I've been on a bit of a nostalgic DS9 kick lately (that's Star Trek: Deep Space Nine for the uninitiated.) My favorite character on the series is actually never listed as part of the main cast, despite being a major character for all seven seasons.
The basic premise of DS9 is that the Cardassians (whose empire is a totalitarian, fascistic society) have finally ended their occupation of the planet Bajor after sixty years, likely due to the influence of the Federation. Ben Sisko, a Commander in Starfleet, is given command of "Terok Nor," a Cardassian space station that had been used as a base of operations for the occupying forces, which Starfleet has renamed Deep Space Nine.
There's a lot of drama mined from the scars left by generations of military occupation and oppression, and also the desperate and morally ambiguous measures the Bajoran resistance took to fight off the occupation.
While the Cardassians transfer control of the station to the Federation (with a strong implication they'll take any opportunity they can to take it back,) there is one lone Cardassian civilian who is left behind - Elim Garak, a tailor who has a clothing store on DS9's Promenade - its sort of communal "main street."
Of course, it becomes obvious very early on that Garak is actually a veteran intelligence operative with the Obsidian Order, Cardassia's intelligence agency - or rather, he was. Garak is a fascinating character because, while it becomes clear that he wishes to help the Federation and preserve Bajoran freedom, he is also tied to his own people. Also, a life in the cloak-and-dagger business has made him both extremely wary of others and also very cynical about them. He also has a sort of "realpolitik" view of things that allows him to engage in actions that clash heavily with the ideals of Starfleet, even at one point assassinating a (relatively) innocent diplomat for a grander political purpose.
He's a great character, and it got me thinking: how would one make him in D&D?
A couple things are obvious: he's a Rogue, and he's got the Spy background. I might swap out a language for proficiency in tailoring tools - it is, after all, his cover. I'd also give him the Mastermind subclass, as that's the sort of deft manipulation that he would employ (as always, I think College of Whispers bards work quite well for spies and assassins, so he could multiclass into that as a possibility.)
Now, what about race?
I've often contended that many Star Trek species can be easily translated into fantasy races. Humans are humans, obviously. Klingons are Orcs, with their obsession with warfare and battlefield honor (particularly their failure to live up to those ideals and tendency to devolve into bloodlust.)
(The Borg are also basically sci-fi zombies.)
Now, Vulcans and Romulans present a quandry.
In generic fantasy, I'd say they make for really obvious High Elves and Dark Elves. Indeed, the Drows' ruthless and cutthroat society fits quite well with the Romulans. They even have the requisite pointy ears. And Vulcans are, similarly, "good guys" but also infuriatingly smug about that status, usually looking down on humans even as humans catch up to them in just a handful of generations.
The thing is, we also have the Gith. The Gith are, I would bet, directly inspired by the Vulcans and Romulans. Not only do they have psionic abilities (Mind Meld, anyone?) but their cultures are even divided in similar ways.
The Githzerai, with their focus on a sort of monastic practice of balance, feel directly inspired by the Vulcan ideals of Logic. Meanwhile, the Githyanki, hiding away on the Astral Plane with a serious "kill first, ask questions only if the prisoners survived" attitude feel quite akin to the Romulans.
The Cardassians are, frankly, kind of B-tier Star Trek aliens - not in terms of quality, but in terms of recognizability. Someone who has never seen an episode has probably heard of Klingons and Vulcans, but it's very likely they think Cardassians are a bunch of reality-show stars.
Now, if we say Drow are Romulans, that frees of Githyanki to be Cardassians.
But I think I might instead go with Hobgoblins.
Hobgoblins are kind of fascinating to me as a race, given that the other two major goblinoids, the standard goblin and the bugbear, are both sort of dumb and chaotic. Hobgoblins, however, have that totalitarian vibe to them (the Hobgoblin Iron Shadow is a stat block for a monastic secret police order in their society.) They place a high value on their status within their society (see the "Saving Face" racial ability), and are quite intelligent.
This all fits pretty well with Cardassians.
So that's what I'd go with: a Hobgoblin Mastermind Rogue with a Spy background customized to allow proficiency in tailoring tools (or maybe train for it with downtime.)
Saturday, February 29, 2020
Friday, February 28, 2020
Speculating on the Contents of Mythic Odyssey to Theros
(Edit: Corrected the title, because obviously it's Mythic, not Mystical)
Well, the new campaign-setting book leaked (notably before Explorer's Guide to Wildemount has even come out - which gives me hope that this isn't like "overriding" some wacky Spelljammer or Planescape or other D&D setting book - I say this as someone who was overjoyed at Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica despite others complaining) I've been looking into Theros as a setting.
Naturally, it's a Greek-mythology-themed world.
Despite the fact that I love to come up with lore for a world's setting, the things I get most excited about in D&D sourcebooks are the stuff you can pillage for your own settings. So let's go through and see what we find:
Races:
Every world has its own peoples, and Theros will likely have a number of appropriately Greek-mythology-based playable races.
In Magic settings, they often have about one "normal humanoid" race for each of the five colors, with Humans often inhabiting either White mana in particular or being found in all five colors. Given the way that humans are sort of instantly relatable, one tends to find them in every setting (though notably not in Magic's Lorwyn/Shadowmoor setting.)
So, Humans are obvious.
Minotaurs and Centaurs are both found in Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, and I imagine we'll simply see them reprinted in Theros unchanged. Minotaurs are one of Magic's staple "red" races, second only to Goblins in their frequency.
Centaurs are a staple "green" race.
Given that both originate in Greek mythology, it shouldn't surprise you to find that these pop up in Theros.
Aside from humans, Theros' other "white" race (man that phrasing feels problematic outside of context) are the Leonin, who are Lion-people (and are found on many Magic worlds.) The Leonin tend to be represented simply as "cats" in Magic's game mechanics, but would likely be considered a playable race in their own right. However, unlike D&D's existing cat-people, the lithe Tabaxi, Leonin are more the kind of proud, brave types, and thus would probably get a bonus to strength instead of dexterity, and possibly have a totally different set of abilities.
Theros' "blue" race is very easy to translate: while they have the Merfolk creature type (a common blue creature type in Magic,) Theros' merfolk are called Tritons, which... is already a playable race in D&D! So just swap out the lore slightly and reprint that from Volo's Guide to Monsters and you're set.
Now, Theros' "black" race (again, problematic out of context) is less obvious. Often, in Magic, the "black" creature type that's most common for human-scale creatures is Zombie. Theros does have Gorgons, but I don't know how common they are. Still, they're a possibility. Likely, given that D&D calls Gorgons Medusas and has a different monster called Gorgons (both can petrify people, but the latter is like a big metal bull monster,) we'd likely see the playable race called Medusas as well. If that's the case, I'd definitely make them playable in Ravnica, as they're certainly a presence there.
Theros also has another humanoid green race in Satyrs. While these guys are Fey in the Monster Manual, we also say Minotaurs and Centaurs swap creature types in Ravnica (ironically, Minotaurs are changed to humanoids while Cenaturs are changed from humanoids to fey.) Like Centaurs, I'd probably count Satyrs as fey creatures but still allow them to be playable (and certainly give them bonuses to charisma.)
With seven baseline playable races, the setting is pretty decently set up.
Subclasses:
Now that we've found out about this, a few of the recent Unearthed Arcana subclasses seem like obvious fits. The Circle of Stars Druid feels extremely appropriate for Theros, given the way that things related to the otherworld of Nyx all have a star-like form to them. A Star Druid's celestial form is described exactly as a Nyx-related thing would appear.
Similarly, the Unity Domain Cleric feels like a good fit for many Greek-like gods, such as Athena or Aphrodite. While these don't have direct equivalents in Theros, it wouldn't be hard to find other good fits.
The Bard College of Eloquence could play into the idea of Greek poets, allowing you to basically be Homer.
And the Paladin Oath of Heroism is just about the most Greek mythology thing I can imagine, given the emphasis in Greek myth on how fame was the way to achieve glory and a paradise on the Elysian Fields.
While the Lurker in the Deep Warlock patron feels a bit more Lovecraftian than Greek, one could affiliate it with the Titans trapped in the Underworld (or the Hundred-Handed Giants from actual Greek mythology, which, to be frank, are kind of the original Cthulu-like creatures.)
The Monks' Way of the Astral Self feels similar to the Druid Circle of Stars as another Nyx-themed subclass.
I think a lot of those subclasses would work well for other settings - the Psionic ones being very good for Dark Sun, for instance. But given Ravnica's introduction of Circle of Spores and the Order Domain, it seems likely we'd get at least a couple new ones with Theros.
Monsters:
A lot of stuff is covered by the Monster Manual here, so I imagine we'll either get a light bestiary or we might see a lot more variants on existing monsters, somewhat like we did in Ravnica. I'd love to see statblocks for the Gods, who are much more approachable here than they are in other D&D settings.
Obviously, the book hasn't actually been announced yet, but I'm always eager to dig into these campaign setting books, and I'm glad to see them ramping them up in this stage of 5th Edition.
Well, the new campaign-setting book leaked (notably before Explorer's Guide to Wildemount has even come out - which gives me hope that this isn't like "overriding" some wacky Spelljammer or Planescape or other D&D setting book - I say this as someone who was overjoyed at Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica despite others complaining) I've been looking into Theros as a setting.
Naturally, it's a Greek-mythology-themed world.
Despite the fact that I love to come up with lore for a world's setting, the things I get most excited about in D&D sourcebooks are the stuff you can pillage for your own settings. So let's go through and see what we find:
Races:
Every world has its own peoples, and Theros will likely have a number of appropriately Greek-mythology-based playable races.
In Magic settings, they often have about one "normal humanoid" race for each of the five colors, with Humans often inhabiting either White mana in particular or being found in all five colors. Given the way that humans are sort of instantly relatable, one tends to find them in every setting (though notably not in Magic's Lorwyn/Shadowmoor setting.)
So, Humans are obvious.
Minotaurs and Centaurs are both found in Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, and I imagine we'll simply see them reprinted in Theros unchanged. Minotaurs are one of Magic's staple "red" races, second only to Goblins in their frequency.
Centaurs are a staple "green" race.
Given that both originate in Greek mythology, it shouldn't surprise you to find that these pop up in Theros.
Aside from humans, Theros' other "white" race (man that phrasing feels problematic outside of context) are the Leonin, who are Lion-people (and are found on many Magic worlds.) The Leonin tend to be represented simply as "cats" in Magic's game mechanics, but would likely be considered a playable race in their own right. However, unlike D&D's existing cat-people, the lithe Tabaxi, Leonin are more the kind of proud, brave types, and thus would probably get a bonus to strength instead of dexterity, and possibly have a totally different set of abilities.
Theros' "blue" race is very easy to translate: while they have the Merfolk creature type (a common blue creature type in Magic,) Theros' merfolk are called Tritons, which... is already a playable race in D&D! So just swap out the lore slightly and reprint that from Volo's Guide to Monsters and you're set.
Now, Theros' "black" race (again, problematic out of context) is less obvious. Often, in Magic, the "black" creature type that's most common for human-scale creatures is Zombie. Theros does have Gorgons, but I don't know how common they are. Still, they're a possibility. Likely, given that D&D calls Gorgons Medusas and has a different monster called Gorgons (both can petrify people, but the latter is like a big metal bull monster,) we'd likely see the playable race called Medusas as well. If that's the case, I'd definitely make them playable in Ravnica, as they're certainly a presence there.
Theros also has another humanoid green race in Satyrs. While these guys are Fey in the Monster Manual, we also say Minotaurs and Centaurs swap creature types in Ravnica (ironically, Minotaurs are changed to humanoids while Cenaturs are changed from humanoids to fey.) Like Centaurs, I'd probably count Satyrs as fey creatures but still allow them to be playable (and certainly give them bonuses to charisma.)
With seven baseline playable races, the setting is pretty decently set up.
Subclasses:
Now that we've found out about this, a few of the recent Unearthed Arcana subclasses seem like obvious fits. The Circle of Stars Druid feels extremely appropriate for Theros, given the way that things related to the otherworld of Nyx all have a star-like form to them. A Star Druid's celestial form is described exactly as a Nyx-related thing would appear.
Similarly, the Unity Domain Cleric feels like a good fit for many Greek-like gods, such as Athena or Aphrodite. While these don't have direct equivalents in Theros, it wouldn't be hard to find other good fits.
The Bard College of Eloquence could play into the idea of Greek poets, allowing you to basically be Homer.
And the Paladin Oath of Heroism is just about the most Greek mythology thing I can imagine, given the emphasis in Greek myth on how fame was the way to achieve glory and a paradise on the Elysian Fields.
While the Lurker in the Deep Warlock patron feels a bit more Lovecraftian than Greek, one could affiliate it with the Titans trapped in the Underworld (or the Hundred-Handed Giants from actual Greek mythology, which, to be frank, are kind of the original Cthulu-like creatures.)
The Monks' Way of the Astral Self feels similar to the Druid Circle of Stars as another Nyx-themed subclass.
I think a lot of those subclasses would work well for other settings - the Psionic ones being very good for Dark Sun, for instance. But given Ravnica's introduction of Circle of Spores and the Order Domain, it seems likely we'd get at least a couple new ones with Theros.
Monsters:
A lot of stuff is covered by the Monster Manual here, so I imagine we'll either get a light bestiary or we might see a lot more variants on existing monsters, somewhat like we did in Ravnica. I'd love to see statblocks for the Gods, who are much more approachable here than they are in other D&D settings.
Obviously, the book hasn't actually been announced yet, but I'm always eager to dig into these campaign setting books, and I'm glad to see them ramping them up in this stage of 5th Edition.
Leaked: Mythic Odysseys of Theros D&D Campaign Setting Book
(Edit: fixed the title. Obviously, it's Mythic, not Mystical.)
It looks as if, in addition to Wildemount, another setting is coming to 5th Edition D&D, and it's Magic: the Gathering's Theros. There has been a leak from, I believe, Penguin Publishing, that suggests that's what we're getting next.
Replicating the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, this book looks as if it will take the Magic plane and translate it into a setting for Dungeons & Dragons.
Theros is Magic's "Greek Mythology" plane, and one that I am far less familiar with than Ravnica, having never played during its sets. However, given the recent release of Theros: Beyond Death, it makes sense that they'd be looking at this now.
Frankly, I'm a little surprised that they're going with Theros given that it's far less original of a world than Ravnica - I'd have expected them to do something more like Zendikar (which was, itself, built to be an "adventure world" that replicated some RPG-like mechanics on its cards.) Still, I'm not one to complain when cool stuff happens, though I can imagine some of the old-school purists are frustrated that they aren't announcing a Spelljammer or Planescape book (that being said, it looks like they're really ramping up on campaign setting books, so I'm holding out hope.)
Here's my basic understanding of Theros:
The world has two sides to it: there is the ordinary, mundane world with its humans, minotaurs, and merfolk, as well as beasts like hydras and griffins and such. But then there is also the world of Nyx, which is the realm of the supernatural and the gods.
Very unlike Ravnica, Gods play a big role in Theros, and like the Greek Pantheon, they have their own agendas and potentially selfish motivations. In Magic, Gods and other sort of inherently supernatural creatures are represented by making them both Enchantments and Creatures (in Magic, an Enchantment is like a permanent spell that stays in play after you play it and tends to have an ongoing effect.)
It remains to be seen what major mechanical concepts they'll bring in for Theros. Ravnica, of course, was built around the ten guilds and the ways that membership in a guild could drive your character. I know less about Theros, but I believe a couple things can be taken into account:
For one, much like Classical Greece, the place is not a united nation, but rather a group of rival city-states (or polises) and I could see being from one place or another having an effect on your character.
In terms of playable races, I suspect we might see the Leonin (a race of lion-people found in many Magic planes) as well as reprinting Centaurs and Minotaurs from Ravnica. Merfolk could be playable (maybe as re-skinned Tritons, which is how I'm approaching them in my Ravnica game.) We could also possibly see Satyrs (perhaps, like Centaurs, giving them a Fey creature type.) It might be a stretch, but Gorgons as a playable race might also work (though probably renamed "Medusas" for D&D, as they were in the Ravnica book.)
Gods, of course, often play a role in D&D, but Theros is a place with very active gods, which could be exciting, and I imagine they might come up with some new rules surrounding the gods.
There are two ways I see this book making a big impact on my home games.
First, our regular Sunday game DM'd by a friend has had a strong Greek myth theme to it, given that our Paladin worships Athena, despite being from the Forgotten Realms. While I doubt we'll just go to Theros (that would require travel through the Far Realm to bridge continuities) it could give our DM some inspiration.
For me, I'm literally starting my (official) first session of a Ravnica campaign, and I have a mechanism in place to allow for Planeswalker character (I'm also using Oldwalker rules to allow them to eventually learn to summon allies with them) and Theros just became a much more likely plane for us to visit.
It looks as if, in addition to Wildemount, another setting is coming to 5th Edition D&D, and it's Magic: the Gathering's Theros. There has been a leak from, I believe, Penguin Publishing, that suggests that's what we're getting next.
Replicating the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, this book looks as if it will take the Magic plane and translate it into a setting for Dungeons & Dragons.
Theros is Magic's "Greek Mythology" plane, and one that I am far less familiar with than Ravnica, having never played during its sets. However, given the recent release of Theros: Beyond Death, it makes sense that they'd be looking at this now.
Frankly, I'm a little surprised that they're going with Theros given that it's far less original of a world than Ravnica - I'd have expected them to do something more like Zendikar (which was, itself, built to be an "adventure world" that replicated some RPG-like mechanics on its cards.) Still, I'm not one to complain when cool stuff happens, though I can imagine some of the old-school purists are frustrated that they aren't announcing a Spelljammer or Planescape book (that being said, it looks like they're really ramping up on campaign setting books, so I'm holding out hope.)
Here's my basic understanding of Theros:
The world has two sides to it: there is the ordinary, mundane world with its humans, minotaurs, and merfolk, as well as beasts like hydras and griffins and such. But then there is also the world of Nyx, which is the realm of the supernatural and the gods.
Very unlike Ravnica, Gods play a big role in Theros, and like the Greek Pantheon, they have their own agendas and potentially selfish motivations. In Magic, Gods and other sort of inherently supernatural creatures are represented by making them both Enchantments and Creatures (in Magic, an Enchantment is like a permanent spell that stays in play after you play it and tends to have an ongoing effect.)
It remains to be seen what major mechanical concepts they'll bring in for Theros. Ravnica, of course, was built around the ten guilds and the ways that membership in a guild could drive your character. I know less about Theros, but I believe a couple things can be taken into account:
For one, much like Classical Greece, the place is not a united nation, but rather a group of rival city-states (or polises) and I could see being from one place or another having an effect on your character.
In terms of playable races, I suspect we might see the Leonin (a race of lion-people found in many Magic planes) as well as reprinting Centaurs and Minotaurs from Ravnica. Merfolk could be playable (maybe as re-skinned Tritons, which is how I'm approaching them in my Ravnica game.) We could also possibly see Satyrs (perhaps, like Centaurs, giving them a Fey creature type.) It might be a stretch, but Gorgons as a playable race might also work (though probably renamed "Medusas" for D&D, as they were in the Ravnica book.)
Gods, of course, often play a role in D&D, but Theros is a place with very active gods, which could be exciting, and I imagine they might come up with some new rules surrounding the gods.
There are two ways I see this book making a big impact on my home games.
First, our regular Sunday game DM'd by a friend has had a strong Greek myth theme to it, given that our Paladin worships Athena, despite being from the Forgotten Realms. While I doubt we'll just go to Theros (that would require travel through the Far Realm to bridge continuities) it could give our DM some inspiration.
For me, I'm literally starting my (official) first session of a Ravnica campaign, and I have a mechanism in place to allow for Planeswalker character (I'm also using Oldwalker rules to allow them to eventually learn to summon allies with them) and Theros just became a much more likely plane for us to visit.
Thursday, February 27, 2020
Baldur's Gate 3 Opening Cinematic and Details
The opening cinematic for Baldur's Gate 3 has been released, along with greater details about the game.
When the first two games in the series came out, along with other D&D-based computer RPGs like Planescape: Torment, I had next to no understanding of D&D. I played Magic: the Gathering in the 90s when I was a kid, but D&D was an enigma to me - one that no one I knew played.
I was not from some conservative region - quite the contrary - and while I did have an aunt who denounced RPGs, I'm sure my own parents would have been fine with it as long as I wasn't spending as much cash on it as I was on Magic.
Anyway, now that I'm a D&D fanatic, it's fun to see the trailer and actually understand what's going on:
What we see is the inside of a Nautiloid - the flying cephalopod organic ships used by the Ilithid, or Mind Flayers, some of the most insidious and ancient bad guys of D&D lore (who are very much inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, particularly Cthulhu.) We see a bunch of dead ilithids in this ship, but one living one, who has captured both a green-skinned Gith woman and you, the player character.
The Gith were once enslaved by the Ilithid, used for labor and imbued with some psionic abilities, but they eventually rose up and rebelled. In fact, the reason the Ilithid now tend to hide deep below the surface of the world in the Underdark is because the Gith have gotten very good at finding and exterminating them. The Gith underwent a schism, dividing between the ruthless and totalitarian Githyanki and the philosophical and enlightened Githzerai. We don't know which of these the woman is, as they're really only separated culturally, rather than physically.
Anyway, the ilithid picks out some "tadpoles" from the pool there and allows them to burrow into the Gith lady and your heads. This is the first stage of "cereomorphosis," which is the way that Ilithid reproduce. It's a horrific process in which the tadpole gradually grows inside the victim's head and mutates the body within, taking control of it, until the infected is transformed into a fully-grown Mind Flayer.
It looks as if the unnamed Ilithid is trying to replenish the crew of this ship, as we see a bunch of his kin dead on the ground. The ship flies over Baldur's Gate - the gritty, crime-plagued city in the Forgotten Realms - and begins abducting people with the Nautiloid's tentacles, presumably either to convert them or to feed on their brains.
However, in the midst of this brazen attack, a portal opens and several Githyanki riding on the backs of red dragons attack the ship (the Githyanki long ago made a deal with a brood of red dragons,) chasing the Ilithid and damaging its ship.
Presumably, the early part of this adventure will involve your character trying to remove the parasite from their head. I'm very curious to see who this Gith woman is - is she a Githyanki, and those attackers were trying to rescue a comrade, or is she Githzerai, and likely to be killed by the Githyanki along with the Ilithid?
And can she be saved, or is she going to become a mind flayer?
Anyway, it's nice to know the lore enough to feel like I can speculate about this.
When the first two games in the series came out, along with other D&D-based computer RPGs like Planescape: Torment, I had next to no understanding of D&D. I played Magic: the Gathering in the 90s when I was a kid, but D&D was an enigma to me - one that no one I knew played.
I was not from some conservative region - quite the contrary - and while I did have an aunt who denounced RPGs, I'm sure my own parents would have been fine with it as long as I wasn't spending as much cash on it as I was on Magic.
Anyway, now that I'm a D&D fanatic, it's fun to see the trailer and actually understand what's going on:
What we see is the inside of a Nautiloid - the flying cephalopod organic ships used by the Ilithid, or Mind Flayers, some of the most insidious and ancient bad guys of D&D lore (who are very much inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, particularly Cthulhu.) We see a bunch of dead ilithids in this ship, but one living one, who has captured both a green-skinned Gith woman and you, the player character.
The Gith were once enslaved by the Ilithid, used for labor and imbued with some psionic abilities, but they eventually rose up and rebelled. In fact, the reason the Ilithid now tend to hide deep below the surface of the world in the Underdark is because the Gith have gotten very good at finding and exterminating them. The Gith underwent a schism, dividing between the ruthless and totalitarian Githyanki and the philosophical and enlightened Githzerai. We don't know which of these the woman is, as they're really only separated culturally, rather than physically.
Anyway, the ilithid picks out some "tadpoles" from the pool there and allows them to burrow into the Gith lady and your heads. This is the first stage of "cereomorphosis," which is the way that Ilithid reproduce. It's a horrific process in which the tadpole gradually grows inside the victim's head and mutates the body within, taking control of it, until the infected is transformed into a fully-grown Mind Flayer.
It looks as if the unnamed Ilithid is trying to replenish the crew of this ship, as we see a bunch of his kin dead on the ground. The ship flies over Baldur's Gate - the gritty, crime-plagued city in the Forgotten Realms - and begins abducting people with the Nautiloid's tentacles, presumably either to convert them or to feed on their brains.
However, in the midst of this brazen attack, a portal opens and several Githyanki riding on the backs of red dragons attack the ship (the Githyanki long ago made a deal with a brood of red dragons,) chasing the Ilithid and damaging its ship.
Presumably, the early part of this adventure will involve your character trying to remove the parasite from their head. I'm very curious to see who this Gith woman is - is she a Githyanki, and those attackers were trying to rescue a comrade, or is she Githzerai, and likely to be killed by the Githyanki along with the Ilithid?
And can she be saved, or is she going to become a mind flayer?
Anyway, it's nice to know the lore enough to feel like I can speculate about this.
Tuesday, February 25, 2020
The Gift of Flesh
The third and penultimate LFR wing for Ny'alotha, the Waking City is out today.
While the previous wing had us ascending the two massive ziggurats on either side of the central hub area, this has us descend into the Maw of Gor'sha (I might have that name slightly wrong,) a fleshy descending spiral. It's possibly implied that this is, in fact, Il'gynoth's body - or maybe it's a part of N'zoth, and Il'gynoth is a growth out of N'zoth? Old Gods are gross, folks.
Anyway, you descend down this spiral and come to a boss room at each "floor."
This is from a tank perspective, as usual.
Shad'har:
This first fight is pretty simple and easy. A bit like Ursoc (but less complicated, at least on LFR) you have one tank hold onto the boss until he does "Crush", at which point the other tank needs to taunt quickly as he'll immediately do "Dissolve," and these two have some nasty synergy you want to avoid.
At each third of the fight, Shad'har will go get a new buff that does various nasty things to the raid and the tanks, but it's really about that simple for tanks.
Drest'agath:
This fight, I imagine, gets crazy on non-LFR. Essentially, DPS needs to burn down adds to keep them under control, and while you can damage the boss (and thus generate threat,) he'll heal back anything you do unless you have a debuff (which I think comes from killing the adds.)
The big thing is that the tank-swap debuff explodes after a few seconds, debuffing anything near you when it goes off - including the adds - increasing the damage they take by 65%. So you want to debuff the adds when you get this on you and then run back to the boss to taunt.
I believe that it gains abilities based on which adds are up, so the raid really needs to focus on keeping those adds under control.
Il'gynoth, Corruption Reborn:
This one's the final boss of the wing and, appropriately enough, the hardest.
Sadly, not as many cryptic whispers from him this time - maybe it was a bug. Still, here's the shape of the fight:
You need to reduce him to zero HP four times. During this phase, the following things happen:
He does a big beam attack that will hit and debuff anyone in front of him. The raid, including the off-tank, needs to stay away from the tank when this happens. Every two stacks of this, the tanks should swap, as getting hit with two stacks will probably one-shot the tank.
Next, random players will be targeted with these eye beams that leave nasty blue void energy on the ground, which remains there for the whole fight and will silence and damage you if you stand in it - so try to drop this stuff far from where people will be standing.
Periodically, blood bubble adds will pop up at three points (important to phase 2.) These fixate on targets, but can be stunned and slowed. When they die, they damage the whole raid, so be a little careful in pacing their deaths.
Once you reduce the boss to 0 hp, he retreats and three flesh-doors open upon his blood-pumping organs (which look a bit like his flesh-mass inside the tree from the Emerald Nightmare fight.) Have the DPS focus one of these down while the tanks (and maybe some back-up interrupters) go to the others to interrupt their casted ability, which summons more of those blood adds.
Once one organ is dead, Il'gynoth comes back and you go back to the first phase. Kill all three organs and kill Il'gynoth a fourth time and you're gold. That last phase is a doozy, though, with all the void crap on the ground and the blood adds swarming your healers.
While the previous wing had us ascending the two massive ziggurats on either side of the central hub area, this has us descend into the Maw of Gor'sha (I might have that name slightly wrong,) a fleshy descending spiral. It's possibly implied that this is, in fact, Il'gynoth's body - or maybe it's a part of N'zoth, and Il'gynoth is a growth out of N'zoth? Old Gods are gross, folks.
Anyway, you descend down this spiral and come to a boss room at each "floor."
This is from a tank perspective, as usual.
Shad'har:
This first fight is pretty simple and easy. A bit like Ursoc (but less complicated, at least on LFR) you have one tank hold onto the boss until he does "Crush", at which point the other tank needs to taunt quickly as he'll immediately do "Dissolve," and these two have some nasty synergy you want to avoid.
At each third of the fight, Shad'har will go get a new buff that does various nasty things to the raid and the tanks, but it's really about that simple for tanks.
Drest'agath:
This fight, I imagine, gets crazy on non-LFR. Essentially, DPS needs to burn down adds to keep them under control, and while you can damage the boss (and thus generate threat,) he'll heal back anything you do unless you have a debuff (which I think comes from killing the adds.)
The big thing is that the tank-swap debuff explodes after a few seconds, debuffing anything near you when it goes off - including the adds - increasing the damage they take by 65%. So you want to debuff the adds when you get this on you and then run back to the boss to taunt.
I believe that it gains abilities based on which adds are up, so the raid really needs to focus on keeping those adds under control.
Il'gynoth, Corruption Reborn:
This one's the final boss of the wing and, appropriately enough, the hardest.
Sadly, not as many cryptic whispers from him this time - maybe it was a bug. Still, here's the shape of the fight:
You need to reduce him to zero HP four times. During this phase, the following things happen:
He does a big beam attack that will hit and debuff anyone in front of him. The raid, including the off-tank, needs to stay away from the tank when this happens. Every two stacks of this, the tanks should swap, as getting hit with two stacks will probably one-shot the tank.
Next, random players will be targeted with these eye beams that leave nasty blue void energy on the ground, which remains there for the whole fight and will silence and damage you if you stand in it - so try to drop this stuff far from where people will be standing.
Periodically, blood bubble adds will pop up at three points (important to phase 2.) These fixate on targets, but can be stunned and slowed. When they die, they damage the whole raid, so be a little careful in pacing their deaths.
Once you reduce the boss to 0 hp, he retreats and three flesh-doors open upon his blood-pumping organs (which look a bit like his flesh-mass inside the tree from the Emerald Nightmare fight.) Have the DPS focus one of these down while the tanks (and maybe some back-up interrupters) go to the others to interrupt their casted ability, which summons more of those blood adds.
Once one organ is dead, Il'gynoth comes back and you go back to the first phase. Kill all three organs and kill Il'gynoth a fourth time and you're gold. That last phase is a doozy, though, with all the void crap on the ground and the blood adds swarming your healers.
Monday, February 24, 2020
Legendary-ing and Minion-ing
Apparently there's a rule from 4th edition D&D about creating "minions." These are minor enemies that can spice up a fight to make it a bit more challenging without being too crazy to run.
Having DM'd for a few years now, what I've definitely noticed is how it can be hard to build a really satisfying boss confrontation. Especially in the low levels, fights go pretty quickly one way or the other. I think the first two fights of my first session went by without any of my monsters getting a chance to hit the party.
A big part of this is action economy, but it also has to do with round-one bursts.
For instance, the first "dungeon boss" I tried to use was a Spectator - a kind of minor beholder in the Monster Manual. The Paladin, getting a good initiative roll, crit on the Spectator and then used divine smite, which did more than twice the monster's health in a single hit before it got a chance to do anything.
So, how to work around this?
First, minions:
Apparently (according to the Dungeon Dudes Youtube channel,) minions do the following:
You take a monster block - one without too many complicated passive mechanics - and you do the following:
You remove any spellcasting.
You remove multiattack - they just do one attack per action.
You give them one hit point - a single hit take them out.
You also give them Avoidance, which is like Evasion, except for all saving throws. Any save they succeed means they take no damage from the effect, but of course anything they fail, if it damages, means they die immediately.
You then have them do average damage on their attacks to keep things simple.
This allows you to throw in a lot more monsters into the fight, which will eat up attacks, and while the threat from them will be real if they aren't dealt with, dealing with them will not make the fight go on forever.
Next, another option: making a creature legendary.
To make an individual monster feel like a threat, it's going to need to live long enough to threaten the party and also have enough actions to keep the party from feeling safe most of the round.
In fact, minons are, in a roundabout sort of way, a bit like legendary actions. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
To make a monster legendary, here's what I recommend:
First, give them max health - whatever the max health they could roll with their dice, that's what they have.
Next, consider the following:
At super low levels (like 1,) you can probably skip these given how limited players' options are. But by level 5 or higher, you might want to give them either Magic Resistance (advantage on saves versus magical effects,) or 3 Legendary Resistances per day (when they fail at a saving throw, they can choose to succeed instead.) These will make it harder for the party to cheese them with a Hypnotic Pattern or a Suggestion or something like that.
Next, the biggest thing: Legendary actions.
The simplest Legendary Action is a basic attack or a cantrip. If their attacks have some nasty effect, you might consider making the attack cost 2 actions. But generally, if it's just a swing with a weapon or a firebolt, you can feel free to make this a legendary action.
Next, I recommend some sort of re-positioning ability. My Thought Spy last night had "Stutter Step," which allowed him to move up to half his movement speed without provoking opportunity attacks.
Both of these techniques are there to make a fight more epic, and also definitely challenging. If you do XP-based character advancement, you'll want to make a legendary creature reward extra XP - possibly doubling it. Minions, on the other hand, might count for a quarter of their normal value.
You can have a legendary creature with minions, but I think you'll want to be careful doing so, as you might make a fight that's just too overwhelming. Then again, my players always surprise each other with how well they can get through my challenges, so maybe go for it!
Having DM'd for a few years now, what I've definitely noticed is how it can be hard to build a really satisfying boss confrontation. Especially in the low levels, fights go pretty quickly one way or the other. I think the first two fights of my first session went by without any of my monsters getting a chance to hit the party.
A big part of this is action economy, but it also has to do with round-one bursts.
For instance, the first "dungeon boss" I tried to use was a Spectator - a kind of minor beholder in the Monster Manual. The Paladin, getting a good initiative roll, crit on the Spectator and then used divine smite, which did more than twice the monster's health in a single hit before it got a chance to do anything.
So, how to work around this?
First, minions:
Apparently (according to the Dungeon Dudes Youtube channel,) minions do the following:
You take a monster block - one without too many complicated passive mechanics - and you do the following:
You remove any spellcasting.
You remove multiattack - they just do one attack per action.
You give them one hit point - a single hit take them out.
You also give them Avoidance, which is like Evasion, except for all saving throws. Any save they succeed means they take no damage from the effect, but of course anything they fail, if it damages, means they die immediately.
You then have them do average damage on their attacks to keep things simple.
This allows you to throw in a lot more monsters into the fight, which will eat up attacks, and while the threat from them will be real if they aren't dealt with, dealing with them will not make the fight go on forever.
Next, another option: making a creature legendary.
To make an individual monster feel like a threat, it's going to need to live long enough to threaten the party and also have enough actions to keep the party from feeling safe most of the round.
In fact, minons are, in a roundabout sort of way, a bit like legendary actions. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
To make a monster legendary, here's what I recommend:
First, give them max health - whatever the max health they could roll with their dice, that's what they have.
Next, consider the following:
At super low levels (like 1,) you can probably skip these given how limited players' options are. But by level 5 or higher, you might want to give them either Magic Resistance (advantage on saves versus magical effects,) or 3 Legendary Resistances per day (when they fail at a saving throw, they can choose to succeed instead.) These will make it harder for the party to cheese them with a Hypnotic Pattern or a Suggestion or something like that.
Next, the biggest thing: Legendary actions.
The simplest Legendary Action is a basic attack or a cantrip. If their attacks have some nasty effect, you might consider making the attack cost 2 actions. But generally, if it's just a swing with a weapon or a firebolt, you can feel free to make this a legendary action.
Next, I recommend some sort of re-positioning ability. My Thought Spy last night had "Stutter Step," which allowed him to move up to half his movement speed without provoking opportunity attacks.
Both of these techniques are there to make a fight more epic, and also definitely challenging. If you do XP-based character advancement, you'll want to make a legendary creature reward extra XP - possibly doubling it. Minions, on the other hand, might count for a quarter of their normal value.
You can have a legendary creature with minions, but I think you'll want to be careful doing so, as you might make a fight that's just too overwhelming. Then again, my players always surprise each other with how well they can get through my challenges, so maybe go for it!
Unearthed Arcana: Armorer Artificer, Circle of Stars Druid, and Fey Wanderer Ranger
The most exciting thing to me here is that they're still tinkering with the Artificer, which to me suggests that they're really going to count it as a true class and not just an Eberron thing.
Given the vast number of subclasses they've been playing with in UA, I'm just waiting for the announcement of a new Xanathar's Guide to Everything-style book.
Let's go through these, starting with the one that really excites me: The Armorer.
Armorers are, straight-up, Iron Man. If you want a suit of power armor with a ton of gadgets, this is it. You get: heavy armor proficiency, intelligence to use with weapon attacks, you no longer need to have good strength to wear heavy armor, and there's even a power armor type that allows you to sneak in heavy armor without disadvantage.
Seriously, this thing is super awesome and if it ever becomes official, I want to play one.
Next, the Circle of Stars druid gives you a number of ways to attack or heal with star-based magic, and lets you take on a sort of constellation form - the constellation you pick gives different benefits. There are also some astrology-like abilities that let you predict the future, a bit like a divination wizard (but not quite as out-there as Portent.)
Finally, the Fey Wanderer ranger subclass involves dealing extra psychic damage and being able to play around with charm and fear effects. It's basically the mind-befuddling ranger subclass.
All cool stuff. I can't wait to see some sort of official announcement of a new book.
Given the vast number of subclasses they've been playing with in UA, I'm just waiting for the announcement of a new Xanathar's Guide to Everything-style book.
Let's go through these, starting with the one that really excites me: The Armorer.
Armorers are, straight-up, Iron Man. If you want a suit of power armor with a ton of gadgets, this is it. You get: heavy armor proficiency, intelligence to use with weapon attacks, you no longer need to have good strength to wear heavy armor, and there's even a power armor type that allows you to sneak in heavy armor without disadvantage.
Seriously, this thing is super awesome and if it ever becomes official, I want to play one.
Next, the Circle of Stars druid gives you a number of ways to attack or heal with star-based magic, and lets you take on a sort of constellation form - the constellation you pick gives different benefits. There are also some astrology-like abilities that let you predict the future, a bit like a divination wizard (but not quite as out-there as Portent.)
Finally, the Fey Wanderer ranger subclass involves dealing extra psychic damage and being able to play around with charm and fear effects. It's basically the mind-befuddling ranger subclass.
All cool stuff. I can't wait to see some sort of official announcement of a new book.
So, We're Going to See Arthas in the Maw, Right?
Arthas Menethil is the most iconic villain in Warcraft.
Yes, yes, that's an opinion, not a fact, but he's got several things going for him: he has a tragic fall from grace, he has an iconic look - actually multiple iconic looks, between the deranged Frozen Throne cover art appearance and the Lich King armor (which, to be fair, is very much a play on Sauron's armor from the Lord of the Rings trilogy.) It also doesn't hurt that Wrath of the Lich King is generally considered to be WoW's golden age.
While Blizzard promised to do something more with Illidan well before the announcement of Legion, due in large part to how Illidan barely appeared in Burning Crusade despite theoretically being its main antagonist, when it came to Arthas, the Metzen and co said, more or less, that his story had been told, and his death felt not only earned but also something they didn't want to reverse given how bad of a guy he was.
To go on a brief (maybe) tangent, I do think there's room for debate on how evil Arthas was. Naturally, everything he does from the moment he takes up Frostmourne is pure evil (though there is a mention in Chronicle Volume III that suggests that there was a somewhat altruistic element to his schemes given that he believed only lockstep unity could defeat the Burning Legion.) But if being soulless for all of that means it wasn't really Arthas, but rather the will of the Lich King, and thus an embodiment of primal death, just using Arthas as a vessel, you really have to then just look at his actions before that.
Arthas definitely does some bad things, but they all have some moral justification. Purging Stratholme is probably his most extreme action, and an evil one, but is it Gul'dan-style mustache-twirling evil? Not exactly. He's not, like, happy to do it. Likewise, his actions in Northrend, like framing and betraying the mercenaries he had hired to destroy his own ships, was ultimately in service of trying to stop Mal'ganis and thus, he thought, prevent the Scourge from infecting Lordaeron again. Indeed, the only reason the plan fails is because he doesn't consider that the curse Frostmourne might put on him will actually make him the agent of the very thing he's trying to prevent.
There's no question that Gul'dan goes to the Maw. But does Arthas deserve it? Frankly, at this point, I actually think that Sylvanas has done more evil with her free will restored than Arthas ever did with his. That might be a bad example, as Sylvanas is clearly in league with the Jailor and the Maw. But compare Arthas, to, say, Garrosh - or better yet, Kael'thas, whom we know is not, in fact, in the Maw, and you wonder how to judge him. I mean, Kael'thas willingly sided with the Burning Legion even when he had Illidan as an ally.
Still, it seems as if Arthas is being judged on his actions even during the Frostmourne period. And if he does bear responsibility for that, well, yeah. I mean, he wiped out an entire kingdom and nearly wiped out another, plus he tried to kill and then enslave everyone in the world. It's, you know, bad.
While I don't think we need to see him brought back as a threat, and I'd also be a little wary of giving him a redemption plot, it also seems as if it'd be a real oversight to not have us find Arthas within the Shadowlands.
But what role might he play?
Yes, yes, that's an opinion, not a fact, but he's got several things going for him: he has a tragic fall from grace, he has an iconic look - actually multiple iconic looks, between the deranged Frozen Throne cover art appearance and the Lich King armor (which, to be fair, is very much a play on Sauron's armor from the Lord of the Rings trilogy.) It also doesn't hurt that Wrath of the Lich King is generally considered to be WoW's golden age.
While Blizzard promised to do something more with Illidan well before the announcement of Legion, due in large part to how Illidan barely appeared in Burning Crusade despite theoretically being its main antagonist, when it came to Arthas, the Metzen and co said, more or less, that his story had been told, and his death felt not only earned but also something they didn't want to reverse given how bad of a guy he was.
To go on a brief (maybe) tangent, I do think there's room for debate on how evil Arthas was. Naturally, everything he does from the moment he takes up Frostmourne is pure evil (though there is a mention in Chronicle Volume III that suggests that there was a somewhat altruistic element to his schemes given that he believed only lockstep unity could defeat the Burning Legion.) But if being soulless for all of that means it wasn't really Arthas, but rather the will of the Lich King, and thus an embodiment of primal death, just using Arthas as a vessel, you really have to then just look at his actions before that.
Arthas definitely does some bad things, but they all have some moral justification. Purging Stratholme is probably his most extreme action, and an evil one, but is it Gul'dan-style mustache-twirling evil? Not exactly. He's not, like, happy to do it. Likewise, his actions in Northrend, like framing and betraying the mercenaries he had hired to destroy his own ships, was ultimately in service of trying to stop Mal'ganis and thus, he thought, prevent the Scourge from infecting Lordaeron again. Indeed, the only reason the plan fails is because he doesn't consider that the curse Frostmourne might put on him will actually make him the agent of the very thing he's trying to prevent.
There's no question that Gul'dan goes to the Maw. But does Arthas deserve it? Frankly, at this point, I actually think that Sylvanas has done more evil with her free will restored than Arthas ever did with his. That might be a bad example, as Sylvanas is clearly in league with the Jailor and the Maw. But compare Arthas, to, say, Garrosh - or better yet, Kael'thas, whom we know is not, in fact, in the Maw, and you wonder how to judge him. I mean, Kael'thas willingly sided with the Burning Legion even when he had Illidan as an ally.
Still, it seems as if Arthas is being judged on his actions even during the Frostmourne period. And if he does bear responsibility for that, well, yeah. I mean, he wiped out an entire kingdom and nearly wiped out another, plus he tried to kill and then enslave everyone in the world. It's, you know, bad.
While I don't think we need to see him brought back as a threat, and I'd also be a little wary of giving him a redemption plot, it also seems as if it'd be a real oversight to not have us find Arthas within the Shadowlands.
But what role might he play?
A Prologue Session for Ravnica
Once again, our regular DM for my Sunday games was feeling under the weather, and so, given that all those players are going to be in my Ravnica-based campaign (which starts a week from today as of 44 minutes ago,) we decided to help the last couple people roll their characters and ran a "mini" adventure (though in fact it felt like a pretty substantial one) with those characters.
What we had were:
A Human Grave Cleric from the Orzhov Syndicate
A Minotaur Fighter from the Boros Legion
An Eladrin Elf Druid from the Golgari Swarm (yes, I'm letting people play non-canon races/subraces if they really want to)
A Goblin Bard from the Cult of Rakdos
and a Vedalken Storm Sorcerer from the Izzet League
The premise was that, at about 10pm on a weeknight in Precinct Six, near Foundry Street, these random strangers got on the Izzet-run subway to head to Precinct One, only for a group of Gruul anarchists to attack the train and divert it off its normal course. The party fought car-to-car through Anarchs, Rubblebelt Stalkers, and survived an attack from a Skittering Horror when the train entered the Undercity (they just had to fight off two grasping tendrils, not the horror itself) before confronting the apparent instigator of this whole thing... a Dimir Thought Spy.
Given that a single CR 1 creature, even to a party of level 1 characters, can be shredded in a single round of combat, I made some adjustments:
First, I gave the guy studded leather armor to pump up his AC by 1 (it turns out this didn't make a difference.) I also gave him max health (this helped.)
Next, I gave him Legendary Actions. The two I gave him were a single dagger attack and "Stutter Step," where he'd be able to move up to half his speed without drawing opportunity attacks.
Turns out this made the fight feel very climactic and exciting. It didn't hurt that he was doing crazy well on saving throws against the various cantrips people were tossing at him (Vicious Mockery and Toll the Dead, primarily.)
Now, Dimir NPCs tend to have Psionic spells, meaning they cast their spells using no components. This, as it turns out, made for some really fun RP opportunities, as I had the guy never once speak, even as he was casting Charm Person on the Bard (who nearly killed the Sorcerer.)
Anyway, it was a pretty cool and intense first Ravnica adventure.
What we had were:
A Human Grave Cleric from the Orzhov Syndicate
A Minotaur Fighter from the Boros Legion
An Eladrin Elf Druid from the Golgari Swarm (yes, I'm letting people play non-canon races/subraces if they really want to)
A Goblin Bard from the Cult of Rakdos
and a Vedalken Storm Sorcerer from the Izzet League
The premise was that, at about 10pm on a weeknight in Precinct Six, near Foundry Street, these random strangers got on the Izzet-run subway to head to Precinct One, only for a group of Gruul anarchists to attack the train and divert it off its normal course. The party fought car-to-car through Anarchs, Rubblebelt Stalkers, and survived an attack from a Skittering Horror when the train entered the Undercity (they just had to fight off two grasping tendrils, not the horror itself) before confronting the apparent instigator of this whole thing... a Dimir Thought Spy.
Given that a single CR 1 creature, even to a party of level 1 characters, can be shredded in a single round of combat, I made some adjustments:
First, I gave the guy studded leather armor to pump up his AC by 1 (it turns out this didn't make a difference.) I also gave him max health (this helped.)
Next, I gave him Legendary Actions. The two I gave him were a single dagger attack and "Stutter Step," where he'd be able to move up to half his speed without drawing opportunity attacks.
Turns out this made the fight feel very climactic and exciting. It didn't hurt that he was doing crazy well on saving throws against the various cantrips people were tossing at him (Vicious Mockery and Toll the Dead, primarily.)
Now, Dimir NPCs tend to have Psionic spells, meaning they cast their spells using no components. This, as it turns out, made for some really fun RP opportunities, as I had the guy never once speak, even as he was casting Charm Person on the Bard (who nearly killed the Sorcerer.)
Anyway, it was a pretty cool and intense first Ravnica adventure.
Thursday, February 20, 2020
Shadowlands Alpha Inc
Well, with the Mythic race to kill N'zoth finished, and only a couple more raid finder wings left to open, BFA is officially going into its post-expansion state. We are still probably many months out from the launch of Shadowlands, but that's a great time for the first testing of the content to begin!
And guess what? Apparently the alpha build is going to be deployed soon, as the initial files and such are being loaded into the Battle.net launcher. There's nothing to datamine yet, but it's really happening.
When it comes to testing, I think there's a very important thing lesson to learn from BFA:
Azerite Armor was going to be one of the central mechanical themes in BFA, and it did wind up being that. Here's the thing: I played on the beta, and it wasn't until the last month of testing (maybe the last two weeks?) that we actually got to see it in action.
Azerite Armor wound up being a frustrating, unsatisfying, and tedious mechanic, which is something I think they realized a while ago but had committed to too hard. Even after three major patches, when we've had new systems come in to be more engaging and interesting than Azerite armor, I'm still finding my Rogue feeling unable to equip his shiny new chestpiece because it doesn't have "The First Dance" on it.
So I would implore that Blizzard gets the Covenant system testable ASAP. Stuff like quests and dungeons and boss fights are all very important, but also something that Blizzard has been doing for a decade and a half (though the glitches on N'zoth suggest that there can always be errors.)
Azerite Armor should have been overhauled early in BFA's testing, but they didn't have time to actually do so, and as such it was a series of ill-fitting bandaids we got over the course of the expansion.
Genuinely, I think BFA would be received as a far better expansion if it had not been for Azerite Armor.
Naturally, I think the new leveling system is going to be one of the major things they'll need to get right in testing.
Here are my concerns:
Given that you can level up in any expansion's content - you can go from 10-50 in Northrend, Draenor, or the Broken Isles - I wonder how they're going to handle scaling old content like raids. I like to do transmog farming, and currently I can clear everything pre-Legion trivially (and I've also managed to clear Emerald Nightmare and Trial of Valor a few times - I finally got The First Satyr's Spaulders for my Demon Hunter's red/black Emerald Nightmare-themed set - I even dyed his hair black and changed his tattoos to red.) When level scaling was introduced, it didn't create much of a problem for people already at the level cap - if you were level 110, it didn't matter much that BC raids scaled up to 80 instead of 70, as everything still died in one or two hits.
But while I think the level compression is a good thing - especially because it seems that it will truly make leveling alts faster - it does make me worry a bit about accessibility of old content. I don't want it to suddenly be impossible to solo Alone in the Darkness, when currently it's trivial.
More than anything, though, I'm really excited for the expansion of new lore. Shadowlands seems like it's going to be World of Warcraft's Planescape expansion, which promises lots of really cool weirdness.
Naturally, we'll have to wait and see just how weird it gets. I'm particularly excited for Oribos, the city at the center of the Shadowlands (though I'm trying not to get myself pumped like I did to see Farahlon in Warlords of Draenor. How is that the one zone we knew had a different name before the world was destroyed didn't get featured in that expansion?)
To return to gameplay systems, I think they really need to make sure that they get Covenants right. At the moment, they seem like a pretty broad catch-all for many game systems, and I think that if Blizzard wants to learn a lesson from BFA, it's that they should try to get one new system right rather than pile on new ones in the hopes that one of them will be good.
Plotwise, I'm eager to see what new characters we encounter in the Shadowlands. While I hope that there's some connective thread to established WoW lore, I'm hoping that we see mysteries solved more than just saying "oh, well, this was all Titan/Old God stuff." I still want to know who the hell Ephial was working for in Spires of Arak.
And guess what? Apparently the alpha build is going to be deployed soon, as the initial files and such are being loaded into the Battle.net launcher. There's nothing to datamine yet, but it's really happening.
When it comes to testing, I think there's a very important thing lesson to learn from BFA:
Azerite Armor was going to be one of the central mechanical themes in BFA, and it did wind up being that. Here's the thing: I played on the beta, and it wasn't until the last month of testing (maybe the last two weeks?) that we actually got to see it in action.
Azerite Armor wound up being a frustrating, unsatisfying, and tedious mechanic, which is something I think they realized a while ago but had committed to too hard. Even after three major patches, when we've had new systems come in to be more engaging and interesting than Azerite armor, I'm still finding my Rogue feeling unable to equip his shiny new chestpiece because it doesn't have "The First Dance" on it.
So I would implore that Blizzard gets the Covenant system testable ASAP. Stuff like quests and dungeons and boss fights are all very important, but also something that Blizzard has been doing for a decade and a half (though the glitches on N'zoth suggest that there can always be errors.)
Azerite Armor should have been overhauled early in BFA's testing, but they didn't have time to actually do so, and as such it was a series of ill-fitting bandaids we got over the course of the expansion.
Genuinely, I think BFA would be received as a far better expansion if it had not been for Azerite Armor.
Naturally, I think the new leveling system is going to be one of the major things they'll need to get right in testing.
Here are my concerns:
Given that you can level up in any expansion's content - you can go from 10-50 in Northrend, Draenor, or the Broken Isles - I wonder how they're going to handle scaling old content like raids. I like to do transmog farming, and currently I can clear everything pre-Legion trivially (and I've also managed to clear Emerald Nightmare and Trial of Valor a few times - I finally got The First Satyr's Spaulders for my Demon Hunter's red/black Emerald Nightmare-themed set - I even dyed his hair black and changed his tattoos to red.) When level scaling was introduced, it didn't create much of a problem for people already at the level cap - if you were level 110, it didn't matter much that BC raids scaled up to 80 instead of 70, as everything still died in one or two hits.
But while I think the level compression is a good thing - especially because it seems that it will truly make leveling alts faster - it does make me worry a bit about accessibility of old content. I don't want it to suddenly be impossible to solo Alone in the Darkness, when currently it's trivial.
More than anything, though, I'm really excited for the expansion of new lore. Shadowlands seems like it's going to be World of Warcraft's Planescape expansion, which promises lots of really cool weirdness.
Naturally, we'll have to wait and see just how weird it gets. I'm particularly excited for Oribos, the city at the center of the Shadowlands (though I'm trying not to get myself pumped like I did to see Farahlon in Warlords of Draenor. How is that the one zone we knew had a different name before the world was destroyed didn't get featured in that expansion?)
To return to gameplay systems, I think they really need to make sure that they get Covenants right. At the moment, they seem like a pretty broad catch-all for many game systems, and I think that if Blizzard wants to learn a lesson from BFA, it's that they should try to get one new system right rather than pile on new ones in the hopes that one of them will be good.
Plotwise, I'm eager to see what new characters we encounter in the Shadowlands. While I hope that there's some connective thread to established WoW lore, I'm hoping that we see mysteries solved more than just saying "oh, well, this was all Titan/Old God stuff." I still want to know who the hell Ephial was working for in Spires of Arak.
From Here to Avernus
Tonight we finished Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus. Despite by trepidations that we had not yet done all the sidequests we might have needed to do, as it turns out, we were fine. We got the "good ending" for the campaign, and we all leveled up to 14.
A couple takeaways:
SPOILERS AHEAD
A couple takeaways:
SPOILERS AHEAD
Thursday, February 13, 2020
Time and Horrific Visions: A Rant
I was heading into the Valley of Spirits. I'd done two pulls and was at a little over half my sanity, with all three orbs left. I needed two more pages from the book you need to beat the "Corrupted" areas for the quest I was on. Things were going well.
I pulled two groups - my Frost DK build is excellent at tearing down groups quickly - and then my client froze.
I waited a moment, hoping it was a little lag spike, but it wouldn't go away. So I quickly rebooted the client and got back in, only to see that - despite having what I would imagine was a couple minutes left of sanity (not to mention the emergency talent that gives you half your sanity back if you drop to 0 health or sanity the first time,) I had apparently failed, with absolutely nothing to show for that run.
It was my last vessel, so I won't be able to take my Death Knight in again until probably tomorrow, if then (I don't recall if the 5.5k one gets for the mini-assaults are enough for him to get a new one.)
This is not a world-ending tragedy or anything, but it does indicate an issue with this kind of time-restricted content.
Yes, you can keep farming Coalescing Visions to get more attempts, but to really get ahead of the curve (actually, just to stay on the curve) is a pretty big time commitment.
Lag spikes and disconnections are always going to be a thing in WoW - they always have been.
Again, this is not the end of the world, but while I think that games can challenge you, there are some ways that a game can just make you feel bad.
In dungeons and raids, if something catastrophic happens and everyone dies because of a nasty lag spike or a sudden disconnection, it's annoying, but once things are up and running, you can easily just go back in and try again.
Also, if you get disconnected in a dungeon, sure, your current pull is probably going to be a mess (if you're a tank or healer, or if it's a very DPS dependent pull,) but if something happens - whether it's an issue with the client or you, say, need to move your car to let your roommate out - it's not horribly punishing to step away from the game for a moment.
People invented pause buttons for games for a reason. And while online games naturally can't be paused because there are other players in the middle of their game experience, the design has historically allowed for people to chill and take a break if necessary. A dungeon's corridors remain cleared until the thing is reset (which, to be fair, was not originally the case - it used to be that after an hour or so trash would respawn.) In the quasi-online Soulsborne games, the enemies are similarly tethered to particular locations, and you can even quit out and show up exactly where you were, with all the enemies you killed still dead.
Just thinking about Torghast as something that could be similar to Horrific Visions in some ways, I would hope for the following:
First, change the limiting factor from a time limit to something else. My sense is that you'll just go up more floors as you push into higher difficulties, and I hope that means there won't be any time limits in there.
Second, I know that rewards need to be time gated so that players don't spam these like crazy. But how about making it so that it's just the rewards you get within it that are gated, but your attempts to get those rewards aren't?
The former is already true in Horrific Visions - the items you need to upgrade the cloak can only be found when Wrathion gives you the quest for them, and those quests, after the first several, only show up once per week. I get that, because of... man there are a lot of currencies here. Because of Echoing Memories or whatever they're called, a lot of people would just spam visions to level up their talent tree thingie.
But if you put a weekly cap on those as well - like the Valor caps back in Cataclysm - and then allowed people to do Visions whenever they wanted, you could make failures less frustrating.
I pulled two groups - my Frost DK build is excellent at tearing down groups quickly - and then my client froze.
I waited a moment, hoping it was a little lag spike, but it wouldn't go away. So I quickly rebooted the client and got back in, only to see that - despite having what I would imagine was a couple minutes left of sanity (not to mention the emergency talent that gives you half your sanity back if you drop to 0 health or sanity the first time,) I had apparently failed, with absolutely nothing to show for that run.
It was my last vessel, so I won't be able to take my Death Knight in again until probably tomorrow, if then (I don't recall if the 5.5k one gets for the mini-assaults are enough for him to get a new one.)
This is not a world-ending tragedy or anything, but it does indicate an issue with this kind of time-restricted content.
Yes, you can keep farming Coalescing Visions to get more attempts, but to really get ahead of the curve (actually, just to stay on the curve) is a pretty big time commitment.
Lag spikes and disconnections are always going to be a thing in WoW - they always have been.
Again, this is not the end of the world, but while I think that games can challenge you, there are some ways that a game can just make you feel bad.
In dungeons and raids, if something catastrophic happens and everyone dies because of a nasty lag spike or a sudden disconnection, it's annoying, but once things are up and running, you can easily just go back in and try again.
Also, if you get disconnected in a dungeon, sure, your current pull is probably going to be a mess (if you're a tank or healer, or if it's a very DPS dependent pull,) but if something happens - whether it's an issue with the client or you, say, need to move your car to let your roommate out - it's not horribly punishing to step away from the game for a moment.
People invented pause buttons for games for a reason. And while online games naturally can't be paused because there are other players in the middle of their game experience, the design has historically allowed for people to chill and take a break if necessary. A dungeon's corridors remain cleared until the thing is reset (which, to be fair, was not originally the case - it used to be that after an hour or so trash would respawn.) In the quasi-online Soulsborne games, the enemies are similarly tethered to particular locations, and you can even quit out and show up exactly where you were, with all the enemies you killed still dead.
Just thinking about Torghast as something that could be similar to Horrific Visions in some ways, I would hope for the following:
First, change the limiting factor from a time limit to something else. My sense is that you'll just go up more floors as you push into higher difficulties, and I hope that means there won't be any time limits in there.
Second, I know that rewards need to be time gated so that players don't spam these like crazy. But how about making it so that it's just the rewards you get within it that are gated, but your attempts to get those rewards aren't?
The former is already true in Horrific Visions - the items you need to upgrade the cloak can only be found when Wrathion gives you the quest for them, and those quests, after the first several, only show up once per week. I get that, because of... man there are a lot of currencies here. Because of Echoing Memories or whatever they're called, a lot of people would just spam visions to level up their talent tree thingie.
But if you put a weekly cap on those as well - like the Valor caps back in Cataclysm - and then allowed people to do Visions whenever they wanted, you could make failures less frustrating.
Tuesday, February 11, 2020
The Halls of Devotion - Ny'alotha LFR Wing 2
Again, I'm struck by how cool the aesthetic of Ny'alotha is and how I wish we'd had more time to explore such a thing (like having it as a full zone - though I do enjoy the invasions.)
After beating the first three bosses, you emerge into the Waking City itself. Emerging from the truly cyclopean architecture of the first wing, this wing has you ascending two ziggurats, each with two bosses. These building's aren't quite as ominously massive as the one you emerge from, but it's here that you see the Ny'alotha skybox, with its massive tentacles extending from N'zoth's massive form.
Taking the right ziggurat first, you start with Dark Inquisitor Xanesh, who is tormenting Azshara for her intended betrayal. The boss herself is pretty trivial to tank - just make sure to leave some room behind you so that when she knocks you back you don't fly off the side of the platform. Dodging void zones (void cones?) is relatively simple, but the trick here is that players who take part in the Void Ritual need to bounce balls of void energy back to a portal lest they empower the boss.
At the top of this ziggurat is Vexiona. We really botched this but managed to LFR our way through a single pull. I believe (and could be wrong) that you can just have one tank on the dragon and the other on adds. When an add dies, the tank can pick up its essence and do a massive beam attack against smaller adds that show up. There are a ton of these, so I think the real key to beating the fight is to make sure you wipe out the adds asap. The dragon will also fly into the sky and do a big breath on the top of the ziggurat, which unfortunately creates an effect that is still impossible to see due to a Mac bug they have yet to fix. So I kind of moved until I wasn't getting the warning debuff. At 40%, she stops summoning adds but does a number of really nasty things where you'll want to run away from her and she puts a stacking debuff on the tank that does more and more shadow damage. Our healers were incredible.
The left-hand ziggurat starts with The Hivemind. This fight is relatively simple. You have two bosses - one per tank with no swapping required. They seem to, at least on LFR, share HP. The two big guys take control of the swarm periodically. While the tall one is in control, you want to stack them, while when the shorter one is, you want to separate them. Then, it's all about killing adds, dodging out of nasty stuff, and interrupting the short boss so that everyone doesn't get poisoned.
At the top of this ziggurat is Ra-Den. This is one of those fights that's easy to cheese on LFR. He'll regularly draw two orbs - one of void, the other of vita - to himself, which buff him. In theory you're supposed to kill these orbs, but our typical tunnel vision DPS didn't, and we were fine. I believe the void one causes a glob of void energy to bounce around the room, which you'll want to have people catch (it'll go the direction they're facing when it hits them.) Like Vexiona, at 40%, he stops doing the old stuff and starts blasting the area with void and doing a harder tank-swap debuff, but it's ultimately not that hard to dodge things.
Next wing, which presumably will be in two weeks, is "The Gift of Flesh," which has Shad'har (one of those eye-covered double-headed dog things that are sometimes demons and sometimes aberrations,) Drestagath (what looks like a big eye-tentacle) and Il'gynoth, in a new form (hey, the guy did tell us he was going to Ny'alotha when we beat him in the Emerald Nightmare.)
That leaves the final wing for just N'zoth - the carapace and then the Old God himself.
After beating the first three bosses, you emerge into the Waking City itself. Emerging from the truly cyclopean architecture of the first wing, this wing has you ascending two ziggurats, each with two bosses. These building's aren't quite as ominously massive as the one you emerge from, but it's here that you see the Ny'alotha skybox, with its massive tentacles extending from N'zoth's massive form.
Taking the right ziggurat first, you start with Dark Inquisitor Xanesh, who is tormenting Azshara for her intended betrayal. The boss herself is pretty trivial to tank - just make sure to leave some room behind you so that when she knocks you back you don't fly off the side of the platform. Dodging void zones (void cones?) is relatively simple, but the trick here is that players who take part in the Void Ritual need to bounce balls of void energy back to a portal lest they empower the boss.
At the top of this ziggurat is Vexiona. We really botched this but managed to LFR our way through a single pull. I believe (and could be wrong) that you can just have one tank on the dragon and the other on adds. When an add dies, the tank can pick up its essence and do a massive beam attack against smaller adds that show up. There are a ton of these, so I think the real key to beating the fight is to make sure you wipe out the adds asap. The dragon will also fly into the sky and do a big breath on the top of the ziggurat, which unfortunately creates an effect that is still impossible to see due to a Mac bug they have yet to fix. So I kind of moved until I wasn't getting the warning debuff. At 40%, she stops summoning adds but does a number of really nasty things where you'll want to run away from her and she puts a stacking debuff on the tank that does more and more shadow damage. Our healers were incredible.
The left-hand ziggurat starts with The Hivemind. This fight is relatively simple. You have two bosses - one per tank with no swapping required. They seem to, at least on LFR, share HP. The two big guys take control of the swarm periodically. While the tall one is in control, you want to stack them, while when the shorter one is, you want to separate them. Then, it's all about killing adds, dodging out of nasty stuff, and interrupting the short boss so that everyone doesn't get poisoned.
At the top of this ziggurat is Ra-Den. This is one of those fights that's easy to cheese on LFR. He'll regularly draw two orbs - one of void, the other of vita - to himself, which buff him. In theory you're supposed to kill these orbs, but our typical tunnel vision DPS didn't, and we were fine. I believe the void one causes a glob of void energy to bounce around the room, which you'll want to have people catch (it'll go the direction they're facing when it hits them.) Like Vexiona, at 40%, he stops doing the old stuff and starts blasting the area with void and doing a harder tank-swap debuff, but it's ultimately not that hard to dodge things.
Next wing, which presumably will be in two weeks, is "The Gift of Flesh," which has Shad'har (one of those eye-covered double-headed dog things that are sometimes demons and sometimes aberrations,) Drestagath (what looks like a big eye-tentacle) and Il'gynoth, in a new form (hey, the guy did tell us he was going to Ny'alotha when we beat him in the Emerald Nightmare.)
That leaves the final wing for just N'zoth - the carapace and then the Old God himself.
Monday, February 10, 2020
Shadowlands and the Gods of Warcraft
It's funny to consider that the first Warcraft game had, basically, Elwynn Forest, Westfall, Redridge Mountains, the Burning Steppes, the Swamp of Sorrow, the Blasted Lands and... maybe Duskwood? There were only Orcs and Humans, and the Orcs were fighting in the name of "Hell" and the humans in the name of "Heaven" and "God."
Retcons happened. And beyond that, expansion of the lore happened.
Warcraft II gave us the rest of the Eastern Kingdoms and Outland. Warcraft III gave us Kalimdor and Northrend. And World of Warcraft has, for the last decade and a half, not only reshaped Warcraft to be more of an MMORPG franchise than an RTS one (both in terms of time existing and content put out) but also vastly expanded the universe. While the Old Gods were hinted at in The Frozen Throne, the entire Old God/Titan mythos that is now at the center (or at least has been at the center) of the lore came about entirely in WoW.
Up until this point, while there have been new players and new developments, we've still been paying off those stories. N'zoth was first mentioned in Cataclysm, and only now are we finally facing him. I don't consider Sargeras to be totally handled yet (once we have an expansion-ending raid boss fight against him, I'll allow for that) but Warcraft's story has all been about resolving the consequences basically of the Legion and the Old Gods' machinations. Given that the Horde was founded initially as a blunt instrument of the Legion, you could really tie everything back to the Legion and Old Gods, and given that the Legion was created in response to the Old Gods, you could even argue that they're truly the root cause of it all.
Which makes Shadowlands simultaneously very exciting and very risky.
As far as we know, the powers-that-be in the Shadowlands are entirely separate from the Titans, Old Gods, Demons, and Naaru. We know of two major players - the Arbiter and the Jailor (I'll spell it Jailer when I see it in quest text.) But what are they?
Prior to the expansion's announcement, I had assumed the Shadowlands would be more of a reflection of Azeroth in the vein of the Emerald Dream - an important world, but not necessarily one that was all that separate from what we know.
Comparing it with D&D's cosmology (which, to be fair, does change with each edition a little) I had assumed the Shadowlands were akin to the Shadowfell, which is essentially the spooky, bleak alternate universe version of the prime material plane, and is sort of the opposite of the heightened feywild.
Instead, the Shadowlands seem more akin to the Outer Planes. In D&D, these include places like the Nine Hells (the Lawful Evil plane,) or the Seven Heavens of Mount Celestia (the Lawful Good plane.) These places serve as both the ultimate afterlives for mortals, but also as the homes of the gods. Essentially, if you take the Christian idea of Heaven and Hell, but you add fourteen other places you could wind up (or fifteen if you include the Outlands, which are the True Neutral plane,) and of course have a broad pantheon of polytheistic deities instead of one god and one entity who tried to be a god, you get D&D's outer planes.
That makes me wonder, then, about the Shadowlands.
From a mortal perspective, the Shadowlands are a place of death, and even the bright, heavenly realm of Bastion seems to run on what Blizzard folks refer to as "death magic." But is that dichotomy really quite so symmetrical? Or, like the Outer Planes, are the Shadowlands really the true metaphysical divine realms that are the source of supernatural power?
And so, with that, we come to the following question: What is up with gods in Warcraft lore?
There is only one entity in the lore that is described simply as "a god." That's Elune.
That being said, there are a number of entities that seem like you could call them gods. When speaking with the Klaaxi after hitting exalted, one of them warns you that "our gods are not your gods" and that when the time comes, their loyalty will be to their own. They are referring, of course, to the Titans as "your gods" and the Old Gods as "our gods."
And obviously, it's right there in the name - the Old Gods are called gods.
That being said, are they? The Old Gods are profoundly powerful, of course, but they are also, ultimately, globs of void-turned-flesh hucked into our universe by the Void Lords. N'zoth and his peers have worshippers and can imbue followers with power, and wield a degree of power that seems godlike from a mortal perspective.
But the Titans seem like a whole order of magnitude greater than they are. Aman'thul plucked Y'Shaarj from Azeroth like he was popping a zit (with similarly nasty consequences.) The Titans, who literally comprise a group called "The Pantheon" (meaning "all gods" in Greek) seem pretty darn god-like, wouldn't you say? They certainly seem to be similar to the Greek gods, except perhaps they sleep around less (as far as we know.)
Then you've got the "Wild Gods." This appears to be a blanket term for the Ancients worshipped by the Night Elves, the August Celestials of Pandaria, and most of the Loa revered by the Trolls.
As far as we know, though, none of these entities are tied to the Shadowlands. The Old Gods are in the material plane and tied to the Void. The Wild Gods do seem to be connected to the Emerald Dream (and thus might also be connected to Ardenweald, so keep an eye on them.) The Titans, it seems, are thoroughly of the physical world.
But Elune, the only entity who has been referred to only as a Goddess, is also a big enigma. We know she's real, as we've seen her do things like take Ysera's spirit up into the stars and bestow the vague blessing of the Night Warrior on the Kaldorei. We also know that she has some connection to the Titans, given that the Tear of Elune is one of the Pillars of Creation and Eonar was hiding out on a world called Elun'ara.
So what is she?
A bit of speculation: We've heard that Tyrande's story is going to be prominent in Ardenweald. Let's imagine that the Arbiter and the Jailor are gods, full stop, and are thus of the same fundamental nature as Elune. Could it be that we might encounter Elune herself? Or at least that we might discover something else about her nature?
Retcons happened. And beyond that, expansion of the lore happened.
Warcraft II gave us the rest of the Eastern Kingdoms and Outland. Warcraft III gave us Kalimdor and Northrend. And World of Warcraft has, for the last decade and a half, not only reshaped Warcraft to be more of an MMORPG franchise than an RTS one (both in terms of time existing and content put out) but also vastly expanded the universe. While the Old Gods were hinted at in The Frozen Throne, the entire Old God/Titan mythos that is now at the center (or at least has been at the center) of the lore came about entirely in WoW.
Up until this point, while there have been new players and new developments, we've still been paying off those stories. N'zoth was first mentioned in Cataclysm, and only now are we finally facing him. I don't consider Sargeras to be totally handled yet (once we have an expansion-ending raid boss fight against him, I'll allow for that) but Warcraft's story has all been about resolving the consequences basically of the Legion and the Old Gods' machinations. Given that the Horde was founded initially as a blunt instrument of the Legion, you could really tie everything back to the Legion and Old Gods, and given that the Legion was created in response to the Old Gods, you could even argue that they're truly the root cause of it all.
Which makes Shadowlands simultaneously very exciting and very risky.
As far as we know, the powers-that-be in the Shadowlands are entirely separate from the Titans, Old Gods, Demons, and Naaru. We know of two major players - the Arbiter and the Jailor (I'll spell it Jailer when I see it in quest text.) But what are they?
Prior to the expansion's announcement, I had assumed the Shadowlands would be more of a reflection of Azeroth in the vein of the Emerald Dream - an important world, but not necessarily one that was all that separate from what we know.
Comparing it with D&D's cosmology (which, to be fair, does change with each edition a little) I had assumed the Shadowlands were akin to the Shadowfell, which is essentially the spooky, bleak alternate universe version of the prime material plane, and is sort of the opposite of the heightened feywild.
Instead, the Shadowlands seem more akin to the Outer Planes. In D&D, these include places like the Nine Hells (the Lawful Evil plane,) or the Seven Heavens of Mount Celestia (the Lawful Good plane.) These places serve as both the ultimate afterlives for mortals, but also as the homes of the gods. Essentially, if you take the Christian idea of Heaven and Hell, but you add fourteen other places you could wind up (or fifteen if you include the Outlands, which are the True Neutral plane,) and of course have a broad pantheon of polytheistic deities instead of one god and one entity who tried to be a god, you get D&D's outer planes.
That makes me wonder, then, about the Shadowlands.
From a mortal perspective, the Shadowlands are a place of death, and even the bright, heavenly realm of Bastion seems to run on what Blizzard folks refer to as "death magic." But is that dichotomy really quite so symmetrical? Or, like the Outer Planes, are the Shadowlands really the true metaphysical divine realms that are the source of supernatural power?
And so, with that, we come to the following question: What is up with gods in Warcraft lore?
There is only one entity in the lore that is described simply as "a god." That's Elune.
That being said, there are a number of entities that seem like you could call them gods. When speaking with the Klaaxi after hitting exalted, one of them warns you that "our gods are not your gods" and that when the time comes, their loyalty will be to their own. They are referring, of course, to the Titans as "your gods" and the Old Gods as "our gods."
And obviously, it's right there in the name - the Old Gods are called gods.
That being said, are they? The Old Gods are profoundly powerful, of course, but they are also, ultimately, globs of void-turned-flesh hucked into our universe by the Void Lords. N'zoth and his peers have worshippers and can imbue followers with power, and wield a degree of power that seems godlike from a mortal perspective.
But the Titans seem like a whole order of magnitude greater than they are. Aman'thul plucked Y'Shaarj from Azeroth like he was popping a zit (with similarly nasty consequences.) The Titans, who literally comprise a group called "The Pantheon" (meaning "all gods" in Greek) seem pretty darn god-like, wouldn't you say? They certainly seem to be similar to the Greek gods, except perhaps they sleep around less (as far as we know.)
Then you've got the "Wild Gods." This appears to be a blanket term for the Ancients worshipped by the Night Elves, the August Celestials of Pandaria, and most of the Loa revered by the Trolls.
As far as we know, though, none of these entities are tied to the Shadowlands. The Old Gods are in the material plane and tied to the Void. The Wild Gods do seem to be connected to the Emerald Dream (and thus might also be connected to Ardenweald, so keep an eye on them.) The Titans, it seems, are thoroughly of the physical world.
But Elune, the only entity who has been referred to only as a Goddess, is also a big enigma. We know she's real, as we've seen her do things like take Ysera's spirit up into the stars and bestow the vague blessing of the Night Warrior on the Kaldorei. We also know that she has some connection to the Titans, given that the Tear of Elune is one of the Pillars of Creation and Eonar was hiding out on a world called Elun'ara.
So what is she?
A bit of speculation: We've heard that Tyrande's story is going to be prominent in Ardenweald. Let's imagine that the Arbiter and the Jailor are gods, full stop, and are thus of the same fundamental nature as Elune. Could it be that we might encounter Elune herself? Or at least that we might discover something else about her nature?
Saturday, February 8, 2020
Magical Realism in D&D - The Unsleeping City
I used to live in a neighborhood of Los Angeles called Eagle Rock. I think after reading Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, I was sort of inspired to think of places I knew having a sort of magical equivalence. Perhaps Eagle Rock could have some powerful eagle spirit one could visit.
I've always been drawn to the idea of fantasy in modern settings, though I'll confess I often balk at the magical realism genre. Perhaps it's because many of the stories I was assigned to read as a student were of that genre, never "fully committing" to the genre by coming up with a new world.
Of course, one of my biggest influences was Stephen King's Dark Tower series, which one could argue is a sort of mix of the kind of epic world-building fantasy I tend to prefer with magical realism.
I suppose it's sort of a question of definition: Many of the "magical realism" stories I've read and felt underwhelmed by were ones that introduced maybe one minor supernatural element into a setting that, even within the fiction of the story, felt like they were there purely as metaphor.
Fully committing to the reality of the fantastical, however, makes the idea of magic in the real world a pretty exciting idea (though if you've seen any of my fiction, it tends to skew toward a modern-like world that nonetheless has its own fantastical history and geography.)
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that I've just watched the free-on-YouTube half of The Unsleeping City, Dimension 20's D&D game set in modern New York.
Conceptually, the premise behind the Unsleeping City is that there is a Sixth Borough, called Nod, which is in the dreaming world, and as such, New York is a sort of portal into the fantastical. Most people don't see things for what they really are, but those who have, for one reason or another, pierced the veil can perceive the trolls, fairies, and mutant Santa Claus clones that inhabit New York.
The game is your familiar 5th Edition D&D, but the interpretations of the various classes and such are updated for the setting. For instance, probably my favorite character is Sofia Bicicleta, a Staten Island aesthetician who has just gone through a gutting divorce and has become something of an alcoholic. After getting drunk, she realizes that some of the ogres outside the bar are actually, literally ogres, and she also realizes she can fight quite well - becoming a Drunken Master Monk.
DM Brennan Lee Mulligan crafts a hilarious and compelling series of adventures for them to get into - one of my favorite bits is how the swarms of rats summoned by the Splinter-like rat-man sewer druid all cheer his name and proclaim their loyalty like he's a medieval king - and naturally, because this is how my mind works: I want to do something like this too.
Now, I'm about to launch a pretty big campaign in less than a month, so modern, real-world D&D will probably have to wait. The campaign will be in Ravnica, however, and I figure we could have some fun with similar urban concepts - my conception of Ravnica is one in which the Izzet League has really allowed the city to have a lot of modern conveniences, and I think there will be plenty of New York accents (it's one I can do decently, which is odd because I'm from Boston but suck at the Boston accent.)
They do manage to sidestep some of the issues you might find in translating the more medieval aspects of D&D. Only two characters are really melee-based, and one of them is a monk fighting without armor or weapons. The Paladin, Ricky Matsui, is a fire fighter (he's Mr. March on the calendar) and uses his fireman's axe as a weapon, so it's decently justified.
Things like armor are handwaved. Money, I think, is relatively easily converted. I think you could make each copper a dollar (New York is expensive! A mug of ale for 5 bucks isn't too bad!)
Ideas like faith are dealt with in a pretty interesting way. The group's Cleric is of the City Domain (found in the "Modern D&D" Unearthed Arcana) and he's basically one of those people for whom loyalty to New York is a religion. His holy symbol is an old subway token he wears on a chain, and the city's blessing toward him manifests in things like traffic moving around him as he walks across the street or the busses always showing up right when he gets to the stop.
Using the real world, it behooves the DM to really delve into the history of the city. Robert Moses, for example, an architect that helped to shape modern New York, plays a role in the Unsleeping City, though naturally he's given a more supernatural position than in real life (as far as we know.)
If you like Critical Role, I recommend checking this out. I have yet to see their other shows, except for a limited run one (in which the players, including Matt Mercer, essentially played Sauron's followers immediately after the ring was destroyed,) but it's quite entertaining. Unlike CR, Dimension 20 is pre-recorded and edited with sound effects and sometimes voice modulation (and I believe editing around rules questions - either that or the players on D20 are really on top of things.) The effect is that it feels perhaps less spontaneous, but also much more polished.
I've always been drawn to the idea of fantasy in modern settings, though I'll confess I often balk at the magical realism genre. Perhaps it's because many of the stories I was assigned to read as a student were of that genre, never "fully committing" to the genre by coming up with a new world.
Of course, one of my biggest influences was Stephen King's Dark Tower series, which one could argue is a sort of mix of the kind of epic world-building fantasy I tend to prefer with magical realism.
I suppose it's sort of a question of definition: Many of the "magical realism" stories I've read and felt underwhelmed by were ones that introduced maybe one minor supernatural element into a setting that, even within the fiction of the story, felt like they were there purely as metaphor.
Fully committing to the reality of the fantastical, however, makes the idea of magic in the real world a pretty exciting idea (though if you've seen any of my fiction, it tends to skew toward a modern-like world that nonetheless has its own fantastical history and geography.)
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that I've just watched the free-on-YouTube half of The Unsleeping City, Dimension 20's D&D game set in modern New York.
Conceptually, the premise behind the Unsleeping City is that there is a Sixth Borough, called Nod, which is in the dreaming world, and as such, New York is a sort of portal into the fantastical. Most people don't see things for what they really are, but those who have, for one reason or another, pierced the veil can perceive the trolls, fairies, and mutant Santa Claus clones that inhabit New York.
The game is your familiar 5th Edition D&D, but the interpretations of the various classes and such are updated for the setting. For instance, probably my favorite character is Sofia Bicicleta, a Staten Island aesthetician who has just gone through a gutting divorce and has become something of an alcoholic. After getting drunk, she realizes that some of the ogres outside the bar are actually, literally ogres, and she also realizes she can fight quite well - becoming a Drunken Master Monk.
DM Brennan Lee Mulligan crafts a hilarious and compelling series of adventures for them to get into - one of my favorite bits is how the swarms of rats summoned by the Splinter-like rat-man sewer druid all cheer his name and proclaim their loyalty like he's a medieval king - and naturally, because this is how my mind works: I want to do something like this too.
Now, I'm about to launch a pretty big campaign in less than a month, so modern, real-world D&D will probably have to wait. The campaign will be in Ravnica, however, and I figure we could have some fun with similar urban concepts - my conception of Ravnica is one in which the Izzet League has really allowed the city to have a lot of modern conveniences, and I think there will be plenty of New York accents (it's one I can do decently, which is odd because I'm from Boston but suck at the Boston accent.)
They do manage to sidestep some of the issues you might find in translating the more medieval aspects of D&D. Only two characters are really melee-based, and one of them is a monk fighting without armor or weapons. The Paladin, Ricky Matsui, is a fire fighter (he's Mr. March on the calendar) and uses his fireman's axe as a weapon, so it's decently justified.
Things like armor are handwaved. Money, I think, is relatively easily converted. I think you could make each copper a dollar (New York is expensive! A mug of ale for 5 bucks isn't too bad!)
Ideas like faith are dealt with in a pretty interesting way. The group's Cleric is of the City Domain (found in the "Modern D&D" Unearthed Arcana) and he's basically one of those people for whom loyalty to New York is a religion. His holy symbol is an old subway token he wears on a chain, and the city's blessing toward him manifests in things like traffic moving around him as he walks across the street or the busses always showing up right when he gets to the stop.
Using the real world, it behooves the DM to really delve into the history of the city. Robert Moses, for example, an architect that helped to shape modern New York, plays a role in the Unsleeping City, though naturally he's given a more supernatural position than in real life (as far as we know.)
If you like Critical Role, I recommend checking this out. I have yet to see their other shows, except for a limited run one (in which the players, including Matt Mercer, essentially played Sauron's followers immediately after the ring was destroyed,) but it's quite entertaining. Unlike CR, Dimension 20 is pre-recorded and edited with sound effects and sometimes voice modulation (and I believe editing around rules questions - either that or the players on D20 are really on top of things.) The effect is that it feels perhaps less spontaneous, but also much more polished.
Friday, February 7, 2020
Them Visions
Is it me or is the Orgrimmar Horrific Vision much, much easier? (I should also note that I've only been soloing them.) I think in part it's the corruption effects one tends to get.
In Orgrimmar, if you're soloing, the effect in the first area is totally ignorable - there aren't any friendly people to be harmed by your bloodthirst. When you go into the Corrupted areas (the 2nd tier, whatever that one's called,) you just need to periodically jump to shake off the illusory bugs.
Meanwhile, the Stormwind ones are both kind of disruptive to positioning. The "Promised Power" one isn't too bad except that you're generally going to be losing out on damage (especially in the fight against Alleria, where she always seems to put arrows down into the power spot.) The burning feet one in Corrupted areas is particularly nasty, sometimes throwing you into another group of enemies you might not be ready for (I've definitely managed to fail a run thinking "well, I've got enough sanity for one more pull" and then getting more dudes right as I'm about to finish that pull and thus can't throw out the sanity regenerator.)
But I also think the Stormwind challenges are less linear. In the Dwarven District, you have to make a circuitous route around the area to plant all the bombs, and in the Trade District, you wind up having to clear everything anyway just to get to all the scattered cages - which you can't open until the "boss" is defeated.
Meanwhile, both the Drag and the Valley of Spirits corrupted areas are basically a linear shot to the boss - in the latter, you even get deposited right back at the Valley of Strength as a sort of hub.
I get that the geography of these areas is about 16 years old at this point, so they had to build around them, but at this point I'm actually just saving my vessels of horrific visions on my more advanced characters to wait for Orgrimmar to come back around, as I think I'll just do better in them.
I know that this isn't going to be the same as Torghast, but it apparently bears some resemblance, what with the scaling dungeon and just trying to get as far in it as you can.
Personally, I've always been stressed out by timed events, particularly in an online game you can't pause. At least in Dark Souls and Bloodborne, if you're not in the middle of a fight you can just quit the game and pop back exactly where you were.
The way the Horrific Visions work, you basically get more time as you improve your cloak and do the little talent tree, and while the quests from Wrathion dictate what your goals should be, you can ultimately push yourself for more of a challenge based on how far you want to delve into it (it also occurred to me only later that you can just push to get the harder areas done and not worry about Thrall/Alleria.)
My sense is that in Torghast, we'll be progressing farther into the dungeon as we go - as gear improves and we potentially get other bonuses, we'll be better-equipped to delve further and gain greater rewards.
I suspect that there will be some sort of time-gating to this, but I personally hope there aren't so many currencies to worry about - maybe just let us do it once a day, or if that's too often, once a week, with maybe some way to get another run in.
In terms of gameplay, I'm hoping that it'll really just be the toughness of enemies that sets how far you get into it. If it's going to be time-gated, don't put me in a mad rush that gets ruined if the internet goes out.
In Orgrimmar, if you're soloing, the effect in the first area is totally ignorable - there aren't any friendly people to be harmed by your bloodthirst. When you go into the Corrupted areas (the 2nd tier, whatever that one's called,) you just need to periodically jump to shake off the illusory bugs.
Meanwhile, the Stormwind ones are both kind of disruptive to positioning. The "Promised Power" one isn't too bad except that you're generally going to be losing out on damage (especially in the fight against Alleria, where she always seems to put arrows down into the power spot.) The burning feet one in Corrupted areas is particularly nasty, sometimes throwing you into another group of enemies you might not be ready for (I've definitely managed to fail a run thinking "well, I've got enough sanity for one more pull" and then getting more dudes right as I'm about to finish that pull and thus can't throw out the sanity regenerator.)
But I also think the Stormwind challenges are less linear. In the Dwarven District, you have to make a circuitous route around the area to plant all the bombs, and in the Trade District, you wind up having to clear everything anyway just to get to all the scattered cages - which you can't open until the "boss" is defeated.
Meanwhile, both the Drag and the Valley of Spirits corrupted areas are basically a linear shot to the boss - in the latter, you even get deposited right back at the Valley of Strength as a sort of hub.
I get that the geography of these areas is about 16 years old at this point, so they had to build around them, but at this point I'm actually just saving my vessels of horrific visions on my more advanced characters to wait for Orgrimmar to come back around, as I think I'll just do better in them.
I know that this isn't going to be the same as Torghast, but it apparently bears some resemblance, what with the scaling dungeon and just trying to get as far in it as you can.
Personally, I've always been stressed out by timed events, particularly in an online game you can't pause. At least in Dark Souls and Bloodborne, if you're not in the middle of a fight you can just quit the game and pop back exactly where you were.
The way the Horrific Visions work, you basically get more time as you improve your cloak and do the little talent tree, and while the quests from Wrathion dictate what your goals should be, you can ultimately push yourself for more of a challenge based on how far you want to delve into it (it also occurred to me only later that you can just push to get the harder areas done and not worry about Thrall/Alleria.)
My sense is that in Torghast, we'll be progressing farther into the dungeon as we go - as gear improves and we potentially get other bonuses, we'll be better-equipped to delve further and gain greater rewards.
I suspect that there will be some sort of time-gating to this, but I personally hope there aren't so many currencies to worry about - maybe just let us do it once a day, or if that's too often, once a week, with maybe some way to get another run in.
In terms of gameplay, I'm hoping that it'll really just be the toughness of enemies that sets how far you get into it. If it's going to be time-gated, don't put me in a mad rush that gets ruined if the internet goes out.
Sunday, February 2, 2020
Ok, More Like a 5-Shot
Oh man.
Subbing in for our usual DM for the Sunday game, I ran a "one-shot" that was only just getting started when we ended it after 3 and a half hours.
The party (the same characters who had done "Horror in the Skies," a D&D mashup of Agatha Christie and H.P. Lovecraft set on an airship) arrives in Gonquista, the only real settlement in the Parthalian Wastes - a post-apocalyptic landscape where the best-preserved remains of the Parthalian civilization (a technologically-advanced civilization that collapsed 20,000 years ago) can be found. Unfortunately, one also finds mutants, ruthless bandits, wandering killer robots, and eldritch aberrations.
The party is sent by a university to find one professor Rupert Evermoore, an archaeologist who is attempting to discover a cistern like the one that Gonquista is built around - allowing for some new settlement to form.
As they arrive in Gonquista, however, they are attacked by a trio of Eonic Drifters and their Warforged mercenaries. Eonic Drifters (found in the Kobold Press' Tome of Beasts) are time-travelers, who can summon future versions of themselves to then try to blip party members forward in time - effectively taking them out for a number of rounds.
I'll say this: Only use one of these in an encounter, because they are mechanically complicated.
The party caught one of the Drifters, named Kallak (and thus forcing me to make it canon that in my setting all Drifters have palindrome names - happy 02/02/2020 everyone!) and forced him to divulge a few things:
That they need to stop Evermoore - they intend to kill him, because his presence leads to events in which the Great Barrier is shattered, unleashing cosmic horror upon the universe.
What the party may or may not have come to understand at this point is that the Great Barrier doesn't' hold things out, but in. Or, perhaps more accurately: the Great Barrier does hold things out, but their world is on the outside of that barrier, and the rest of the multiverse considers their world to be just the doorstep to the yawning maw of madness that is the Far Realm.
The party got some cool stuff in town, including making an order for an electrically-powered fist weapon (that might also be a sex toy) before setting out into the wastes on their Wasterider vehicle.
Sadly, I have not yet attacked them with Gnoll biker raiders wielding shotguns, but we'll have to save that for later.
Subbing in for our usual DM for the Sunday game, I ran a "one-shot" that was only just getting started when we ended it after 3 and a half hours.
The party (the same characters who had done "Horror in the Skies," a D&D mashup of Agatha Christie and H.P. Lovecraft set on an airship) arrives in Gonquista, the only real settlement in the Parthalian Wastes - a post-apocalyptic landscape where the best-preserved remains of the Parthalian civilization (a technologically-advanced civilization that collapsed 20,000 years ago) can be found. Unfortunately, one also finds mutants, ruthless bandits, wandering killer robots, and eldritch aberrations.
The party is sent by a university to find one professor Rupert Evermoore, an archaeologist who is attempting to discover a cistern like the one that Gonquista is built around - allowing for some new settlement to form.
As they arrive in Gonquista, however, they are attacked by a trio of Eonic Drifters and their Warforged mercenaries. Eonic Drifters (found in the Kobold Press' Tome of Beasts) are time-travelers, who can summon future versions of themselves to then try to blip party members forward in time - effectively taking them out for a number of rounds.
I'll say this: Only use one of these in an encounter, because they are mechanically complicated.
The party caught one of the Drifters, named Kallak (and thus forcing me to make it canon that in my setting all Drifters have palindrome names - happy 02/02/2020 everyone!) and forced him to divulge a few things:
That they need to stop Evermoore - they intend to kill him, because his presence leads to events in which the Great Barrier is shattered, unleashing cosmic horror upon the universe.
What the party may or may not have come to understand at this point is that the Great Barrier doesn't' hold things out, but in. Or, perhaps more accurately: the Great Barrier does hold things out, but their world is on the outside of that barrier, and the rest of the multiverse considers their world to be just the doorstep to the yawning maw of madness that is the Far Realm.
The party got some cool stuff in town, including making an order for an electrically-powered fist weapon (that might also be a sex toy) before setting out into the wastes on their Wasterider vehicle.
Sadly, I have not yet attacked them with Gnoll biker raiders wielding shotguns, but we'll have to save that for later.
Saturday, February 1, 2020
The Reaper Class for D&D Fifth Edition
Well, I've been mulling this thought in my head for a good long while, but today, in a fit of creativity, I made a full draft of the Reaper class for D&D.
Inspired in part by the Death Knight from World of Warcraft, the Reaper deviates significantly from both that design as well as the Oathbreaker Paladin and similar Death Knight designs.
The most distinguishing feature of the class is that a character who becomes a Reaper is now considered undead. This severely limits the ways in which the Reaper can be healed by friendly magic, but to aid in their survival, they have a number of ways to heal themselves in the midst of combat.
Reapers are a martial class, with access to martial weapons, heavy armor and shields, the extra attack and level 5, and a number of aggressive fighting styles.
They eventually learn to imbue their weapons with power to deal extra necrotic damage and then special runes that cause additional damage and other effects.
Like Paladins and Rangers (and Artificers, now,) Reapers are half-casters who can have up to 5th level spells.
Reapers have three subclasses, called Sigils, which are the Sigil of Blood, Sigil of Death, and Sigil of Shadow.
Blood Reapers focus on battlefield tactics and enhanced self-healing.
Death Reapers focus on spellcasting, summoning an incorporeal minion and learning more spells as well as cantrips to allow them to act as true ranged casters.
Shadow Reapers focus on stealth and instilling fear in their foes, gaining the ability to move stealthily even wearing heavy armor and gaining various bonuses against frightened opponents.
I created a spell list for them that blends some of the Paladin's and Wizard's spells (particularly Smite spells, necromancy, and illusion spells.) I also created an old WoW favorite, Corpse Explosion, which is just as nasty and horrible as it sounds.
Naturally, this being the first truly finished draft of the class means that there are likely a lot of kinks to work out. I have no idea if it's balanced - I suspect it's overpowered until I look at some of the high-level Paladin abilities and then I wonder if it's underpowered.
Being unable to heal up from Cure Wounds or most other healing spells feels like it could be a dealbreaker to anyone considering the class, so I wonder if the healing solutions I've come up with are good enough (much of it is based on being able to spend hit dice in the middle of combat, but I worry that that'll just make short rests less useful to Reapers, rather than actually making up for the lack of most magical healing.)
Still, I'm fairly pleased with this ambitious concept. Naturally I'm also worried that I've come up with too-complicated mechanics, but I think in the end it shouldn't be unmanageable.
Inspired in part by the Death Knight from World of Warcraft, the Reaper deviates significantly from both that design as well as the Oathbreaker Paladin and similar Death Knight designs.
The most distinguishing feature of the class is that a character who becomes a Reaper is now considered undead. This severely limits the ways in which the Reaper can be healed by friendly magic, but to aid in their survival, they have a number of ways to heal themselves in the midst of combat.
Reapers are a martial class, with access to martial weapons, heavy armor and shields, the extra attack and level 5, and a number of aggressive fighting styles.
They eventually learn to imbue their weapons with power to deal extra necrotic damage and then special runes that cause additional damage and other effects.
Like Paladins and Rangers (and Artificers, now,) Reapers are half-casters who can have up to 5th level spells.
Reapers have three subclasses, called Sigils, which are the Sigil of Blood, Sigil of Death, and Sigil of Shadow.
Blood Reapers focus on battlefield tactics and enhanced self-healing.
Death Reapers focus on spellcasting, summoning an incorporeal minion and learning more spells as well as cantrips to allow them to act as true ranged casters.
Shadow Reapers focus on stealth and instilling fear in their foes, gaining the ability to move stealthily even wearing heavy armor and gaining various bonuses against frightened opponents.
I created a spell list for them that blends some of the Paladin's and Wizard's spells (particularly Smite spells, necromancy, and illusion spells.) I also created an old WoW favorite, Corpse Explosion, which is just as nasty and horrible as it sounds.
Naturally, this being the first truly finished draft of the class means that there are likely a lot of kinks to work out. I have no idea if it's balanced - I suspect it's overpowered until I look at some of the high-level Paladin abilities and then I wonder if it's underpowered.
Being unable to heal up from Cure Wounds or most other healing spells feels like it could be a dealbreaker to anyone considering the class, so I wonder if the healing solutions I've come up with are good enough (much of it is based on being able to spend hit dice in the middle of combat, but I worry that that'll just make short rests less useful to Reapers, rather than actually making up for the lack of most magical healing.)
Still, I'm fairly pleased with this ambitious concept. Naturally I'm also worried that I've come up with too-complicated mechanics, but I think in the end it shouldn't be unmanageable.
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