The Climax of Critical Role's Second Campaign (SPOILERS)

 Critical Role's second campaign started three years ago in January of 2018. They've now had what is presumably the "final boss" fight of the campaign, with what is likely to be a denouement episode to close out the campaign next week, similar to how things worked out in the first campaign.

Campaign two has been a fairly different experience than the first one for a few reasons. The first campaign jumped in in the middle of it, when the players were already level nine or so, and with a home game that had already gone on for a few years prior to the stream. Apart from a few sessions with pairs or one trio of group members at level 1 to get a feel for the characters, the second campaign started things off more or less at the beginning, with the whole group getting together in the first episode.

Structurally, the first campaign also felt, at least in retrospect, to be a bit more about world-spanning, universal threats, connected to the player characters but less directly. Meanwhile, campaign two was almost entirely based on plots and arcs that centered around its characters, which reached its logical conclusion in the campaign's final boss.

Let's get into spoilers.

Ok, Apparently There's Been a Manual of the Planes Almost Every Edition Before 5th

 A quick look on Dungeon Master's Guild informed me that apparently there have been many editions of Manual of the Planes, such that it might as well be a standard book for every edition like the DMG, PHB, and Monster Manual (do we call that the MM?) 2nd Edition did not have one, it seems, but there were many Planescape products that detailed the many planes (as a 5th Edition baby, I'm sometimes blown away by all the publications TSR put out for individual campaign settings.)

Anyway, as I've written about before, I think it would be great if we got an updated Manual of the Planes. Not every campaign that travels to the Outer Planes needs to involve the specifics of Sigil and its various factions - we've seen how campaigns can just touch on various ones, like Critical Role's first campaign involving sojourns to Elysium, the Nine Hells, and eventually Pandemonium.

The DM's Guild page for the 4th Edition Manual of the Planes details some of the philosophy behind the revamped cosmology - the "World Axis" - that was a big controversy and was basically reverted by 5th Edition (though 5e has also emphasized that the universe is whatever you want at your table).

And while I've gotten used to the idea of the Great Wheel, I do actually kind of get the idea behind smashing it - the complaint was apparently about "needless symmetry" - that there were so many good-aligned planes where it seemed unlikely for players to get into the sort of conflicts that drive adventures.

And frankly, I get it. I think you could have easily made only nine outer planes, with just one for each X,Y coordinate on the alignment chart. Are Bytopia and Arcadia all that necessary, or could they have just been folded into Mount Celestia?

Humans love patterns, and complete sets, and that structure can sometimes lead to great things, such as the Guilds in Ravnica, which are only the combination of each two-color combination in MTG. 4th Edition tried to boil the planar system down to the necessities.

The concept of the World Axis is that the Material World exists between the Astral Sea and the Elemental Chaos. The Nine Hells and The Abyss are both preserved here, but it places the Hells within the Astral Sea - a realm of gods - as a plane/world within the Astral Sea that is home to corrupted divine servants - aka Devils, whereas the Abyss is in the Elemental Chaos, and it defines Demons as corrupted elementals.

The Feywild and Shadowfell were mixes of existing concepts like the Plane of Faerie and Arborea (though Arvandor, part of Arborea, also exists in the Astral Sea) in the former case or the Plane of Shadow and Negative Energy Plane for the latter.

I can understand the backlash, but at the same time, if this were the cosmology that were presented to me when I first got into D&D, I would probably find it just as cool.

While I think 5e is going to stick with the classic Great Wheel as established originally in the 1st Edition Manual of the Planes, I'd love to see a new take on it, perhaps one that explores the potential for nuance.

For example, when we say that one of the Planes is Good - take The Beastlands as an example - what does that mean for mortals?

I think it's important that places like Carceri or Gehenna are clearly bad places to be, as they're evil planes. And in contrast, I think it's important that the Upper Planes are truly good.

But there's potential for the idea that pure goodness is not exactly compatible for the complexities of mortal life.

Humans (and humanoids as seen in D&D) are complicated, and even people with the best intentions have their own flaws and faults. I think you could get plenty of mileage out of the notion that any mortal who has not died and undergone the purification process of being reborn as a Petitioner carries danger into the Upper Planes, and that the denizens of those planes will fight to contain the contamination. Sure, they might be quicker to cast spells like Banishment than outright kill people, but there could be plenty of well-intentioned (and even possibly well-resulting) actions that Celestials of the Upper Planes take that is at odds with a D&D party's intentions. You might encounter an Angel who knows that a good-aligned party member will wind up a Petitioner in a heavenly plane, and thus decides that it'd be best for everyone if the angel killed that person now, sent their soul through the process, and got them fast-tracked for heaven - but in a way that could seriously disrupt, you know, their life back on the Material Plane and the mission that the party is on.

What I'd love is a source to talk about these sorts of things.

Naturally, the Lower Planes are much more obvious adventure locations, given the malevolent hostility of most creatures you're likely to encounter there (though hey, you might need to buy something at the markets on Grazz't's layer of the Abyss - doesn't all have to be demon-slaying).

Anyway, this isn't to complain or anything - I'm still really bubbling with excitement over Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, which is freaking good. But I hope that we get a Manual of the Planes or something like it in 5th Edition.

Myst Nostalgia and the D'Ni Numerical System

 Myst came out when I was 7 years old, and Riven, its first sequel, came out four years later when I was 11. While I played the third game, it's these first two that had huge influences on my general aesthetic tastes. I loved the weird sort of "fantasy technological" style of it, where it wasn't really science fiction in any serious way, but there was still sort of futuristic technology amongst the broad 19th Century furnishings.

Anyway, in the second game, taking place in the "Age" (which might be thought of as a world or plane) of Riven primarily, one of the important things to discover is the workings of the D'ni numerical system. The D'ni are an ancient civilization that discovered or developed the magical art of Writing, which allows the creation of linking books that can take a person between Ages.

Anyway, using a creepy children's toy that has what looks like sacrifices being dropped toward a carnivorous fish or shark, you can work out the basics of five symbols that correspond to the numbers 1-5. Each is just a couple of lines drawn within a square, but it gets slightly more complex. The number system is kind of simultaneously a base 5 and base 25 system (our own number system is base ten, because once we hit 10, the "counter" resets and we add another place to the number - the digit to the left of the original one now indicates how many times the original counter has cycled through its 10 symbols, going 0123456789).

The Roman Numeral system ran into an issue when it got to certain amounts, due to the fact that it needed a new set of symbols for each multiple of ten, whereas the Indian/Arabic numerals can represent arbitrarily large numbers. The D'ni system can as well.

The reason I say the D'ni one is sort of both base 5 and base 25 is that there is a kind of reset every five numbers, but you only add a new digit to the number every 25 counts.

Every digit is represented as lines within a square. The "one" digit is a vertical line that cuts the square in half. The "five" digit is a horizontal line that cuts it in half, but the truth is that really what it is is the "one" rotated counterclockwise 90 degrees. Thus the "six" is a square cut into four segments by a vertical and horizontal line - representing effectively "five plus one." When you reach ten, you instead rotate the symbol for "two" counterclockwise 90 degrees, and overlay the other digits rightside up to say "ten plus X".

Eventually, when you get to 24, you have the symbol for 4 (a rectangle that covers the lower right corner of the square, a little taller than it is wide) along with itself rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise (hence representing "four-time-five plus four")

But when you hit 25, there's no more room for this - you can't just rotate another 90 degrees because your vertical line will just become vertical again, so now we finally move on to another digit - but the "digits," which, again, are all within squares, are now bound, sharing a "wall" to make it clear these are part of the same number. The first position, like in Arabic numerals, represents the highest order of magnitude, while the next represents the next lower. So 25 is thus just the "one" digit followed by an empty square, representing zero. In this sense, it's the equivalent of 10 (which is just a one followed by a zero) except that, being a base 25 system, it represents a value of 25.

Anyway, I just ran across a website that will convert Arabic numerals into D'ni ones, and I'm kind of delighted by it.

If you are running a TTRPG and want to play around with codes embedded in numerical systems, I'd recommend stealing this wholecloth. You could also take it as inspiration to make other systems - maybe a base 12 system or something else.

Is WotC Too Conservative on 5th Edition Releases?

 I love Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. I came for the monsters and subclasses and lineages, but what really hooked me has been the overall philosophy of the book, its focus on not just the gameplay mechanics or the lore (though there's plenty of the latter) but instead on how to run a game that puts spookiness center stage, and ideas for how to take existing monsters and make them scary.

As a sidenote: as with much of nerd culture, which has historically been dominated by straight white dudes like me, I've seen people complaining about the "wokeness" or other catch-all terms for the book emphasizing inclusivity. I suppose that I've never really understood the instinct within nerd culture to close off others who are different than you, but the truth is that the whole idea boils down to "don't be a jerk." All the horror stories about bad players or bad DMs I've ever heard has been about people who don't really care to make the game a fun environment for everyone else, and the safety tools detailed in Van Richten's are there for your benefit as a DM - essentially they're a guide for "how to avoid alienating your players," and I think everyone would rather have the table (virtual or real-life) be filled with people who are excited to be there and happy to play the game, rather than feeling deeply uncomfortable. Don't be a dick.

But moving on: if there is one tension I feel in Van Richten's Guide it's that they dedicate a massive chunk of the book to detailing several domains of dread, to the point that it's the bulk of the book, and overflows into a second section for paragraph-long descriptions of other domains... and yet I want more.

In past editions, they've often had separate books released for different campaign settings: you get a supplementary player's guide, and then a guide for the DM in order to run the setting, and then sometimes some published adventures.

One of the governing philosophies of 5th Edition has been quality over quantity. We get one big published adventure per year, like Rime of the Frostmaiden or Descent into Avernus the previous year, and then we've been getting anthologies like Candlekeep Mysteries or Ghosts of Saltmarsh in the "off season."

I think that they've ramped up the other books to come out in recent years - we got our first new campaign setting book in late 2018 with Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica (though that is ignoring the early and... underwhelming Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide) and since then we've gotten several setting books, the latest of which being Van Richten's.

And then, of course, we've had monster books in Volo's and Mordenkainen's, and rules expansions in Xanathar's and Tasha's.

The D&D staff at WotC is actually very small, hence their reliance on contractors. And I also suspect that they're going to be a bit hesitant to change what has been a winning formula.

But I guess I'm just ravenous for new stuff.

Let's take Planescape as an example:

I don't know if we're due to get a Planescape sourcebook any time soon, though I'd love to see one. But Planescape is simultaneously two very different things that could each justify a reasonably heavy tome.

One one hand, you have the entire planar system. While the DMG does take a bit of time to explain the D&D multiverse, it's not terribly in-depth. You get a half-page blurb about most of the Outer Planes (with longer entries for the Nine Hells and the Abyss) but most is left to your imagination.

In earlier editions, there was the Manual of the Planes (and there might have been a 1st and a 2nd edition version, maybe a 3rd?) which went in depth on all of the Outer Planes, and I believe other planes like the Elemental Planes, Astral, Ethereal, etc. In most campaigns, the outer planes play a distant and limited role, but it can be very exciting to visit them, and potentially adventure across them.

For 5th Edition, I could see taking a similar approach to Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica's use of the guilds, or the way that Van Richten's goes through its Domains of Dread. It would be cool to have a big chapter divided into 5-10 page descriptions of the Outer Planes, with key locations, figures, a general vibe to it, and then some suggestions on the sorts of adventures you could run set there.

But Planescape isn't just that.

This hypothetical "5th Edition Manual of the Planes" would be super great to have, but Planescape is also very centrally focused on the city of Sigil and the True Neutral plane of the Outlands. The 2nd Edition Planescape sourcebook is all about these locations, and there's enough complexity in Sigil that you'll want a huge chunk of book to go into detail about the Factols and adventures that could revolve around them (in fact, Sigil and Ravnica share a lot of DNA).

I suspect, thus, that if we were to get a Planescape book, it would be more likely to focus on these elements, much as the 2nd Edition version did.

But that 2nd Edition book also makes frequent reference to the Manual of the Planes, and any adventure that has you hop into those places will need you use that as your primary sourcebook.

So, there are a couple issues at work here:

One is a philosophical choice that I think is noble: 5th Edition's books have always operated under the assumption that the only other books you have are the Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual. And it's good that D&D is designed so that you never need any of the other books for the game to work. But it also creates some limitations.

For instance, Eberron is a popular setting, but we haven't gotten any published adventures set there or any supplementary material for it from WotC.

Now, again, the actual D&D staff at WotC is small (I think it's about 20 people) and I absolutely do not know the complexities of what it would mean to expand that team, especially given that it's one team within WotC, which is itself a subsidiary of Hasbro, so there are a lot of corporate cooks in the kitchen, so to speak.

And so I think there's a limit on how much stuff they can expect to produce. The problems inherent in relying on outside contractors, though, are also numerous - for example, the Candlekeep Mysteries adventure "The Book of Cylinders" received some editorial changes that undermined the author's intent (particularly frustrating in that it added colonialist language that undercut one of the major motivations the author had in presenting the new humanoid culture introduced in the adventure as a dynamic and autonomous people in their own right, deeply tied to the Forgotten Realms' lore).

I'm also probably a small minority of D&D customers in that I basically have a standing order to buy every 5th Edition book that comes out. But I, for one, would love to have a bit more interconnected content.

Even if we do wind up getting a Manual of the Planes equivalent as well as a Planescape book, how long could we expect to wait between those two? I suspect that WotC would be hesitant to return to an "Outer Plane" theme so soon after the release of the first.

In fact, I think Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft is sort of the first instance of 5th Edition publishing two books in the same non-Forgotten Realms setting, and I think it was 5 years between those two releases.

Perhaps this is less about the sheer volume of releases, but more about how willing they are to let their non-core-set releases connect to one another.

Campaigns, Endings, and How to Structure a D&D Story

 Critical Role is the most popular D&D livestream show, and while I don't have any numbers in front of me, I think it's played a big role in 5th Edition's popularity. While there's nothing about it that is different than the way that you could play a game at home (except the cameras and studio) the players and DM are all so good at leaning into the storytelling that many watch it much as one would watch a beloved TV show. It leans hard into the idea of D&D as improvisational storytelling randomized by dice.

The folks at CR have indicated that the current story arc of their second campaign is going to conclude that campaign, though they say that the story of those characters is not necessarily over (they've returned to the characters of the first campaign in a few one-shots over the years, which seems a precedent for us to see members of the Mighty Nein again, assuming that they survive the current adventure).

Just as one can start to feel a bit saddened by the approach of a good book or the final season of a beloved TV show, it can feel a little sad to imagine that this campaign, with characters we've spent years following, is coming to an end.

And so I thought I'd talk about the structure of D&D storytelling and different ways to approach it.

Aside from Critical Role, my favorite D&D streaming show is Dimension 20. But Dimension 20 has both a very different tone and a very different structure.

Critical Role was designed to, as best as possible, simply transport the joys of the home game that the members played to a streamed medium. Indeed, the first campaign jumps in when the characters have already advanced from level 1 to, I believe, level 9, with ongoing plots and arcs - literally taking the game they had already been playing (in Pathfinder, in fact, converting to 5th Edition D&D when the stream started). Its players are all professional voice actors, and unsurprisingly, this group of theater kids tends to focus on the dramatic storytelling aspects of the game. That is not to say they don't get silly - just like any D&D game, things get utterly ridiculous at times. But the players also really buy into the dramatic stakes of the story, and there are some heartbreaking tragedies and major character triumphs that make the show a really exciting thing to watch beyond the obvious monster-slaying.

Critical Role also does things with a long campaign structure. The first campaign started streaming at level 9 and went all the way to, for some characters, level 20 (and I think I need to rewatch the last arc of that to get a better idea of how to run a really effective tier 4 campaign.) Campaign two started at level 2 and the characters are currently level 15. With weekly sessions that go 3-4 hours that go on for a few years apiece, it's a truly epic saga told over an immense runtime.

Dimension 20 does things a lot differently.

Formed by a group of College Humor internet comedy folks, the tone is much more comedic. These are all sketch comedy writers and performers who do stand-up and improv, and Brennan Lee Mulligan, the show's DM, clearly likes to go for high concept premises that are often patently ridiculous. For example, perhaps the darkest campaign they ran was A Crown of Candy, in which the characters navigated a Game of Thrones-style dark fantasy world of intrigue and betrayals, but every person in that world was themed around different types of food, the player characters being mostly candy. At one point, one of the characters, who is a king, reminisces with a dying friend about their days fighting in wars, but the friend is also literally a big slice of cake.

Dimension 20 is organized into seasons, in which a tight story is told over maybe 12 2-hour sessions, always alternating between a Roleplaying episode and a Combat episode. The story is a bit more "on rails" because the show also makes elaborate sets for their combats (and thus need to make sure that those fights happen) but nevertheless is fantastically exciting because of the game, strong improv that the players bring to the table.

The show is also not live-streamed, and so they edit it, adding sound effects and close-ups during combat to illustrate what is going on in a somewhat more cinematic manner. While you don't get to literally see the story as it's being improvised, the end result is more polished (and likely helps them fit the episodes into their two-hour runtimes - if you could cut all the time looking up rules or hesitating to make a decision about what to do on one's turn, I think most combats would be way, way shorter.)

But also, in terms of story, the games are confined to more limited arcs that come to a definitive end. Rather than simply having a campaign go on, a particular campaign might get a second season, which is almost like a sequel. The first season, Fantasy High, takes place in a nation in a traditional fantasy world that, uniquely, feels like late 20th/early 21st century American suburbia, with cars and "crystals" (smartphones) and computers, malls, arcades, etc., where the characters are all students at a high school for people looking to go into adventuring as a career. The first season takes them through their freshman year at the school, defeating a great evil. Then, when season two starts a few years later, they have an entirely new plot that takes place during their Sophomore year, after several seasons in which they had been able to play other campaigns.

I started running D&D before watching either of these (I think Dimension 20 started after I'd already begun playing,) but a different show was my inspiration to check the game out: Acquisitions Incorporated, which was initially created to serve as a promotional game for 4th Edition with the folks at Penny Arcade and other webcomics. Acq-Inc actually operated more like a series of one-shots with the same characters, usually tying into whatever the big plot was in 5th Edition's (once they transitioned to that) published adventures. Acq-Inc spun off its own live game with The "C"-Team, which I also watched for a while, and which was a bit more of a longform campaign.

Anyway, I think when you look at the descriptions of classes and such, the possibilities of a campaign taking players all the way from 1 to 20 looks very appealing. But it's also very hard to do - you need to sustain a campaign either over a very long time or make leveling up much faster than the game generally expects you to make it.

As a result, I think it's highly valid to limit a campaign's story in terms of scope and time frame. Yes, we want to see our characters progress and become insanely powerful, but sometimes it makes sense to keep things limited. I've been giving a lot of thought to Ravenloft games lately, and generally speaking, I don't recommend having them go beyond level 10. Frankly, there's no minimum or maximum number of levels to go through to tell a compelling story. I'd generally recommend letting players level up at least once during a campaign, as progression is part of the appeal of D&D, but you could tell a really exciting story in which the players never even hit level 5. (As an example, the Ravenloft domain of Richemoulot, which is frequently ravaged by a plague, could work as a full tier 1 setting.)

For Critical Role's second campaign, there are certainly plot threads I think they could pick up if they choose to revisit the Mighty Nein, but at the same time, the current antagonist and the arena in which they are facing that antagonist feels every bit as epic as the confrontation with Vecna at the end of campaign one - even if they don't have 9th level spells.

Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft Review

 I realize that I've been posting about this book for, well, months, but I've now finished reading it cover-to-cover, and I'm now ready to give my informed impressions:

This might be my favorite campaign setting sourcebook for 5th Edition. Let me see if I can articulate why:

There are other strong contenders for that top spot. Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica makes great use of its ten guilds to give you options for all sorts of interesting adventures and plot hooks. Explorer's Guide to Wildemount not only has great guidelines for building a campaign around your players' characters, but is also profoundly useful as a granular guide to the setting itself, allowing a DM to easily let the players go anywhere on the map and then just grab the book and come up with an adventure for them appropriate to the place where they arrive.

Van Richten's focus is on tone. Apart from what seems like an excellent starter adventure in The House of Lament (that has replayability and drips with atmosphere,) you're not going to find dungeon or battle maps here (though Curse of Strahd has you covered if you ever want players to go to Castle Ravenloft or other locales in Barovia.) While it does have some fantastic horror-themed monsters, you might be surprised to find that just about every NPC in the book, including its Darklords, is represented by stat blocks from the Monster Manual, some of which are not terribly high CRs. Granted, the book pointedly describes the various characters as having a stat block "like" X Monster Manual entry, and speaking from experience, I highly recommend customizing monsters to suit your purposes (that said, there are also reasons to keep a Darklord low-CR).

Many of the classic Domains of Dread and their Darklords have been reimagined, sometimes gender-swapping them, or sometimes having an old Darklord replaced by a new one. There are also some new domains. I'll confess that some of these don't scream "horror" as obviously as others. While Dementlieu is now a paranoia-inducing Cinderella-meets-Masque-of-the-Red-Death, a place like Hazlan feels like it could exist in a more traditionally broad fantasy genre.

But, of course, horror is sometimes more about how you tell a story than the pieces at play.

Rules bloat is something that I think can threaten to overcomplicate an already complicated game like D&D - something I'm given to understand was a big issue in 4th Edition. The new subclasses and Gothic Lineages are easily incorporated into the modular system of D&D, but the big headliner new mechanic, Dark Gifts, are, I think, probably simple enough not to bog down a game. The alternate Fear and Stress rules might be a little much, but if you and your players can handle them, could make for a tenser, scarier game.

This book is, I think, more aimed at helping DMs run games better than probably any book since the DMG. Not only do they give the DM lots of lore and locations, but the guides on designing a domain of dread and its darklord and the later "Horror Workshop" have some really great tips for making a Ravenloft game feel different (though as a DM who tends to have horror elements in his normal D&D, it's useful for any such game.)

One of Van Richten's strengths is that the setting itself is cool: A series of disconnected demiplanes all linked by the Mists. The DM is given broad discretion to shape the narrative and draw the players where they want them to go, but also allows for myriad types of game. A Ravenloft game could easily be a one-shot in which the party only gets swallowed by the Mists for a harrowing night of terrors and then gets spat out back into their home world, or it could be an extended attempt to escape the Mists. Or the party might simply be Ravenloft's new permanent residents, or even have grown up there and never knew anything else. Likewise, the scope of a game can be whatever you want - you can easily run an entire campaign in a single domain, or have the players regularly travel through the Mists between different locales.

While I'm certain to pillage some things from this book for my own homebrew campaigns, I'm also very tempted to simply run a Ravenloft game. (When the players of my Ravnica campaign eventually get to Innistrad, I'm for certain going to employ some ideas from this book.)

So, let's break it down:

Pros: Excellent guidance for thematic storytelling. Exciting new subclasses and "races." Thorough details and inspiration for a number of adventure types, including outlines for how to run a zombie siege, the cycles of a plague, a high-stakes costume ball, and more. Super cool monsters. And a great starter adventure. Also, the book has some hidden secrets that reveal themselves when you piece together certain evidence.

Cons: Effectively no magic items. No unique stat blocks for Darklords. "Other" Domain descriptions are very short despite seeming, in some cases, cooler than some of the featured ones. Lycanthropy really feels like it could have been redesigned as a Gothic lineage, but wasn't.

I'd definitely recommend this one, but I will say that if you're just going in for stat blocks and subclasses (something I'm sometimes guilty of) and ignoring the lore and DM guidance, you're going to be missing out on this book's best strengths.

Ravenloft's "Other Domains"

 Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft has fairly in-depth discussions of many of its domains, from Barovia to Valachan, with pages dedicated to the personality of its Darklord, a section about its key locations, and usually a thing that's unique about that domain that you can build adventures around, like stages for Falkovnia's frequent zombie sieges or a renown system for dealing with the rival factions in Kalakeri.

However, the book details several other domains listed that I think work fairly well as "elevator pitches," with one or sometimes two paragraphs giving you the basic gist of them. Some of these are long-established domains while others are brand new.

I thought I'd mention some of my favorites among these:

Cyre 1313, The Mourning Rail:

I love the idea of a train dungeon - for one thing, I've always loved having more modern technology encroach (or suffuse) fantasy settings (I went crazy for Final Fantasy VII Remake, which if anything is near-future). The premise here is that on the world of Eberron, there was a lightning rail train set to leave the capital of Cyre, taking would-be survivors out of the country before the disastrous Mourning left everyone dead. But the Darklord, its "Last Passenger" was some high-up person (presumably a member of a Dragonmarked House) who insisted on kicking some of the passengers off in order to maintain their privacy. Not only did this doom the people kicked off the train, but it also delayed the train long enough that it never escaped the Mourning. So while the passengers are desperately hoping the train can go fast enough to escape the impending disaster, none realize that they're all dead already.

Vhage Agency:

This domain is just a single private detective's office in which everything is in black & white. Its Darklord runs the detective agency, and sends adventurers out the door and into the Mists to help her solve cases, though she hides the fact that she's a murderous criminal who is involved in every case she investigates. I love the idea of making this domain a kind of hub/base of operations for the party, and again, it ventures outside of the classic fantasy timeframe. (I love the idea that the party can get food here by ordering the fantasy equivalent of Chinese food, which gets handed to them by a wraith-like arm jutting out of the Mists out the front door).

Tovag:

This classic realm is the home of Kas, as in the Sword of Kas. Vecna's vampiric former lieutenant was trapped in a kind of shared domain with his master after the two had a falling out way back in 2nd Edition, and that edition's final adventure modules series was a campaign that involved Vecna's escape from Ravenloft. But it seems Kas was left behind and has also never figured out that his nemesis isn't there anymore, so he constantly sends troops into the Mists to attack Vecna's stronghold, and none ever return.

Odaire:

Ok: evil Pinnochio, a village taken over by evil toys who killed all the adults. That's the basic pitch.

The Rider's Bridge:

A no-muss, no-fuss domain that's perfect if you just want your party to fight a Dullahan. It seems to connect to other domains periodically, but you could easily have this just be a weird one-shot jaunt into Ravneloft.

Darkon: An Ideal Grand Campaign Hub

 Darkon is one of the classic Domains of Dread, ruled by the Darklord Azalin the Lich, who was a one-time ally and then later bitter enemy of Strahd von Zarovich before he found himself in his own domain.

Unlike Barovia, Darkon is primarily a Dark Fantasy setting, where all the usual elements of a D&D fantasy world could be found - dwarves and elves, dragons and beholders, etc., - but which was ruled under the iron fist of its undead wizard-king.

In 5th Edition, though, things have changed.

I don't know if it was a module from some earlier edition or what, but the domain had a prophecy of a doomsday known as the Hour of Ascension, in which the dead of the land would rise up and everything would fall to ruin.

And by 5th Edition, that's happened. And Azalin is nowhere to be seen.

Azalin had been the foremost expert on the magical laws of the Mists of Ravenloft, the Domains of Dread, and the Dark Powers, and while Vecna beat him to it, you can trust that no one is better suited to figure out how to escape a place like Darkon than a lich.

Darkon is maybe the most populous of the domains, and has many different things going on in it, but the big thing now is, other than every dead body getting up as a zombie or other undead creature 24 hours postmortem, is that the Mists of Ravenloft, known in Darkon as The Shroud, are encroaching and absorbing the domain while a few individuals have inherited the powers of the crumbling state left behind by the vanished Azalin.

Now, the book plays coy with what actually happened, and leaves it open for Azalin to have been destroyed or captured or something, but they also have a whole entry in the Mist Travelers section for a human archmage named Firan Zal'honen, who happens to share both a last name with Azalin's son and also have an imp familiar named Skeever, when the Darkon chapter also lists "Azalin's familiar, an imp named Skeever" as a potential ally in that realm. So... yeah... Either Azalin's using disguise self and Nystul's Magic Aura to appear human, or maybe he found a way to revert himself to human while also escaping Darkon. Or he's some kind of clone.

Either way, Azalin's deep understanding of Ravenloft and his ancient rivalry with top-billed Darklord Strahd von Zarovich to me says that if you want to run a truly epic campaign in Ravenloft, and not limit it to lower levels to preserve the horror, Darkon's impending doom and Azalin/Firan would make a great figure at the heart of the story.

While Ravenloft is obviously designed to allow you to run a D&D adventure that is claustrophobic and creepy, I think you can essentially effect a genre shift toward epic fantasy when using a character and location like these.

Naturally, Van Richten's avoids referring often to other books than the Core Three, though once or twice it suggests taking some things from Curse of Strahd (naturally,) but if you want to graduate from the horror genre into something more epic, I'd really recommend looking at Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes.

The Dark Powers are intentionally kept vague, and while the book does confirm at least one of them to have originally been a lich, I think you could take great liberties, and even forge some or your own apocrypha. What if the Dark Powers are (at least in part) actually the Dukes of Hell, and so an effort to combat them could draw in foes like Bel, Geryon, or Hutijin? Or you could look at the fact that Ravenloft is, after all, a part of the Shadowfell, and have horrifying shadow creatures like Nightwalkers represent the Dark Powers' wills made more directly manifest.

You could also even imagine them to be celestial beings who have created the domains to sequester greatly evil beings away.

Most of the really iconic monsters in Van Richten's itself cap out at about CR 13 - I don't really see any individual monster being terribly scary for a party that's made it to tier 3 except for the Star Spawn Emissary. Again, the book is very much about how difficulty and a monster's toughness isn't necessarily what will make it scary, but I do feel like you could really change the whole tone of the campaign by embracing a larger scale and a more epic storyline after the initial haunted castles and ancient tombs are cleared out.

A Darklord Need Not Be a Final Boss in Ravenloft

 Curse of Strahd was created to be a modern update for the original Ravenloft module, recreating the massive dungeon that is Castle Ravenloft, as well as fleshing out the broader region of Barovia, with an adventure that takes you across the whole land. The adventure ends with a final confrontation (or likely a couple) with Strahd von Zarovich, the D&D multiverse's first vampire.

In Curse of Strahd, the eponymous Darklord has a unique stat block, though in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, they simply suggest using the standard Monster Manual Vampire stat block for him (though likely the spellcaster variant version.)

In fact, one thing that is a bit surprising about Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft is that the Darklords and other major NPCs do not have their own unique stat blocks. And some Darklords have shockingly unthreatening stats - one is a Ghost, and there's another that's a Wererat.

Given that the structure of Curse of Strahd is that you eventually confront and slay (at least for now) Strahd in order to emerge victorious (and if memory serves, escape Barovia and the Domains of Dread entirely) it might be a little shocking to see that there are Darklords here that a level 2 party could likely handle.

Given that, how are you supposed to run a campaign in these settings?

I think there are a few ways to approach it.

The first way is that the players won't necessarily know who the Darklord is. In Barovia, everyone lives in terror of Strahd, but in other domains there might be much less of a sense of who the domain is built around. So even if your villainous Darklord is a simple Cult Fanatic or Bandit Captain, you might not know to go after them until you've faced far greater dangers. The Darklord's obscurity is their shield.

The second is that a Darklord might be public, but also well-defended. Just as in any D&D game you can have important people represented by the Noble stat block, and just have them use beefier blocks to represent their personal guard, you can have a Darklord employ various monsters as guardians and bodyguards to keep the party from simply marching up and taking them out.

The third is to remember that the Dark Powers want to prolong the Darklords' torments eternally, and that means that death is no escape for a Darklord. While on the Prime Material Plane you can probably rest assured that a vampire is no longer going to trouble you once you've seen them reduced to ash by sunlight, Strahd's destruction will eventually be reversed, and, well, hope you're not in Barovia by the time he gets back. So even if your party easily takes down Saidra d'Honaire the day they arrive in Dementlieu (though she's definitely going to benefit from that second bonus) she's likely going to return not long after.

I'd recommend allowing the players to encounter the Darklord without too much difficulty, but you can either stay their hands by making them seem like a bigger threat than they are, or you can give them impossible means of escape or victory that might break the rules of the game a bit - you don't want to totally rob the players of agency, but part of the buy-in with Ravenloft is that the world is hostile, and the Dark Powers can engineer a situation to further their goals, which tend to be to keep the Darklord trapped in their self-imposed cycle of torment.

Of course, there's a fourth option, which is that a villain need not be an antagonist. Consider Hannibal Lechter in Silence of the Lambs - Hannibal is a total monster who shows zero remorse whatsoever for murdering and eating other people, but his role in the story is that of the mentor, not the antagonist. He's ultimately there to help Clarice catch the serial killer.

In a similar way, the party might be dealing with a dangerous villain that needs to be stopped, and they might be forced to turn to the domain's Darklord in order to stop it. Because I like to have cosmic horror villains as the ultimate wildcard, imagine that there's a Lesser Star Spawn Emissary going around Barovia, installing strange devices that transform the people into horrific abominations like gibbering mouthers or other aberrations. Strahd von Zarovich is the absolute tyrant of his domain, but I could imagine a cosmic outsider like the Star Spawn, or perhaps some Demon Lord, breaking the rules of Ravenloft, maybe even defying the Dark Powers themselves in order to do something that is somehow even worse.

In this case, the party might find themselves forced to align themselves with Strahd as the lesser of two evils, and the Darklord might be a willing ally, but for all the wrong reasons.

Despite its weird nature and the way it revolves around the Darklords, you can ultimately play any sort of plot or campaign within the Ravenloft setting, and especially if players think they know what to expect with a Ravenloft game, you can throw them a big curveball and have quite a bit of fun with it.

Pillaging Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft

 Any time a sourcebook comes out, I'm tempted to run some sort of adventure or campaign set within that world. But I also tend to prefer to run things in my own homebrew setting (I've put a lot of work into fleshing it out, and it's also custom-built for the kind of adventures I like to run). Yes, I'm currently running a Ravnica-based campaign, but I do feel drawn to return to my own mythos with all my own creations.

And then they drop a book like Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft.

Ravenloft is a very cool setting, and has a truly unique feel to it, given its emphasis on horror. It's also very different from other settings in that it's not really a "real world" the way that Eberron or the Forgotten Realms are. It's an impressionistic land that operates on nightmare logic. Yes, it has inhabitants who are real people, but they have to navigate a world that is out to get them.

So, again, with any campaign setting book, I like to piece together what we as DMs (or players) can "pillage" from it - what elements we can take and use outside of a genuine Ravenloft campaign.

The first and most obvious parts are those that fit into D&D modular design. Van Richten's comes with two new subclasses (for Bards and Warlocks) as well as three new playable "races" (that can work a little differently than other races, but can also work on their own as well) and some backgrounds that could fit in other settings. These are all broad enough in scope that they could work in any world that has shadowy magical powers, undead creatures, spirits, hags, and the like. (In fact, I wonder if, should we get a Feywild sourcebook, we'll see the Hexblood reprinted there.)

Ravenloft's Dark Gifts have a clear source in the setting, but you could easily adapt them as an added bonus in other settings. These are mostly beneficial, and will likely be a net boon to your players' powers, but they all come with a downside that could make a bad situation much worse.

Moving on to other obvious things, the book has a decent bestiary which includes a number of deviously deadly monsters like the Dullahan, Jiangshi, Loup-Garou, Star Spawn Emissary, and the just-as-nasty-as-it-sounds "Zombie Clot." Supernatural terrors are not limited to horror-specific settings, and the Star Spawn Emissary in particular feels like it could be a recurring, mysterious threat in any campaign that involves Elder Evils, the Far Realm, or other aberration-type monsters as a major threat.

Organizations like the Priests of Osybus or the Ulmist Inquisition could easily serve as inspirations for factions in a homebrew world, and they have some unusual and interesting stat blocks to represent members. For instance, rather than having the Priests of Osybus tied to the Dark Powers, you could use something like them as any kind of powerful cult that employs necromancy in the name of just about any kind of evil villain.

Van Richten's has optional rules for Stress and Fear, which you could use in any game that wants to emphasize the toll that adventuring takes, and could work in any setting (I'm tempted to use them in addition to lingering injuries from the DMG in an actual Ravenloft game.)

Unfortunately, there's no big list of new spells (rare for a setting sourcebook) or magic items (conversely, usually pretty common in one) but I think we've actually got a pretty decent glut of such things in recent books (the items in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything are pretty extensive) so I actually appreciate the focus instead on making the elements of a game you're running matter more.

There's already guidance in the DMG on building villains, but you might look as well to the section in Van Richten's on building Darklords and the domains around them. While Ravenloft literally has the domains' forms determined by its Darklord, you can use the same guidelines for thematically linking a villain with the environment in which you fight them.

Even if not swallowed by the Mists, there's typically plenty of room for scary things in any D&D world. Some of the domains detailed in the book include outlines of the cycles of a plague, or how to run a zombie siege (which you could easily adapt as any other kind of siege. Maybe it's a horde of orcs rather than the shambling undead).

I'm on the fence, actually, between running a true Ravenloft campaign or just incorporating things into my own setting (I do know that when the characters in my Ravnica campaign eventually go to Innistrad, I'm going to be using the crap out of this book.) The guidance on building your own domains of dread is actually really great for us homebrewers, as it lets you build something that's entirely your own but can still interact easily with the rest of the canonical stuff.

Planescape? Or A Broader Guide to the Planes?

 The Planescape setting is one of the weirdest, most unconventional D&D settings. The setting launched in 1994... sort of. Planescape primarily introduced the city of Sigil that sits at the dead center of the multiverse (well, sort of - it's really more the center of the Outer Planes, and arguably it's really the Prime Material Plane at the dead center - a matter of debate). Conceived of as a campaign setting that took place entirely in the otherworldly outer planes - the realms of gods where philosophy dictates what passes for reality there - the setting built itself around this idea of philosophy, with several Factols (factions) in Sigil, and portals and passages that allow for adventures across the planes.

The setting was itself built upon 1987's Manual of the Planes for 1st Edition (specifically AD&D,) which first introduced the Great Wheel cosmology built around the various alignments.

Having read through the 1994, 2nd Edition Planescape Campaign Setting book, its focus is narrowed in on Sigil and the Outlands, which is the True Neutral outer plane (also sometimes called simply "Concordant Opposition.") Planescape introduced the Tiefling and Githyanki/Githzerai races, along with the "Baritaur," which is a sort of more goat-like centaur race (also notable that Tieflings were not specifically tied to devils, but rather just represented any sort of "planes-touched" humanoid).

The book assumes the reader to have more information about the Outer Planes from the Manual of the Planes and other sources, and so it focuses its spotlight mostly on the Factols and Sigil, with some sections about a select few of the "Gate Towns" in the Outlands that contain portals to all the other Outer Planes, as well as a few locations within the Outlands (including the divine caverns of Ilsensine, which back then was an Ilithid God that took the form of a giant Elder Brain, unlike the 5th Edition conception of Ilsensine as more of a philosophical ideal that the Ilithids aspire to than a literal deity.)

Planescape's whole aesthetic, including its illustrations by Tony DiTerlizzi and cover art by Robh Ruppel have a wonderfully unconventional style that feels of a piece with the general grungey, alternative vibe they were going for with the book (I'm a shameless nostalgic for 90s alternative culture, because that's what the cool, older kids were into when I was a little kid).

And Sigil, standing as it is kind of within but also separate from the True Neutral plane, is shared by groups that follow radical and extreme philosophies that are hard to pin down in terms of their goodness or evil.

The elephant in the room here is that Ravnica, the Magic the Gathering setting that WotC brought into D&D with Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, shares a lot of DNA with Sigil. Both are impossible cities that are ruled over by powerful factions that are all opposed to one another but kind of balance each other out.

The way I described Ravnica recently is that it's a place that would be a dystopia if any one of the guilds achieved total control of it, but somehow they all balance one another out to make it livable, and I think Sigil kind of operates on a similar principle (though instead of the Living Guildpact, they have the omnipotent Lady of Pain and her Dabus.)

I would 100% want to play in a Planescape campaign, but I'd also want to make ample use of the Outer Planes in general. The only one any character I've played has visited is the Nine Hells, which is an obvious place for high-stakes adventures, but I love that there are such weirder ones, like the howling tunnels of Pandemonium or the twin landscapes of Bytopia that can just look up at each other.

A Planescape book, I think, has to really dedicate most of its text to the idiosyncrasies of Sigil and the Outlands. And that makes me wonder:

Should we first (or even just in addition to) have an updated, 5th Edition guide to the planes?

The DMG gives us details for the Outer Planes, but it's fairly limited. The Nine Hells and the Abyss get a bit more, with various layers detailed, but there's not a ton to go on. Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes gave us a few monsters to populate certain Outer Planes with, such as the Cadaver Collector for Acheron or the Howler for Pandemonium, but I'd love a book that dedicates a sizable chapter (comparable to the ones for each guild in GGtR) to each plane, giving us a broad sense of it, maybe some sample adventures and a map to use for inspiration. And then we could have a bestiary in the back that gives us creatures to find in the various planes.

I mean, look, I've got plenty of devils to populate the Hells, and I've got tons of Demons to populate the Abyss. But what kind of creatures do my players meet in Arborea? And how are they different than the ones they meet in Elysium? Give me some higher-level Modrons for Mechanus, and maybe some other Inevitables?

Indeed, I'd love some guidance on how to run an adventure in the Upper Planes. How likely are the players to encounter a dangerous monster in a realm that is, in a very literal sense, heaven?

I have no evidence to suggest that one of the campaign setting books coming out this year will be Planescape. In fact, going on UA alone, I'd assume we'd be getting Dragonlance and a Feywild book.

But I also get the sense (perhaps wishful thinking on my part) that players would be really excited about a Planescape book. And, well, maybe this is even more wishful thinking, I think we could be into getting both a book for Planescape and a broader one about the D&D multiverse.

Har'akir: The Ultimate Megadungeon

 Har'akir was originally introduced to check one of the classic boxes of horror - The Mummy. Made the year after Frakenstein and Dracula, the Mummy starred Boris Karloff (probably more famous for playing Frakenstein's monster, but this role's a pretty big one too) The Mummy is about an ancient Egyptian priest who had been cursed and buried alive for sacrilege, and is uncovered by a group of western archaeologists who accidentally resurrect him. For those of my generation, the 1999 remake starring Rachel Weisz and Brendan Fraser is probably more accessible, but the general vibe is the same - adventure movie with horror elements.

Har'akir I think was very much conceived originally in that adventurous "exotic locale" mode, and I think there's been more effort in Van Richten's to allow adventurers in Har'akir to be less colonialist outsiders coming into another culture and more people who have grown up a part of Har'akir's culture.

The influence of Ancient Egypt on our cultural imagination is huge, and is particularly tied to the adventure genre from which D&D borrows a lot, as fraught with imperialism and colonialism as that genre is. But the model for just about any "ancient tomb" with "forgotten gods" in basically any fantasy story has got to be Ancient Egypt. The idea of "cyclopean architecture" surely looks back to the Pyramids and the various ancient cities swallowed by the Sahara.

The story of Har'akir, or more specifically its Dark Lord Ankhtepot, borrows heavily from The Mummy's Imhotep, but changes a few things. Ankhtepot, like Imhotep, was not a pharaoh but a priest. But Ankhtepot conspired to assassinate a young pharaoh and he and his priests were seized by the people. Ankhtepot was cursed to remain conscious as his body was mummified and then left in a sarcophagus alone with his thoughts until all memory of his name was forgotten, and only then did the Dark Powers reach out to him and grant him a domain of dread to call his own - Har'akir.

Ankhtepot is cursed with what seems like a blessing - he is completely immortal, and rules over Har'akir without any fear of losing his power. But with a part of his soul missing as part of his curse, this existence is torture.

Now, Egyptian tombs are the primary basis for your classic "deadly dungeon." Pyramids and other tombs were sometimes trapped to discourage (or stop) tomb robbers, and some had false tombs to prevent tomb robbers from finding the actual remains of the person buried there. I don't know that there's ever been anything quite so sophisticated as the blow-darts, closing stone doors, spikes, and giant rolling boulder from the cold open to Raiders of the Lost Ark, but you get the idea.

In fact, I've always pictured the Tomb of Horrors, the infamous early dungeon module that Gary Gygax created solely because his players thought the game was too easy (and was updated for 5E in Tales from the Yawning Portal,) as having a vaguely Egyptian vibe, found somewhere in a desert.

In Har'akir, one of the interesting concepts is that the vast desert land covers up countless subterranean dungeons - and that they all connect into one massive network. You could cross through the mists and find yourself in some dusty old tomb, and you might spend your entire time in Har'akir just moving through this single massive complex of dungeons.

In fact, I could imagine an entire campaign in which the entire goal the party has is simply to find a way to the surface.

Har'akir is not a small place, and so the amount of stuff below the sands is mind-boggling - which is why it's important to remember that the Domains of Dread operate on nightmare logic. Yes, in any real world, you'd never get enough stuff to fill a dungeon complex that large, and constructing it would take an absurd amount of time, resources, and effort. But because the Dark Powers just kind of willed this place into existence to serve as Ankhtepot's prison, you never have to justify it.

The Ulmist Inquisition and Badass Monster Hunters in General

 Ravenloft is a horror setting, and to a degree what you want to try to achieve as a DM in that setting is terror and horror, to spook your players and make them feel that they've got to run, run, run if they want to survive.

But D&D is also about heroic adventurers who kill monsters. My philosophy when it comes to fantasy is that since the earliest fantasy fiction, which includes humanity's earliest myths, we've come up with the scariest monsters to embody our fears, and then we make the most ridiculously badass heroes to kick those monsters asses - we conjure our fear to dispel it. And frankly, if you look at the history of humanity in general, rising up from just being some not-terribly-strong, not-terribly-fast apes, to the point where the chance of any of us getting killed by a predator like a lion or a bear or a crocodile is minimal, well: humanity did become badass. Indeed, our concerns in modern society are less about how much we fear the monsters that we evolved to - predatory animals - and more how our strengths are so broad that we threaten nature itself, and the scariest monsters are other humans who would turn that violence against its own species.

You could argue that the monster-hunter narrative dates back to Gilgamesh. But I think it's interesting to look at how the genres of horror and of heroes intersect. There's almost an arms race.

Taking two classics of Gothic Horror, namely Frankenstein and Dracula, the former was written 79 years before the latter, which is something that's easy to forget given how clumped together they are in the modern consciousness. In fact, the Bela Lugosi movie of Dracula was made only 34 years after the novel was written, while Frankenstein's film adaptation (which came out the same year as Dracula - I guess 1931 was a freaking awesome year for monster movies) was 113 years after its source material.

The stories are very different. But one of those differences is that in Dracula, there's an expert who leads the fight against the vampire lord. Abraham van Helsing is a brilliant scientist, and given that this is set in a world where vampires are real, it's all very scientific for him to know how one deals with it - stakes to the heart, etc.

Van Helsing is not really an action hero in the original book (there are younger characters who play that role) but over time, he's become the template for badass vampire (or more generally monster) hunters, and serves as the obvious inspiration for Ravenloft's Rudolph van Richten just as Dracula is the inspiration for Strahd von Zarovich.

While Van Helsing is probably the prototypical gothic monster hunter - the kind of guy with a black doctor's bag filled with wooden stakes, silver bullets, and small vials of holy water that are the perfect shape and weight for throwing like grenades - I think you might look to Solomon Kane as someone who kind of codifies the trope. Created by Robert E. Howard (whose Conan the Barbarian I'm sure you've heard of,) Kane is the protagonist of a series of pulp novels, and between his slouch hat, brace of flintlock pistols, rapier and dirk, and dressed all in black, and tell me he doesn't look exactly how you'd picture a monster hunter. Look up the critically reviled Hugh Jackman movie Van Helsing (2004) and you can see that they've just taken Solomon Kane's wardrobe and given it to Abraham Van Helsing.

I have not actually read any Solomon Kane stories nor seen any film adaptation, nor that aforementioned Van Helsing movie, but I, frankly, freaking love this trope.

And I think that in part it's because I've always loved the aesthetics of horror while liking the optimism (or at least lack of nihilism) of epic fantasy.

Oh, and obviously Geralt of Rivia from The Witcher is another example of this trope, though more truly medieval instead of 18th/19th century.

Anyway, my point:

The players in a Ravenloft campaign are well-positioned to become this sort of badass monster hunter character type. While it's not official content, the popularity of Critical Role has given Matthew Mercer's Blood Hunter class a lot of exposure, and I think the primary fantasy behind this class is to play this kind of dark monster hunter. I also think the Ranger's Monster Slayer subclass is built to embody this as well.

But what's cooler than an individual or small band of adventurers who go and hunt monsters? How about a whole army? A multiverse-traveleing, super powerful army of monster hunters who have insane powers and can stand up to monsters without flinching.

Allow me to introduce the Ulmist Inquisition.

Now, I believe the Ulmist Inquisition dates back to earlier editions, but what we get in Van Richten's is still some really intriguing lore.

The story goes that before Strahd fell to evil and became the first vampire, he had an ally named Ulmed, who fought alongside him, fighting evil (I'm really interested to dig into whether Strahd was always an evil man or if there was a turn, but that's too big for this.) When Strahd did fall, Ulmed was devastated. He retreated back to the city of Malitain, which was a city-state that exists on the world from which Barovia was taken (and boy do I want to know what, if anything other than maybe mist, exists there now!) and founded the Ulmist Inquisiton, and his three friends each founded a different order. Ulmed had psionic abilities, and these were passed down through training and asceticism to the members of the various orders, who use psionics to fight evil across the multiverse.

In Van Richten's there's a stat block for a member of each of the three orders, which are all CR 8, and each is equipped with a silver sword (because they're not idiots) and various psionic abilities.

The Inquisitor of the Mind Fire has psionic abilities that can either stun foes with psychic damage or mind-control groups of foes (as long as they're not immune to the charm condition) to fight for them for a turn.

The Inquisitor of the Sword can blink around the battlefield like crazy - teleporting 60 feet every round as a bonus action and then another 30 after both of its melee attacks (and also heals every turn thanks to a psionic control of their metabolism).

The Inquisitor of the Tome can shoot force bolts from afar and can also create a vortex of psionic energy that sucks foes into its center, knocking them prone and dealing force damage to them. (And can also potentially deflect attacks back on the attacker).

I think these are the types of stat blocks you'll generally not use for the party to fight, but one could represent a super-helpful NPC that might accompany the party on dangerous missions. They each have super-useful at-will spells through their psionics, including dispel magic, sending, etc., as well as a few that depend on which order they're a part of.

In fact, I almost feel like one of these guys is a great "call in the cavalry" kind of stat block if the party is heading toward a TPK. Let's say your party has decided to fight the loup garou at level 5 with no silver weapons - consider throwing one of these guys in to cover their retreat.

That being said, these are single-minded monster hunters who could easily take things too far. I would particularly say that if you have any Reborn, Dhampir, or Hexblood party members, one of these could show up as an ill-informed menace who sees the party member as a monster to put down. After all, "Inquisition" is practically synonymous with unchecked zealotry and horrors committed in the face of an organization that claims to be righteous.

The Ulmist are described as hunting evil across the multiverse, and their headquarters are outside of the Mists of Ravenloft. I think you could play it as if any mission into the Mists is a one-way trip - a suicide mission. But I also think you could do something interesting if the Ulmist are one of the few groups that actually know how to get out of the Mists - maybe an Ulmist Inquisitor is the party's ticket out of the Domains of Dread.

It also means that you could easily throw these into any setting - not just Ravenloft. Maybe they can show up in your Planescape campaign, or delving into the depths of Khyber in Eberron, or fighting the Red Wizards in Thay.

Anywhere there are terrifying monsters to fight, you can have the Ulmist Inquisition to show up having done their homework and ready to take care of business.

Building a Terrifying Encounter - The Dullahan

 It's tempting, often, to throw a whole bunch of monsters at a party. And frankly, especially at high levels, to sustain the difficulty you generally have to have any climactic boss fight come after a sustained series of challenges to burn off resources.

As usual, this isn't some guide - I may have been DMing D&D for several years now, but I still feel like a novice compared to the old guard who were throwing the Demogorgon at players before I was born. It's more of a speculation on how to build a fight that can feel like a real danger.

The Dullahan is a piece of Irish (and more broadly Celtic) folklore that has spread through a great deal of English-speaking culture. For Americans, the likely most well-known example of a Dullahan in fiction is The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Washington Irving's story tells the tale of Ichabod Crane traveling to Tarrytown, New York, and being terrorized by the story of the Headless Horseman, the legend being that it was a dead Hessian mercenary who had fought with the British against the Continental Army during the American Revolution, and whose head had been blown off by a cannon, and now... basically haunted the place.

Indeed, I think most people would recognize the term "Headless Horseman" before Dullahan, but the idea is the same. (Sidenote: when I was 3, my older sister and I watched the old live action Disney movie Darby O'Gill and the Little People, which had both a banshee and a Dullahan driving a "death coach," and suffice it to say that we were scarred for life.)

In many ways, the Dullahan as portrayed in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft shares some similarities with Death Knights - they're both a kind of martial class, often mounted on a skeletal warhorse or nightmare, and are a wicked character who came back because of their evil. But, very importantly, the Dullahan lacks a head.

The Dullahan is CR 10, which means that for a party of 5 player characters, in theory it should be a balanced encounter for a level 7 party, according to Xanathar's guidelines. That said, that "balance" is very much based on this being one fight among many, and barring some lucky (for the monster) crits, it's not going to be that big of a deal.

The Dullahan has a +8 to hit and deals an average of about 20 damage with its melee attacks, of which it has two, or 14 with its ranged spell attacks (also 2, though this only has a +7 to hit.) Notably, the battleaxe is especially deadly if it crits - on a crit, the target has to make a DC 15 Con save or they get decapitated (the only races I could imagine that not being lethal for would be like Warforged and maybe Reborn - though if the thing survives decapitation, it takes a ton of extra necrotic damage). Spending all 3 legendary actions, the Dullahan can move, make a battleaxe attack, which does extra necrotic damage if it's not a crit.)

The Dullahan has an AC of 16 and an average HP of 135. However, notably, it's a mythic monster, and after "beating it," it goes into "phase 2," where it gains new legendary actions, summons a bunch of Death's Heads (flying heads that do various nasty things but are much lower CR) and heals back to full.

Frankly, making it a mythic encounter already helps amp up the difficulty - the party is effectively fighting two of these sequentially, and might burn a lot of resources on the first phase without necessarily realizing there's a second.

Giving the Dullahan a mount makes a lot of sense - a Skeletal Warhorse can work, but if you want to let them fly around and terrorize a place and also have a somewhat beefier steed, a Nightmare's a good option.

Now, how to build up the terror factor?

First off, this is a cool enough monster that you want to build up to it. Every campaign has its own different pacing, and I know I sometimes fret as a DM if I haven't thrown the party into combat for a session or two. But I'd really recommend you take the time to build up to this guy.

Dullahans are headless, but they're also really into decapitation. There's something extra terrifying about the kind of monster that specifically goes after heads. Decapitation is a kind of dehumanization of the body. Faces are the main way we identify one another, and so seeing a head without a body or a body without a head feels deeply wrong in a way that, say, a lance through the heart wouldn't.

You'll definitely want to make sure this is the kind of monster your players will find fun and not just disturbing, and be ready to broad strokes the descriptions of what this thing does if it becomes an issue. In fact, I'd even recommend possibly coming up with a different explanation for its instant-kill mechanic than decapitation if that's something any of your players don't want at the table - the Con save could easily be flavored as the Dullahan having the supernatural ability to sever the connection between soul and body, not unlike a Githyanki's sword being able to snip a silver chord anchoring a soul to the Astral Plane. I think there are different ways to rule whether a body can be resurrected with something like Raise Dead after its head is cut off - whether some post-mortem surgery could restore it enough that the spell would do enough to reattach the rest - but if you are worried that "not cutting off their head" makes it too easy for the party to recover the PC, you could simply say that part of the magic of the Dullahan is that you really need Resurrection or True Resurrection them back.

Anyway, a Dullahan is very much a folkloric, gothic monster that I generally imagine terrorizing small towns, especially isolated ones. You can 100% have an urban Dullahan (in fact, I'm tempted to use it as a lieutenant of the Death Knight that's hunting one of the player characters, though given that the party's managed to kill the Death Knight once and is now just trying to figure out how to make him stay dead, Dullahan might be a bit underpowered for them) but I really see them as country monsters - something that would keep an isolated town too frightened to take the roads away from town. Indeed, with a flying Nightmare mount and its flaming skull attack, you could have one periodically attack the town from above and set fire to the buildings.

Yes, I'm aware that that is precisely what the Headless Horseman does in World of Warcraft in the weeks leading up to Halloween.

Death's Heads, which the Dullahan summons when it goes into Mythic mode, can also serve as monsters to build up to the fight, though at CR 1/2, it's unlikely that any party that stands a chance against the Dullahan will find these guys to be much of a challenge. They're mainly meant to be a complication to the rest of the fight, but I think you could use them as well to foreshadow the eventual confrontation.

Here's one way you could build up to a Dullahan.

The party is heading to a small village somewhere likely in a deep wood (we want our headless horesman/woman to be hard to spot from afar) and they come across a scene of slaughter. It's a caravan that's been utterly wiped out, the wagons burned, and every body has been decapitated - but they can't find any of the heads. Maybe the party learns about the village by searching the wreckage, and they go there.

Then, in town, they find out that the village has been cut off for a long time now - there are stories of strange things in the woods, and maybe one villager caught a glimpse of a headless rider. Maybe there's some old legend of a headless menace from the village's past. Or you could lean into the Irish folklore side of things and make the Dullahan more of a fey being (in fact, in I believe the Creature Codex by Kobold Press, their version of the Dullahan isn't even undead - it's a fey creature that is horse, rider, and severed head all in one. Oh, and that version has a whip made of a human spine, which, I regret to inform just about everyone, is part of the established myth.) The Dullahan might be some fey punishment for some transgression against an ancient agreement with some archfey - maybe the Dullahan brings the heads back to his archfey master as trophies - or perhaps the Dullahan's head was taken by the archfey, and it made a bargain that once it had taken some insane number of heads (I feel like thirteen times thirteen has a good mythic ring to it) back to the archfey's court, they'd get their own head returned to them.

Ok, for our scenario, let's lean into the fey connection to up the stakes a bit - the Dullahan spends most of its time forced to serve its evil archfey master, in the Feywild. The reason it strikes this village and not some more populated area (aside from the fact that a Dullahan isn't invincible, even if it could slaughter many troops send against it) is that the Fey Crossing that leads to its master's realm is near that village. It only has, say, one week every decade or, oh, let's say thirteen years, in which to collect its heads, and then the threat is momentarily gone, but so is the chance to stop it and keep it from coming back thirteen years on.

Now, this backstory actually makes the Dullahan slightly more sympathetic (though still selfish - surely murdering 169 people for your own freedom feels like a pretty nasty trolly problem to find yourself in) but you could always make the reasons the archfey cut their head off in the first place reflect poorly on them (maybe they were trying to get the archfey to empower them to some terrible ends).

Of course, there's always the option to just have it be totally unexplained, and that will tend to push it more into the realm of horror. I might recommend going the Dark Souls route: you, the DM (and thus game creator) know the full backstory, but you could leave just the faintest hints for the players to piece together - leaving clues that the Fey have had an influence in this area throughout its history, maybe even stories about a fabled castle "that one can only travel to through a sparkling green mist" and stories about a "beautiful maiden with violet hair" lives in a "palace of bone." Maybe there are folk tales of why you should never try to make a deal with a fairy, because she'll twist your words into the worst version of what you want. And then, when the party finally confronts the Dullahan, you see that he has a lock of violet hair as a favor - and just let the players piece it together if they want to.

They key here is to build to it. Maybe more headless corpses start showing up. Maybe a friendly NPC  turns up dead and without a head. If you're in Ravenloft, maybe the world itself conspires to creep you out - someone finds an old illustrated tome of folklore that has a "troupe of fools" in one image, which depicts figures that clearly are supposed to be the party, all missing their heads (or maybe the book itself is damage such that the illustration is cut off at the characters' necks.)

Now, what level do we think this should be at?

Again, CR 10 is supposed to be balanced for level 7 players in a party of 5, according to Xanathar's. The Dullahan is an inherently deadly encounter, given that a crit and a failed CON save means off with your head. That, in and of itself, should make the fight feel scary. However, there's every chance that you simply won't roll a crit the entire encounter while running the Dullahan. So, we'll want to make sure that it's still plenty scary without crits - while not being impossible (because as always, we want the party to win.)

With both attacks hitting (in melee) the Dullahan puts out about 40 damage per round, plus up to three more hits if it just uses its legendary actions to attack (60 if all hit) or with its Head Hunt, one attack (at advantage) that does 47 damage on average.

This thing packs a wallop, even without crits. So, on all hits, that comes to about 100 or 87 damage per round in phase 1.

It has a +8 to hit with the battleaxe. By this point, I think we can assume that any "tank-y" class that's going full heavy armor, sword, and board, will have splint and a shield (possibly not plate yet, as that's super expensive.) So we're looking at 19 AC for some. A dex-based melee class will likely only have gotten Dex up to 18 at this point, so in studded leather that's 16 AC or if we're looking at a monk with, say, +2 Wis, the same. A two-hander-wielding melee character who has, say, just splint with no shield, will have an AC of 17. So I think broadly, for those who are meant to be right up in melee with the Dullahan, we'll say they have an average AC of 18 (skewing up in case +1 Shields, the Defensive fighting style, or other mitigating factors come in). That means that the Dullahan is hitting only roughly 50% of the time. So we cut its average damage per round in half, which makes it around 44-50.

Let's say our melee fighters and paladins have got a +2 to Con. At level 7, on average, they've then got 60 HP. Our Monk with similar Con has 52.

So, if the Dullahan really focuses one person down, they have a decent chance of knocking a PC unconscious at least within a round.

Calculating player damage per round is a little harder. But my instinct is to say that for a tier 2 party, chewing through 135 health is going to take at least a couple rounds, and doing so twice will certainly take longer (barring a paladin getting a lucky crit or something like that.)

I would also always recommend that when running a legendary monster as a real boss, you should give them the maximum HP they can have, which for the Dullahan is 198. The mythic phase transition does say it regains only 87 hit points, and I might honor that even if we started at 198, making the second phase more frantic.

Terrain is always an exciting way to make fights more dynamic. A bridge is a natural place for a fight with a Dullahan to show up, and you could improvise some mechanics like if the Dullahan's mount charges, characters could be knocked off the bridge.

Going back to the build-up, to pull in good old Darby O'Gill and the Little People, a great monster you could use before the fight with the Dullahan is a Banshee. Like the Dullahan, the Banshee is one of those deceptively dangerous monsters, as even at only CR 4, a single seriously failed save against her wail will put a character to 0 hit points instantly.

If you want to make the Dullahan fight even scarier (if the party is too high level for it to be a challenge on its own) consider having it accompanied by banshees - maybe who arrive as part of the mythic phase transition. 

There's something elemental about the Dullahan. It might be my Irish heritage, but it really sticks with me as a creepy but also super awesome monster.

Great Wheel or Great Square?

 The D&D cosmos is, of course, flexible based on the model the DM chooses. 4th Edition shattered the "Great Wheel" cosmology, but that act was, I think, largely derided, and 5th Edition mostly seems to restore the ordered system of outer planes based around the concept of alignment.

Alignment is maybe D&D's most successfully osmotic element - while people who never played D&D might take a look at a Beholder and recognize it, or they might know about the Demogorgon thanks to Stranger Things (though the Demogorgon is actually a figure of folklore that long predates D&D), but social media is frequently graced with nine-square grids sorting characters from TV shows, types of sandwich, methods for keeping your place in a book, into the nine classic "X,Y" alignments.

By the time that the Planescape campaign setting was introduced, the seventeen outer planes were codified with names and broad identities. Some of their names have changed - for example, in an effort to placate the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and early 90s, the Nine Hells were changed to "Baator," with different types of fiends getting new "made-up fantasy names" like "baatezu," "tanar'ri," and "yugoloth," rather than what had previously been devils, demons, and daemons (you can see why they kept yugoloth). But there were also some changes, such as changing the "Happy Hunting Grounds" to the Beastlands, presumably due to the culturally problematic aspects of the old name (which was likely an invention of white settlers basically speculating about what heaven would look like for Native Americans, which became a more widespread mythos than any legitimate indigenous religious beliefs) or Olympus to Arborea (giving the Chaotic Good plane more of its own identity and tying it less directly to the Greek Gods).

The Great Wheel is a really elegant way to organize the Outer Planes of D&D, but it also introduces the following oddity:

Is it a circle or a square?

To be clear, what I mean by this is how we would place the planes on a big chart with two axes - where the x axis is lawfulness versus chaos, and the y axis is goodness versus evil.

Oh yeah, fair warning, this is nerdier than most of my posts.

If it's a square, it would have the following consequences:

Mt. Celestia, Arcadia, Mechanus, Acheron, and the Nine Hells would all be equally lawful. Gehenna and Bytopia would be a bit lawful, and the rest not particularly lawful at all.

It seems a bit weird to me to suggest that Mechanus is not the absolutely most lawful plane in the multiverse - is it really only as lawful as the Nine Hells?

But, if it's a circle, you then get the following:

Hades is the most evil plane in the multiverse, and it, Carceri, and Gehenna are all more evil than the Nine Hells and the Abyss.

And that doesn't seem right either. It's hard to imagine a place being more evil than the Abyss.

There are a couple oddities to alignment that come up as a result here.

First, one sort of wonders whether one axis of the alignment system matters more to us than the other. I think most of us could imagine that any of the upper, or good, planes, would probably be fairly pleasant. Sure, they might be sticklers for codes of honor and rules in Mt. Celestia, but they're by definition good, which would presumably mean that they would treat you well there (if goodness is defined by behavior and not simple nature - see Diablo III: Reaper of Souls for an exploration of the distinction - I'd argue that if "goodness" were simply being made of some stuff we consider to be good, like a Celestial is, and not based on what the individual does, it's not actually good - which is exactly the sort of philosophical debate Planescape is supposed to get you to think about!) Anyway, the point is, the Upper Planes are all good and we'd probably be fine going to any of them, as they're all more or less literally heaven.

And I think when we judge a character - like an NPC - we're going to be much more concerned with what the second word in their alignment is than the first. If you were to somehow find out the alignment of the wizard that had been sending you out on quests, don't you think it'd be a much bigger deal to find out they're *gasp* evil than *gasp* chaotic? I don't think anyone would bat an eyelid at the latter case, but the former would mean really changing up what you're doing in the campaign.

So I think it's possible that the weight of moral alignment is stronger than that of "ethical" alignment (meaning the law/chaos specturm). Any of the Lower Planes is a horrible place, even if you're on the edges. I mean, Acheron's an endless battlefield where giant iron cubes bang into each other and the echoes keep ringing for eternity. So maybe our model should be more like a rectangle - all the lower planes (Acheron to Pandemonium) are on the bottom while all the Upper Planes (Arcadia to Ysgard) are on the top, and only the three morally neutral planes - Mechanus, Outlands, and Limbo - make up the middle row.

Granted, I'm not sure that even works, because while I think the Abyss and the Nine Hells are probably just as evil as Gehenna, I also kind of feel like Arcadia is meant to be a little more focused on law than goodness - it's a place of well-intentioned but somewhat arrogant adherence to the rules. And hey, Brennan Lee Mulligan described Acheron as "Orc Heaven," so maybe it's not strictly speaking evil.

One of the things that complicates this is your stance on Neutrality.

It's easy to think of Neutrality as the Vanilla alignment, the one that picks no side and simply ignores such concerns. But here's the thing we don't often acknowledge: vanilla is a flavor in its own right. In fact, vanilla is maybe my favorite smell in the world.

In fact, there's another axis of alignment that I don't think has ever been codified, but is very important: how strongly a character holds to that alignment.

Someone who is True Neutral might simply not think much about moral or ethical philosophy. They might just keep their head down, do what they need to survive, and mind their own business. But in contrast, you might have a figure like Mordenkainen, who works diligently to maintain a careful balance between good and evil, law and chaos. His neutrality is not passive, but an active choice he makes and works very hard to fight for.

And that, I think, complicates but also fleshes out the meaning of a place like Hades. Hades is the Neutral Evil plane. Now, if neutral is just "lack of a stance," it would seem to be just a plane of pure evil, and thus could be a more evil place than both the Nine Hells and the Abyss (they totally could have gotten away with just nine outer planes, but bless 'em, they make 17). But another way of looking at it is that Hades' neutrality on the matter of law versus chaos is itself an important element of the plane. This is a place where the order and protocols of law must be balanced with and checked by the spontaneity and diversity of chaos, but also vice versa.

Again, you could interpret this as "let's not get distracted from our true purpose, evil, by worrying about these concerns" or you could simply say "it is important to us that our evil wasteland maintains its own character and identity."

It's a bit easier to conceive of the lawful and chaotic neutral planes as having more emphatically neutral alignments - Mechanus is dedicated to law, and in its mechanical nature, sees moral concerns as non-issues. Limbo sees morality as meaningless, like most things.

No plane does emphatic neutrality quite as well as The Outlands, though, where every valley has a corresponding mountain, and every lake has a corresponding island.

So, did we find a resolution here? Great Wheel or Great Square? I don't know. But even though alignment tends to play a pretty minor role in most D&D games, its cosmic implications are vast when you start to get into the realms of the gods.

Star Spawn Emissaries

 (Based on info from The Digital Dungeonmaster's page-through video)

Ravenloft is famed mostly for its Gothic horror elements, but it, and D&D, has always had other genres of horror at work. Cosmic horror as a genre is one that deals in ambiguities. While I think it's closer kin to science fiction than fantasy (though I'd argue that both exist on a continuous spectrum of speculative fiction) in a lot of ways, cosmic horror is the horror of watching the rationalities of sci-fi collapse into the superstitious awe of fantasy. D&D's cosmology is one of balance, where good doesn't always prevail against evil, but the two are at least symmetrical enough that we generally assume that the overall order of the universe will remain intact.

Devils and demons are beings of pure evil, but the very fact that they exist in that framework sort of necessitates opposite numbers, with angels and other celestial beings representing good.

Cosmic Horror is about taking those understood models and suggesting they're wrong, or at the best myopic.

In my apartment, we have three cats. The cats are lovely and adorable, and show genuine affection toward us. Psychologically, the prevailing theory on cat psychology is that pets like dogs and cats don't really understand us as being different species. Our cats see us as just big cats, part of the same family, and relate to us in a similar way that a kitten would to their parent.

We humans, of course, understand that we're a totally different species separated by millions of years of evolution, but there's enough common heritage that we can relate to cats and dogs, and can assume we have at least similar if not quite the same types of emotions and feelings toward others. Our cats know us to be affectionate, to keep them safe from dangers, and to give them food, and to comfort them with pets and hold them if they're scared. And to us, cats are similar enough for us to feel empathy toward them, to appreciate them as sources of companionship and comfort as well.

Humans are clever, and we can study other animals enough to simulate some kind of behavior that will put other animals at ease. But there are some ways that we behave that's pretty odd and even terrifying from an evolutionary perspective. For example, the pets we love, we sterilize, cutting them out of the evolutionary process. This is done for the individual's own good in part - we don't want to burden our pets with parenthood - as well as an attempt to control the population of a species that, through its proximity to humanity, has over-succeeded, becoming an invasive species.

But given our mastery over our particular Kingdom in the tree of life, cosmic horror introduces a troubling notion: what if our mastery over animals on Earth is only as impressive as ants' ability to cultivate and farm aphids?

And what if, just as our cats think that we're just big cats who take care of them, we humans have, amidst us, creatures that seem totally human to us but are actually something far more intelligent, sophisticated, and potentially dangerous. After all, not all humans are so kind and empathetic toward other animals.

The Lesser Star Spawn emissary in Van Richten's Guide is a medium aberration that can take on the form of a beast or humanoid. But beneath this form, there's a horrifying monster that can devastate mere mortals, a CR 19 creature with a boatload of hit points, and myriad ways to inflict psychic damage and terrify a party of adventurers.

Worse still, the Lesser and Greater Star Spawn Emissaries are not really two separate monsters. As soon as a Lesser emissary is killed, it immediately regenerates into a Greater Star Spawn Emissary. This thing is CR 21, and is Huge in size, and has now cast away any pretenses, becoming a 25-ft tall mass of flesh and teeth, along with elements of its previous disguises.

Worst of all is that both of these forms are not even the real monster. Both are simply projections of something far too vast, alien, and distant to be represented in a stat block. They're described as "fingers" of some vast being that poke into our world (well, or the world of Ravenloft.)

In Lovecraft's mythos, most of the "Outer Gods" are totally incomprehensible and far as one can get from human-like. But I think the coolest and creepiest of his creations, at least on a conceptual level, is Nyarlathotep. Nyarlathotep is sort of a god, but also serves as the "soul" of the Outer Gods, a kind of alien nexus of consciousness or something. Unlike most of Lovecraft's monsters, Nyarlathotep sometimes appears as a human man, and can meet with characters and talk to them. Yes, he tends to be somewhat menacing (and naturally racist old Howard Phillip indulges in all manner of exoticism, always depicting Nyarlathotep as being either swarthy or midnight black - as always you have to read Lovecraft's work with a giant boulder of rock salt) but his intentions are not always obviously malevolent (even if he's one of the few eldritch abominations in Lovecraft's work that seems to care enough about humanity to wish us harm).

So, here's how I'd use these Star Spawn emissaries. I would introduce one as an NPC. They might have an air of mystery about them, some charming, sophisticated individual, but this alien being is smart enough (their lowest mental stat is Wisdom, which is at 20) to know not to raise any red flags if it would make things harder for them (though that is a big if). I might even have them act as a friendly, if odd, NPC.

But a being like this is unlikely to be doing anything benevolent. The key is that what they intend to do could A: be one step in a million-year-long plan and B: its effects might be hard to understand. You could have a being like this trying to change the color of the moon by an imperceptible amount because of something that needs to happen for them in a billion years.

But it might also be something that will happen more immediately, and that might be something a whole lot worse.

Krakens are not aberrations, and as a mythological creature, they predate what we'd call cosmic horror, but in many ways, they fit the bill to a T: a profoundly ancient creature from before the humanoid races existed whose arrival would spell disaster to just about anyone. Frankly, give a Kraken a fly speed and you've more or less got Cthulhu.

It might be that a Lesser Star Spawn emissary is trying to break some ancient seals that keep a Kraken bound in the bottom of the ocean.

On the other hand, a Star Spawn Emissary could represent what TV Tropes calls a "Greater Scope Villain." One of the scary concepts in cosmic horror is that even the most terrifying monsters that the characters face are, themselves, woefully underpowered compared to something else. You could have a campaign in which the party faces off against some terrible power like a hive of Mind Flayers, only for the Mind Flayers to be terrified of one of these - and the thing for which it is an emissary.

In fact, this was done very well in Campaign Two of Critical Role.

SPOILERS FOR CRITICAL ROLE CAMPAIGN TWO:

During an adventure in which Jester, the tiefling trickster cleric, wanted to hold a big convention for her god, who is actually a mischievous archfey who had been her "imaginary friend" as a kid and she believed in him hard enough to make him into a sort of lesser deity, she and the rest of the party went to an island that they soon found was already under the control of a so-called god named Vokodo. In fact, Vokodo was a Morkoth - an aberrant creature who was also only just pretending to be a god. Vokodo was himself a pretty scary monster (as usual DM Matt Mercer buffed the stat block, I assume,) but when the party faced off against this alien menace, they discovered that it was only there in the first place after fleeing a horrifying living city adrift in the Astral Sea. It would be well after they dealt with Vokodo that they then discovered the ancient city of Aeor and a fallen comrade's connection to this nightmare city (which is where their adventures have actually taken them by this point in the campaign.)

I think you could use an emissary like this, especially in its "false ally" front, when introducing a greater threat while dealing with something lesser. A Beholder is a pretty big deal to most parties, but they might shrink in terror at what one of these represents.

And all the while, the party might assume that the emissary is just a powerful scholar of the paranormal and esoteric.

Bluetspur: Your One-Stop Shop for Alien Abduction and Cosmic Horror

(Based on info from The Digital Dungeonmaster's page-through video)

 One of the long-established Ravenloft domains, Bluetspur is quite different from what you'd find in other domains. The domains of Ravenloft are filled with terror and horror, but most are at least somewhat livable. People are born, grow up, and die (not always even violently!) in these domains and can live somewhat normal lives.

Not... so much in Bluetspur.

The Darklord of Bluetspur is The God-Brain, an Ilithid Elder Brain that consumed others of its kind to grow in power and knowledge. When it began to deteriorate from some bizarre affliction, the other Ilithid hives psionically banished it from existence, seemingly destroying it, though in fact the God-Brain was taken by the Dark Powers.

Bluetspur is Ravenloft's purest Cosmic Horror domain, and does not have any towns or villages - only Mind Flayer hives beneath the ground and strange, non-Euclidian structures that extend above ground, including an impossibly tall mountain that seems to curve toward you if you look up at it.

Most 5e books only refer to stat blocks and the like within itself and the core three. Van Richten's breaks this rule occasionally, suggesting using existing stat blocks in Curse of Strahd for folks like the eponymous Rudolph van Richten (though it also provides an alternative in case you don't have CoS).

When it comes to Bluetspur, I'd highly recommend using some of the expanded Mind Flayer stats for monsters in Bluetspur, such as using the Ulitharid for the rival Mind Flayer seeking to undermine the God-Brain. (You could also use Dyrrn from Eberron if you want to get real nasty with it.)

The one possible exception is actually the Elder Brain stat block. The Elder Brain is CR 14, which might be fine if you're never going beyond tier 2, but Bluetspur seems like one domain where you could genuinely go all the way to tier 4 in Ravenloft. (Sidenote: I think I might have a campaign that goes 1-10 in Ravenloft and make 11-20 pure Planescape - maybe have a Relentless Killer antagonist who thinks they're a demon lord, until the actual, let's say Baphomet, shows up and destroys him for his arrogance, and then sucks the party into the Abyss.)

The God-Brain is no ordinary Elder Brain, and the chapter advises you to treat it more like a sentient place or object than a monster to fight - I'd use the regional effects from the Elder Brain and its telepathic link system, but make it essentially impossible to fight the damn thing.

However: here's the key with Bluetspur: The players don't have to go there for it to be scary as hell.

In the Lovecraft story The Shadow Out of Time, the narrator describes an experience in which he was witnessed to develop a completely different personality for a couple-year period, and he explains that what had actually happened was that an alien consciousness from the distant, distant past had actually swapped bodies with him, sending him back to a pre-human civilization he refers to as the Great Race of Yith, who have survived for countless eons by body-surfing into the future, with the implication that the extinction they experienced in the past might occur only after they've taken over humanity and left human minds to die off by their adversaries (despite this, the Yithians are one of the more benign creatures of Lovecraft's fiction.)

The Mind Flayers of Bluetspur are able to psionically project into other domains, abducting individuals from those realms and experimenting on them, possibly converting them via cereomorphosis into new Mind Flayers - they've experimented with introducing vampiric blood to mind flayers, creating Mind Flayer vampires who feed on others before going to the God-Brain's brine pool and getting dissolved within to nourish the ailing Elder Brain.

The tables in the Bluetspur section are 100% horrifying nightmares - one of the major themes is that the Mind Flayers constantly write over memories of abductions to their realm, so that an individual (including player characters) might have fragmentary, repressed memories that return to them (I think the one that blew me away the most was "you have a memory of a figure in front of you being deemed "acceptable," and was taken away, while you were deemed "unacceptable," and were left behind").

Adventure hooks for the domain include things like discovering a barn in which all the livestock has exploded, or a character discovers a metal device implanted under their skin. Full on alien abduction stuff here, which is a very different vibe than your typical D&D adventure, but makes 100% sense given what Mind Flayers are.

Just as another example of a piece of fiction that deals with these themes that stuck with me, the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Schisms," which is one of the creepiest episodes in that series. In it, Commander Riker along with some junior officers are having trouble sleeping, and eventually they discover that beings that live in subspace (the sort of alternate plane of existence that faster-than-light communication is broadcast through) have been taking crew members and experimenting on them, leaving subtle scars where, for instance, an arm was detached and then re-attached just slightly off its original position. And then, of course, there's basically all of the X-Files.

Bluetspur hits Cosmic, Body, and Psychological horror really well, and I think that it would make for a great "final adventure" for a campaign.