an absurd amount of ass, so I think it'll be fine. But my initial plan was for a hundred zombies. So I might throw five of these hordes at them (might have them fight one or two to start with and then reveal the rest.)

Moving on to the skeletons:

I was a little less radical in my design here. Essentially, I just beefed them up. I treated the basic skeleton stat block as if they were sort of generic characters - like limited fighters. So I gave them an extra attack at level 5 and ability score improvements at levels 4 and 8.

First was the Elite Skeletal Archer, which I essentially bumped up to level 10 (getting two ASIs and an extra attack) and then slapped some scale mail on them to boost their AC to 16. Easy peasy, and the archer becomes a CR 2 monster, or in other words, a much better tier 2 or 3 minion monster. While normal skeletons are being sent out on patrol around the Lich's territory, these guys are probably patrolling the ramparts of their dread citadel.

But you can't just have archers. You need some guardsmen! And for that, I bumped things up further.

The Elite Skeletal Guard is bumped to level 17 and outfitted with plate armor as well as halberds - because halberds seem like a great kind of weapon for guardsmen. I also basically swapped the standard skeleton's strength and dexterity before applying the ASIs to boost their Strength, Constitution, and Wisdom. I also granted them proficiency with perception, because they are supposed to be guards, aren't they?

These guys wind up being CR 5 - meaning they can form the backbone of a combat encounter with some of the archers mixed in with them.

Finally, what readers of this blog should not find very surprising, a lot of my "army of the dead" concept is inspired by the Scourge in World of Warcraft - sure, they use mindless zombies, but they're mostly a pretty well-regimented army of skeletons, some of whom retain some magical ability.

So I've created the Elite Skeletal Mage. These are not meant to be boss-level casters, and so I tried to keep their abilities relatively limited. Essentially, they're there to magically harass the party while the archers and guards bring the pain. The idea is to sprinkle one or two of these guys into a larger encounter with other skeletal minions.

I basically gave them a character level of 6, but 4 levels of wizard, and boosted their Intelligence to 14 so that they can actually cast some stuff. They actually wound up being a lot like a Cult Fanatic, except they're wizards instead of clerics. They have Ray of Frost as a cantrip (bit of a Warcraft reference there) and then use Magic Missile, Mage Armor, Shield, Hold Person, and Ray of Enfeeblement. Again, they're less about pumping out the damage than harassing the party that is being pelted with arrows or sliced with halberds.

So I've managed to put together a nice little army of the dead. None of these guys are terribly complex on their own - they're all built to be minions or mid-way encounters. And if your characters have wisely chosen to go with bludgeoning weapons (I get the aesthetics of it - my Paladin's going to be going with a greatsword, but why would you ever not just take a maul? Frankly, in the vast majority of cases I like my Paladins to swing mauls,) they'll carve through these guys at double speed.

But we do want some kind of a boss, right? And that's where my next homebrew monster comes in: I want to create a Death Knight that the players can fight in tier 2. I'm aiming for about CR 8 or 9. Basically, I want the boss guy to lead all these nasty skeletons. But the Death Knight, a CR 17 monster, is a bit much for a party of, say, level 9 characters.

Beyond that, I'm going to be working on some vampire variants as well. Indeed, I'm now thinking about all the statblocks I want to generate. I actually need to make a bunch of ancient robots for my setting, so we'll have to take a look at some earlier ones I designed and come up with variants.

This is fun.

New Unearthed Arcana Subclasses: College of Eloquence and Oath of Heroism

They're coming out with a lot of these lately, aren't they?

In the latest Unearthed Arcana, we get new subclasses for Bards and Paladins. After new ones for Barbarians, Monks, Sorcerers, and Warlocks, it seems like the folks at Wizards are really getting on the subclass train.

Should we read much into this?

Three books in 5E have expanded subclass options: Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, Xanathar's Guide to Everything, and Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica. While the first and last of those were a bit limited - giving just one new subclass to not all the classes (only two in Ravnica,) one could argue Xanathar's main feature was the addition of 2-4 subclasses for every existing class.

Now, Unearthed Arcana is, to be fair, just a testing ground for new ideas. But in the past, it has hinted toward future releases - the Order Domain and Circle of Spores were both first tested there (we also had School of Invention and the Brute Fighter archetype, the former of which became an Izzet-league magic item and the latter... just sort of wasn't that interesting and got dropped.)

I'm going to go totally wild with speculation here: I think we might be looking at ideas for a new major sourcebook. It could be another broad-scope book like Xanathar's, or it could be a campaign setting book. If it's the latter, these latest subclasses made me think of Planescape, given that Oath of Heroism feels very appropriate to Ysgard, and College of Eloquence feels very appropriate to Mechanus. That said, I'm not sure that the Cosmic Horror-themed Warlock and Sorcerer subclasses from last time quite fit into that concept. We could simply be looking at another general sourcebook.

But let's get into those, shall we?

College of Eloquence gives you many options to calm people down and gain advantage on charisma checks. One of the coolest elements is that, at high levels, when people use their Bardic Inspiration you've given them, they actually get to keep it if the check failed despite the bonus die. And if it does succeed, you can "chain" it to another creature at no extra cost.

College of Heroism has a lot of things that seem, frankly, kind of overpowered. There's a lot here where you gain benefits from critting or you have an easier time critting (which is always fun on a paladin, given divine smite,) and at higher levels you get to use a reaction to boost your AC when you get hit (with no limit on how many times you can use it) and your level 20 "super mode" lets you, among other things, just choose to succeed on an attack roll every turn, or choose to succeed on a saving throw.

Anyway, it's all fun stuff. And it's nice to see these coming out at a decent clip.

My New Hobby: Creating Playlists for D&D

Given that I designed the adventure my players are on over two years ago - it's just taken them that long to get through the stuff I had prepared ahead of time (and we haven't been playing as frequently as we used to this year) - I've had little planning to do as a DM. Sure, I do have to make adjustments, and I've integrated stat blocks and other things that have come out in the meantime (having more vampire stat blocks from Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica and Tome of Beasts/Creature Codex is very useful right now.)

But thanks to my friend/roommate's subscription to Spotify, I've been using the service to put together playlists for my D&D campaign.

I have a fairly large number of playlists (each listed as Duck of Power's D&D, and then the name of the specific list, if you can find them) for different situations.

I've almost exclusively stuck to video game music, as I find that music designed for games (outside of cutscenes) tends to be designed without a massive build or drop off in intensity (there are some exceptions even among the ones I've used.) A lot of old-school game music isn't quite up to what we're looking for, in terms of instrumental quality (not to badmouth Chiptunes if you're into that kind of thing) but thankfully a lot of people have done covers that sound fantastic.

I have the following lists. Each is over an hour long, some of them reaching more than two hours, which helps them from getting repetitive over a night of gaming.

General Exploration:

This one is the sort of catch-all - any time the players are traversing the world, or going through standard fantasy environments. There are a lot of overworld themes here, particularly from Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, and World of Warcraft.

Heroic Combat:

This is the standard combat mix. Once we roll initiative, this goes on unless we're using a more specific combat mix. The music gets more intense, but the tone is generally meant to be exciting - showcasing our brave heroes fighting their foes.

Dark Exploration:

This one's meant to be all about the creepiness. This one is going to get a lot of use in the current adventure (more or less replacing General Exploration.) Again, lots of WoW stuff here, with a bit of Diablo III and Darkest Dungeon. The intention for this mix is not to just be any dangerous place, but specifically those that give you the creeps. Given that the party is currently in a large barony ruled by a racist vampire wizard, there's a lot of gothic (and cosmic) horror elements for them to explore.

Dark Combat:

The notion behind this mix is that Heroic Combat is all about facing foes that you're evenly matched for - that your heroes will feel confident that they can prevail against said foes. Dark Combat is meant to instill a sense of panic and terror - the monster is here, and you're in a fight for your life. Naturally, there's a lot of Bloodborne boss music, though I'm pretty happy with "Assault on New Avalon" from WoW (it's the music that plays toward the end of the Death Knight starting experience, once you're basically overwhelming the Scarlet Crusade with swarms of undead.)

Otherworldly Locales:

To a large extent, this is meant to be for planar travel. It's a little less focused, but I've allowed for a little more sci-fi music here, like stuff from Mass Effect 2. There's a fair amount from the Burning Crusade WoW expansion here as well, which is the most science-fantasy expansion they've had (except maybe Legion, but its space-demon stuff was mostly in later patches, which, annoyingly, don't come on the soundtracks to the expansions.)

Ancient Locales:

This is mostly for ancient ruins - the kind of places you might find buried in sand or hidden underground. There's a slightly ominous, slightly otherworldly feel to this, but the notion is that these places are very ancient. Assassin's Creed Odyssey, with its pseudo-Egyptian music, worked great for this. Likewise, a lot of the Temple music from Ocarina of Time (plus two covers of the Stone Tower Temple theme from Majora's Mask.) Finally, the soundtrack to Riven has a great number of tracks for this. Also, basically any Draenei-themed music from WoW.

General Urban:

This is the mix for city music. It's generally a bit upbeat, and provides an alternative when going through cities and major towns from the General Exploration mix. I'll confess that I think this one needs a bit of work.

Western Exploration:

There's a region of my homebrew setting that feels very Wild West, and so I took a lot of music from Red Dead Redemption and Bastion, which works pretty well here.

Western Combat:

Similar sources, these are tracks that are geared a bit more toward fighting.

Works in Progress:

Not a list, but I would like, at some point, to create mixes for traveling by sea or on airships. I have playlists, but they're not long enough for me to really want to use them. There's some Assassin's Creed Black Flag on them, but it's hard to find stuff with just the right tone I'm looking for. A naval combat mix would also be great (I really want to try out the naval combat rules in Ghosts of Saltmarsh.)

Alternate Character Backgrounds in Ravnica

Guild identity is at the core of Ravnica as a D&D setting. What began as a mechanical concept in Magic (namely: we want a multicolor set where people only play two colors in their deck, so let's build identities around those ten color pairs) became one of the key defining traits of the setting (the other key trait, I'd say, is the fact that the entire world is a single vast city, meaning that explorers are literally just finding new neighborhoods and districts that people "downtown" have never heard of.)

In Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, this is reflected through various character backgrounds, with one for each guild.

And to an extent, I think this is useful, given how distinct Ravnica is from other D&D settings. For example, if you have a player who wants to come up with a Wizard character who lives in a remote tower in some uninhabited forest, you might force them to re-think that character by limiting them to these character backgrounds. That Wizard ain't going to have the sort of isolation they're looking for unless they can create a demiplane to steal away to, because Ravnicans have about as much privacy and personal space as people who live in Tokyo (having not been to Tokyo since I was six, I'm going to own up that I just picked it as a famously dense city.)

But while the backgrounds to a great job of officially linking a character to a guild, I'd also say that there's room to wiggle.

Generally, the book recommends using other backgrounds if players, for some very strange reason, want to play Guild-less characters in a Ravnica campaign. Granted, half the world's population is "Gateless," but surely given how the guilds are one of the big things of the setting, you'd want to pick one for your character, right?

But I think you could make allowances for characters who are members of their guilds, but didn't quite come up in the same way.

The simplest way of implementing this is simply to allow players to use these other backgrounds but still benefit from being members of the guild factions. You might also grant them access to the guild expanded spell list and perhaps throw in a guild insignia in their starting equipment.

The main thing that inspired this thought was House Dimir.

The Dimir Operative background is built around the notion that you've infiltrated another guild. Indeed, you can even play it that way with your fellow players, perhaps allowing the DM to reveal it in a cool way.

But the Dimir do have a small public face - the librarians, book sellers, and private investigators (and, in my version of Ravnica, journalists.) So it seems a little disappointing that there's no option for player characters to be that kind of Dimir member.

Of course, Dimir faction rewards are also less tangible and more plot-focused than other guilds, presumably given the assumption that you'll also be earning renown with the faction that you've infiltrated. So DMs might want to come up with good rewards for Dimir members who are openly wearing the blue-and-black.

I do think one should be cautious, though. If you have a player who is not terribly familiar with the setting, you might, for example, find a player who wants to play a Fiendish Warlock from the Cult of Rakdos. But let's say they pick up the Sage background and play it as a scholar of forbidden, demonic rituals whose patron is hidden from the world. That's not exactly on-brand for the Rakdos, who would never hide the demonic nature of their guild. You'd run the risk of losing Rakdos' showbiz and entertainment element. Now, if you were to re-work it so that the Sage background is instead someone who works for the Cult as essentially a "dirt miner," looking through old records to find embarrassing secrets of the rich and powerful as material for the next big satirical revue, it could work fantastically.

Backgrounds are, of course, something that the game explicitly encourages you to customize - even in Adventurer's League you can swap out some of the elements to get what you want. So while it's a great "third choice" at character creation after race and class to align yourself with a guild, it's also pretty obvious that any of the guilds will want members with diverse experience and expertise. Boros Legionnaires use intimidation to get criminals to surrender, but surely some of them will instead try to calmly persuade a bad guy that maybe it'd be safer for everyone to just relax and work things out.

Given the sheer number of D&D games I'm lined up to play in the near future, I think my eventual Ravnica game is probably not going to happen for a while, but I'm eager to figure out exactly what shape it will take.

New Details on Eberron: Rising From the Last War

(I might just start calling the book Eberron.)

Well, in just a little over two months we're going to be getting the official Eberron book for 5th Edition.

I've never played a game set in Eberron, but the setting seems really cool, and frankly I think it's more up my alley than the Forgotten Realms in terms of tone and originality.

The premise of Eberron is this:

The continent of Korvaire, one of the major continents on the world of Eberron, had been at war for a very long time, with different kingdoms clashing against one another in the Last War. And then, one day, the kingdom of Cyre just... was destroyed. An event called the Day of Mourning left the entire kingdom destroyed, with everyone dead.

The other kingdoms ceased their hostilities in the face of this devastating event, ending the war out of fear that further conflict could lead to another such event. But this has resulted in a very uneasy peace - the war's conflicts weren't really resolved, with no real winners or losers.

Beyond the kingdoms, however, there are also powerful houses - the Dragonmarked Houses - which are something like massive megacorporations that hold monopolies on certain industries. Members of these houses carry dragonmarks - a sort of mystical birthmark - which give them magical powers that help them in their given industries.

Among the Houses is House Cannith, who manufactured weapons of war and sold them to all sides. Their greatest creation are the Warforged - artificial humanoids bearing a resemblance to golems, but with humanoids intelligence and free will. The Warforged were built as living weapons to fight in the war, but with the end of the conflict, they've been forced to find new meaning for their lives.

One of the major elements of the setting is the way in which the Houses, and the general study of magic, has led to a ubiquity of magic. Ordinary people might know cantrips or ritual spells and use them in their jobs. Magic has allowed for the creation of airships and a system of trains known as the lightning rail. There are newspapers and many other "modern" conveniences that Eberron has arrived at through magic rather than pure science.

This probably manifests in the most exciting way in terms of gameplay with the Artificer class. Artificers are the first fully new class to be introduced in 5E since the player's handbook, and the Eberron book will have three subclass options for them (those of us who got the Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron will get an updated version that includes the Artificer with one subclass.) Artificers use magical inventions to provide utility and fight monsters.

Tonally, Eberron borrows a great deal from pulp novels from the middle of the 20th century. With all the intrigue and cloak-and-dagger shenanigans the Dragonmarked Houses get up to, there's plenty of opportunity for noir-ish mysteries in places like the city of Sharn, a metropolis with skyscrapers and plenty of air traffic.

There's tons of cool twists on classic D&D ideas, like wild Halflings who tame dinosaurs, or a society that uses Positive energy to live on forever as good-aligned undead. If you, like I do, tend to like to see the fantasy genre grow past the standard medievalism that so often defines it, this setting should be very appealing. (Of course, this is also coming from the guy who's super excited for Throne of Eldraine, the new Magic the Gathering set, which is based on Arthurian knights and Grimm's fairy tales, so I can enjoy the classics as well.)

But let's get to the details:

The book will have four new playable races: the Changelings, Shifters, Kalashtar, and Warforged. There will also be new sub-races for existing races that establish people as Dragonmarked - this includes "subraces" for races like Human or Half Elf that don't typically have subraces.

There will be adventure location maps, similar to the ones found in Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, such as airships and lightning rail trains.

There will be a level-1 adventure to introduce the setting.

There will, of course, be tons of information about the setting and its various locations and ongoing plots.

And there will be 38 new monsters!

Oh, and there's a new cover for the book! Apparently they just swapped an image from within the book with the old cover, but I think it's a better look. The new one depicts a warforged wizard and a halfling ranger with a dinosaur beast companion exploring a canyon while some ominous winged creature (I couldn't tell if it was a dragon or a demon) watches them from above.

Getting the Campaign Back on Track

I think the biggest challenge to being a dungeon master for D&D is just getting people to show up.

I love running the game, particularly running my own story. The players always come up with different ways to do things than I expect, and I'm now thinking of how I might shift the adventure around.

Basically, the players now know that they're going up against a vampire named Baron Orszag (yes, that's just the Hungarian name for "land," like how the Hungarian word for Hungary is "Magyarország," because my dad was born there and my grandfather had Bela Lugosi's accent) who engineered a subtle plot to have their patron, Baron Angir, killed (Angir is also a vampire, but a good guy.)

Anyway, we've been unable to play a lot this year due to various scheduling issues, but now that I've A: shifted the game to play at my own apartment, which is closer for most of the players and B: added my other apartment-mate to the game (she's married to the first apartment-mate) I've got enough people to, I hope, consistently get people together to play (my general rule is we want at least four to show up not counting me, and with two players and the DM living where we play, it should be easier to get that.)

We have a lot of other games going on - one of my players also runs a game here that I play in, and that first roommate is about to start a Curse of Strahd game as well (I'm going to play in that as well! And yes, I'm aware that it's funny we're both starting big Vampire-themed adventures at the same time, but I've had this one planned out for over a year, so there.)

Anyway, we didn't have any combat encounters this session, but we'll be starting the next one with a big fight against an angry mob (I might alter the Bar Brawl stat block to treat them as a swarm) as well as a lesser vampire (using the Blood Drinker Vampire stats from Ravnica) and a pair of gargoyles.

It should be a fun opportunity for the players to shake the rust off, and I think that with a CR 8 vampire and two CR 3 gargoyles (if I'm remembering those stats right) plus some potential threat from the crowd, it should be a decently challenging but manageable fight.

Anyway, I'm hoping we'll get another game in soon - if not next week then the week after - and get this game back into gear soon. There's a lot of fun to be had and...

If by some chance you're in this game and read this blog without having told me you do, maybe don't read the next bit...

Right? Good?

There's also three dungeons in this adventure, with some major twists and ideas I'm really proud of that I'm super excited to try out.

What WoW Info We Can Expect at Blizzcon this Year

We're now less than two months from Blizzcon.

BFA's current state is the following: we've had our second major patch, bringing with it the second "tier raid." We know that 8.2.5 is on the horizon, coming with story developments, various balance changes, and updated models for Goblins and Worgen.

Given that 8.2.5 is not live yet, it's unlikely we'll be seeing 8.3 drop within less than two months, which means that we're almost certain to get to Blizzcon before we see 8.3 go live.

We know that there will be an 8.3, because Blizzard has said that the end of the Eternal Palace raid will make it clear who the final boss of BFA is. Admittedly, a lot of the community doesn't seem to think it is that clear, but to me, if that statement was made in good faith and not just a total lie, it has to mean that N'zoth is BFA's final boss, as it was his escape that ended the Eternal Palace.

Another reason to believe strongly that there will be an 8.3 is that Blizzard did a two-tier expansion once in Warlords of Draenor, and basically everyone felt super cheated by such an insubstantial expansion.

So, we're approaching Blizzcon without the final patch of the current expansion out, despite the fact that we're expecting the next expansion to be announced.

The good news is that there's a ton of precedent for this. Mists of Pandaria was actually the first expansion to be fully complete before we heard about its successor. If you watch the announcement trailer for Cataclysm, for example, it starts with a roughly second-long preview of Icecrown Citadel, which had not yet come out. Wrath was announced before we got 2.4, and Mists was announced before we got 4.3.

Now, what this does mean is that we might not get to see as much of the new expansion as we're hoping.

Expansion announcements are always kind of strange, because we get the very first impression they want to give us of a new expansion. Sometimes, it's ludicrously polished, like how Legion's announcement (which was at Gamescom - probably because they didn't want to have to wait until Blizzcon given how long Warlords' tail was) had the Mardum half of the Demon Hunter starting experience more or less how it turned out on live. But it's also sometimes pretty rough - Mists of Pandaria, for example, basically said "yes, we've got Pandaren and Monks, and there's going to be a vaguely Chinese feel to the expansion" but we got nothing about the centrality of the Alliance and Horde conflict or the Mogu or much about Pandaria itself until a couple months later. In fact, I think the only thing they could show was stuff from the Wandering Isle.

When Cataclysm was announced, they actually spent a good deal of time talking about Icecrown Citadel and the various features of 3.3 - including the dungeon finder, which was kind of a huge deal.

I don't know if we'll be getting another huge, transformational change to the way that raids or dungeons work in 8.3, but I could imagine that at Blizzcon we're going to get a lot of info about 8.3 and just the basic gist of the new expansion.

So what details can we count on seeing?

The name and general premise: We'll know where it's set, and we'll get a general "vibe" for the expansion. Like, will this be the Shadowlands expansion with a bunch of spooky undead? Will it be a dragon-themed expansion on the Dragon Isles? That sort of thing should be covered.

New Character Options: New races and new classes are usually the major headlining elements to a new expansion, and we'll probably get a look at these kinds of details. Now, granted, when BC was announced, they knew Blood Elves would join the Horde, but they hadn't actually decided on the new Alliance race - Pandaren had actually been a possibility. I, for one, am really happy they went with Draenei, who might be my favorite playable race. Still, that was the old days, and I think they'd be unlikely to skip such a major detail.

New Level Cap: There were only two expansions that only raised the cap by 5, but given the possibility of a level squish, we might see something crazy like "new level cap: 60."

Beyond that, it's a bit early to say. I'm hoping that they'll do this more like Blizzcon '09 (holy crap that was 10 years ago) when they gave us a bunch about ICC but also a fairly robust amount of detail about Cataclysm. It'd be good to see things like dungeons, important characters, and details about whatever new systems get worked in.

Naturally, a lot of this is dependent on how far along they are in developing these things. How many zones are polished enough to show off? Naturally, it could all turn out like Blizzcon '11, where we got the basics and had a big series of posts (or maybe panels at other conventions) to talk about Mists in depth.

Still, I'm very confident we'll get the next expansion announced, and if it's not on the PTR by then (which seems very possible,) we'll also get a very big info dump on 8.3.

In a lot of ways, I think BFA has more to resolve than it can in one more patch. So I'm curious to see exactly where the focus will be. I'm leaning toward N'zoth, but that will mean that the Sylvanas story and with it the general Alliance/Horde war story is unlikely to come to a conclusion here. So unless they're going to pull a Wrath and make this a four-tier expansion, or if they're willing to resolve a ton of plot in questing content rather than raids, I think there are a lot of threads that could carry through to 9.0.

Are the Shadowlands a Reasonable Setting for a WoW Expansion?

To avoid being clickbait-y: my argument is going to be yes.

But let's get into it:

WoW, like basically every RPG that exists, from Final Fantasy to the Elder Scrolls, is heavily influenced by Dungeons & Dragons - a game you might have seen me posting a great deal about on this blog.

D&D's larger cosmology, which usually applies even if you're making your own homebrewed settings, is built on the idea of different planes. Your ordinary, mundane world is the Prime Material Plane - and in fact, all the mundane worlds where what we'd consider normal people come from (normal including elves and dwarves and the like) are in that same plane. There are a bunch of different planes as well, though, like the Inner Planes - which notably include the Elemental Planes - and the Outer Planes, which is where one tends to find gods, as well as angels, demons, and devils (in D&D, those latter two things are distinct from one another, though what you'd probably think of as demons in general in most settings are referred to as "fiends.")

But the planes the absolute closest to the prime material plane are two sort of reflections of the material world: the Feywild and the Shadowfell.

Now, obviously Warcraft has elemental planes (they even have distinctive names, where in D&D they're just "The Elemental Plane of Water," etc.) But we've also learned more about planes that feel very closely equivalent to the Feywild and the Shadowfell, namely the Emerald Dream and the Shadowlands.

Now, granted, the Feywild is much more like the land of Faerie as derived from Celtic mythology, being a place filled with magic and Fair Folk (aka Fairies) who act in ways totally foreign to normal people - meaning that they're just as likely to be murderously dangerous as they are to be genuinely helpful, and it's not going to be terribly obvious which way things will go based on appearance.

The Emerald Dream, outside of corruption by the Nightmare, is a much more obviously benevolent place, home to benevolent Wild Gods (which one could argue is actually more akin to D&D's Beastlands - an outer plane that exists between Neutral Good and Chaotic Good.)

If the Feywild is lush and filled with unpredictable magic and creatures, the Shadowfell is a bleak, grey reflection of the world that tends to be filled with undead and ruins - if you've ever played Dark Souls III, you could probably imagine most of the stuff in that game to look right at home in the Shadowfell. Actually, probably most of Bloodborne too. The popular Ravenloft gothic horror setting for D&D takes place in a group of pocket demiplanes called the Domains of Dread, which can be thought of as kind of soap bubbles within the greater Shadowfell.

In WoW, the Shadowlands serve a more specific mystical purpose - it's where the spirits of the dead go when people die. And whether it's a transitory plane before they go onto some afterlife (or are reincarnated) or if it's purely just the "underworld" hasn't been explicitly answered. Ironically, of all the planes in WoW, it's the one you've probably gone to the most frequently, given that our ghosts that pop in at the graveyard are technically traversing the Shadowlands.

Right: so would the Shadowlands work as a setting?

Basically all WoW expansions have primarily taken place in Warcraft's equivalent of the Prime Material plane. You could argue that Outland, being partially sunk into the Twisting Nether, makes it a planar adventure, and Draenor is of course in a different timeline (though potentially the same material plane.)

For many years, the Emerald Dream was considered an obvious location for an expansion - indeed, there was even work done on a large Emerald Dream area that found its way into Vanilla files - though whether this was meant to be a raid or an expansion I don't know. But Blizzard decided that the lore wouldn't make for a good expansion - not that there's not interesting stuff for the Dream, but that it just wouldn't be visually interesting.

The Emerald Dream is said to be a version of Azeroth that exists as if no civilization had ever risen. The Sundering never happened, and there's no buildings or settlements. So not a whole lot to work with for a whole expansion. Granted, we did see bits of Thunder Bluff in the Emerald Nightmare raid, so maybe that notion has been retconned. But it seems unlikely that we'll get that one.

But are the Shadowlands bound the same way?

In a rather pessimistic way, one can think of the Emerald Dream as the "before" picture of Azeroth. The Shadowlands, being the land of the dead, could almost be thought of as the "after." This is a place where civilization has arisen and all the changes the people of the world have wrought on the planet have taken place - but it's all in the past. Again, I'm reminded of Dark Souls III, where toward the end of the game (and a big chunk of the Ringed City DLC) you travel seemingly to the farthest possible future and see the many great civilizations' ruins all tumbling and crushing together, covered in ash. So you'd actually have plenty of opportunities to have interesting locations for us to visit in the Shadowlands.

But then there's the other issue: if we're literally in the Shadowlands when we travel as a ghost, shouldn't it really just look exactly like the real world?

See, in D&D, the Shadowfell isn't really where the dead go when they die - characters who die in D&D just die, and then they either get resurrected, or they go to the Outer Planes for their afterlife. The "ghost run" is really just a gameplay mechanic with some lore to explain it. In D&D, the Shadowfell is truly a different place - there's, for example, a city called Evernight in the Shadowfell that is the reflection of the prime material plane's city of Neverwinter, that, while a clear reflection of the other city, is fundamentally different, with its own inhabitants.

In WoW, you could imagine that the Shadowlands as it truly appears is not simply the ghost-version of the world. Maybe as a ghost whose time hasn't yet come, you don't see it as it really is. Or maybe, there's a "Border Shadowlands" and a "Deep Shadowlands," similar to how D&D has the Ethereal Plane (which, I should note, is where you tend to find ghosts, for the record) has a "border" aspect to it that overlays with the prime material, and a "deep" aspect that has you move sort of fifth-dimensionally into a misty world that has portals to the other inner planes. Perhaps the "Deep Shadowlands" could have its own places and even inhabitants.

Of course, alternatively, we could return to the connection with Ravenloft. The Domains of Dread are created by mysterious entities known as the "Dark Powers," who tend to find particularly evil (and usually tragically self-deluded) individuals and create demiplanes for them in which they are forced to live through their self-inflicted tragedies over and over, acting as both rulers of their domains but also prisoners within them.

This would be a way for the Shadowlands to have its cake and eat it too - being a reflection of Azeroth, but also allowing for cool new locations.

And you know why I think this would totally work? Because we've already seen one of these Warcraft Domains of Dread.

Helheim.

I don't remember if it's explicitly stated, but I strongly believe that Helheim is in the Shadowlands. But it's also not the equivalent space of anywhere on Azeroth (we know of.) And Helya, as a totally tragic figure who then did great damage to the world only to be trapped in her own realm totally fits as a Ravenloft-style Dark Lord (not to be confused with the Dark Powers.)

So one could imagine that a WoW expansion set in the Shadowlands could be a series of zones like Helheim, each with a different theme around the entities stuck there.

Thros, the land of Gorak Tul, was also not explicitly but almost certainly in the Shadowlands as well. Now, Thros did look exactly like the Crimson Forest, true, but it was also created for just a single (admittedly climactic) quest, and so I'd argue the reason it wasn't its own Helheim-like mini-zone was simply a question of developer efficiency.

I've generally assumed Ny'alotha is a place in the physical world - namely that it was simply the prison in which N'zoth was held (which would also mean that it was his capital city, like Ahn'qiraj for C'thun and possibly Ahn'Kahet for Yogg-Saron, assuming the latter really spanned all of what is now Northrend.) But given that N'zoth seems to be truly free of his bonds (and seemingly mobile - unless that was just his shadowy projection... I had previously assumed Old Gods couldn't really move given that they were burrowed into Azeroth) maybe the fact that Ilgynoth talked about going to Ny'alotha when we killed it, perhaps it's an Old God-y, void-corrupted area of the Shadowlands?

Given all these locations, and obviously with the potential for Blizzard to just make up more (I sure hadn't heard of Stormheim before Legion was announced,) I think you could very easily use the Shadowlands as a full expansion setting.

And frankly, given that I think WoW is usually best when it's going for the spooky horror stuff - between the Undead questing zones, Karazhan, practically all of Wrath, Black Rook Hold, and Drustvar - I could totally be down for an expansion in the spookiest place of all. Give me the Lich King, Helya, Bwonsamdi, and a role for Sylvanas that doesn't involve as much genocide, and I'm going to be a very happy WoW player.

Sylvanas in the Key Art for Blizzcon

Blizzard released the "key art" for Blizzcon - the splash of characters from their various franchises that they're there to talk about.

The Diablo barbarian is at the center, which either means potentially disappointing a ton of people (whether it's fair that they're disappointed or not I won't say) by simply talking Diablo Immortal, or driving people crazy in a good way by officially confirming Diablo IV.

But let's talk WoW, shall we?

The key art figure is Sylvanas.

Now, that's all the real news, to be honest. If you're here just for the facts (m'am,) we're done.

But let's look at what this could mean.

In 2017, the Blizzcon key art for World of Warcraft was Jaina - ironically in her old Dalaran Mage outfit, rather than her badass new Lord Admiral look. Still, while technically not telling us much, it did suggest rather strongly that we'd finally get to see Jaina's homeland and that she'd play a major role in the expansion's story.

To be fair, since the end of the Dazar'alor raid, in which she was the final boss, Jaina's role in BFA has somewhat lessened to more of a simple "main Alliance representative" state. I'm very eager to see how the whole Derek Proudmoore plotline goes (and hoping that Sylvanas made a miscalculation because she didn't know about Calia) but I think Jaina, with her quite compelling story in 8.0, has done most of what she was meant to do in BFA.

So what of Sylvanas?

Sylvanas is obviously a huge part of BFA. Always one of the most interesting and polarizing characters in WoW, her status as Warchief has put her destructive ways centerstage, no longer allowing her to hang out in the back as the Horde's own token evil team member. As an instigator, she's been much more prominent than her opposite number Anduin (one of the big reasons I wish we'd get more of a moral balance between the factions is that it might allow the Alliance to actually do something - and yes, I shouldn't ignore Dazar'alor, which was rather big and also rather ethically questionable - but far from obviously evil the way that, say, Teldrassil was.)

But her presence in the key art for Blizzcon 2019 suggests very strongly to me that Sylvanas' story is not going to be resolved in BFA.

I hear a lot of speculation that N'zoth is going to be saved for the next expansion at the earliest, but frankly, I don't think so. We were told that it'd be clear who the final boss of BFA was after the Eternal Palace raid, and I sure as hell didn't see Sylvanas unleashed from an ancient, millennia-old prison.

The reason I don't mind fighting N'zoth "prematurely" is that A: it's not premature. We've been waiting to fight this thing since he was first mentioned way back in Cataclysm - which came out nine years ago. And B: N'zoth is the master manipulator. While Blizzard might even sell it as if we decisively defeat him at the end of BFA, they have an infinite license for N'zoth to re-emerge in some form and simply reveal that dying at our hands wasn't even a setback - it was all part of the plan.

There's no datamining, no leaks, nothing like that to back this up except logical storytelling, but my theory (and I won't say it's my prediction exactly, as much as it's where I think the story logically needs to go) is that BFA ends with us killing N'zoth, but in so doing corrupting Azeroth (the Titan, to be specific.) And then, someone makes the hard decision - maybe it's Sylvanas, maybe not - that Azeroth needs to die. We can't risk a Void Titan emerging and destroying the universe. We did what we could to save her, but with the Old Gods finally triumphant, we need to do the unimaginable in order to prevent the worst.

But then, there's a loophole. Where do the souls of the dead go when they die? Bwonsamdi calls it the Other Side, but it's known more broadly as the Shadowlands.

And who has dedicated herself to understanding the dead and how to bring the dead back? Sylvanas Windrunner.

And what a nasty position we'd all find ourselves in. The Alliance rages against Sylvanas for her many terrible crimes against them. The Horde rages against her for her tyrannical rule. But it turns out we need her, because without her, the world soul is lost forever.

That's all totally speculative, of course. But Sylvanas' place in the key art suggests, to me, that she'll continue to be an important figure in the next expansion.

Now, to be fair, there is a pattern that could mean that Sylvanas is both this expansion's end boss and also continues to play a prominent role.

BFA doesn't have "tier sets" but it does have major raids versus minor ones, similar to how things would be broken down in other expansions. Legion had the Emerald Nightmare and Trial of Valor as "minor raids," while Nighthold, Tomb of Sargeras, and Antorus were the tier raids.

BFA could be broken down in a similar way. Uldir and Crucible of Storms are the minor raids, while Battle for Dazar'alor, the Eternal Palace, and whatever the last raid is will fill those "tier raid" roles.

And let's think about something: Dazar'alor and the Eternal Palace have two things in common regarding their final bosses. Neither died (or at least, didn't stay dead - it's unclear if Azshara was dead or unconscious before N'zoth woke her up.) And both were in the Warbringers shorts that came out prior to BFA.

There's one more character from those shorts: Syvlanas Windrunner. So might we actually see her as the final boss, and also see her survive the raid?

Now, granted, doing so would really raise some eyebrows given Blizzard's insistence that Sylvanas is not just Garrosh 2.0. Having her as the final boss of an expansion and then lead us into the next one is exactly what they did with Garrosh. But it would complete that pattern, and humans freaking love to see patterns.

Regardless of whether Sylvanas or N'zoth wind up being the final boss fight of BFA, I'm feeling quite confident that Sylvanas will be a major player in expansion eight. And to me, that suggests that the subtle death and death-magic theme of BFA will be far less subtle next expansion, much as Legion's Old God themes became far more prominent in BFA.

Lovecraftian Subclasses in the Latest Unearthed Arcana

After the last UA gave us a wild magic Barbarian subclass and a psychic-themed monk subclass, the latest gives us new subclasses for the Sorcerer and Barbarian, as well as a new cantrip.

Both involve elements common with the works of Lovecraft and cosmic horror.

Sorcerers get the Aberrant Mind sorcerous origin. The notion in this subclass is that your sorcerer got their powers after being tainted by some kind of aberration - being born in some place warped by the Far Realm, maybe having been enslaved by an Aboleth, or even having nearly undergone Cereomorphosis, only for the process (which would have seen your body essentially overtaken by a nascent Mind Flayer) to fail.

Aberrant Minds get several free spells (not counting against the "known spell" limit) that, when cast using Sorcery Points, actually count as Psionics and thus don't require any components (it took me a very long time to figure out that was the distinction.) You can also eventually find yourself transformed in various body-horror ways to give various physical benefits. Definitely one of the creepier subclasses, and if my Great Old One Warlock ever multiclasses into Sorcerer, this'd probably have to be the subclass for him.

Warlocks get the Lurker in the Deep. Now, if you've watched Critical Role's second campaign, you'll be familiar with Fjord (pronounced just "Ford,") the well-meaning but deceptive half-orc who woke up after nearly drowning in a shipwreck with a magical falchion by his side. Fjord is a Hexblade warlock, but his patron is less Shadowfell-y and more like a Great Old One - a massive underwater sea monster titan with, just, too many eyes called Uk'otoa. Well, even if I think it fits Great Old One, it's an even better match for the Lurker in the Deep, which has a patron that's some ancient underwater creature like an Aboleth, Kraken, or Leviathan - maybe even something from the Plane of Water. In addition to some obvious aquatic-based abilities, you can also have your patron come and aid you in various ways, and summon a tentacle of theirs to help in combat.

So what could this all mean?

After seeing the Order Domain, Circle of Spores, School of Invention (which sort of became a magic item,) as well as several Ravnica races that were first tested in Unearthed Arcana before the Ravnica sourcebook was announced, I now look at a lot of UA articles as potential hints for something in the future.

On one hand, the psionic nature of Aberrant Mind and the Monks' Way of the Astral Self makes me wonder if they might be gearing up for some Dark Sun-themed release, which I know to be a popular (and very different from both Forgotten Realms and Eberron) setting. On the other hand, Lurker in the Deep sure as hell ain't going to be much of a thing on the desert world of Athas (unless there's some vast ocean there I'm not aware of.)

The truth is that these could just be ideas they're tossing at the wall. Or, we might get something more akin to Xanathar's Guide to Everything, which is not really about any one particular theme but adds some "missing pieces" that feel like they fill out the options pretty well.

But given how my homebrew setting has cosmic horror monsters that even fiends consider dangerous as its most prominent supernatural threat, I'm very curious to see if we see more of that sort of thing in future 5E releases. After all, with Out of the Abyss and Descent into Avernus, we've got two major adventures featuring the headlining fiend types. Maybe a bit more in the way of the aberration is what we could use next.

How Much to Demand of a TTRPG System

So, I've been reading a bit about Pathfinder 2.0. Years ago, a friend started talking about running a Pathfinder game - this was prior to D&D 5th Edition, when the common wisdom was that Pathfinder was the better game. Not having had any TTRPG experience, I had no idea what the differences might be, and so I said I'd make a half-orc beast master in an effort to play against my usual types (which tend to be very arcane, urban-friendly, and plate-wearing if I can manage it.)

Now, I'm about four years into a very deep delve into D&D 5th Edition. I have sixteen official D&D books, plus two Kobold Press books (Tome of Beasts and Creature Codex) as well as a pre-ordered Eberron: Rising from the Last War not to mention a strong inclination to get Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus (you had me at Infernal War Machines.)

While I've been experiencing major campaign frustrations lately (we've played less than once a month this year) I'm nevertheless steeped in D&D - its mechanics, and increasingly, its lore (though given my homebrew setting, which even has its own outer planes and gods with no real crossover with the D&D canon except Great Old Ones like Tharizdun whom I reason could cross between multiverses as a being of the Far Realm, it's more for inspiration than real background.)

Those books are, honestly, a rather significant financial investment in D&D, even if I've tended to buy them on sale (feeling guilty for supporting Amazon rather than my local game stores, but a 40% discount is hard to pass up.) And that's not to mention the huge time commitment as well - it's hard enough to corral players together for my game without learning and then teaching them a whole new game system.

And yet, there are intriguing ideas I've read about in Pathfinder Second Edition that make me want to take a look at it.

The first thing that struck me is that the concept of "race" is replaced by "ancestry." Now, while this might in practice be merely a semantic change, it's something I appreciate. For one thing, the edition seems to be emphasizing that none of these peoples are inherently evil. In the Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron, they justify non-evil Goblins and Orcs by suggesting that Eberron is more distant from gods like Maglubiyet and Gruumsh, whose evil filters down to their people.

But I'm always uncomfortable with the idea that any person is truly evil based on their ancestry, given the rather obvious real-world racism such beliefs mirror. To be certain there are some cultural practices that are passed down that I'd consider evil, but it's not in the genes (it's also important to note that every culture has its evils, and usually the way we demonize others is by minimizing our own flaws while magnifying others'.)

There seems to be a lot more freedom in Pathfinder both for building characters and taking actions in combat. In the latter, it appears that feats - a "potentially every four levels or so if you want to give up an ASI" thing in D&D - are the main way that you build your character. It can mean the difference (I think - again, haven't read the book) between something like a Fighter versus something like a Paladin. It's how you multiclass. It's even how you say that your character is a half-elf or a half-orc - apparently half elves, for example, are humans with a feat that denotes their other heritage (I'm curious if you can do it the other way - be an elf with a feat denoting human heritage.)

In combat, the way it seems to work, you get three actions per turn - but no specific allowance for movement. Which seems to suggest you can attack more if you plant your feet.

My sense is that Pathfinder 2E is more complex than D&D 5E, being less beginner-friendly but also letting greater customization.

What I don't know is if those rules get complex everywhere.

See, here's the thing: one of the things I like about D&D 5E is that a lot of the stuff you do in game doesn't need to have specific mechanics. You can boil down almost everything to skill checks and saving throws and then have the DM just sort of "yes, and" the party.

I know there are rules written for stuff like downtime, with tables to roll on and the like, but to a large extent I like to just run it logically as a story.

It's only really combat where I get very strict about rules (and I'm willing to bend those when it makes for a good moment - like letting someone cast Mage Hand and pour a healing potion into the mouth of someone who's about to die.)

And I get that people have different ways they like to interface with the game. If I want strictly rules-based gaming, I tend to go for video games. There are a lot of options for rules-tinkering strategy. Indeed, while I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Magic: the Gathering, higher level play (which, playing Online, it all seemed to be) sucked some of the fun out of it, when I was more interested in coming up with fun, flavorful decks. In fact, the release of the Ravnica book for D&D was really exciting for me because I love that setting (and ok, loved that set as well in large part because it was much more balanced than the previous ones) and I was (and am) excited to play through stories set there.

Again, I'm speaking from kind of a place of ignorance - I don't really know enough about Pathfinder to know whether I'd like it more or less (or equally in different ways) than D&D 5E. But I'm also wondering a bit whether it would even make that much of a difference.