Demi-Legendary Creatures - Creating a Phased Fight That's Exciting and Cool

Ok, DMs:

Player characters are powerful. It's the nature of the game, and you want your players to feel strong (well, unless you're playing a horror-based campaign... I have some ideas about that, like just balancing encounters as if they were all X levels higher or if there were X more players in the party, but that's another post and not based on experimentation) and heroic. And after all, you want them to ultimately prevail against the monsters you throw at them.

But frankly, I think that most enemies - especially if you run games with big groups - go down so insanely quickly that you, as DM, don't even get to use their fancy toys.

Generally speaking, I think that any time the players outnumber the monsters you throw at them, if there's one particularly central figure to the fight (and basically always if you ever have them fight just one monster) you'll want to make the monster legendary.

First, I recommend giving them max health - just look at their hit dice and assume they rolled the maximum for each die.

If your party is very heavy on magical crowd-control, give them 3 daily legendary resistances. But most importantly, to solve action economy issues, give them legendary actions.

I recommend the following:

Let them make one of their regular attacks (if it's a spellcaster, let them cast a cantrip) this can often just be a single legendary action if one attack isn't that big - most dangerous monsters have multiattack - but if your monster only makes one or two attacks, but these attacks do massive damage, consider making this cost 2 legendary actions to balance it.

Then, give them some sort of movement ability that doesn't provoke opportunity attacks - a half-speed movement with no opp attacks is a pretty standard one I use.

And then you might come up with something creative - maybe an area-effect around them. Keep the damage lower than their typical attacks, as this can hit multiple party members and thus feel a lot bigger overall (you can make this cost extra actions if you want to buff its damage.)

Now, this works pretty well for any creature you want to make a big boss monster. (In general, this will still make the encounter fairly balanced for the party - if you really want to amp it up be very difficult, consider doubling the health after maxing it.)

But let's say you're not really looking for an epic, plot-important encounter, and just want to soup up a random encounter or a sidequest.

Here's what I did tonight:

You max the health, but you don't use legendary actions... until they get to the ordinary average health.

Then, the legendaries activate, and for the rest of the fight, things get more difficult.

It essentially creates two phases of the fight - one in which the party is likely to feel pretty confident at first as they wail on the thing, and then it kicks into high gear after they've gotten a few hits in.

My example was the Gearkeeper Construct from Explorer's Guide to Wildemount - something I flavored as an Izzet invention that had been secretly corrupted with Phyrexian oil, and so went berserk.

Its normal health is 161, but maxed out it's 238. So once the party had done at least 77 damage, it got the following legendary actions:

Blade Spin: Creatures within 10 feet of the construct must make a DC 15 Dex save, taking 2d8 slashing damage on a failure, or half on a success.

Bowl Through (Costs 2 Actions): The construct moves up to half its movement speed. Any creature whose space it passes through must make a DC 15 Strength save or be knocked prone and take 3d8 slashing damage. This movement does not provoke opportunity attacks.

Attack: The construct uses its Arm Blade or Spear Launcher attack.

The fight (immediately following a fight with some Fluxcharger Weirds and Iron Defenders) only lasted two rounds against a party of 6 level 10 players, but there was enough to do that it felt reasonably epic.

I Made a Blue Mill Deck and I Think I'm A Bad Guy Now?

I decided to liquidate a ton of my craftable cards in order to build a House Dimir mill deck - the recently keyworded ability that lets you put cards from your opponent's library into their graveyard.

If you know very little of Magic, here's how it works:

Almost all decks win by reducing the opponent's life total to zero. However, there's a failsafe built into the game if both sides just turtle up and focus entirely on defense instead of offense. On each of your turns, you have to draw a card from your deck (the deck is referred to as the library). There's a rule to prevent games from lasting forever, which is that if you would draw a card but your library is empty, you lose.

You can think of it as going to 0 or less life is like being killed (or for friendlier duels, getting beaten into submission, I guess) while losing this way is like you've gone completely insane as your mind has been wiped out.

Point is, it ends the game.

While drawing cards is usually a good thing, some decks are built around the idea of forcing the opponent to draw tons and tons of cards - more than they can ever use - or, better yet, just tossing those cards directly into the graveyard so they don't have a chance to use them. (Note that some decks are built around doing this to themselves and then using cards that dig things out of the graveyard, which is why Dimir mill decks in the original Ravnica block were somewhat hosed by Golgari ones in the same set.)

There was a card that existed, I believe, in the very original Magic set ("Alpha") called Millstone, which let you do this to your opponent repeatedly, and since then, it's always been called "Milling," which has just this year been made an official keyword - when a player mills 1 card, they are taking 1 card from the top of their library and putting it in their graveyard.

I initially wanted to build my deck blue/black for that old school Dimir feel, but as it turns out, there's not a lot of support for interesting enemy-graveyard synergies with black cards these days (at least, not that I could put together) and so I decided to go pure blue for an easier time with mana and more of a focus on milling.

The deck is fun to play - you set up various permanents that trigger when you cast other spells, always milling the opponent for two cards, and then on top of that the spells you're casting mill the opponent as well. So once you're up and running, you're milling them for 8-10ish cards per turn. With a little luck, that means the opponent's clock is ticking down precariously. I even have this Ashiok planeswalker card (maybe the first planeswalker I've regularly used) that both mills and then exiles the enemy graveyard - so even if they do have resurrection stuff, you can wipe it out.

Yes, it's fun to play.

But is it fun to play against?

I have yet to win without the opponent conceding with what I figure must be a frustrated sigh.

The deck is pure control - there's no emphasis at all on damaging the opponent, so the only real interactions with the other player is that you're setting up roadblocks while they race to kill you before you can mill them out.

I suspect an Azorius (White/Blue) deck of this sort could work - leveraging white's life-gain to put more time on the clock - but I also think that keeping it mono-blue lets you hyper-focus on grinding down their deck.

Anyway, I also think that having slightly elevated lag while my roommates are both on a voice chat for their LARP in quarantine (which I think basically becomes a standard TTRPG) has maybe made it a little frustrating for opponents, as every time one of my triggered abilities that says "target player mills x cards" goes off, I need to manually target it, which has a maybe 1-2 second lag, and that adds up.

Anyway, it's an evil, evil deck. But also kind of fun in a mischievous way.

Sinking Deep Into MTGA

Oh boy, have I played a lot of Magic in the past... 30 hours or so.

Now that the game is running smoothly (though it always seems to need to clean up after restarting, which takes a while) I've been playing around in the game.

As you play, you can (limited to a certain number of games a day, presumably for sanity's sake) earn Xp which then gives you various rewards, including cards. After finishing the five "color challenges" that start with 4 bouts against AI with a predetermined card order to teach you various concepts and then tossing you against a real foe for the last (though giving you credit, win-or-lose) you seem to then unlock a daily quest to get two-color card sets. I first got a Gruul Clans set (my least favorite color-combination, actually! Except maybe Green/White) and today I earned an Azorius deck - these are full decks that are added to your collection, including the rare... what are they called, pain lands? The ones like Watery Grave where they're actually two land types and you can either let them come in tapped or pay 2 life.

I've been amazed at how effective the Azorius set is right out of the box, though its initial successes have hit a bit of a dip lately.

I'm still a hardcore Dimir fan, and have a deck that now has two Thiefs of Sanity - and will probably get more if I feel ready to spend my Rare cards.

Oh, here's how targeting specific cards works:

You can't actually trade with other people (probably to tamp down on scams) and so, instead, as you open packs, you'll get little tokens that allow you to craft new cards. I believe that once you surpass four copies of any given card (specific to a set/artwork) you'll start getting these tokens instead, and it might be that each pack comes with some automatically. I believe you need to get multiple tokens to earn a full Mythic or Rare card - I haven't gotten super into it.

The point is, as your collection fills out, you can start going after specific cards, and I'm finding myself very tempted to make an old-school Dimir mill deck - especially given that they've finally keyworded "mill."

I've been playing in casual, unranked matches for now - want to iron out my decks a bit before I step into those waters. So most people I play have relatively simple decks - largely built out of the starter decks you earn early on by playing the tutorials. Occasionally, you come across some insanely powerful deck that looks like it's built for tournaments, and while that usually means you're screwed, if you manage to outmaneuver it, it makes it that much sweeter.

Just some metagame things I'm surprised by, as someone who hasn't really played much since 2006 or so:

Healing seems like a huge thing - lifelink creatures and health-gaining cards are way more prevalent than they were in my day. Healing used to be kind of scoffed at as a waste of a card, though it seems like you get so much additional value out of these cards that it's a pretty big bonus.

Despite the prevalence of healing, the games go fast - it might just be that Arena is way more streamlined than MTGO, but it seems like it's faster than a game of Hearthstone - which is kind of shocking, given how much easier it is to play a defensive game in MTG than Hearthstone.

At least at the casual level, there's a decent degree of diversity among the playstyles, which is very nice. I remember playing during the Kamigawa block, and it was like every opponent was using Sensei's Divining Top, Umezawa's Jitte, and maybe those Black spirit dragons that would life-drain for 5 when they died. And that was in "casual" games.

I still have a ton to learn about the metagame - I can wrap my head around the Ravnica guilds because, well, that's what I most recently played. But when people show up with these Ikoria triome decks and all the crazy mutation stuff, I really feel out of my league (especially as a creature that's got all those mutations has about three billion abilities.)

In terms of flavor, I really hope they're planning a return to Innistrad, as I missed the boat for that both times and would love to be able to check that setting out from a card-playing perspective (I've already made a level 16 adventure for my Ravnica D&D game - currently at level 10 - that will take them through all four provinces of Innistrad and probably take a long time to finish. But we've got a lot of plot to get through before we get there.)

Anyway, despite long ago passing my daily rewards, I've been having a blast just playing.

Again, I really dislike how the Crystal currency makes it hard to remember exactly how many actual dollars (or euros or whatever) you're pumping into the game. I spent 25 bucks yesterday and I'm sticking to for about a month - thankfully, it's not like I can't win without rare-encrusted decks, so I don't feel that compelled to spend more.

First Impressions of MTG Arena

Finally, after I believe years, Magic the Gathering Arena is now available on Macs. So how is it?

Well, this morning, having downloaded it just about as soon as the Mac client was available, it was painfully slow, buggy, and kept verifying files - a process that interrupted the game and forced you to wait for half an hour or so.

Thankfully, whether it was server instability or just the kinks of trying to get into a system that was still downloading things in the background, by this evening the game has become far better - running smoothly and working fine.

The primary challenge, now, is that I haven't played Magic in, like, a really long time. Not only do I have to build up a new collection of cards (with the real stuff and MTGO, this makes my third) but I also don't have a great sense for the metagame.

So I've defaulted to my favorite style of deck - a kind of Blue/Black aggro/control, primarily focusing on black creatures (vampires, primarily, which used to be way rarer) and using blue for a bit of control and card draw to keep things up.

I've had pretty decent success rates - I don't know the exact numbers, but I'd say I'm winning roughly every other game, and possibly even more.

One thing I don't love so much is how they obscure how much you're paying for cards by forcing all transactions to be through a Disney Dollar-like Gem currency. It makes me retroactively appreciate how Hearthstone just puts it in dollars if you're not buying a pack of cards at a time with gold. There is also a gold currency here, but I think, like Hearthstone, you can only earn so much in a day.

The UI and UX is an immense step up from what I remember of the MTGO days, with streamlined gameplay that figures out the optimal lands to tap for mana and speeds through phases you don't need to worry about unless you put a stop there for devious purposes.

The deck builder, I think I just need to get to know it better. To be frank, I think I'm way better at playing the game itself than building decks, but I try to do a sort of iterative design where I look out for cards that always seem to sit in my hand, unusued, and try to replace them with ones that I have a use for.

The game also gives you infinite basic lands to work with, which is just rational, but I'm trying to figure out how to set my favorites rather than just manually selecting them.

Anyway, I feel a bit like I'm 8 again, so that's fun. And given the current... everything, I'm glad that I have something to do with the time.

If You Hadn't Already Removed the Idea of "Evil" Races From Your Own Games, You've Been Missing Out

One of the small moves toward anti-racism in Wizards' production of D&D announced recently was the re-examination of classically "evil" races - with orcs and drow in particular mentioned.

Historically, these races were considered evil because, well, that was what they'd inherited from their fantasy forebears. Drow, of course, were just an opportunity to flip the script on the classically good, Tolkienesque elves ("what if elves, but evil!?!") and orcs, while not really invented by Tolkien (I think they date back to Greek myth, though in a very different and less prominent form) were established by JRRT as the go-to menacing, ugly monster-people who would come in and kill you for no good reason.

But let's talk Tolkien and Orcs.

Tolkien was a devout Catholic, and part of Catholic doctrine is that race doesn't have anything to do with how worthy you are of salvation - that you can be a good person regardless of how you were born, and that anyone who chooses to do good works (and believe in God) can be a full-fledged, good Catholic.

Tolkien struggled, then, with the orcs, as he wanted to have vast armies that his big villains could send against our heroes, but he wanted the heroes to be morally justified in slaughtering them. But he also felt that he couldn't just have had Morgoth - the setting's equivalent to the devil, and basically Sauron's old boss - create the orcs wholecloth, because another aspect of his Catholic worldview was that only God could create a race of truly sentient people. In fact, in his setting, the Dwarves were created by an enthusiastic Vala (think somewhere between archangel and minor god) before God (Eru) had finished work on his own creations, the elves and the humans, but not being the one true god, this Vala couldn't actually make the dwarves sentient. Because this deed had not been done out of arrogance, but out of an attempt to contribute to the "music of creation," Eru decided to breathe true life into the dwarves - and without that, the dwarves would never have been anything more than soulless automatons.

Anyway, with the actual creation of people requiring Eru's intervention, Tolkien struggled with the Orcs (and Trolls) until he had an idea - what if the Orcs aren't a separate race? Instead, he decided that the Orcs were actually Elves, but elves who had been warped, tortured, and brainwashed by Morgoth, and later Sauron, turning all the elves' beauty to ugliness and their love of peace and tranquility into bloodlust.

Of course, what Tolkien hadn't thought of was something he actually used for the evil humans of his setting - that there were people who had simply been deceived into working for the big evil bad guy. Tolkien, a product of his time, and certainly not as conscious of racism as we understand it today, made his evil humans vaguely Middle Eastern in vibe, but unlike the Orcs, who had been warped so far that they never had a chance to be good, these ones could, theoretically, be redeemed if they were shown the error of their ways.

If you're familiar with this blog, you'll be aware that, while it's branched out in recent years, it started as a WoW blog. And for all its flaws, one of the things I love most about the Warcraft cosmos is that its "evil" humanoid races are never that simple.

Warcrafts I & II generally played the orcs the way that they were in Tolkien - irredeemable aggressors who just want to destroy. But with Warcraft III, the entire concept of the orcs was transformed. We discovered instead that the orcs of Warcraft were once a very different culture, and that, like the Haradrim in Lord of the Rings, they were tricked into becoming the Burning Legion's puppet. By the Third War, the Horde is working on rehabilitating itself.

And what's great is that this does not, in any way, reduce the amount of conflict. Indeed, it introduces new conflicts. While the Orcs still have to deal with enemies that they've made - either the humans whom they've put on the defensive and who want vengeance, or the demons who wish to regain control of their race - they also now have internal conflicts, where they must decide what the destiny for their people will be. They must reckon between those who wish to wash their hands of the past and move forward - but risk descending into the same old habits - and those who wish to do penance, but potentially fail to act decisively to gain what their people need to survive. Indeed, there's even the conflict of whether to valorize a past that, while not demon-corrupted, was problematic in its own ways, and of course led to their corruption in the first place.

Hell, you want drama? The Orcs in Warcraft are undergoing the same cultural reckoning that we in America are dealing with - having to reexamine our complicity and even active participation in toxic behaviors. I mean, could the parallels get any clearer? The Orcs' capital city is named after a dictator who was responsible for a war of genocide! Thrall, well-meaning though he was, memorialized monsters in his foundation of the nation of Durotar, and there's a vocal contingent (perhaps fewer since Garrosh's day) among the Orcs that continue to insist that they were always the good guys. Sound familiar?

I haven't touched much on the drow here, but at the same time, I feel as if D&D canon has already been shifting away from the notion that they're all bad guys since the introduction of Drizzt Do'Urden in the '80s.

There can absolutely still be evil political structures in place that put members of these races in antagonistic roles, if you really want to get the old-school feel of fighting them. But making that an issue of politics, and fleshing out the cultures of these people to the point where they're not all bloodthirsty monsters makes the worlds you play in far more interesting, not to mention realistic.

D&D's always going to have pure evil monsters for you to fight. No one's saying that we're going to have to sit and sing Kumbaya with the Demogorgon or anything. But the whole premise behind a creature being a humanoid, rather than a fiend or a monstrosity, is that they're ultimately just a person - and people can be good, bad, or far more often, some mix of the two.

While I feel like this change has been implied for a long time, it's good that they're making it official.

Shadowlands Reveal Stream Rescheduled for July 8th

Blizzard had planned to do a stream to reveal new information about the upcoming Shadowlands expansion earlier this month, but decided (wisely, I think) that such a thing would come off as sort of tone-deaf as the national conversation was focused much more on the history and heritage of racism in our country.

While that conversation is far from over (and I think Blizzard needs to do some work on its own issues of racial representation - the new human customization options are a good start, but there's still a ton to look at) I also understand that they're on a schedule that will require them to get some info out there about Shadowlands before it releases - presumably some time this fall.

So, the stream has been rescheduled for early July.

What can we expect to see?

I think the biggest element will probably be a release date for the expansion. Despite everyone working from home, Blizzard has made steady progress on adding more content to the alpha test, and while they haven't yet started the broader beta test, it does look at this point like a lot of the game's content is out there. At this point, I think the main super-important feature to test that I don't think is out there quite yet is Soulbinds, which have the potential to help balance the covenants, giving the developers more knobs with which to tune the covenant choices to be in line with one another. Given that I'm intending to make my choices of covenant entirely based on what I feel would be right for the given character (though skewing toward allowing my first four characters to take one of each) I do really hope I won't feel like I've messed up with some insanely sub-par choice just because it actually makes a lot of sense for my Demon Hunter to go Necrolords or whatever.

I also suspect we might get a sense of what the first "major" raid will be, possibly taking place in the Maw (though it'd be very odd if we take out the Jailer in 9.1, unless they confirm that there's a different big bad. Maybe Sylvanas? Or vice-versa?)

We won't have a Blizzcon this year for obvious reasons, but I also think they'll probably hold off on any big 9.2 reveals until the expansion's actually out.

Dark Souls: A World in the Shadowfell?

The Dark Souls series is set in a bleak world inspired by western fantasy, but made by Japanese game studio From Software by director Hidetaka Miyazaki. At the core of the series is the problem of sustainability. When the first game begins, you get an epic cinematic in which the history of the world is told - once, the world was grey and unchanging, with only grey trees and stone dragons who looked over the static expanse. Then, some entities, deep within the earth, discovered the First Flame, and with it, the Lord Souls. These beings would become god-like lords and bring about a new age, slaying the dragons, burning the arch trees, and introducing disparity - between life and death, and between light and dark - to create a new age of Fire.

During this age, Gwyn, the Lord of Sunlight, ruled as a divine king, and civilizations grew - both Gwyn's glorious kingdom of Anor Londo, and a number of human realms.

But, over time, the Fire began to fade - and as it did, disparity itself began to break down. The Curse of Undeath began to infect humanity, causing the dead to rise once again, but suffer from the effects of "hollowing." Each time they rose, a little of their individuality, intelligence, and personal will would fade. By the time of the first Dark Souls game, the undead are being shuffled off to remote asylums to wait out until the end of the world. However, as your character hears, there may be a way to solve this problem - a "Chosen Undead" can journey to Lordran - the realm of the lords - and ring the bells of awakening to address the issue. Once the player does so, they are informed that they can "Link the Fire" and thus reignite the Age of Fire, restoring true life to the people and allowing the world to escape its decline into stagnation and dread.

The "good" ending of the first game has the player discover that Gwyn sacrificed himself, burning away his own soul to fuel the First Flame - which was how they solved this problem the first time it happened - and in it, the player sacrifices themself in the same way.

By the time Dark Souls III comes around (and I'll confess I don't really know much DSII lore, but I'm given to understand that III follows much more from I) this cycle has repeated itself several times, such that there are numerous "Lords of Cinder" who had taken Gwyn's place. In III, when the prince who was literally bred and raised to be the next Lord of Cinder refuses to do so, a contingency plan goes into effect, where several former Lords of Cinder gather to collectively give up what they have left to keep the flame going - though even that fails, as the re-awakened undead Cinder Lords don't actually show up, for various reasons (except Ludleth, good old Ludleth.)

One never gets to see the lands of Dark Souls at their height - the game is all about visitng these places after they have fallen - either to decadence or to post-apocalyptic ruin. While the player's actions are, in theory, a source of hope for the people of this world, that hope is generally a very bleak and desperate one.

Dark Souls' world seems to just want to fall apart. The almost gravitational pull to this stagnant, static nature is so persistent - even though the first game might suggest that the Age of Fire could be preserved with just a little maintenance, the implications of the third game suggest that it's getting harder and harder to achieve with diminishing returns.

And that got me thinking: that's kind of like the Shadowfell, isn't it?

In D&D, the Shadowfell is a realm parallel to our own, but it's darker and bleaker and filled with the undead. Sort of the opposite number to the Feywild, it's a weirdly parallel world, where the geography is similar, but different (a great video game example would be the Dark World from Link to the Past.)

But while the normal world is filled with a mixture of life and death, energy and entropy, the Shadowfell saps vitality from those within it. Color is drained from things, and if a player character spends too much time there, they'll slowly lose their motivation and fall into a kind of depressive stupor.

A bit like Hollowing, don't you think?

The Shadowfell is associated strongly with the undead, as well as monstrosities that are based on negative emotions - the Sorrowsworn. Undeath is a kind of stagnation - it has none of the energy or drive of life, and even the more charismatic and motivated undead, like vampires, tend to be kind of empty inside, ever searching for something that will give them meaning beyond the monstrous tedium of their existence. But it's also not really death, which, in D&D terms, means going on to the Outer Planes, where the higher concepts of good, evil, law, and chaos give its inhabitants the kind of eternal purpose that doesn't lose meaning over time. Depression, to use my personal definition, is a kind of transcendent boredom, and undeath seems to require this kind of mental disconnect as the body withers away and the individuals are stuck in meaningless patterns.

As I see it, the Feywild is manic - with its capricious and whimsical-yet-deadly fey creatures always jumping from one passion to another - while the Shadowfell is depressive, stuck in stagnation without any real hope of getting out of the rut.

To my mind, then, you could interpret the Dark Souls universe as some corner of the Shadowfell in which a fragment of another plane of existence - the Feywild, or the outer planes, the positive energy plane, or even the material plane - somehow got in, and some undead beings found it, giving them purpose and meaning and motivation. They created a whole new world around this powerful source of magic, and made something resembling the material plane. But over time, the true nature of the Shadowfell began to work its way into this new world, and the bleakness began to sap and diminish the First Flame.

Thus, the dying of the First Flame and the coming of darkness is just the Shadowfell finally reasserting itself.

Of course, what this would then imply is that the hope for the people of that universe would be to somehow escape to the material plane. But that is probably easier said than done.

Yharnam as a Ravenloft Setting

The Soulsborne games have, of course, managed to be a big influence on me even though I only started playing them a couple years ago. While I understand why people adore Dark Souls, I, myself, prefer Bloodborne (though I wish Bloodborne was as big as Dark Souls III.) Both series' worldbuilding and aesthetics are incredible (and incredibly bleak) but maybe it's just because I've actually managed to beat Bloodborne (in DSIII I still have Nameless King, Darkeater Midir, and Slave Knight Gael, and of course Soul of Cinder evading me) but that one has a special place in my heart.

Anyway, it just occurred to me that Bloodborne could work really well as a Ravenloft setting.

(Similarly, I think Dark Souls could easily take place in the Shadowfell, which I could and probably will dedicate another post to.)

But let's talk specifically about the Ravenloft setting.

Ravenloft is a D&D setting that is built around Gothic Horror. But while gothic horror literature is typically set in our own world, and you can certainly have plenty of gothic horror tropes in the various worlds of the material plane in D&D, the Ravenloft setting places characters in the Demiplanes of Dread - a special, extra-planar region outside of mundane reality.

The Demiplanes of Dread pre-date the Shadowfell (which was introduced in either 3rd or 4th Edition, I think) and so, while they're connected to the Shadowfell in 5th Edition, they're also kind of separate. Essentially, think of the Demiplanes as being bubbles in the border between the Shadowfell and the Material Plane. While the Shadowfell, like the manic-to-its-depressive counterpart the Feywild, is a parallel world with equivalent features and locations, the Demiplanes are pieces of the material plane that have been swallowed by the Mists, and become their own little pocket universes, connected to one another, but also isolated.

There are mysterious figures - godlike but not gods - called the Dark Powers, who choose which people and which lands are taken. Each demiplane has its own Dark Lord, who is simultaneously the most powerful being in that demiplane and sort of its ruler, but also its prisoner, bound to the world and to a cycle of repeating their crimes in a limbo-like state of perpetual self-torment.

Most famous of these, and effectively the namesake of the setting, is Barovia, where the vampire Strahd von Zarovich rules from his home, Castle Ravenloft. The 5th Edition module Curse of Strahd is the updated version of the original adventure that spawned the Ravenloft setting.

While Barovia is by far the best-known part of the setting, the basic premise allows for all sorts of Dark Lords, each generally conforming to a classic horror trope, though these can go into somewhat less gothic territories like Mummy Lords and even infamous pirates. The setting does also sometimes contain some cosmic horror tropes as well - after all, Lovecraft's work was a sort of blending of Edgar Allen Poe's fixation on madness and psychological horror with the fear of alien beings such as from H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds.

Bloodborne, of course, is a story that blends the aesthetics of gothic horror - the gothic architecture, the notion of men becoming beasts - with cosmic horror - the alien hidden beneath it all, the notion of knowledge as a dangerous thing that could lead to madness - as well as some of Hidetaka Miyazaki's penchant for disturbing visuals.

But something occurred to me - the actual mechanics of Bloodborne actually bear some resemblance to that of Ravenloft.

Both are about cycles. The Dark Lord, win or lose, will generally find themselves repeating their cycle over and over. It's extremely rare for the Dark Powers to actually permit a Dark Lord to leave Ravenloft (in a questionably canonical episode, the ur-Death Knight, Lord Soth, had no illusions about his own crimes, and so the Dark Powers basically figured "you know what, ironic punishment isn't really working on this guy. He's far too self-aware.")

Who, then, is the Dark Lord of Yharnam?

I'd say it's Gehrman, the First Hunter.

Bloodborne is a little odd, and distinct from the Souls games in that the final boss changes depending on which of the three endings you go for. There is an ending in which you allow Gehrman to behead you within the Hunter's Dream - the sort of peaceful respite that you return to when you die, or when you wish to take refuge from the dangers of the night. Doing so severs your connection to the Dream, and you're allowed to wake up and presumably leave Yharnam, with all the nightmarish memories of what came before forgotten. This leaves the final boss of the game Mergo's Wet Nurse, a very clearly monstrous (though not necessarily evil) thing within a conjured nightmare created by the evil College of Mensis (or, something. You never really know with these Soulsborne games.)

But if you refuse to let him do so, Gehrman fights you. What's interesting is that your refusal to leave the dream could either be a sign of your bloodlust taking over you, or maybe a more altruistic desire to keep the city safe. Either way, Gehrman's motivations seem to be pretty noble - he wants to put you down, either because you've become a blodd-crazed beast or because he's trying to spare you from what he knows will happen if you stay.

Gehrman, it's implied, fought beasts to protect the city of Yharnam, and while he did not succumb to the Curse of Beasts like so many other hunters - who became werewolf-like (or far worse, such as in the case of Ludwig) monsters - he must have committed some terrible crimes (likely involving the being Kos, whose corpse is seen in the final boss arena of the Old Hunters DLC) and made some kind of deal with the Moon Presence - one of the Great Ones - where he'd oversee other hunters.

If Barovia is indicative of other Ravenloft settings, the only way to escape the demiplane is to slay its Dark Lord (or be Vistani.) This does allow for a final triumph, and a happy ending one can earn by surviving up to that fight.

But one could imagine Yharnam as a kind of exception to that rule. Gehrman might need some task performed - the destruction of some horrifying monster that counts as the official final boss of the adventure, and he'll free you by severing your conneciton to that demiplane. But players who see the anguish that he's in, the horror that he's forced to endure, might choose the "good" ending and refuse to leave him - only to trigger this final fight.

And, true to the bleakness of the story of Bloodborne, the reward for defeating him is, yes, saving him from this eternal cycle, but then being forced to take his place.

MTG Arena Finally Coming to Mac in Just Three Days

Announced on Twitter, Magic: The Gathering Arena, the (relatively) new online digital platform for MtG, will be available on Macs in just a few short days.

As a lifelong Mac user (our family wasn't religious, but we stuck with Apple through the rough times before they re-hired Steve Jobs) this is a pretty big deal, as I'll finally be able to play Magic online without some sort of emulator (I played a fair amount of MTG Online in college that way, and it was laggy as hell.)

Now, having never played Arena myself, but having seen videos, I'm given to understand that it works a bit more like Hearthstone, with a relatively generous ability to acquire cards just by playing. I doubt I'll be able to carry over my collection from MTGO, though very little of that would probably be legal in more modern formats.

Still, I'm excited to actually get to play the game, which I first started playing way back in 1994 or so when I was 8 years old.

Scaring Your Players

My attitude as DM is that you're there to present challenges that your party can overcome. While you need to provide a big enough challenge that they're going to be engaged, you also don't want to make things so hard that they don't have a reasonable chance of surviving.

Naturally, unless your group is super-hardcore, any player whose PC is killed and can't be brought back will simply be able to roll up a new character, so the actual penalty to killing a character off isn't actually that high.

I've never actually killed a PC in D&D, which is either due to my players really knowing what they're doing, rolling luckily, or my hesitance to make really deadly encounters.

What I've found, though, is that it makes it hard for me to scare my players.

Currently, the party is hovering around the tail end of tier 2 - some players are level 10, and the others are just a couple levels behind. Recently, I had the players enter "Kazejen Library," a super-secret building owned by House Dimir as a repository for some of their many, many books of secret lore. The revelation they discovered there was that the major Dimir villain of the campaign (there's one for each guild, part of a vast conspiracy) is an Elder Brain (yes, Mind Flayers aren't canon in MtG, but they seemed like a good fit for the Dimir, which seems to be the most aberration-friendly guild.) So I built the adventure to have them solve some relatively simply puzzles to get into the library and then face off against a group of Star-Spawn Manglers led by a Mind Flayer (who, sadly, used Mind Blast once, and all the players succeeded on their saves, and he was dead before he could do anything else.)

From there, they had to explore a section of the library. I kept them in initiative because there were monsters lurking around some corners of the library. The idea was for them to run from the monsters as they searched for the exit.

Instead, they mostly stood and fought.

This, for one thing, made the encounter last way longer than it was supposed to, but also I think failed to present the tone I was looking for - the party was slaying monsters, using their various abilities and attacks, and not really going into the labyrinth I'd designed.

Eventually, as a failsafe, I had monsters start to "respawn" to force the party to flee, but it hadn't really worked as well as I wanted it to.

So how do we scare our players?

I think, for one thing, that my players feel relatively safe with me - I throw them fights that they can win, and even if there are moments that get scary - like when my homebrewed Phyrexian Negator gets a sneak attack in a surprise round and takes the Barbarian nearly down before they can rage - the fight is still clearly doable.

Player characters in D&D are fairly tough, though, and their damage output can surprise you. I was looking at the Lich stat block while making a homebrew variant based on the Monk class rather than the Wizard, and realized that the thing has less than 200 health, which means that some high-damage-specced characters could, with some luck, really blast the thing apart before it could do much (especially if encountered at the level you're supposed to be to fight a Lich, which is roughly 15ish.)

So this makes me wonder how one can even scare a player character in the higher levels.

To an extent, this is intentional, of course. Gaining power in a world filled with monsters is the way to no longer fear them - a Vampire is an absolute menace to a level 4 character, but by the time the players are level 13 or so, they're a pushover.

The Ravnica game isn't meant, overall, to be a horror story, even if the main bad guys, the Phyrexians, are horrific. But it does make me wonder a lot about building horror into the narrative of the game. Horror is a tool, just like NPCs with quest objectives and hidden maps, to direct your players in one way or another. I'm struggling to make the players feel scared enough to play through what I want them to see.

Urban versus Wilderness Adventures in D&D

I've been running my Ravnica campaign for a few months now. As an entirely urban setting - where every square on the map is dense city - Ravnica has presented its own opportunities as well as challenges.

In terms of opportunities, it's a really unique setting. Usually in a D&D game, "the city" is a relatively safe place where monsters and danger are exceptional. Sure, you might get in trouble with the town guard (whether you deserve it or not) or encounter monsters attacking the city, but generally the whole point of a settlement like that is that it is safer. In Ravnica, with nowhere for the monsters to go, you've got a city where there could be some horrible thing lurking around any corner, and half of them are backed by a guild that gives them license to attack you.

The challenge, as I'm seeing it, however, is that isolation gives the DM a lot more control over players' actions. I've been entranced by the very scant details offered about Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden because it talks about it as an adventure that puts players in an empty wilderness with nothing but freezing temperatures and monsters.

In an urban setting, you can certainly endanger the party, but unless you railroad them a bit, the party will always have the option to do one of a million different things, and you've got to be ready for that.

It's very exciting - I've had sessions in the current chapter of the campaign in which the entirety of what happens is all just stuff the players came up with, as I've hastily altered some random encounters to fit with the sort of combat they might be involved in to fit the scenario.

But I'll confess that the idea of just stranding them in some wilderness does feel kind of appealing, forcing the player characters themselves to be the only friendly faces amidst monsters and wild beasts.

By level 13, the Planeswalkers among the party will start to spark, and then we'll be able to travel to other worlds of the Magic multiverse (I'm very excited for them to go to Innistrad because I'm a closet goth, though I also wonder how well gothic horror works at higher levels). But there are a few things the party will need to do before I let them get that high.

Still, even though we know almost nothing about it and it's not coming out until September (which is like thirty years from now in 2020 time) I've got a crazy notion that I might want to run the adventure once it comes out, in parallel with my current campaign.

Rumors About Rime of the Frostmaiden, and Speculation

Rime of the Frostmaiden, the just-announced new adventure book for D&D 5E, has been teased as a more "modern horror" adventure, in contrast with the edition's most famous (and probably most popular of all the published adventures) horror book, Curse of Strahd, which was built around the tropes of Gothic Horror.

But what do we mean by Modern Horror?

The horror genre is as old as human civilization - we've always been telling stories to explain our irrational fears - and even ancient myths had horror elements; there's a reason why classical heroes were fighting unnatural monsters.

But what do we really mean by Modern Horror?

Given that this is vaguely spoileriffic, I'm going to put it behind a cut (it's only really spoilery given the influences on the adventure, rather than any specifics, but hey, a cut's cheap.)

Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden is the new adventure for D&D 5E

Wizards of the Coast has announced the next adventure book for 5th Edition: Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden.

Chris Perkins (lead story designer for the D&D team) is playing things close to the vest on the plot here, but here's what we know:

It's set in Icewind Dale, a far-northern region of Faerun along the Sword Coast that is isolated from the rest of the continent by the Spine of the World mountain range. It's a frozen, cold region where people go to get away from their old lives.

The genre and tone of the adventure will be horror, though less the Curse of Strahd-style gothic horror, and more modern horror (Perkins made reference to John Carpenter's The Thing as one of his inspirations). The adventure will feature many monster variants, taking familiar monsters from the Monster Manual and altering them such that even veteran players won't really know what they're dealing with (apparently the adventure's monster chapter is longer than any other published adventure this edition.)

Frozen wastelands, dark evils hidden beneath the ice, howling storms, and an air of paranoia and distrust are all things that seem to characterize this new adventure.

Sounds freaking cool.

WotC's Statement on Diversity in D&D

America is reckoning with our culture and history of racism in the midst of massive protests against the killing of people of color. It's all too easy for people like me, a cisgender, heterosexual white man, to comfortably sit in a bubble of ignorance, forgetting about the systemic and cultural problems that continue to plague us. Systemic problems are complex and difficult to deal with, given how entrenched they are in our society, and while we can look to landmark moments in which those systems were partially dismantled, such as the elimination of slavery (with a big asterisk) with the Thirteenth Amendment and the elimination of explicit legal racial discrimination with the Civil Rights Act, the truth is that these problems are insidious and persistent, and require our vigilance to combat them.

Yet, even more complex and subtle is the way that our culture of racism has altered the way that we see the world. It's important to remember that even those with the best values - who believe in racial equality and the humanity within all people, regardless of where their ancestors came from and what they look like, racism still affects our worldviews.

This is a bigger topic to bite off than a single post in a gaming blog can chew, but I thought I'd mention some of the things that Wizards says they're doing to try to adjust the legacy of racism that D&D - even in its recent 5th Edition publications - has unconsciously perpetuated.

First, there are some clear problems with the vilification of entire races. Orcs and Drow, in particular, are mentioned as problematic, perhaps because of their prominence within the canon of D&D and fantasy in general (well, "dark elves" for Drow.) The drow portrayal as dark-skinned and also (maybe therefore) evil is a pretty obviously racist thing, but in a broader sense, the idea that an entire people are inherently evil because of their genetics is the broader racist idea. Wizards points to their recent Eberron and Wildemount settings as examples where Orcs and Drow respectively have more complex and nuanced cultures, but I think in general subverting the old "these people are all chaotic evil" tropes is a necessary change.

Even more flagrantly racist are depictions of human cultures in Curse of Strahd and Tomb of Annihilation (both of which I'm actually playing right now.) The Vistani, a mainstay of the Ravenloft setting, are very clearly based on the Romani people, who have historically been persecuted as outsiders and pariahs, and some of the tropes in that setting - such as the notion that they can place curses upon other people - are historic canards that have been used to justify their persecution. Tomb of Annihilation, in its portrayal of Chult, tries to give the black humans of that region a complex culture, but some of the basis of its history, inherited from earlier editions, still plays on tropes that carry over too much of our own world's history of imperial exploitation and misrepresentation of the culture. I remember when that book came out that there weren't any members on the creative team for that book that were black, which seemed like a baffling oversight.

Another element that I think is worth talking about is that they've addressed the inherent issue with racial bonuses to ability scores. Apparently, in a new publication, they'll outline new rules to base ability score bonuses to classes, rather than races. Not only do I think this will have a positive effect on gameplay, but it also allows the inter-species diversity of a D&D world to reflect the reality that, among humans, there has never been any confirmed link between racial background and any kind of ability like strength or intelligence. Doing away with penalties, such as removing the penalty for intelligence among orcs in the Eberron book, was a good start, but I think this broader approach is a great move.

The core, however, to making the game accessible to everyone, is the final goal outlined, which is to make a concerted effort to hire a more diverse team to work on the game. This, of course, is the marathon goal that can't be fixed in an instant, and requires a corporate culture shift. People of color, women, LGBTQ+ people, and wouldn't you know it, how about some LGBTQ+ women of color, should be part of the making of this game that we all love, but beyond that, we need such people in positions of leadership. It's all too easy for a team to meet quotas on diversity and clap their hands and decide the job is done.

I love this game, and I want to feel that I can invite any friend I make into the myriad worlds that it opens up. It's been a safe place for me while I've dealt with some very difficult moments in my life. And I want that sense of belonging, of safety, and of excitement to be just as available to everyone.

I hope that these beginning steps lead to better representation within D&D, and I wish the team luck on implementing them. Certainly, mistakes will still happen, and I think all of us who wish to be allies need to be open to criticism. When we earnestly accept that criticism and make the effort to address the problems that have been pointed out, though, we find ourselves in a better place.

Known Enemies in Shadowlands

With the Alpha live and all four level-up zones now available for testing, we've started to get a sense of the various plots going on in the new expansion, and what we might expect regarding the sorts of monsters we'll be fighting.

Again, I think it's really exciting to have an expansion in such a heightened realm of magical reality - the most otherworldly expansion yet. But this is from testing material, and this is my interpretation, having not gotten an alpha invite (hoping for a Beta invite when that starts!)

So let's get into it, shall we? Spoilers ahead.

Building a Modern D&D Setting

If you've read my fiction blog, Dispatches From Otherworld, you'll know that I'm fascinated with taking fantasy out of its medieval time period. A big part of that is Stephen King's Dark Tower series, which I read over the course of my senior year of high school and freshman year of college (the latter was when the last book came out.)

I was delighted when Dimension 20 did their Unsleeping City game - a D&D game set in a magical version of New York City, where the hidden "Sixth Borough" of Nod and its dream magic leaked into the rest of the city.

A lot of modern-set fantasy does this sort of Magical Realism thing - setting things in our familiar world, but introducing elements of magic. Harry Potter, the massively popular novels written by a disappointingly transphobic author, is probably the best example of what I'd call heightened magical realism, where the magical world is still the core of the story (and not just a metaphor for some other element of the story) but is hidden away to explain why we aren't aware of it.

What I'm interested is, instead, is true fantasy set in a world that is recognizably modern. To make it a full on fantasy world, it needs a couple elements:

It has to have its own history and geography. Admittedly, you can sometimes fudge this - things like His Dark Materials or Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel are both set in our world, but with alternate histories that make magical elements major elements of that history. But I think it's fun to just invent new histories and people wholecloth.

Naturally, it's also got to have some known supernatural element.

This, to me, is what you need to make it high fantasy.

For D&D purposes, you'll want to have a place for multiple humanoid races, with their own histories informing their place in the world.

But to make it modern, you need a couple other elements:

First, I think you need to have modern technology. Cars, airplanes, phones, firearms, radio, television, and likely computers and internet, are all going to be things that distinguish the setting as a modern one. Notably, the source of that technology does not need to be the same. A perfect example of this is Final Fantasy VII (which, to be honest, is a great example of the entire concept of a modern fantasy setting,) with its Mako-driven economy.

Another element is the use of other forms of government. Now, of course, Republics and Democracies have been around for thousands of years, but fantasy tends toward medieval-style kingdoms. While you can have these sorts of things in a modern setting, consider making them UK-style constitutional monarchies, where the royalty is a figurehead for an otherwise democratic society.

Mind you, things don't have to be great - depending on how pleasant you want your setting to be, you might have totalitarian police states, or, you could engage in a critical eye toward even so-called democratic societies that are plagued by systemic problems and hypocritical failures to live up to their declared ideals.

I'd recommend avoiding any direct correlations. Even with good intentions, literally dehumanizing real-world cultures by representing them with non-human races can be problematic, especially if default humans are clearly based on white westerners (I love you, WoW, but you're super guilty of this.) That being said, there are universal themes to explore regarding the challenges of integrating disparate cultures in a more interconnected world, and with the invented history of a fantasy world, you can do this in a way that deals with it in the abstract.

Generally speaking, I think that a modern D&D world will feel more explored, more mapped out. The sprawl of civilization in the modern age means there's far less "wilderness" than there was in medieval times.

But here, you can take one of the important elements of fantasy - making the setting itself magical.

In our world, there isn't (at least there doesn't seem to be) some powerful, conscious, deliberate entity to the natural world that defends itself. The natural disasters that things like carbon emissions have brought on is more the result of humanity negligently digging away its own environmental support structure for short-term gains. But in a fantasy world, the land itself could be conscious, and the forests and other natural environments might consciously rise up against the sprawl of civilization, like air elementals attacking jetliners for polluting their home.

Civilization itself does not need to be the enemy, though (as a humanist, I'm against that kind of blanket worldview) and you could introduce fiendish manipulators as metaphors for the greed and brutality that we see in modern society.

You don't have to have any real political agenda, of course, to your setting, and simply imagine how magic and technology and modern political philosophy might interact with one another. Is there a government department regulating magic? Are there big-box stores for magic items? Have "monstrous" races integrated into society?

In terms of gameplay, maybe the industrialization of magic has made magic items far easier to come by. Perhaps travel by teleportation circle is something everyone can achieve simply by going to the local "Tele-Port." Perhaps the Lich's phylactery isn't in some ancient ruin, but is hidden in a storage facility off in some other city.

You could choose to make the supernatural elements of the settings very different from typical D&D - maybe focusing on a kind of UFO-like alien menace. But I think you can also have a lot of fun in making it the very same sorts of issues you find in other D&D settings - dragons, demons, undead, and monsters - but just have them appear in a modern context. Imagine the Tarrasque smashing steel-and-glass skyscrapers like the Kaiju that clearly inspired it.

And through this modern context, you might see other planes in a similar context. They've already kind of played with this idea in Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, with the Infernal War Machines, that seem more at home in a Mad Max movie than your typical knights-on-horseback fantasy story.

If you have the time and energy, you could imagine how your setting might have started as a classically medieval setting and then underwent an industrial revolution and political change to transform into this modern version. Don't be afraid, if you do this, for there to have been some massive upheavals to get us here, as that will provide tons of story fuel.

Fame, of course, is an element of stories dating back as long as stories have existed, but the global nature of modern media will also allow you to play games with how famous your player characters get as they achieve greater feats of heroism (or villainy.) That might be great for your Bard or Paladin, but less so for other members of the party. Villains might not simply try to assassinate the heroes as they achieve greater things, but instead perform character assassinations to try to turn the public against them.

Mingling technology and magic can also provide some exciting potential - maybe ghostly spirits can travel via electrical wire, so that a vengeful spirit might pursue them through the internet.

Campaigns in such a setting could take various forms - a long journey might be a road trip (which I guess is what FFXV is - seriously, Final Fantasy has been doing this for a while) and a dark, haunted citadel might be a corporate skyscraper (FFVII) or some heavily-guarded military base.

I think there's a ton of potential in modern fantasy, and D&D is a versatile enough system that you could make it work in such a setting pretty easily.

Nuanced Alignments of the Gods of Theros

Theros is somewhat unusual in MtG settings in how explicitly influenced the world is by its Gods. In most MtG settings, Gods are either non-existent or only kinda-sorta gods. Ravnica, D&D's last visit to the MtG multiverse, is a world that doesn't really have gods - the most traditional religious organization in the setting came out with a dual-land that worked as a (black mana) Swamp and (white mana) Plains called "Godless Shrine." In the era's past, there were god-like beings that traveled the multiverse, but following the Time Spiral block (which came out the year after Ravnica debuted) Planeswalkers were profoundly downgraded to basically superheroes rather than gods.

Theros was the first set to use God as a creature type.

The first set introduced five gods, one for each color of magic, and they later created ten more, one per two-color combination, meaning that there's a god corresponding to each guild in Ravnica.

The use of these colors, though, does create some dissonance with D&D's classic alignment system, introducing some nuance and messiness - which actually makes it a lot more like Greek myth.

Take Heliod, for example. Heliod is the would-be patriarch of the Theros Pantheon. As the white-mana aligned God, he values morality, authority, and cooperation. Unlike Zeus, he's associated with sunlight rather than storms, but he fills a very similar role.

In D&D terms, he very clearly gets put in the Lawful Good category.

D&D fits with a more Abrahamic or Zoroastrian mythos of dichotomies. In D&D, the good outsiders are good, and the evil ones are evil. You'll never encounter a demon that doesn't want to destroy you - even if they're willing to help for the time being. And while you can have overzealous beings in the service of good, when a being like an Angel takes it so far that they become evil, they literally transform - take Zariel, who turned into a devil because she allowed her desire to fight chaos outweigh her desire to do good (though depending on how you do in Descent into Avernus, this change might not be permanent.)

Heliod, however, is arguably the big bad of the Theros setting. When the Planeswalker Elspeth Tirel comes there and looks for guidance, he tries to kill her, jealous of her power, and then manipulates her into acting as his "champion" and playing at being her benevolent patron. The truth is that Heliod believes (genuinely) that he ought to be in charge of everything and lead the pantheon, but he's actually petty and jealous.

I think a key way to approach the Theros setting is to look at Greek mythology and consider the fact that their stories were written (or rather, told, as most of their stories were an oral tradition) for dramatic effect first, and moral lessons later. That's why Greek heroes are less "heroic" than you might expect. Consider the fact that Heracles murdered his wife and children - the famed "Twelve Labors of Hercules" were actually the tasks he was sentenced to after committing that heinous crime (yes, he did so during a psychotic break, or "Ate" induced by Hera, who hated him for being her husband's bastard son). Heroism in Greek myth was much less about moral virtue than acts of greatness and renown - though that's not to say that there weren't traditionally admirable heroes among them (indeed, Hector, the champion of Troy, was such a great guy that when Achilles dragged his corpse behind his chariot around the walls of Troy, the gods prevented his body from being damaged, so he still looked as beautiful as he did in life even after this desecration.)

But you're probably familiar with the notion of Greek tragedy - the classic (literally) dramas that tended to end with the protagonist's undoing and destruction. Typically, a hero earned their tragic end by fighting against fate. But the ultimate fate of all mortals is right there in the name - mortals suffer from mortality.

And yet, for the Greeks, those who strived for excellence, to rise above, earned the best afterlife - the Elysian fields (ironically, D&D's Neutral Good plane, which I'd guess is the best one, is named after just one area of the namesake of its Neutral Evil plane, Hades.) Fame was a major value in Greek culture, and the fact that we still tell stories of Perseus, Theseus, Heracles, and their ilk would be a great sign of their success at living meaningful lives and earning their spot in Elysium.

As such, a Theros campaign naturally makes larger-than-life characters a strong choice for a party. But it also gives characters of any alignment a reason to strive against the gods - even those that they worship.

One of the really interesting, humanistic elements of Theros is the dirty secret behind the Gods - it's not that the Gods created Theros. It was the people of Theros who created the Gods.

Because Theros is connected to the realm of Nyx, which is made of dream-stuff that manifests things people think about, the Gods arose from things that mattered to people - the explanation for the greater specificity of the more recent gods is that humanoid civilization has given people more specific things to care about.

Heliod is one of the few gods aware of his position - that he is only this great big powerful deity because people believe him to be so, and thus, the gods instinctively know that they must find more worshippers and greater devotion to them to empower themselves and, indeed, to survive.

The potential of this element of the setting is utterly massive - it means that your party might be able to defeat a god not simply by fighting the monsters they send, but by convincing the people of the plane to believe differently. Elspeth, in the most recent set, is able to destroy Heliod's spear, Khursor, by convincing the people of Theros that her spear, the one she got in the Underworld while dead, was actually the real Khursor - and thus, it became so.

If the party wins the belief of Theros' people, they could potentially re-shape the gods themselves.

Thus, philosophy and belief is a very real force in this setting (not unlike Planescape, actually).

Looking at the Playable Races of Theros

Theros, the second MTG setting coming to D&D, is a world inspired by Greek mythology.

Greek myth was populated by many types of beings and monsters, and Theros has several that are inspired by that mythological foundation.

Many of these are familiar, existing in earlier publications, but we also get a few more.

Humans:

Yep, every setting has humans, obviously. And in typical fashion, humans are the "Mario" of races, having the average, balanced stats and well-suited to any class or build. Humans are found in the Poleis (city-states/cultures) of Meletis, Akros, and Setessa, which correspond roughly, respectively, with the cultures of Athens, Sparta, and the Amazons (the mythological culture of warrior-women that both freaked out and kind of turned on the patriarchal Greeks).

Minotaurs:

Minotaurs are mechanically identical to the ones found in Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica. While Ravnica's Minotaurs are typically drawn to the chaotic Gruul Clans and the lawful Boros Legion, in Theros, the typical Minotaur is drawn to the god Mogis, who's basically the equivalent of Ares (as in, super chaotic-evil, not to be confused with the Romans' version, Mars) and who takes the form of a celestial minotaur. Not all Minotaurs are evil, but that's their general reputation.

Centaurs:

Another reprint from Ravnica, and also a race taken from Greek myth. There are two major "Bands" of Centaurs in Theros, and both are nomadic, roaming people who trade with the other races, or attack and plunder their traders in the open country. Iroas, the God of War (more in line with Athena or the Roman Mars, in that he is honorable and strategic, unlike Mogis) takes the form of a celestial Centaur.

Leonin:

The Leonin are a race of lion-like humanoids. Before the Gods empowered the mortal races to rise up, the plane was ruled by the Archons, a tyrannical group of celestial beings. When the mortal races were inspired to rise up by the Gods, the Archons' empire was smashed, but the Leonin, generally, chose to reject yet another supreme authority, and left the poleis to found their own civilization where they would be ruled only by themselves.

Leonin get a 35ft base movement speed. They get a +2 bonus to constitution and a +1 to Strength.

They get 60ft darkvision and can use their claws as natural weapons for a d4 of damage plus strength.

Leonin also get a choice of bonus proficiencies: Atheltics, Intimidation, Survival, or Perception.

As a bonus action, they can unleash a Dreadful Roar, forcing everyone in 10 feet to succeed on a Wisdom saving throw (Con based DC) or be frightened of you until your next turn, recharging on a short or long rest.

Tritons:

Tritons are another reprint, and are the somewhat alien dwellers beneath the waves, who are driven to explore and unearth secrets. The Tritons trade with the surface-races, but exist apart from them (notably, the Goddess of the Sea, Thassa, takes the form of a Triton.)

Satyrs:

Satyrs are dedicated to the idea of appreciating life and the world, and embracing destiny. Famed for their Baccanalian parties and their mission to bring "The Revels" to the other races, the Satyrs might be dismissed as comic relief, but the wise among them fervently believe in a spiritual need to embrace the world for what it is.

Satyrs, like Centaurs, are considered fey rather than humanoid. They gain +2 to Charisma and +1 to Dexterity.

They have 35 ft baseline movement speed. Additionally, when they make a long or high jump (even from standing still) they can roll a d8 and add that many feet to the jump.

Their horns work as a natural weapon, dealing 1d4 plus strength bludgeoning on a hit.

Perhaps the most impressive bonus is Magic resistance - they have advantage on saving throws against all spells and magic effects.

Satyrs also get their choice of bonus proficiency: Performance or Persuasion, as well as proficiency with a musical instrument of their choice.

Analysis:

Of the two brand-new races, I think Satyrs' magic resistance is a huge bonus, and buffs to Charisma and Dexterity are good for several classes. Other than, potentially, humans, the only race with any Wisdom buff are Centaurs, but then again, any class can have a strong relationship with a God, not just Clerics.

Leonin are clearly well-suited to heavy melee classes like Barbarians, Paladins, or Fighters, which is also true for Minotaurs. There's also not a ton of races here with darkvision (I think only Leonin and Tritons.)

Unlike Ravnica, where racial differences seem to take a backseat to guild affiliation, the different peoples of Theros seem far more divided among racial lines. Minotaurs in particular seem poised to have interesting stories, given the assumption by many that you're all about that evil slaughter-god.

The existence of a second Fey race (which is funny, because Centaurs are monstrosities in the Monster Manual, which is also true of Minotaurs, who, as a playable race, are just humanoids) is an interesting development - I wonder if we might see more bending of creature-type in races in the future (though would that mean they'd have to retroactively make Warforged constructs? And if so, how do you heal them?)

Leonin in particular are exciting to have formalized, given their prevalence in MTG planes - as someone whose Ravnica game is going to go inter-planar at some point, I'm happy to have official versions of such a race in case someone wants to/has to reroll. (I was just going to use Tabaxi but replace their Dex bonus with Strength.)

Magic Planes to Bring to D&D Next

I don't know how popular Mythic Odysseys of Theros will be. Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica was, actually, a controversial addition to 5th Edition, though the quality and potential it introduced made it a pretty well-received book once it came out. After several years in which there wasn't any official setting sourcebook other than Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide (even if there were some adventure books that started to hint toward others) the first they came out with was one for a world from Magic The Gathering - seen by some (ok, many) as a cheap ploy for corporate synergy to get players from Magic to try D&D, while neglecting fan-favorite settings from D&D's history. Perhaps viewed as insulting, at the same time as GGtR, the Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron was released as a simple pdf. It took a lot longer for Eberron: Rising From the Last War to be released.

So far, the true "Campaign Setting" books that have come out (I'm leaving out Acquisitions Incorporated because it's more of a "Different Tone" book, still set in the Forgotten Realms) are those for the Sword Coast in Forgotten Realms, Ravnica, Eberron, Wildemount (and thus sort of Exandria) and soon Theros. So some Old School D&D fans might be disappointed that only two of those are previously-established D&D.

Now, I think Wildemount makes perfect sense as something to introduce to the game. D&D has always been a game designed by its fans, and Matt Mercer crafted a deep and intricate setting that a lot of people have fallen in love with thanks to Critical Role.

But I also think that the Magic team, perhaps because they're less bound to the intricacies of geography and such, have been able to create some really interesting, heightened fantasy worlds. By turning them over to the D&D team and countless dungeon masters, they've given a broad prompt that those people can run with.

Magic has high-concept worlds, and I think stories that can take high concepts and then flesh them out can be very fun.

So, the question, then, is where to go next?

Generally, I think that the setting should be one that remains in the public consciousness: I don't think anyone's itching to go to Ulgrotha (though I would find it kind of hilarious if they used a D&D book to rehabilitate the setting of the least popular Magic set.) But I also think the setting would need to be one that can sustain more than a single visit. Alara, for example, was "fixed" in the final set of its block, unifying the five shards into a whole.

It should also probably be a popular setting, too, given that that might encourage people to actually check it out. They nailed this one with the first book, taking what I'm pretty sure is the most popular Magic plane, Ravnica.

So I'm going to go through a couple setting I think fit these bills and talk about pros and cons.

Innistrad:

Innistrad is Magic's Gothic Horror plane. It was hailed as a massive success of top-down card design, where the story and flavor of a concept informed the mechanics on its card. There have been two blocks set on that plane: Innistrad/Dark Ascension/Avacyn Restored and Shadows Over Innistrad/Eldritch Moon. The short pitch: Innistrad is a world where humans are at the bottom of the food chain, hunted by vampires, werewolves, geists, skaabs (flesh golems), and zombies. Humanity only survives thanks to the power of Avacyn, an angelic protector who empowers its priests and "cathars" who fight back against the monsters. The latter block saw the gothic horror start to transform into cosmic horror with the arrival of one of the Eldrazi titans (see Zendikar).

I think this could work, but I also think that it steps on the toes of one of D&D's most beloved settings, Ravenloft. There is also the fact that you'd probably only have humans as a playable race (though there was a time when werewolves were transformed into benevolent nature guardians, but I think that "solution" was broken in the return to the setting.) I think you could do a lot, mechanically, with curses and transformations. Personally, because I'm a secret goth I guess, I'd love to see this, but I'm somewhat less confident this would be their choice, and I think a dedicated 5E sourcebook for the Ravenloft setting would be a better choice.

Zendikar:

Zendikar was conceived as an "adventure world," even using mechanics inspired by RPGs. So this is sort of a gimme. Zendikar is a world that constantly changes as part of a phenomenon called The Roil, which sees mountains rise or fall in mere days and islands rise up from the sea to float in the sky. Additionally, a massive number of strange hedrons - stone diamonds carved with intricate runes - are found everywhere in the plane. Secretly, the hedrons are there to keep the three Eldrazi Titans, Emrakul, Kozilek, and Ulamaog, trapped on the plane lest they threaten the rest of the multiverse.

Again, Zendikar being inspired by RPGs makes it an obvious choice. The only thing I could imagine making it tricky to pull off is figuring out what state the Eldrazi are in at the point the book is set. There's some clever cosmic horror foreshadowing before they're released - the Merfolk of this setting worship three gods that they don't realize are actually world-consuming monsters. But it would also be weird not to feature the Eldrazi.

Dominaria:

The original setting for MTG, Dominaria has one thing that is both going for it and against it. Because it was the primary setting of the game for about ten years, there's very little central theme to the place. Recently, they made another card set based there, and they decided the theme should be its vast and extensive history. More than any other Magic setting by far, the history of Dominaria is fleshed out. Likewise, there's a great diversity in locations within the setting itself.

The only downside, then, is that Dominaria starts to feel a bit like any other general fantasy RPG setting. That being said, I think that if you really placed an emphasis on the sheer number of apocalypses that Dominaria has gone through, you could have a lot of fun with it.

Kaladesh:

Ok, I don't know how interested they are in returning to this plane. I think the initial impulse to go there was to show off the homeland of Chandra Nalaar, one of the major characters of Magic's ongoing story. But this is also a fairly interesting high-concept setting. It's a sort of magical steampunk India where the major conflict is between a well-intentioned but authoritarian government and radical libertarian renegades, who clash over the resource called Aether, which is used to power the various wondrous inventions.

Visually and conceptually I think this place has a lot to offer.

New Phyrexia:

Ok, this one's almost certainly a no-go, but hear me out: New Phyrexia started as the metallic plane of Mirrodin, where all life was sort of partially inorganic - ironically, this was the set where they made "human" a creature type, despite the fact that their humans all had metal plates or spikes in their bodies. But Mirrodin was corrupted and eventually taken over by the evil contagion known as Phyrexia, the "big bads" of the first roughly eight years of Magic. Since then, the plane has become a horror wasteland, where monstrosities that have emerged from this contagion have developed distinct cultures, all dedicated to corrupting the multiverse with their machine-plague. Players would probably be members of the dying-out Mirran Resistance, who are the few people who have not yet been "compleated" and transformed into Phyrexian horrors.

This would be the most grimdark possible setting from Magic, and I could see interesting mechanics for how Phyrexian corruption would work, but damn would it be bleak. Unless...

Planeswalker's Guide to Dominia:

This might be unwelcome without a new Planescape book, but one of the things that's fantastic about Magic as a broader setting is that there are so many world to travel. Why limit yourself to just one? In my game, I've created a special feat to allow players to become Planeswalkers, which, at level 13, gives them a once-a-day use of Plane Shift that can only target themselves initially (while I know the current canon is that you need a super-rare planar gate like the one Bolas got made on Kaladesh, I want to allow the whole party to travel the multiverse, so they can train to summon their friends with them.)

But I'd love to see formalized rules for planar travel in the Magic games. In fact, here's how I'd want that book structured:

Focus first on Dominaria, giving us a rough outline (maybe not quite as detailed as Wildemount or Eberron, given that we've got more ground to cover,) but then put in rules for Planeswalkers (maybe make it a rule that if you're going to do this sort of campaign, all PCs are Planeswalkers.) Then, we get chapters giving us a rough pitch for some of the planes they can visit (much less in-depth for Ravnica and Theros) and the sort of adventures that might take place there.

And then, throw in a couple subclasses (I feel like a new Artificer subclass would be perfect, given how important Urza et. al. are to the oldschool story) and a bestiary with some of the most iconic Magic creatures. Give me stats for a freaking Atog!

Much like Spelljammer and to an extent Planescape, this would be a great opportunity to smush campaigns together. Hell, I'd love to see an Izzet Engineer, a Satyr from Theros, and a Cathar from Innistrad bumbling around the multiverse.

"Level Scaling" and D&D

I believe it was in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion that I first became aware of the notion of level-scaling. With a big, open world (Cyrodil, in the case of Oblivion, the central kingdom of the Tamriellic Empire) they wanted people to feel free to explore and do things in their own chosen order, and so they created a system where you could do everything at level 1, but as you got more powerful, you'd face tougher monsters.

It sort of worked. Oblivion, I think, now stands as a lesser dip between the cult-favorite Morrowind and the massive blockbuster that was Skyrim, but the game was mostly pretty decent. The problem, however, was that the game felt much harder as you leveled up unless you very carefully optimized your build. The fact that you could choose not to level up simply by never sleeping meant that there was a fairly optimal way of playing in which you simply let your skills level up but never actually took new character levels. It was also somewhat jarring when the bandits on the road near the capital were tougher than the horrifying daedra you'd killed in your first Oblivion gate.

Skyrim did this better and more smoothly, and they also implemented a few systems where going to a new location would kind of "lock" it where it was, level-wise, meaning if you wanted to go somewhere that was a bit easier to, say, farm up some materials or skill up your weapons, you could. I think some of the smoothing out of skills, like getting rid of item durability, also helped with this, meaning you could really focus on combat-helpful abilities.

This got me thinking, though: we sort of scale things in D&D as well.

Now, obviously, different DMs have different styles, but I generally feel compelled to make sure the monsters my party encounters are at a difficult level where they can win, but also where the whole combat won't be done in a single round thanks to a Wizard's fireball (or an Artificer's, given that the campaign I'm running has the latter but not the former - and they're an Artillerist.)

There are two reasons why level scaling is attractive in D&D.

The first is that combat takes a big chunk of time to run, regardless of how difficult the fight is. It might seem realistic that the town guard - literally using the Guard or Soldier stat blocks - might come to respond to some chaos the party is causing and not realizing that those level 15 players could turn them into a pile of ash with a simple gesture. But for your players, getting all set up, rolling initiative, and feeling out your strategies for the fight can feel like a big waste of time if nothing is going to be a threat to them. Yes, this can be a great opportunity for diplomacy to defuse the conflict, but if the party happens not to choose that option, the DM is going to have to have stat blocks and HP tracking ready to go if things do go down.

Having bigger threats is a little more ambiguous. I'll confess that I think I coddle my players a little. I've never actually killed a PC in about 4 years of DMing. I do think you owe it to your players to telegraph the arrival of some monster they're not equipped to handle - just having a group of level 5 players get roasted by an ancient red dragon that comes out of the blue isn't really fun. But if you tell them that there's an ancient red dragon in that cave over there, you can send a message to them that says "you should not go there right now, but you might consider coming back when you're much more powerful." Given that you can't (generally) just reload your last save (though resurrection magic can help with this) the stakes are a little higher if the players decide to be reckless.

A DM needs to train their players a bit, too. I think my somewhat obsessive adherence to encounter scaling has made a lot of my players feel that every threat can be dealt with immediately and directly. I'm trying to unteach them that with my current adventure - there's a heavily-fortified Simic laboratory that they know is secretly part of a plot to aid the Phyrexians in invading Ravnica, but the defenses are far too powerful for them to have a reasonable chance of getting in until they can deal with certain elements of the lab's defenses.

The balance, of course, is to let the players come up with creative solutions while still maintaining the adventure's integrity (the players initially wanted to sneak in through the sewers, but I had it built out in the water of "Zonot Two" to ensure that they couldn't just sneak in immediately.

I do think there's something to be said for a totally unscaled world - the authenticity that random bandits on the road aren't necessarily going to be archmages and assassins just because your party can face such threats.

But running a game of D&D is all about balancing the narrative, the setting, and its challenge as a game.

Heritage Armor and Disposable Alts

At this point, I've gotten heritage armor on a Lightforged Draenei, Void Elf, Nightborne, Kul Tiran, Dark Iron Dwarf, Highmountain Tauren, and now Vulpera (the latter has an annoyingly unexpected delay - rather than getting it in the little Vulpera section in Orgrimmar, you have to go to Vol'dun, which means that, barring a friendly Mage to portal you there, you have to do the entire BFA starting quests to get to Zandalar, which is a little annoying if you wanted to hold off on them until you, you know, had your heritage armor.)

The thing is, as someone who has now played this game for nearly 14 years, I don't lack for alts (see name of blog). Most of my main characters date back to 2006 - I've been playing my Paladin, Shaman, Rogue, and Warlock since vanilla, my Priest since Burning Crusade, and my Death Knight since early in the morning after getting back from Best Buy with my copy of Wrath of the Lich King, back when you actually had to install the game from CD-ROMS.

The Allied Races are cool, and a lot of them have a ton of story potential for the future (the Vulpera, while very cute, are by far the thinnest playable race in terms of lore, and that includes Void Elves.) The thing is, the vast majority of these alts are very unlikely to become characters I play prominently.

Of all my allied race alts, the only one that has become its "class leader" (essentially the one that I play when I want to play that class) is my Kul Tiran Druid, and frankly, the only reason I felt ok with retiring my Night Elf Druid (which was, I think, the third character I ever made in 2006) is that I've never really been that into Druids as a class (yes, I know they can do everything, but I generally just don't like the way they do those everythings.)

Fun story about that Night Elf Druid: it's the only character for whom I've paid to have its name changed. When made it, I was taking an Irish Gaelic class in college and decided it'd be clever to throw in some Irish words for character names. While my Shaman, Tarbhad, has the Irish word for "bull" (Tarbh, pronounced, if I recall correctly, "Tar-roo") the Druid was just the Irish word for river, Abhainn (pronounced Ah-wen). When I joined a guild that was actually doing stuff, I changed it to Selarion so that people might be able to actually pronounce it. The only other character I have whose name changed was my Priest, whom I transferred along with my other Horde characters to another server in Cataclysm to make room for some other alts (if only they'd had the current lack of limits on characters-per-server they do now!) Originally named "Eclesius," I changed it to the less on-the-nose "Etharian" when that name was already taken on that server.

Anyway, playing with the XP buff (which, to be fair, will feel like nothing compared to the way Shadowlands is going to speed up leveling) I've been working on allied races, trying to unlock their heritage armor.

But it's a sort of ephemeral reward. Most of these alts - the Highmountain Warrior, the Nightborne Hunter - are destined to just sit there at 110. Even the allied races I really like - the Lightforged and the Void Elves, for example, are still secondary characters. There's no way that I'd retire my Human Paladin, whom I created in 2006, was my first Alliance character, and has been my main since 2008, even if the Lightforged guy has an awesome beard (that is, tragically, hidden by his heritage armor helmet.)

I've grown attached to these characters over more than a decade, and even if I briefly considered changing my Death Knight to Lightforged as a "canonical" development of his story, it would just be so weird for him to suddenly have a different voice.

I'm all for the broader diversity of options in playable races, and their presence gives the creative team tons of future story potential. I'm not complaining about their existence, just lamenting that, with few exceptions, I'm not going to be playing them all that much.

Mythic Odysseys of Theros - Mechanics and Features

So, what new mechanics does the Theros book introduce?

First, we can get a couple of obvious ones out of the way:

Theros has several new races, as well as some that have been printed in other sourcebooks. Notably, humans are the only player race from the Player's Handbook canonically found in Theros.

Minotaurs, previously published in Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, are fierce warriors and wandering marauders.

Centaurs (also found in Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica) are spiritual nature-worshippers who avoid urban civilization generally.

Tritons (also found in Volo's Guide to Monsters) are seafaring people who live beneath the tides, seeking knowledge and trading with other peoples.

Leonin are lion-people who live in Theros' open grasslands, generally living in tight-knit packs.

Satyrs are rowdy hedonists who love to revel and express themselves artistically (like Centaurs, Satyr count as fey rather than humanoid.)

Theros also introduces two new subclasses:

The Bardic College of Eloquence allows your bard to be a sort of poet or arguing philosopher, with a number of ways to make your bardic inspiration more reliable and effective (also, by level 3, you can't roll lower than a 10 on Persuasion and Deception checks.)

The Paladin Oath of Glory is all about dedicating yourself to feats of heroism and strength, inspiring those around you.

Moving on to more unique mechanics:

Piety is a stat similar to renown, which allows you to increase your favor with your chosen god. By honoring your chosen deity, you can start to earn various benefits. For instance, with 10 piety to Heliod, the God of the Sun, you can cast Daylight once a day. Like ranks in the Ravnican guilds, these range from minor bonuses at 3, ramping up to permanent ability score increases at 50.

Additionally, there are a number of Supernatural Gifts that Theros characters start with (though the DM might reward these if the player pleases a god who can bestow it.) These are kind of like minor (or not so minor) level-1 feats, or sort of similar to subraces or Eberron's Dragonmarks. For example, one of the most extreme ones is "Anvilwrought," which almost makes you a Warforged, marking you as being made by Purphoros, the God of Craftsmanship.

The book also has a number of new monsters (including Mythic monsters, who have essentially an "enrage" mode in which they become more dangerous after your initially "defeat" them) as well as a short intro adventure and some sample adventures and maps based on the various gods (similar to the guild-based adventures in Ravnica.)

There's definitely a lot to pillage from this book, especially if you want to make the gods a more central piece of your own setting. I love omens and prophecy in fantasy, and you can make that a big part of any character's (or every character's) personal journey through your campaign.

Mythic Odysseys of Theros - Setting Breakdown and First Impressions

While it's not available as a physical book yet, D&D's latest campaign setting book is now out on D&D Beyond, meaning we can take a look at it and unpack all the things it contains.

As a sort of follow-up to Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, Mythic Odysseys of Theros is the second crossover between Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, taking on of the planes visited in Magic and fleshing it out as a broader campaign setting for D&D.

Theros is a setting that is inspired by Greek Mythology. Greek myth is already more or less the solid-rock foundation of western fantasy fiction (not to ignore Norse myth, the Bible, Egyptian myth, or Arthurian legend, of course) and thus a great deal of its DNA is already hardwired into D&D.

Indeed, the very notion of exceptional warriors/hunters wandering the world and battling monsters is more or less how all Greek heroes work. The Monster Manual is filled with Greek monsters - Chimeras, Medusas (which... as a Greek myth fan this name has always frustrated me, because Medusa is a specific person who was turned into a Gorgon, which is the type of monster. I don't know where those weird bull things came from,) Satyrs, Centaurs, Hydras, Sphinxes, Gryphons, Hippogriffs, Harpies, and probably many others I'm forgetting are all derived from Greek myth.

So it's pretty easy to built out a Greek-myth-based D&D setting.

Theros, of course, was built initially to serve as a Magic setting, though, and from that we get a few concepts that might not have arisen if it had been made for D&D specifically.

Magic's five colors of mana give it a sort of natural sorting of its magic, peoples, and places. Every magic setting is going to have plains populated by people who believe in structure, authority, and cooperation, islands where people value knowledge and intellectual pursuits, mountains where people value passion, fury, and creativity, forests where people honor nature and physical ability, and swamps where power, ambition, and amoral practicality. Thankfully, the genius of Magic The Gathering is that these five colors are broad enough in theme and definition that it's not hard to put them in any fantasy setting. You could even retroactively go into a lot of existing fantasy settings and apply its concepts (though they might not always link up with the themed landscape features - the Dothraki in A Song of Ice and Fire are textbook Red, but live on plains, which are the white mana lands.)

Theros takes the broad aesthetics and themes of Greek myth but builds things up with new specific places. That being said, there are some very clear analogues. Meletis, a port city that values philosophy and learning, is clearly meant to represent Athens, while Akros, a city ruled by a king and where every citizen is expected to serve as a soldier is obviously meant to represent Sparta. But the gods of Theros are fairly different.

In a fun turn, while Ravnica is a setting that essentially doesn't have gods (though you could argue entities like Mat'Selesnya or Ilharg the Raze-Boar are kinda sorta gods) Theros is entirely wrapped up in its very prominent deities.

How prominent are the gods? Well, at night you can often see the gods literally walking across the sky, manifesting as massive, humanoid forms made up of stars. Devotion to the gods is the default for any person in the setting, including player characters, though some individuals, known as iconoclasts, reject them.

The gods are immortal, but their existence is also predicated on faith and belief. The reason for this is that Theros has three sort of demiplanes or layers. There is the mortal layer, which is your standard, mundane reality. Above that, however, is the starry expanse of Nyx. Nyx is a realm of dream-stuff, and it is actually the beliefs of mortals that gives the gods form - it was the rise of humanoid civilization that gave form to the newest gods, who reflect aspects of life in the humanoid experience.

Beneath the mortal realm, however, is the Underworld. This is where the dead go, and is divided, like the Greek underworld, into realms both good and bad, depending on the person's acts in life. Like in Greek myth, the more fame and great deeds you performed in life, the more glorious and wonderful your afterlife. Unremarkable and villainous people have dreary and dreadful afterlives.

The first thing that really makes Theros stand out as a D&D setting is that the Underworld is a fully-functional and real place where player characters who die still have things to do. There are actually new rules for how to handle a mortal soul that has crossed over into the underworld, and a party that doesn't have access to standard resurrection magic (or who can't use it because Erebos, the god of death himself, has claimed that soul) can literally just travel to the Underworld and bust their friend out. This is not to say such a feat is easy - the Underworld is terrifying - but the massive story potential this opens up is incredible (and remember, villains can also make the escape attempt.)

Still, you're probably going to focus things on the mortal realm for the most part.

There are a number of major city-states, called Poleis (singular is "Polis," like in "Metropolis.") These poleis give individuals an identity, and aren't strictly limited to the cities themselves - an Akroan could live in Meletis and still cling to that identity. Given that citizenship in these poleis requires both parents to be citizens as well, it does also create a large number of potential outcasts - which could be a good reason your character is an adventurer.

As mentioned before, Akros is the Sparta-like polis of warriors. Meletis is the Athens equivalent, with its philosophers and sailors. Setessa is clearly inspired by the legends of the Amazons, and is a city where the women rule and the men are sent to travel the world once they become adults (the book also makes note that Setessa recognizes transgender people, allowing its citizens to take on the roles of their gender identity, regardless of how they previously presented.)

These three poleis are primarily human, but naturally, there are other peoples in Theros. Oreskos is a large grassland primarily inhabited by the Leonin, a race of lion-people (who have distinct racial traits from the Tabaxi.) Originally used as enforcers by the Archons - rulers of a previous age - the Leonin are generally far less pious, with many iconoclasts among them.

To the north is the minotaur polis of Skophos - a city built inside a giant labyrinth. The minotaurs are known for their chaotic, marauding nature, and have long clashed with humans.

Then, there's Asphodel, the necropolis - a polis inhabited by "The Returned," who are all people who escaped the underworld. Many were forced to shed their identities as they crossed the River Tarthyx (Theros' equivalent of the River Styx... from Greek myth, rather than the one that connects the lower plains in D&D.) The Returned are generally not very friendly to the living, in a "let's just kill them all" kind of way.

The Siren Sea is inhabited by Tritons, who trade as marine merchants with the other poleis and help keep the sea's many dangerous krakens contained within their "sea locks."

The Skola Vale is a region populated by Satyrs, who are hard-partying hedonists, who travel to other communities to bring revels and chaos that happens to help nature reclaim the world a bit.

After the way the Underworld works, the next really exciting thing about Theros conceptually is that it sort of works on "myth time." In Greek myth, the "age of heroes" that saw figures like Heracles, Pericles, Theseus, and those sorts was thought to have happened "many years ago," with no specific dates. In Theros, that malleable, vague sense of time and distance is actually part of the world and the way the gods can shape it. While the walk from Meletis to Akros is said to take two days along the roads, the actual span of history and scope of the world is kind of impressionistic. Thus, much as the Odyssey takes years despite the relative short distance from Troy to Ithaca, a journey across Theros takes as long as the gods want it to.

The fuzziness of the setting's history also plays into the myths of its heroes. Rather than referring to specific individuals, the heroes known to the people of Theros are given generic titles like "The Warrior" or "The Hunter." Mythically, the deeds of these heroes are combined into these individuals, even if the feats they performed were the work of many different people. As such, a player character might come to embody "The Protector" for a time, playing the role of that great hero.

Destiny and Fate are key forces in Theros. While the gods are not bound by fate - after all, the fate of mortals is to one day journey to the Underworld, and gods are immortal - everything is controlled by the ineffable hand of destiny. As such, prophecies and omens play a huge role in the setting and culture.

This post is getting absurdly long, so I'll break it into two to touch on the mechanics introduced in the book.