Going In Blind to Session Zero

 Tomorrow, I'm going to an (outdoor, fully vaccinated) session zero for a new campaign set in Wildemount, the continent on Exandria, which is D&D's most recent canonical setting (originally established by Matthew Mercer as the setting for the Critical Role campaigns. Actually, given its mention in Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, you could argue that Theros is actually newer, but on the other hand, the MTG worlds are also only dubiously "canonical" as part of the greater D&D cosmos, given that they're from the multiverse of a different IP that is, conveniently, owned by the same company. Similar questions arose when the MTG set called Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms brought in folks like Zariel, Mordenkainen, and Lolth as Planeswalkers.)

Per the instructions of our DM (who is also one of my oldest and best friends, and has played in every campaign I've run, and is a veteran DM himself,) we've been asked not to come up with characters until this session zero. This goes against my instincts, which is to write 6-10 page short stories as a backstory (I've actually written stories that began as character backstories before deciding they had legs as fantasy literature, and am now 8000 words into something that might become a novel). In an effort to build the characters deeply into the world, he wants us to all begin crafting our characters with RP at the forefront.

Still, D&D is a game with mechanics, and we're still going to be playing the game, so I've given some vague thought to the general shape of what I want to play.

I'm torn, slightly, between one class and subclass I want to play and a broader goal. Currently, the three characters I play most are an Eldritch Knight Fighter who is the group's tank and is melee-based, an Oath of Vengeance Paladin who is more more focused on damage output (but due to being one of the two melee characters in the party, becomes something of a tank by default,) and a melee-based Gloomstalker Ranger (who has been an illustration of why you should always go with a Dex build as a Ranger even if you plan on fighting in melee. Just use shortswords or scimitars instead of handaxes and you'll be fine.)

As you can see, I always seem to play characters who get into melee, and whose primary combat move is to just hit things.

So, my general intention with this new campaign is to try to be the opposite, playing a pure caster who would sit at range. My personal aesthetics push me toward a Wizard, but I'm trying to avoid going too specific on that should another player really want to be one. I have been somewhat drawn to the idea of a Druid - so often Wild Shape is the feature people focus on with them, and I think it would be fun to play one that is truly a caster first and foremost, likely going with either Circle of Wildfire or maybe Circle of Stars.

I love Warlocks, but I have played one through level 13, and so would prefer to try something new.

Now, this might all go out the window if I decide to go with the class and subclass I've been kind of obsessed with, which is the Armorer Artificer. In its Guardian Mode, I think it becomes the best tank class in the game (though Ancestral Guardian Barbarian is up there,) but of course this puts me once again into the category of a heavily-armored character who mostly just hits things. I could focus more on the Infiltrator Mode, but my instinct is that that version of the Armorer is not quite as amazing (though still decent.) And, of course, while you do get half-caster spells, the primary mode is still going to be attack rolls.

I've played one before (to level 12, actually,) but I do love Monks, and could imagine that as an alternative, though again that is utterly opposed to my primary intentions. I've only played one in a one-shot, but I did enjoy playing a Rogue as well, though again, the same issue arises.

Now, the point of the session zero is to come up with the character first, and then figure out a class that fits for that character. But I think there are a fair number of classes that could work for different classes. A Fighter's intense training could easily translate into a Monk's time at a martial-focused monastery. A Druid who studies natural mysteries could easily be a Nature Cleric, or even a Wizard.

When I write a backstory, I like to include at least one (though usually several) big mysteries - something weird happened that has not yet been explained, or there's a strange person who told the character something that does not yet make sense. I like to include these to seed things with the DM. Our DM is also doing what I intend to do in future campaigns as well, which is to not even come up with a primary plot until the characters have established their backstories. Brennan Lee Mulligan made this suggestion, arguing that in any good story, you wouldn't be able to just swap out different protagonists.

The nature of WotC's published adventures requires them to be somewhat open-ended in order for anyone to be able to run them with whatever party. And a really skilled DM can work specific character elements into a pre-written story. But it's a pretty exciting prospect to imagine that the big bads we fight and conflicts we deal with are all baked into our characters' stories. I mean, isn't it way cooler that Darth Vader is Luke's father instead of just some random bad guy? (Though, counterargument: didn't it suck when they dragged Rey's grand-parentage into Rise of Skywalker when the story would have been so much more meaningful if her destiny wasn't determined by her genetic donors?)

Anyway, the plan is for us to have a nice long session talking about the world and where we want our people to come from within it (naturally, I've gravitated toward races that aren't actually mentioned in Explorer's Guide to Wildemount. Warforged are actually technically in the lore if you consider campaign 2 canonical, and then Tritons are just not mentioned at all, but I think they're really cool. We'll see. I could play an elf, though I'm usually less inclined toward the non-human Tolkienesque races).

Then, after our session zero, we're going to have one-on-one discussions with the DM about our character, including secrets they might possess that the group doesn't know, or just more broadly fleshing things out.

Conceptually, I think I'm going to try to avoid a dark and brooding backstory filled with trauma (which my Paladin is currently sitting on a whole mountain of). I had a lot of fun in a one-shot playing an older character who has a super healthy home life. I also might try playing an idealistic and naive young character (arguably my Great Old One Warlock was one of those, though he had that in addition to being literally psychotic... and he was also convinced he killed his dad in what was actually an accident, so I guess he had trauma too.)

Anyway, our session is tomorrow, assuming nothing comes up to delay it, so I might post about the new character tomorrow evening!

Cordial Vampire and a Historic Vampire Deck

 So, honestly, until embarassingly recently, I didn't really "get" Modern Horizons, or its digital-only gaiden sequel, Historic Horizons. But, now that I understand the "Modern" format (basically every card set they've come out with since the borders changed in 8th Edition) and how Historic is kind of the Arena equivalent, dating back to the first sets to be released on Arena (which I believe was Ixalan, though earlier sets like Amonkhet and Kaladesh remastered have been added,) these new sets make way more sense: a way to add new cards to these formats that can link up with any of the mechanics used in those earlier sets.

It's also a way for deck archetypes that might be popular in those formats to get some new blood in them - you might not have had much luck finding new Modular artifact creatures since 2003, but the "Horizons" sets bring new stuff to them.

And if this is all obvious to you, good for you. You've been paying closer attention than I have.

With Jumpstart: Heroic Horizons, we've seen new cards added to the Historic format, including one terrifying infinite combo that I imagine will see some kind of ban (for now, having instant-speed removal to cast immediately after they use Davriel's Withering on Witherlark, to kill the thing before the former resolves, and home they don't have another one and an open black mana to do it anyway seems to be the only way to survive it.)

But while I imagine that the metagame for Historic is even thornier than it is for Standard (and Standard 2022) it's also a format that opens up a lot of possibilities for fun decks.

Way back around 2005 or so, I made a vampire deck. This was before Zendikar, Innistrad, or any set in which vampires had any sort of tribal support. Back in those days, black had basically only the one "small creature" tribe that saw any kind of regular printing, which was zombies. Yes, we had skeletons, though never, I believe, with any tribal support, and then of course Thrulls, which did technically get at least one tribal card in Fallen Empires. Anyway, WotC had not yet decided to make vampires the default black "humanoid" "race." Indeed, the most prominent vampires were pretty big creatures like Sengir Vampire, serving more as rivals for black's other big creatures like demons.

This deck worked, kind of. (Notably, this was on MTGO, so there were some cards, like Reformed Vampire - a sneaky tribute to the character and show Angel, which was a spin-off of Buffy the Vampire Slayer - that wouldn't even count for the Modern format.)

Anyway, after doing a Jumpstart game in which I had a vampire (and sliver, though I didn't even seem to draw them) deck, I decided to try my hand at building a Vampire Tribal deck.

And actually, it kind of works. I've managed to have some pretty successful matches, which was especially nice after a terrible losing streak today (I've been fighting just to stay at Silver Rank 1, and even for a bit dipped down about halfway through Silver Rank 2.)

The deck is built around - if it's built around anything other than "these are some cool vampires" - lifegain and swelling creatures, which, you know, is actually pretty classic vampire stuff.

Through mostly luck, I actually have four copies of Westgate Regent, which is one of those cards I think could be a huge centerpiece finisher in Standard if the proper support cards would allow you to build a deck around it. A bit like Szadek, Lord of Secrets from way back, Westgate Regent is a 4/4 flying vampire for 3BB (classing Sengir Vampire body) with Ward - Discard a Card, and when it deals damage to a player, it gets +1/+1 counters for each point of damage it deals.

Naturally, this guy will finish off your opponent real quickly (finding a way to give it double strike would be really nasty) and the Ward cost can be great if your opponent is out of cards.

The next really crucial piece is Cordial Vampire. This guy is a 1/1 for BB. Whenever any creature (including itself) dies (the phrasing on the card is a bit different, which I assume is to make sure you know to count it as well,) all vampires you control get a +1/+1 counter. This is actually deceptively powerful, as if you trade in combat, this triggers twice. So you can let him hang back from combat and block to pump him up from a 1/1 very quickly (in one game he got to 10/10.) And this goes across the board, so if you can manage to have a large number of vampires out, this will get delightfully out of hand really quickly.

I'm not sure I'm ready to spend wildcards on historic stuff, but I actually think this deck has legs, and will probably tweak it a bit. I know that when I started playing Arena, vampire decks were pretty popular in the metagame (possibly in part because they were somewhat cheap,) and I could imagine working some of the cards from those decks into this one (there are several already.)

Anyway, when it comes to classic horror monsters, I think I like werewolves more the same way that I'm a dog person - I still love vampires, just as I adore our three cats, even if I think of myself, personality-wise, as more of a werewolf/dog person.

While I don't think a dog is in my future any time soon, given the building I live in (and also because the three cats we have are plenty to keep us busy with pet care, and I would burn this whole world down if anything happened to them,) the prospect of Innistrad: Midnight Hunt on the horizon suggests that there could very well be some really fun lycanthropuppies coming real soon.

Children of the Nameless

 So, I went and read the Children of the Nameless, a MTG tie-in novel released for free a couple years ago (it must have been a few, given that Davriel showed up in War of the Spark.)

This might be the first actual tie-in book I've actually read (as I said before, I never finished The Book of Atrus,) if you don't count online-only postings (though this kind of counts as that, given that I read it on the Apple Books app on my laptop.)

Anyway, it was a quick read and actually pretty good. Either it's novella in length or I burned through it very quickly (it's 539 pages in the Books app, but the pages are pretty generously spaced and large-fonted, so I imagine it'd be much shorter in other formats.)

The story takes place on Innistrad, but aside from a few references to angels going insane and the threat of werewolves, vampires, and geists, I think someone without any familiarity with the world could easily grasp the basics of the book.

Tacenda is a teenage girl who has a gift bestowed upon her by "The Bog," a circular pond near her village. Tacenda has access to a number of magical songs that can, among other things, ward off monsters. Her sister, Willia, has been gifted with powerful strength, which she uses to fight off monsters. However, with these gifts comes a curse - Tacenda is always blind during the day, and her twin sister is always blind by night, meaning they can never actually see one another at the same time.

One day, Tacenda's world shatters when a swarm of horrible geists come in and massacre her town, killing her sister, parents, and nearly anyone she knows. She suspects that the "Man of the Manor," a recently-arrived nobleman who displaced the previous lord (who had been a vampire) is behind the attack, and goes to take her revenge.

However, when she arrives, she discovers that the lord and his demonic servants had been framed, and she and the lord, Davriel Cane, go to investigate.

Though Tacenda is, I would say, more of the protagonist here, Davriel is obviously the real highlight of the book. This is a Magic book, after all, and Davriel is a perfect black-mana antihero. He is a master demonologist and diabolist, who has retreated to Innistrad (yeah, he's a planeswalker) in order to hide from his foes and live in comfort and laziness.

Davriel is a cynic, often lambasting Tacenda's moral sense and laying out a philosophy of transactional relationships and a sense that people who believe they are "good" are the most likely to commit atrocities. He's clever, having arranged contracts with demons that ostensibly would forfeit his soul to them, but which couldn't practically ever be fulfilled (for example, with one of his demons, he will surrender his soul if he makes it to 65 without dying, but never told the demon that he had already died once.)

While the colors of magic are never mentioned, the book does a rather interesting exploration of Magic's nuanced view on the matter - Davriel's demons are actually quite likable and sympathetic characters who also mourn the loss of their fellows, even if they are in theory motivated by the desire to claim and consume souls. Miss Highwater, a succubus-like demon, respects Davriel for recognizing her skill at contracts and employing her in a job that does not reduce her to a mere seductress.

The story is not an epic, taking place all within a single night, but it hints at a much deeper and larger story for Davriel, which will likely be explored if WotC uses him in future sets (his appearance in Historic Horizons is promising, and I suspect we'll find that the plane New Capenna is on is either his home plane or the first one he planeswalked to.)

Important to the story, and certainly to his character, is that he carries within him an "Entity" that is the sentient remnant of a destroyed plane. Though it is not a demon, the Entity acts very much like one, always begging for him to give in and use its power. But, for reasons that are eventually revealed, he has refused, even though he is certainly not a scrupulous person.

Anyway, it's a fun read.

Capenna and Kamigawa and Some Non-Ravnican Urban Adventures Coming for MTG

 Kamigawa was first introduced in 2004-2005's Kamigawa block, back when we had one big block per year with three sets usually taking place on a new plane (actually, Kamigawa was only the second of such plane-hopping blocks, after Mirrodin.) But while Mirrodin's story the prior year had followed the stories of Odyssey and Onslaught blocks somewhat directly (the plot set in motion by Karn trying to do the right thing but accidentally making things worse, even on the very plane he created,) Kamigawa was actually a distant prequel, giving us the background on Toshiro Umezawa, a wandering ronin who would be the ancestor of Tetsuo Umezawa, an as I understand it previously un-fleshed-out figure from the original Legends set way, way back in the early days (like, before I even started playing as a little kid - I was two sets late!)

Kamigawa was presented as a fantastical world based on Japanese folklore. The primary conflict was between the world of mortals and that of the Kami, the spirits who inhabited every aspect of the world (inspired by Shinto beliefs in Japan.) Beyond that, the setting had Samurai and Ninjas, and its demons were all "Oni," which in Japanese culture are a kind of ogre-like demon. Thus, I believe that all Oni in Kamigawa block were actually Ogre Demon Spirits, as most extra-supernatural creatures were considered kami (dragons, for instance, existed in a legendary cycle as dragon spirits.) Among the humanoid races, we had goblins reimagined as kappas (which aren't quite the same) as well as rat folk known as Nezumi, four-armed snake-folk called orochi, fox-folk known as kitsune, and "moonfolk," who look rather human-like but have long, rabbit-like ears (based on the Japanese notion that the craters of the moon resemble a rabbit, rather than the western "man in the moon.")

The aesthetics of the original block do get pretty surreal with the kami, but for the most part, it looks like a classic fantasy-version of Japan, more or less what you'd expect.

The new set, Kamigawa Neon Dynasty, which comes out in early 2022, is going to be a huge departure. Catching up with the modern day, which is seven or eight thousand years later, Kamigawa has undergone a profound transformation, and now exists as more of a cyberpunk setting.

I don't think we've actually seen any plane at point in history this distant from one another. I believe the "standard calendar" used for most of MTG lore is Argivian Reckoning, which I think places Urza's birth as "year zero," which puts the original block over three thousand years before that. I suppose the existence of Yawgmoth's legendary card from Modern Horizons (which depicts him prior to his discovery of Phyrexia, and thus makes him look like just a normal human, albeit a super, super evil one) means that we've got at least one card that comes from about two thousand years before the Kamigawa story (and one could argue that the various depictions of Nicol Bolas or other Elder Dragon Legends, or the Ur-Dragon, could come from even earlier).

The point is, things have really changed on Kamigawa. MTG has always had a bit of a science-fantasy element to it - the Phyrexians are kind of a robot apocalypse mixed with body horror, and the Thran, it's implied, had a rather futuristic society before their fall.

But going full-on cyberpunk is an interesting move. I'll be curious to see how much they lean into the sci-fi elements - naturally, one of the major concepts of cyberpunk is the existence of a virtual "cyber world" apart from the physical one, though I think that element of the genre has evolved as we've seen the actual development of the internet as a dominant cultural force. (The "cyberspace" imagined in early cyberpunk stories seems more like an MMO than the way people actually seriously handle internet commerce and espionage.)

What strikes me, though, is how cyberpunk tends to take place in urban settings. What we've seen of the new Kamigawa set - which is actually only two pieces of art, one depicting a new planeswalker who is some kind of cyborg ninja, and another just depicting a city with what appears to be magical trees growing out of it (could it be a basic forest?) - seems to imply an urban focus for the set.

Cyberpunk works well as a genre connection to a Japanese-inspired plane. Japan has produced some seminal works within the genre, such as Akira and Ghost in the Shell, and the genre grew out of an era of growing Japanese wealth and influence, particularly thanks the production of electronics. But even if we've seen sci-fi elements in Magic before, this is a pretty explicit leap out of conventions.

What's interesting to me is that the next set, Streets of New Capenna, seems likely to do similar things, both genre-blending and, again, finding an urban setting.

Again, we've seen very little of New Capenna, but the general vibe has been that it'll be a gritty urban city (New Capenna is likely just a city on its as-yet-unnamed plane, similar to how Strixhaven is just a school on the plane of Arcavios.) We know that the city was built by angels, but is now dominated by demons and gangs. And these gangs have the look and feel of 1920s and 1930s gangsters, the classic era of that other very urban and even less fantasy-adjacent genre.

Apart from its three-color gang theme, I don't know that we have a ton of details about New Capenna, but there are strong hints that Davriel Cane, the newish planeswalker character introduced in the novel Children of the Nameless, who has gotten a couple of cards depicting him and his magic, is probably from there. Davriel has the right look - his slicked-back hair, a pencil mustache, and his "robes" look more like a tailored suit. (One of his demonic servants, Miss Highwater, also seems to be wearing a woman's business suit). Davriel's previous life as an "accountant" might mean that he used to work for one of these gangs. I think it's highly likely that he'll be one of the planeswalker characters we see in New Capenna, and possibly the protagonist of its story.

Anyway, while Ravnica is the ultimate city in MTG, we have gotten a couple of urban-based sets and blocks before. Kaladesh is a whole plane, but most of the action in that block takes place in the metropolis of Ghirapur. Likewise, we had the plane of Mercadia back in the Mercadian Masques set, where almost everything that happened took place in that city (which if I recall correctly was founded by Thran escaping their destruction on Dominaria?)

Coming back to MTG many years later, I've found that the elimination of "blocks" can make each set a bit of a dizzying introduction of brand-new mechanics, so I think it's interesting when they find ways to create some kind of thematic throughline. Naturally, we've got two back-to-back Innistrad sets coming next, so it might not actually be too hard to have some mechanical continuity there, and next fall will see two Dominaria-based sets, though I believe the first will be set in the current point in the timeline whereas the other will be a distant prequel (or rather a different perspective on the story told in Antiquities). (Oh man, could we get a freaking black-bordered Urza planeswalker card depicting him right after his spark ignites?)

Anyway, I'm pretty excited for basically every one of the next six Magic sets.

Jumpstart: Historic Horizons, and the Whole Historic Format

 MTG Arena is only a few years old, whereas Magic the Gathering is pushing 30. Arena has translated the game very highly effectively to a digital space. While Magic the Gathering Online has been around for about 20 years, and that game arguably more directly replicates the paper card game, Arena streamlines things considerably to flow quickly, tapping your lands automatically and doing other quality-of-life things like showing cards you can cast from places other than your hand next to your hand.

I'm a huge fan (though I wish it hadn't taken them so long to make a MacOS version, which only came out last year) and it's gotten me back into this game that I've been playing off and on for the past, well, like 27 years.

Arena has a special format called Historic, which is basically just whatever sets they've released for Arena. The game got started in the Ixalan block, and so that and anything that came after it have all seen normal releases and thus are available for the format. More recently, they've come out with "Remastered" sets for Amonkhet and Kaladesh, which combined those multi-set blocks into a single release, and added them to the Historic format.

Because Historic is an online-only format, Historic Horizons, taking a queue from Modern Horizons (which is built to add cards to the Modern format, which is everything going back to Eighth Edition - you can tell because the card frames are the modern ones, as opposed to the old ones), is taking the radical step of making digital-only cards that have effects you couldn't really do in paper magic.

For instance, there's a card called Davriel's Withering, which is an instant that gives a target creature -1/-2 perpetually. That means that even if it's in the graveyard, scooped back into the hand or the library, or in exile, the creature retains this. In fact, this card has been the engine for an infinite combo loop - there's another card whose name escapes me, but when it enters the battlefield, you can put a creature card with a low cost from your graveyard into play. And you can make it a permanent -1/0 with Davriel's Withering, so that every time it comes into play, it'll immediately die, and thus can be a target for its own ability. So you get that going with any permanent that causes the opponent to lose life or whatever whenever a creature you control comes into play or dies, and you've got an automatic win.

But brokenness aside, it's interesting to see them playing around in this new design space.

It's also interesting for me, as a relatively new Arena player, to see this format. Given that I only started playing last year, most of the cards I have in Arena are still Standard legal (though about half of them, including the wildly powerful Eldraine cards, are going to be rotating out soon) so I haven't really been compelled to play in that format.

Standard is, I think, probably the most popular way to play Magic. The benefit is that no deck remains on top for a super long time. Each new set added to the format is a larger proportion of the total cards, and thus has a better chance of upsetting the balance, and every year, half the format gets rotated out. So even if there's a period in which one deck type always wins, it won't last super long.

On the other hand, if you're looking for diversity, Historic (and other larger formats) seem pretty compelling, as you'll encounter way more types of decks. This makes it a bit of a challenge to figure out the metagame, as your Eldraine-based Mono Green Stompy deck might not be quite so powerful in the face of some really powerful deck from three years earlier.

I suspect that if I keep up with Arena for a few years, the format will be less intimidating given that I'll have amassed a decently large collection myself.

Myst - The Latest Remaster

 The first computer game that I remember playing was called Cosmic Osmo. It was a black-and-white exploration game with no objectives. You traveled around in a space ship to one of I believe four worlds, and could meet funny characters with bulbous bodies and very simplistic animations. It was goofy and fun, and perfect for a small child like I was (I probably played it first when I was 3, so this would be 1989 or so).

Later, we got a new version of it called Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel (the last "world" of the original game was a giant spacebound fish, though of course you could visit them in any order.) This added another four worlds (again, if I remember correctly,) but in addition, the game advertised the next project by the creators of Cosmic Osmo, a little game called Myst.

If you are too young to remember when Myst game out, you might not realize how huge a deal it was. No other game looked remotely like it. It was the first game (or at least the first popular one) to have computer-generated 3D graphics that had rendered textures (as opposed to flat colors), making it look more like a real world you could inhabit than anything that had ever come before.

The game came out when I was 7, and it was a phenomenon. Computer and video games had mostly been considered something for children, but Myst, with its tricky puzzles and beautiful but empty world attracted a wide audience of adults.

Now, Cyan Worlds (which had been just Cyan at the time of Myst's initial release) has come out with an update of it. This is not the first update - far from it. As computer games have grown far more sophisticated, Myst's initial selling points don't seem so revolutionary. But it's a true classic of a game. The latest release is designed to allow you to play the game in VR (though you can, like I have been, play it on a normal screen as well.)

My sister works in VR, and despite the fact that people have been talking about VR for longer than Myst has been around, it seems like it's finally starting to get rolling as a games medium. But with the exception of Half-Life: Alyx, we haven't really seen the AAA video game industry jump onto this new medium.

What I find interesting is that I think the sort of games VR developers have focused on seem to be more akin to Myst than the action- (and, to be honest, testosterone-) fueled "mainstream" game industry. Myst seemed like an obvious thing to bring to VR (though given how many rereleases it's gotten in the decade since its release, I'll be shocked if we don't get or already have a Skyrim VR port.)

Myst was hugely foundational to my fantasy aesthetic - it's one of the main sources I could cite for my interest in non-medieval fantasy, the surreal cross-section of a kind of 19th century sci-fi with magic sticking with me.

The game has a puzzle randomizer, which changes certain values and such in the game so we can't just do the whole thing from memory, but I've got to be honest, I've blown through it without looking up any guides. The only times I've gotten "stuck" have been forgetting that you could search the drawers in Achenar's room for his blue page in the Stoneship Age and getting a bit turned around in the Channelwood Age (I mistook the elevator to the Myst book for one I had already used.) These puzzles are basically hardwired into my brain, so in 2 and a half hours of game time, I've already cleared through the Stoneship, Mechanical, and Channelwood ages.

The most notable difference playing now is that you have freedom of movement. Originally, you would warp from one tableau to another to move around the islands of the game, whereas now you have what is clearly a VR-style movement (you can go forward and backward or sidestep with keys and you aim where you're looking with your mouse, which presumably is just turning around and looking in VR).

I have noticed that some of the puzzle "consoles" have been changed, though that could have happened in other releases over the last 28 years. For example, the three pump buttons in the Stoneship Age have been replaced with this funny sliding lever and a single button to activate it. And Atrus has apparently upgraded the cabin in the "woods" on the main island to have an electric starter instead of requiring you to light a match.

The biggest change, which I didn't even realize until I was in the Channelwood Age, was that you can actually carry both Sirrus' red page and Achenar's blue page at the same time, meaning that you don't have to navigate back to the Myst linking book twice (glad I realized that before I did the Selenitic Age - that maze is a big one.)

Of course, with foreknowledge and also just the benefits of 30 years of game development, the game is sort of shockingly small. It's still gorgeous, though this release does not have the cutting-edge graphics the original had for its era. Also, they've replaced the blue-screen footage of Rand Miller playing Atrus and his brutish son Achenar and Robyn Miller (who also wrote the music) playing the conniving other son Sirrus. These have been replaced with CGI animated characters instead, which... I'll be honest, I always kind of liked the blue-screen live action stuff. Their performances were perfectly good for the characters (I believe, though I could be wrong, that the audio is preserved at least.)

The detail of the world is far greater now - the smooth polygons of the rock spire from which the big tower (the one where you find your initial hints to get to each age) rises are now jagged and treacherous-looking, and the hexagonal basalt columns that make up the area where you arrive in the Mechanical age looks a lot clearer. And there are birds and frogs and such that give the areas a bit of life.

Of course, another big change is that I'm five times older than I was when I first played this. The journals about the various ages found in the library, some of which carry necessary clues to reach them, I now find a lot more interesting, as they're the clearest area where the story is actually illustrated. I feel like you could do a whole exploration of the theme of colonialism - Atrus sets out to simply explore and meet new people, but his sons turn the whole exercise into domination and exploitation, and, given how empty these worlds are, likely also genocide. In Riven, the sequel, we find a world in which Atrus' father has come to dominate a terrified populace that views him as a god - it's implied that there are a ton of people in Riven, but that they are actively hiding from you for fear of either you or Gehn's retribution, or both.

Way, way back (probably when I was 8 or 9,) I bought one of the three books that the Miller brothers wrote about their world, this one being The Book of Atrus. I never actually read it, but it's sitting on my bookshelf. I'm given to understand that it's actually a lot better than most tie-in novels, and the fact that Myst (at least at that time) really was a project by a pair of brothers (and a few other people, of course) makes me think this is more about exploring the ideas and themes of it than generating excitement for the brand.

Anyway, after spending a couple weeks back in my childhood home with my dad, this is another fun nostalgia trip to go on.

Trying Out MTG Arena on a Phone

 Back almost ten years ago when Hearthstone was new, I tried it out - it was a sort of similar game to Magic, with familiar Warcraft lore, and best of all, it worked on Macs. But also, it seemed poised to work well on a mobile platform, even the rather simple-by-necessity phone platform. I think MTG Arena was likely WotC's response to Hearthstone. While MTG Online had been a kind of direct translation of the game to a computerized medium, including the ability to trade cards with other players, Arena ditched the traditional form of acquisition, giving us things like Wildcards, and then awarding tons of free packs simply for playing. Indeed, you can actually build some pretty serious decks without paying a cent, though if you want to have a bunch of competitive decks, you'll probably want to drop some cash.

The thing is, Magic is a more complicated game than Hearthstone. There's far more interactivity and complexity to its cards. Arena manages to streamline some of the things that made MTGO slow, like its pretty smart auto-tapping for lands, but how does it play on an iPhone screen?

Kinda ok? I guess?

To be fair, I have a relatively ancient phone, an iPhone 6S, which is six years old. Therefore, some of the graphical flair causes the game to drag a little (my Macbook Air, which is only a few months old and has the M1 chip, has no problems with it.)

So it's possible some of the awkwardness of the game is due to my phone being slow. I think I'm just kind of amazed that it works at all. I could certainly see the game running fine on an iPad, where I imagine you could have just the same UI as the PC version (I say PC including Macs here). The phone version squashes things a bit, so my impulse-purchased Davriel avatar is in a tiny rectangle rather than being at the lower center of the screen.

Still, it's exciting to see that I can now play Magic while away from my computer. This does probably put a final nail in the coffin of any interest I have in playing more Hearthstone (I'm not boycotting Blizzard, given what I've been hearing from developers working there, but MTG is a much earlier love of mine, and I generally like the game better anyway.)

Mechanical Speculation for the 2022 Sets (Plus Innistrad)

 The remaining sets to release this year will be Innistrad: Midnight Hunt and Innistrad: Crimson Vow.

We got a little about the premise of these sets in the 2021 Magic Showcase earlier today. Introduced originally last year as "Werewolves" and "Vampires," it's clear that those tribes are going to be pretty central in the two sets, though they've always been major factors in Innistrad sets. Story-wise, Midnight Hunt will be about something going wrong with Innistrad's Day-Night cycle, leaving the world shrouded in night longer than its days, which its werewolf population seeks to take advantage of. Crimson Vow will center around a wedding between Olivia Voldaren and some other powerful figure who has yet to be revealed (I think it's supposed to be a planeswalker.) I'll confess I don't know the lore for Innistrad super well. While it would make sense for Olivia to want to marry Sorin Markov, given his vast power, I also think that the vampires of Innistrad detest him for creating Avacyn and generally pumping the breaks on their desire to drink all the humans' blood. So we'll have to see what figure pops up here. (If they make Baron Sengir a planeswalker I'll be insanely happy, though I believe he's canonically dead.)

Especially after the cosmic horror invasion of Emrakul in Shadows Over Innistrad and Eldritch Moon, I could imagine they want to do a back-to-basics set somewhat like Zendikar Rising (though my general impression, which is admittedly more my own feelings, was that ZR was a bit meh in terms of lore. I guess I never experienced the disappointment of having the plane's mechanics and story taken over by the Eldrazi, and actually found them to be the most interesting part of the setting.) Still, Innistrad has a pretty good track record of top-down design, so I could imagine that the big new thing of these sets is their precise focus on two of its most iconic tribes.

Now, next we have Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. This is obviously a huge departure in terms of aesthetic for the entire game. Even though we've had magepunk settings where super-advanced magic starts to look a lot like distant-future sci fi technology (what we've seen of Vrynn, for example, looks like it would be at home in the Dune novels) I think this is going to be the first time where they directly quote a fundamentally science-fiction subgenre, i.e. cyberpunk, in a Magic set. Of course, blending cyberpunk with fantasy has plenty of precedent, like Shadowrun, and the image of the massive metropolis that was one of the two art pieces we got in the preview clearly has fantastical elements.

Kamigawa's mechanical identity was, I'd say, two primary things in its original 2004-2005 block. The first was Legends matter - there were tons of legendary creatures, lands, artifacts, enchantments, and even a first run at legendary spells, which had the Epic mechanic. The other major theme was the spirit/non-spirit conflict. The story was about a war between mortals and the kami (aka spirits,) and so many spells were built around either spirit hate or non-spirit hate, or buffing whichever side your deck was built around.

The vast number of legends gave the setting a pretty rich identity, but my experience at least was of a somewhat imbalanced gameplay (to be fair, I was pretty new to the very idea of a metagame, and this was on MTGO, where getting the top cards was not nearly as easy as it is on Arena. But it definitely did seem that when Ravnica came out, we started seeing a much broader variety of decks.)

Anyway, the folks at WotC have explicitly said they're looking at a new mechanical identity for the plane. The futuristic nature of the setting could likely be represented in technology, which tends to take the form of artifacts. Artifacts will likely be a huge theme in The Brothers War, coming much later, which could on the one hand mean a bit of synergy between sets, but also likely means that Kamigawa will need to hit it from a different angle. Another theme could be some kind of "enhancement." Cyberpunk tends to involve a lot of cyborgs, where the human (or humanoid) intersects with technology, and where digital constructs can shape the physical world. I could imagine there being a heavy theme of modification through things like auras or equipment, or other spells that can be tacked on to others (perhaps reviving the original Kamigawa's "splice" mechanic or something similar.)

Streets of New Capenna's mechanical theme has already been presented: it'll center around five three-color gangs in the eponymous noir-ish art deco city. Our brief visit to Ikoria had a tri-color theme that was built around the "wedges" that were first explored in Tarkir. But the first three-color block was Alara, where the "shards" of a color and its two allies were the central theme. Given that, I would not be shocked if the three-color gangs were based on these. I'd love to see good three-color lands on par with the Ikoria Triomes come out to support this theme. I think it's also notable that this has a somewhat similar theme to the Hearthstone expansion Mean Streets of Gadgetzan, that was both built around three gangs in a 1920s-like setting (even if Gadgetzan in WoW is nothing like that) that also had a theme of gangs that provided cards usable by three different classes (which are sort of the rough equivalent of colors in Magic.) Blizzard and WotC have always had a fair amount of cross-polination in ideas, of course (Hearthstone I'm sure would never exist if not for Magic).

Moving on to Dominaria United, this won't be around for a while - by the time it comes out, Zendikar Rising, Kaldheim, Strixhaven, and AFR will rotate out of standard - but I suspect we're going to continue an exploration of Dominaria's new mechanical identity as explored in its eponymous set from 2018, which is the "historic" plane. I suspect we'll see some returning mechanics from that set, as well as the old nostalgic creature types and the like (Slivers, anyone?) Of course, Sagas became something of a perennial after its release, with the cards returning in both Theros Beyond Death and Kaldheim. I think there's a good chance we'll see a lot of artifacts as well, especially leading into the following set.

What's interesting about the two back-half sets in 2022 is that we're going to get two sets in a row on Dominaria, but they will, presumably, not be a continuous story (unless it involves time travel.) The Brothers War, which honestly just typing out makes me shiver with nostalgia and excitement, was the huge event that kind of set the entire Magic story in motion (yes, we've gotten stories about things that happened before it, but the war between Urza and Mishra is practically the foundation myth that first gave Magic an actual story). But, I think the heart of that war is that both brothers were artificers, and so there's no way it's not going to feature a ton of artifacts (Antiquities, the third ever Magic set and the one that first established that story, was a very artifact-heavy set, and I think debuted the idea of a set having a strong mechanical identity). What intrigues me is that WotC has said that they're going to look to more perspectives on what was going on with the war. I think we can probably expect legendary cards for Urza, Mishra, and probably Ashnod and... Talos, was it? But the thing about the Brothers War is that this deep personal rivalry caused a whole lot of grief for the rest of the plane. I'll be curious to see how the other peoples of Dominaria who just wanted to be left alone are represented.

I've got to say, I'm pretty excited about all of these sets. I mean, I think the ones I'm least excited for are Streets of New Capenna and Dominaria United, but I say that only because the other ones, along with the more imminent Innistrad sets, fill me with such eager anticipation.

Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, Streets of New Capenna, Dominaria United, The Brothers War

With Magic's big announcements today, we've gotten the big reveals on the upcoming sets for 2022.

Magic is going to be doing some serious genre-bending, which I've always been a huge fan of. While there are some other products that are definitely worth talking about (like expansions into other IPs like Lord of the Rings and Warhammer 40k,) for the canonical MTG stuff, there's some huge news.

The first half of 2022 is going to have a more urban and modern/futuristic feel.

Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty is a return to the plane of Kamigawa, taking place 2000 years after the events of the original block from back in 2004/2005. Kamigawa is themed around Japanese culture and folklore. The original set was something of a prequel, with events taking place before even the era of the Legends set (explaining, for instance, how the Umezawa Clan got started on Dominaria.) In Neon Dynasty, Kamigawa has seen the rise of futuristic megalopolises, with cybernetics and other technology giving us a full-on cyberpunk feel combined with its magical, kami-filled world. There's a new planeswalker from Kamigawa who is a cyber-ninja, which is freaking cool.

The next set is Streets of New Capenna. The inspiration here is a plane of gangsters, which seems to have a big Art Deco city in which rival gangs, each functioning as three-color tribes, vie for control. Apparently the city was founded by angels, but demons have corrupted it and filled its street with crime. Thus, we'll have a kind of 1920s gangster feel to what seems to be another fairly urban setting.

The back half of 2022 is going to switch gears with two sets that take place on the OG Magic plane, Dominaria. Dominaria United looks like it will be set in contemporary Dominaria, following the events of the eponymous set that came out a few years ago. I suspect we'll see a continuation of some of the mechanics introduced in that set (though Sagas seem like they're practically evergreen at this point,) with a promise of familiar characters, both good and bad, coming.

The last set of the year is The Brothers War. Way, way back in the day, the first expansion set to really flesh out Dominaria as a setting, Antiquities told the story of the Brothers War as one of the ancient past, with a sort of archaeological approach to it. This set will fully take place in that early era in which rival brother artificers Urza and Mishra fought for domination of the plane. This war of massive artifact creatures will likely mean a strong artifact theme for the set, and I'm looking forward to seeing some jaw-dropping art of dragon engines and other mechanical monstrosities set loose upon Dominaria.

Of note, when it comes to Kamigawa, there was always this problem where the flavor of the plane was very exciting, but a lot of the mechanics were pretty underwhelming (though I still think Ninjutsu was cool.) They are apparently taking a very new approach to the plane, giving it a new mechanical identity (which previous was the "legends" plane.)

I'm also interested to see that they seem to be doing a bit more of these double-visits to planes. While the three-set block structure was abandoned a few years ago, for a time they were doing two-set blocks before converting to individual set visits. However, with super-popular settings like Innistrad and Dominaria, it makes sense for them to hang out there a bit longer.

As someone who has made great use of Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, I'd be very happy if they announce a Dominaria-centric D&D setting book. I never really understood why Theros was chosen to get a book, and Strixhaven seems especially premature, but Ravnica is arguably the most popular Magic plane, so that made perfect sense as a first visit. Dominaria, on the other hand, has such a detailed history and geography, with so many potential stories, that it seems a natural fit for a D&D book. I hope that, with a double-visit to that setting, the chances of a D&D book for Dominaria are higher.

Another big announcement was the next Un-set, Unfinity, which will be a crazy sci-fi carnival theme. I don't know if silver-bordered sets can even work in Arena, but it does show a new, greater willingness to try out settings and genres that are not so strictly fantasy.

I imagine there might be some fantasy purists upset about cyberpunk Kamigawa or the gangster-filled New Capenna, or Unfinity, but I'm going to go on record that this nerd, who has been into Magic since practically the beginning, freaking loves the idea. The ideas of Magic are so elemental that I think they could work in practically any genre, but also, the fantasy genre need only show us something otherworldly and wondrous - it need not be locked in perpetual medievalism.

And I'm very excited to see WotC exploring these new frontiers.

DMing on the Road and My First Official Ravenloft Game

 Following my vaccination, I eagerly planned a trip home to Massachusetts to see my Dad and also my sister in New York. This whole Delta Variant thing has made me question how wise it was to go through with the trip (though if I get back to California without Covid, I'll count it as a win) but as it stands, I'm back in my hometown just outside of Boston.

I didn't get into D&D until my 29th birthday (probably documented on this now 9-year-old blog,) which always seemed like an oversight - I don't know why I wouldn't have gotten into it earlier, other than the fact that no one I knew seemed to play.

Anyway, I decided to run a one-shot for my friends who still live in the Boston area. Between them and significant others and other friends and kids (there's a 10-year-old kid playing, which is exciting!) we have a party of six. And we're going to be doing a Ravenloft-set game.

So, the party consists of a Tiefling Warlock (Undead Patron,) Mountain Dwarf Life Cleric, Half-Orc Paladin, a Dhampir Wild Magic Sorcerer, a Tabaxi Clockwork Soul Sorcerer, and a Wood Elf Ranger.

I'm going to set it in what I think is probably my favorite domain of dread, Lamordia, the frozen bay and mountains secretly ruled by its Darklord Doctor Viktra Mordenheim, the Frankenstein-like crafter of flesh golems.

I'm going to avoid making her the villain for now (even solo, at CR 2 she could be a bit much for level 1 players, most of whom have never played before,) and instead have a former protege whose laboratory she had sabotaged to kill him as the big bad.

The party is going to be swallowed by the mists and find the remote lab hidden beneath a ruined lighthouse kept by an old kook who is somewhat based on Willem Dafoe's character from The Lighthouse.

Under the lighthouse, the party will encounter some disembodied limbs as the big bad, Otto Totenfeld, had been trying to build golems out of just limbs. When they confront him, his spirit will possess a Swarm of Zombie Limbs to attack, supported by four Crawling Claws.

My hope is that it'll be a good, straightforward introduction to the game, but with a distinctive Ravenloft-y tone. And, you know, not too gruesome as to traumatize the 10-year-old player.

We're playing tomorrow, so here's hoping it goes well.

Wizard Subclasses - Tasha's

 Holy crap. We've made it through all thirteen classes in 5th Edition D&D. Here, at the end, we get the sole brand-new subclass for Wizards to come out of Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. As we've seen with Wizards, there's a tendency for the level 14 capstone to be the real jaw-dropper, but the more powerful subclasses have some good features early on and in the middle levels.

I do still think that the primary appeal of being a Wizard is just getting access to the largest, most versatile spell list in the game. But some subclasses will bring a lot of extra juice to the table.

The Wizard's spellbook is a unique feature that kind of blends the prepared spells of divine casters as well as druids and artificers with the learned spells of everyone else. It introduces a new sort of minigame - finding and recording spells, which means a DM can have a fair amount of control over how much versatility a Wizard gets. While magic items like weapons, armor, or other things can be a big prize, having a Wizard in your party means that you can potentially reward players just by allowing them to discover a spellbook with unusual or powerful spells.

Order of Scribes:

So, for those of you who like the notion of a Wizard being someone who spends any spare time they have in the library, this subclass puts your focus directly on the spellbook. There are some amazing quality-of-life features here, and I think some pretty powerful abilities. Let's dig in.

At 2nd level, you get Wizardly Quill. As a bonus action, you can magically create a Tiny quill in your free hand. The quill does not require ink, and will produce ink of a color of your choice on whatever writing surface you use.

Additionally, the time you must spend copying a spell into your spellbook becomes 2 minutes per spell level if you use the quill for the transcription. To be clear, this reduces the time you spend copying spells by a factor of 60. If your 18th-level Wizard finds a book with Invulnerability in it, you would normally have to spend 18 hours copying that. Now, however, it takes just 18 minutes - less than a third of a short rest. While the quill does produce ink, I don't think this negates the gold cost of copying the spell (as you need other components to experiment with the spell and possibly fancy paper to add to your spellbook.) Though if your DM allows it, this could allow you to avoid a significant gold sink (which is actually why I think it's probably not the case.)

You can also wave the feather of the quill over any text your write with it as a bonus action to erase it if you're within 5 feet of the text.

So you always have something to write with, which is super convenient.

Also at 2nd level, you get Awakened Spellbook. Your spellbook has become sentient, and you gain a few benefits while holding it.

First, you can use the book as a spellcasting focus for wizard spells (which is just kind of cool).

Also, if you cast a Wizard spell with a spell slot, you can replace it with the damage type of another spell in your spellbook of the level of slot that you expended. So, for instance, if you have Fireball and Lightning Bolt in your spellbook, you can turn that into Lightning Ball or Fire Bolt (but... not the cantrip. You get what I mean.) If you upcast Lightning Bolt to 5th level and have Cone of Cold in your book, you can make it Cold Bolt. If you're in a campaign that has any creatures with damage immunities, this can be a great way to get around them. Fighting a red dragon? Swap out your fire damage for other kinds.

Additionally, once per long rest, you can cast a spell as a ritual without taking any extra time. So, say you need to cast Feign Death right now, but can't spare the spell slot, or you would really like to get that Leomund's Tiny Hut up as soon as you can while the Fighter and the Barbarian are holding off the horde of zombies at the door, this will let you do that. (I mean, the Hut still takes a minute, but ten rounds is way better than 110 rounds.)

The last, and maybe best feature here is that you can replace your spellbook using your Wizardly quill by writing arcane sigils into a blank book or a magical spellbook (such as a +1 Arcane Grimoire!) to which you're attuned. At the end of the rest, the spellbook's consciousness is summoned into the new book, instantly copying all your spells into the new book. The spells then vanish from your previous book. You can do this during a short or long rest, finishing at the end of it.

Perhaps the worst nightmare for a wizard is that all the spells they've spent their career copying spells into a spellbook only for some thief or disaster to take it from them. But now, you can just make a new one instantly, downloading it onto a new hard drive, as it were.

One thing I do wonder about is if you can have a consciousness in two separate books. I guess you don't really need it. The feature doesn't say anything about what happens if your old book is destroyed - do your copied spells still exist within the "save state" of a destroyed spellbook? I think I'd rule that it's a kind of disconnected consciousness that retains a memory of the spells, and so it'd bring them with it. Probably.

At 6th level (yeah, that was all level 2) you get Manifest Mind. As a bonus action while you have your book on you, you can cause the mind within to manifest as a Tiny spectral object, which hovers in a space of your choice within 60 feet of you. The mind is intangible and doesn't occupy its space, and sheds dim light in a 10-foot radius. You can choose its appearance.

While it's manifested, it can see and hear, with darkvision out to 60 feet. It can telepathically share what it sees and hears with you, no action required.

When you cast a Wizard spell on your turn, you can cast it as if you were in the Mind's space instead of your own, using its senses, though only a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus per long rest.

As a bonus action, you can cause the Mind to hover 30 feet to an unoccupied space that you or it can see. It can pass through creatures but not objects.

If the Mind is ever more than 300 feet away from you or if someone casts Dispel Magic, or if your Awakened Spellbook is destroyed, or if you die, the manifested mind vanishes. You can also dismiss it as a bonus action.

You can conjure this mind once for free per long rest, or you can spend a spell slot of any level to conjure it again.

So basically, this is really great. While this thing is not going to be stealthy at all (it literally glows,) it can still be used to scout out locations and potentially fry bad guys who are lying in wait for you. Given that it's intangible, even if your foes spot it, they can only deal with it if they have dispel magic or can attack you. And it's very cheap to get it back up and running.

On top of this, I think you can give the mind a lot of personality with some creativity. The suggestions the entry gives are that it could look like a ghostly tome, a cascade of text, or a scholar from the past. I'm going to suggest two shoutouts for kids who grew up in the 90s, citing the books from the Pagemaster, and also Ghostwriter from the PBS show, which appeared as a kind of weird little dot. I feel like you can go super whimsical on this one.

At level 10, you get Master Scrivener. When you finish a long rest, you can touch your Wizardly Quill to a blank piece of paper or parchment and copy a spell from your Awakened Spellbook onto the scroll (the book must be within 5 feet of you when you do this, yadda yadda yadda.) The spell must be of 1st or 2nd level and have a casting time of 1 action. When in the scroll, the power of the spell is enhanced, counting as one level higher than normal. You can then cast the spell from the scroll by reading it as an action. The spell is illegible to anyone else, and once used, the spell vanishes from the scroll when you cast it or when you finish a long rest.

Also, you can craft spell scrolls using half the gold and time if you use your Wizardly Quill (weirdly the DMG doesn't actually seem to provide rules on crafting them, though Xanthar's does, on page 133.)

Breaking these two down:

The limit to 1st and 2nd level spells is a significant one, but on the other hand, getting a free 3rd level Invisibility once a day is pretty decent (at 3rd level you can get two people with it.) This is mostly just a little extra utility that won't expend spell slots. Also, I believe that when you cast a spell through a scroll, you won't need to provide material components, so you could get off a 2nd level (not that it scales) Protection from Evil and Good without needing a vial of holy water.

As for crafting spell scrolls - Spell Scrolls always suffer a bit from the eternal consumable problem - players never want to use up their consumables. They're either not a powerful enough effect, or they're so powerful that they're sure they'll want to use them later. How many Red Essences did you finish your run of Super Mario RPG with? But if you have the gold and the time, crafting a huge number of spell scrolls can be super useful in a long dungeon. Resource management is one of the only ways for a DM to challenge higher-level players, and this is a strategy you can take to alleviate some of the pressure. While it'll take a week and 500 gold to get just two Fireball scrolls (normally you'd only get one,) that could be a real lifesaver - but again, will require a campaign with some downtime.

Finally, at level 14, you get One with the Word. While your Awakened Spellbook is on your person, you have advantage on all Intelligence (Arcana) checks (the book is effectively using the help action.)

Additionally, if you take damage while your spellbook's mind is manifested, you can prevent all of that damage to you by using your reaction to dismiss the mind. You then roll 3d6, and the spellbook temporarily loses spells of your choice that have a combined level equal to that roll or higher. If there are not enough spells in the book to cover this, you drop to 0 hit points (and I just realized that that would happen even if you didn't take enough damage to go to 0!)

Until you finish 1d6 long rests, you are incapable of casting the lost spells, even if you find them on scrolls or in another spellbook. Once you finish the the requisite number of rests, they reappear in your spellbook and you can cast them as normal.

Once you use this reaction, you cannot do so again until you finish a long rest.

This is the big red emergency button. This is what you do when the foe hits you with a Finger of Death that will kill you, or a Disintegrate. This is your "if I don't do something, I'm dead" button. It's a hefty price to pay (though at this level you can hopefully get your 3-18 spell levels using weird utility spells like Nystul's Magic Aura, Simulacrum, Mirage Arcane, and such - things you can definitely live for a few days without casting). But also, this does not just drop you to 1 hit point. It fully prevents the damage. If you fall off a cliff hundreds of feet, you can use this to survive damage that would have flattened a raging barbarian. Technically, if a star exploding counted as a single instance of damage, you could survive it with this.

And that is the kind of over-the-top feature I want to see in a subclass capstone feature.

So, the overview the Order of Scribes. I'll confess that when I first read this one back when Tasha's came out, I was kind of unimpressed. But the massive quality-of-life features here, along with some really powerful abilities (Manifest Mind is really amazing for safely peeking around corners, for example,) I actually find myself really interested in playing one of these.

Wizards have a whole lot of options, and I actually think that there are only a handful of "bad" choices. It's a solid and good class, and there's a reason it's so popular. And while I think that Divination probably gets a little extra exposure thanks to the power of Portent, you've got a lot of great possibilities with plenty of others.

And so we have it. A review of... holy crap, 114 subclasses (actually 115 - I did the Way of the Ascendant Dragon. Guess I should go back and do the Drakewarden Ranger.)

It has been really interesting to see how these subclass options can complement a class' capabilities, but also how they can sometimes create an entirely different style of gameplay. You can see how the design philosophies have gotten bolder over time, generally speaking, though plenty of PHB subclasses still hold up (perhaps by carving out really big design space that other subclasses wish they could tap into.)

Of course, we already know about two new subclasses coming in Fizban's Treasury of Dragons, and one can assume that there will be more to come later.

It's been fun to walk through all of these and do a comprehensive review. It also certainly reminds me of the fact that I will never be able to play every character concept that I have. Oh well.

Wizard Subclasses - Wildemount

 While putting Bladesinging up first as a SCAG release and grouping these together alone will mean that the last of these posts will only be the Order of Scribes subclass, I do think that Wildemount's two related subclasses make sense to group together. In Matt Mercer's Exandria setting, some mages have begun to explore a special kind of magic called "Dunamancy," ("dunamis" is an ancient Greek word that relates to power and potential.) Essentially, these subclasses are the "quantum physics" of magic.

The Wildemount book actually introduces new spells, and their availability for various classes has been slightly ambiguous. As a DM I more or less rule them as all available to Wizards, Sorcerers, and Warlocks as arcane magic, though some are suggested as associated with one of these subclasses or the other.

The two are Graviturgy and Chronurgy - the former dealing with mass and inertia (hence gravity) and the other manipulating time. As I think is well-documented on this blog, I'm freaking obsessed with any kind of time travel or time manipulation, so naturally I gravitate (pun unintentional) toward that subclass.

Chronurgy:

This is the subclass all about temporal manipulation. While actual time travel is the sort of thing that a DM will need to very carefully plan out if they allow it at all, you can at least futz with time in some interesting ways.

At 2nd level you get Chronal Shift. As a reaction when you see a creature make an attack roll, ability check, or saving throw, you can force the creature to reroll, and you can wait to decide to do this until after you see if its roll succeeds or fails. The target must use the second roll. You can do this once per long rest.

This is a potential clutch move - making it far less likely for the big boss to crit the squishy wizard (i.e. you) or giving the Barbarian another chance to succeed against that dominate person spell. For a villainous example, think of this as when Thanos undoes Wanda's destruction of the Mind Stone at the end of Infinity War.

Also at 2, you get Temporal Awareness, letting you add your Intelligence modifier to your initiative rolls. As with War Magic, this is nice, as a Wizard will often want to have high initiative to set up crowd control or a big burst of AoE damage at the start of a fight (potentially before allies get close enough to make it hard to place your effects, or killing off lesser enemies before they can do anything.)

At 6th level, you get Momentary Stasis. As an action, you can force a Large or smaller creature you can see within 60 feet to make a Con save. If they fail, the creature is encased in magical energy until the end of your next turn or until it takes damage. The creature is incapacitated and has a speed of 0. You can do this a number of times equal to your Intelligence modifier (minimum of once) per long rest. So this is basically a built-in crowd control ability. A single turn is not enormous, but also not nothing - being able to freeze the boss's wizard minion for a turn can really help you out.

At 10, you get Arcane Abeyance. When you cast a spell of 4th or lower level, you can condense it into a mote, freezing the effect in time as a little grey bead for 1 hour. The bead is a Tiny object with AC 15, 1 HP, and immunity to poison and psychic damage. If not used before then, it is destroyed and vanishes in a flash of light.

A creature holding the bead can use an action to release the spell, and the bead disappears while the spell takes effect using your spell attack modifier or save DC, though for all other purposes this treats the creature who releases it as the caster. You can do this once per short rest.

This effectively lets you split concentration - hand this to a character who never has to concentrate on spells and you can have two spells up at a time. You can also use something like Mirror Image and hand this too a Monk to give them extra survivability. Basically, there are a lot of potential uses for this.

Finally, at 14, you get Convergent Future. If a creature you can see within 60 feet of you makes an attack roll, ability check, or saving throw, you can use your reaction to ignore the die roll and decide whether the number rolled is the minimum needed to succeed or one less than that (your choice.) Doing so gives you one level of exhaustion, which can only be removed via a long rest (so you can't cheese this with Greater Restoration.) While I believe that Bless or Bane can screw this up (it doesn't actually say - if it only affects the d20, a Bless can screw up your forced failure and a Bane can screw up your forced success.) But barring such cases (or including them if we rule it affects the entire roll,) this lets you just choose whether one of these succeeds, which could be absolutely clutch. (Notably it doesn't say that they "have to take the result," so I think this doesn't get around advantage.) Also, I find it interesting that if you want to play dangerous, you can use this several times in a day, though you're going to need a very long time to recover.

Obviously I love the concept of this subclass. I think that in terms of power it might fall slightly behind the best Wizard subclasses, but as is often the case, the capstone is a super over-the-top ability that can be insanely good.

Graviturgy:

This subclass is all about manipulating gravity - altering the density of objects and such. Generally I think you can kind of play this as a "space wizard," which might be one of the most awesome two-word phrases that exist.

At level 2, you get Adjust Density. As an action, you can alter the weight of an object or creature you can see within 30 feet. The object has to be Large or smaller. You can double or halve the weight of the target for 1 minute or until your concentration ends.

For creatures, if their weight is halved, their movement speed increases by 10 feet, it can jump twice as far as normal, but it has disadvantage on Strength saving throws and ability checks. While doubled, the creature's movement speed is instead reduced by 10 feet but it gets advantage on Strength checks and saves. At level 10, you can now affect targets that are Huge or smaller.

This is a pretty interesting one. I think most often you'll use this to speed up allies or slow down enemies, and the fact that there's no save against it is pretty cool (also you can use it any number of times, effectively making this a "cantrip.") Situationally, this could be very cool as a way to make a foe snap the rickety bridge they're crossing to get to you, or make it easier to toss a friend across a chasm.

At level 6, you get Gravity Well. When you cast a spell on a creature, you can move them 5 feet to an unoccupied space of your choice if the target is willing or if they fail against the spell's save DC or you hit them with a spell attack. This requires no extra action on your part, so you could potentially shift around every creature that fails its save against a Fireball, or you could cast fly on an ally and then give them the 5-foot gap needed to avoid opportunity attacks while they fly away from a foe. Battlefield manipulation, even at a short distance, is always nice.

At 10, you get Violent Attraction. When a creature within 60 feet of you hits with a weapon attack, you can use your reaction to increase the attack's velocity, causing the target to take an additional 1d10 damage of the weapon's type. Alternatively, if a creature within 60 feet of you takes damage from falling, you can use your reaction to increase that damage by 2d10. You can do this a number of times equal to your Intelligence modifier (minimum 1) per long rest.

Now, I think the weapon damage boost should double on a crit, so you could effectively use your reaction to give a big boost when an ally crits. I don't know how often you're going to have foes falling, but being able to tack on an extra 11 damage on average is nice. This is a bit situational, to be honest.

Finally, at 14, you get Event Horizon. As an action, you can emit create a powerful gravity field for 1 minute or until your concentration ends. For the duration, creatures hostile to you that start within 30 feet of you must make a Strength save. On a failure, they take 2d10 force damage and their speed is reduced to 0 until the start of your next turn. On a success, they take half that damage and every foot they move costs an additional 2 feet of movement (effectively reducing their speed by 1/3.) You can do this once for free per long rest, or you can expend 3rd or higher level spell slots to do it again.

This can potentially really help lock down monsters - Just keep them on the edge of your Event Horizon and any creature with normal humanoid movement speeds will be able to get only 10 feet away from you if at all, so you can easily just move closer to trap them again. In fact, if a creature is coming toward you, you can actually run toward them, getting them just on the edge of the effect, and while they might have been able to get to you before, now they're going to be unable to reach you even with a dash. That this only affects hostile creatures means that this can be some serious battlefield control while giving allies full freedom to maneuver.

So, I think that both of these subclasses certainly get points for originality. In terms of power, I think they're both pretty good but not quite top-tier (though this is all theoretical, of course.) I also think that both subclasses reward clever creativity, which is always a good thing in a game like this.

Neither of these were reprinted in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything (nor was the Fighter's Echo Knight,) which is a shame, but they are still very much official 5E content, so have at them if they appeal to you.

Next post we're going to end this very long series with just a single subclass - the Order of Scribes. Get your Pagemaster on and play the ultimate library nerd subclass for a class that's all about being the library nerd already!

Wizard Subclasses - SCAG and Xanathar's

 So we come to the non-PHB Wizard subclasses. Freed from being based on the different schools of magic, these subclasses can pursue more unusual themes. As we saw with the PHB subclasses, most of the original ones got their most exciting features at high levels, though some, like Divination and Evocation, hit the ground running with some nice effects.

Bladesinging:

Bladesinging was originally introduced in SCAG as an Elf-only Wizard subclass. Unlike the other race-restricted subclass (Battleragers for Dwarves,) this one was actually good. The subclass received some revisions - primarily removing the race restriction (I always felt this would be a really cool tradition for a more sophisticated Orc culture - basically the Klingon style of Wizard) though I think there might have been some other changes in there as well. The Bladesinger attempts to do the seemingly impossible - to make a Wizard who can be a front-line fighter. Let's take a look at its features and see how it does!

At level 2 you get Training in War and Song (Bladesinging): You gain proficiency in Light Armor as well as one type of one-handed melee weapon of your choice. The Mage Armor spell effectively gives you +1 Studded Leather Armor, but if you can find more powerful magical armor, this will not only save you the spell slot but also let you benefit from the scaling of another magic item. For the weapon, I'd highly recommend the Rapier, though the Whip is actually not a terrible idea given its range. I'd steer away from strength-based weapons given that you'll need high Dexterity to maximize your Light Armor's benefit.

You also get proficiency in Performance if you don't already have it. Performance is rarely a skill check that will mean life-or-death, but it's a nice thing for a bonus.

Also at 2 you get Bladesong. If you aren't wearing medium or heavy armor or using a shield, you can use a bonus action to activate your Bladesong for 1 minute or until you're incapacitated, or if you don medium or heavy armor or a shield or you use two hands to make a weapon attack.

While in your Bladesong, you get the following benefits: You add your Intelligence modifier to your AC (minimum of +1), your walking speed increases by 10 feet, you have advantage on Dexterity (Acrobatics) checks, and you gain a bonus to any Constitution saving throw to maintain concentration on spells equal to your Intelligence modifier (minimum of +1.)

You can use this feature a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus per long rest.

This is actually pretty huge. Your off-hand will basically be free to hold a spellcasting focus, so you won't need Warcaster to cast spells in combat. If you manage to get both your Dexterity and your Intelligence modifier to +5 over a campaign, you're actually going to have a very high AC - 22 just with nonmagical Studded Leather. Also, you're going to have a much easier time making those Concentration saves. If you manage to have those stats and you get +3 Studded Leather, you're going to have an AC of 25, as well as access to the Shield spell, so you can push that up to 30. For a Wizard, that's a way, way better AC than you'd normally be able to get.

Now, the limit here based on proficiency bonus is going to mean you can't necessarily use this on every fight. The good news, of course, is that you're still going to be a Wizard, with all the spells that you get from that.

At level 6, you get Extra Attack. But unlike other classes. You can make two attacks per turn, but unlike how this feature works for every other class that gets it, you can replace one of your attacks with a Cantrip. This makes the SCAG cantrips (also reprinted in Tasha's) extremely good - pick up Green Flame Blade and you'll be hitting two targets for a ton of damage and then be able to follow up with a second attack. It's better than an Eldritch Knight's War Magic because you also get to keep your bonus action.

At level 10, you get Song of Defense. When you take damage, you can use a reaction to expend a spell slot to reduce the damage you take by an amount equal to five times the spell's level. This is where the squishiness of the Wizard starts to get mitigated - not only can you eventually reduce a burst of damage by 45 (though that will cost you a very high-level spell slot,) because you know how much damage you want to reduce, you can pick the right spell slot to most efficiently reduce that blow. Something hits you for 23 damage, well, you can expend a 4th level slot and reduce that to a very manageable 3.

At 14th level, you get Song of Victory. While your Bladesong is active, you add your Intelligence modifier to the damage of your melee weapon attacks. This will make your attacks hit a lot harder under Bladesong, which is probably the only time you're likely to be really focusing on melee.

This is a great alternative "battlemage" subclass to the Eldritch Knight, putting more of a focus on the mage than the battle. It is, however, very stat-dependent. I'd recommend this subclass if you happened to roll a Wizard who has very high Dexterity and Intelligence, and preferably a good Constitution as well. With point-buy and a +2/+1 race, you could potentially grab a 15 in Intelligence and a 14 in Dex and Con, raising Int and Dex to 16 with racial bonuses, which would mean that you could eventually max both Dex and Int and get Con to +3. I don't think you're really going to be a "tank" per se with this subclass, but if you want to mix melee and spellcasting, the very high AC you can achieve will at least make it possible for you to fight pure-attack monsters (and also, strongly consider getting Misty Step to bamf away from foes after you strike them.)

War Magic:

This sort of blends abjuration and evocation to focus on basically being a battlefield artillery. The fantasy of the class is that this is for military wizards, using magic tactically and being great at handling enemy mages.

At 2nd level you get Arcane Deflection. When you are hit with an attack or fail a saving throw, you can use your reaction to gain a +2 bonus to AC or a +4 bonus to the saving throw, potentially turning it into a miss or success, respectively. When you use it, you can't cast spells that aren't cantrips until the end of your next turn. So you basically are channeling your higher magical power into survival, and need to recharge.

You also get at 2 Tactical Wit. You add your Intelligence modifier to your initiative rolls. This (which Chronurgists also get) will make you much more likely to roll a high initiative, which Wizards tend to like to do (it's good to be able to drop a fireball on that horde of orcs before your Barbarian gets into the fray with them.)

At 6th level, you get Power Surge. You have a certain number of Power Surges at any time, up to a maximum equal to your Intelligence modifier (minimum of 1). Whenever you finish a long rest, your Power Surges reset to 1. Whenever you successfully end a spell with Dispel Magic or Counterspell, you gain one Power Surge, stealing the magic from the spell. If you end a Short Rest with no Power Surges you gain one.

Once per turn when you deal damage to a creature or object with a wizard spell, you can spend one power surge to deal extra force damage equal to half your wizard level.

So, this is cool in theory, but I also feel like this really expects you to be doing a lot of counterspelling and dispelling magic, which is extremely dependent on what you're fighting. And at the very most, this is going to be 10 extra damage, which is a little underwhelming for what seems like it should be a core feature of the subclass.

At 10, you get Durable Magic. While you're concentrating on a spell, you can a +2 bonus to AC as well as Saving Throws. I do kind of like how this encourages you to have a spell to concentrate on, though maybe +2 isn't quite enough.

Finally, at 14, you get Deflecting Shroud. When you use Arcane Deflection, you can cause magical energy to arc from you. Up to three creatures within 60 feet of you that you can see take force damage equal to half your Wizard level. A bit of free, unavoidable damage is certainly nice, though again I don't know if I think this is really that exciting of a capstone feature.

Yeah, my general sense of War Magic is that every feature feels like it should be propping up some much cooler feature, but there's no real "star of the show" here, and so I don't really think it's that appealing. Like Power Surges would be great if you could use them a whole lot, but I imagine very few people would ever be able to hit their maximum number in a day of adventuring, and even then, it's just a little bit of extra damage here and there.

So yeah, between these two, I think that, while stat-dependent, Bladesinging will enable a melee powerhouse who also has access to the entire Wizard spell list. War Magic doesn't really live up to the fantasy - I feel like you'd rather just have an Evocation Wizard on the battlefield.

Next, we're going to handle the two Dunamancy subclasses out of Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, and I think we might save the Order of Scribes for its own, final post.

Wizard Subclasses - PHB Part 2

 As we continue our final subclass review series, we now come to the second half of the PHB Wizard subclass options. Themed around the eight schools of magic, Wizards are one of the two classes to get a very large number of subclasses in the PHB, compared to some that only got two. We've seen a bit of variance in power levels, though any Wizard is going to benefit a lot from just their spell list.

As a note, I'm going to shorthand the "Savant" features, as these are the same across the eight PHB subclasses, just relating to their school. Your gold cost and copying time for spells of your school will be halved. It's nice but hardly exciting.

So, let's pick things up again:

School of Evocation:

If your main motivation for playing a Wizard is to toss powerful damage spells around like fireball or lightning bolt, this is the subclass that will best support that style of play. While there are some non-damaging evocation spells like Sending, most of the direct damage bursts are of this school.

You get Evocation Savant!

Also, at 2nd level you get Sculpt Spells. When you can an evocation spell that affects other creatures you can see, you can choose a number of them equal to 1 + the spell's level. The chosen creatures automatically succeed on their saves and even if they'd normally still take half damage on a success, they instead take none. This is huge - you can now safely drop fireballs on up to four friends without worrying about them at all. This is better than a Sorcerer's Careful Spell metamagic, as that will still allow "protected" creatures to take half damage, whereas here, they take absolutely zilch. So toss a fireball into the melee group without fear!

At 6, you get Potent Cantrip. When a creature succeeds on a saving throw against a damaging cantrip of yours, they still take half damage (but no other effects.) This means that, unless the creature is immune to the damage type or you roll a 1 on a cantrip before level 5, you can ensure that your foe will take at least some damage from every single cantrip you cast on them. Cantrips do scale up in damage, and this makes them very reliable. A great feature. This will encourage the use of saving throw cantrips like Acid Splash or Frostbite rather than attack-roll ones like Firebolt.

At 10, you get Empowered Evocation. You can add your Intelligence modifier to one damage roll of any wizard evocation spell you cast. Now, let's talk the nuances of Magic Missile. The vast majority of people treat this spell as having you roll 1d4+1 a separate time for each dart the spell creates. And I think that's a reasonable way to do it. If that were how the spell worked, you'd only add your Intelligence modifier once to the total damage of the spell. But technically, this (and I believe Scorching Ray) actually only require you to make a single roll, and each dart (or ray? Though they can crit, so I could be wrong about those) deals the same amount. This would mean that you are effectively adding your Intelligence modifier to every dart, which makes that spell way, way more powerful, and very good when up-cast. (With an Intelligence modifier of +5, if this is how it works, you'd be doing 1d4+6 per dart, or 8.5. That means that a 6th-level Magic Missile, which shoots 8 darts, would deal 68 damage. That's not super far off from the average of 75 damage Disintegrate does, but while Disintegrate is a save-for-none spell, this is an automatic hit, which is cuh-razy.) Even without these shenanigans, you're still adding a bit of damage to your spells, which is nice (and it'll include evocation cantrips.)

At 14th level, you get Overchannel. If you cast a wizard spell of 1st-through-5th level that deals damage (not just evocation) you can choose to deal the maximum damage for that spell. You can do this once safely per long rest. If you do it another time, you take 2d12 necrotic damage for each level of the spell, and each subsequent time you do it again before taking a long rest, you take an additional 1d12 damage. Notably, this ignores resistance and even immunity - you will take the damage.

Naturally, this is a feature you'll want to be careful with, but when you need to hit really freaking hard, it's a nice tool in your arsenal. This can cause spells to deal nearly double their average damage. For example, a fireball or lightning bolt does an average of 28 damage, but if you Overchannel it, it will do an automatic 48. Meteor Swarm does an average of 140 total damage, but with this it'll do 240. How's an extra hundred damage sound?

Evocation is very good at doing what it does, and what it does is what a lot of players (especially new ones, though damage output is always nice to have) want to do.

School of Illusion:

This is a subclass all about deception. Rather than directly messing with peoples' minds, you focus on their perceptions, and that can be very potent. Note that you'll need a cooperative DM to really take the ramifications of your illusions seriously, and that they'll have to roll with some crazy BS, though that's tons of fun.

You get Illusion Savant!

Also at 2 you get Improved Minor Illusion. You learn Minor Illusion if you don't know it already, and it doesn't count against your wizard cantrips known (I'd allow someone who took it early to just grab a different one. Given that as of Tasha's Wizards can just swap out cantrips on a long rest, you can treat this as a "School Spell" like Clerics have domain spells.) Additionally, when you cast Minor Illusion, you can create both a sound and image with a single cast.

At level 6, you get Malleable Illusions. Starting at 6th level, if you cast an illusion spell with a duration of 1 minute or longer, you can use your action to change the nature of that illusion within the spell's normal parameters if you can see it. This lets you adjust the illusion on the fly, which might help aid in the deception. It'll also come in handy with later features.

At 10, you get Illusory Step. As a reaction when a creature makes an attack roll against you, you can interpose an illusory duplicate between the attacker and yourself. The attack automatically misses you and then the illusion disappears. You can do this once per short or long rest. Essentially you can do a minor Mirror Image as a reaction, and anything that makes it easier for a squishy wizard to survive will be a big help.

At level 14, you get Illusory Reality. When you cast a spell of 1st level or higher, you can choose one inanimate, nonmagical object that is part of the illusion and make the object real. You can do this as a bonus action while the spell is ongoing. The object remains real for 1 minute. As an example, you can create an illusion of a bridge over a chasm and then make it real enough for your allies to cross. The object can't deal damage or harm anyone.

This is where this gets insane, and makes illusion almost more like conjuration. Consider, for instance, that if someone suspect that you're using a magical disguise and reaches for the non-existent hat you're wearing, you can suddenly make it real. And also, in that bridge scenario, maybe the monsters give chase after you cross it. So you drop concentration on the spell, and they fall into the chasm. Really, truly powerful.

This is the sort of subclass that can pull of some utterly insane stuff if the DM is willing to reward a creative player, and I love that.

School of Necromancy:

Ah, the spookiest of subclasses. You'll be stealing life, raising the dead, and overall just being a A+ spooky boy/girl/person. While Wizards of any school can potentially be bad guys, this is a subclass where you'll need to kind of work hard to justify not being at best morally neutral, and very likely just evil.

You get Necromancy Savant!

Also at 2 you get Grim Harvest. Once per turn when you kill one or more creatures with a spell of 1st level or higher, you regain hit points equal to twice the spell's level, or three times if it's a spell from the school of necromancy. You don't get this from killing constructs or undead. It is not unheard of for Wizards to get killing blows, and this can fill you back up. What I don't know is if this would count if your zombies from Danse Macabre killing something would count for this - I suspect no, but it seems within the DM's interpretation.

At 6th level, you add Animate Dead to your spellbook if it's not there already. When you cast the spell, you can target one additional corpse or pile of bones, creating an additional zombie or skeleton, respectively. When you create any undead with a Necromancy spell, the creature's hit point maximum is increased by an amount equal to your Wizard level, and it adds your proficiency bonus to weapon damage rolls. (Note that Summon Undead, from Tasha's, does count as Necromancy - while it's similar to the other "Summon" spells, it's the only one that is not of the Conjuration school, and thus works with this.)

At 10, you get Inured to Undeath. You have resistance to Necrotic damage and your hit point maximum cannot be reduced. This is pretty cool given that a lot of incorporeal undead have these sort of life-drain effects, so if your Necromancer fights a lot of undead creatures, you'll be very resilient against them.

Finally, at 14, you get Command Undead. As an action, you can choose an undead creature you can see within 60 feet of you and force them to make a Charisma saving throw. If they succeed, you cannot use this feature on them again. But if they fail, they become friendly to you and obey your commands until you use this feature again. (Notably this doesn't officially count as a charm, thus getting around any immunity to the charmed condition.)

Intelligent undead are harder to control this way. If its intelligence is 8 or higher, it has advantage on the saving throw, and if it's 12 or higher, it can repeat the save at the end of every hour until it succeeds and breaks free.

Ok.

So.

While a Lich will burn a legendary resistance to save out of this and a Death Knight has a +10 to charisma saves, and both are smart enough to be able to repeat their saves, there are some very powerful undead you can use this on. A Nightwalker, a CR 20 undead monster (which I actually had occasion to use in tonight's game,) has a -1 to Charisma and only an intelligence of 6. So you could, with this feature, permanently gain control of one of these things pretty easily. Similarly, a Mummy Lord has a good chance of saving against it, being smart enough to get advantage and with a nice +8 Charisma save bonus (actually it has Magic Resistance anyway,) but if both rolls were low, you could have a Mummy Lord under your permanent control.

Nuts. Absolutely nuts.

Necromancy is a bit harder to use than simply conjuration given that you need the bodies to raise, and the power of the creatures you get is not significantly better. But not only do Necromancers have a lot of flavor behind them, but... again, have you seen Command Undead? Have you seen that you can take control of a FREAKING NIGHTWALKER?

Ahem.

School of Transmutation:

The magic of turning things into other things. Transmutation feels very much like a great option for a lot of utility - thematically good for a "toolbox" wizard. Let's look into their features:

You get Transmutation Savant! (And that's the last of these, phew!)

At 2 you also get Minor Alchemy. You can perform a ritual on an object made entirely of wood, stone (not precious stones,) iron, copper, or silver, and transform it into a different one of those materials. Each 10 minutes you spend, you can transform up to 1 cubic foot of material. After 1 hour, or until you lose concentration, the material reverts to its original substance. The utility of this is very much up to the imagination - though the concentration limit is a big limitation. You could turn some silver trade bars into platinum and hoodwink a moneychanger. Or, if you had a werewolf stalking around you tavern, you could transform the edge of your fighter's sword into silver. This one requires some creativity.

At 6, you get Transmuter's Stone. You can spend 8 hours creating a transmuter's stone, which grants a benefit to whoever carries the stone. When you create the stone, you choose one of the following: Darkvision to a range of 60 feet, 10 feet increased walking speed (as long as the creature is unencumbered), proficiency in Constitution saving throws, or resistance to your choice of acid, cold, fire, lightning, or thunder damage. When you cast a transmutation spell of 1st level or higher, you can switch the effect on the stone if it's on your person. And if you create another one, the previous stone ceases to function.

This is a textbook "toolbox" feature, which you can switch with relative ease depending on the situation. It's a lot of options for many different potential situations, which is nice to have.

At 10th level, you get Shapechanger. Polymorph is added to your spellbook if not there already. You can cast it once for free each short or long rest on yourself, transforming yourself into a besat of CR 1 or lower. Polymorph is a really useful and versatile spell, and getting a free one of them to, say, turn yourself into a bird to fly around, can be very handy. Naturally, you'll probably have Polymorph already in your spellbook, but this free use is nice.

At 14, you get Master Transmuter. You can use an action to consume your transmuter stone, destroying it but getting one of the following effects immediately:

Major Transformation: You can transmute a nonmagical object no larger than a 5-foot cube into another nonmagical obeject of a similar size and mass of equal or lesser value. You must spend at least 10 minutes handling the object to do this.

Panacea: You remove all curses, diseases, and poisons affecting a creature you touch with the stone, and they regain all their hit points.

Restore Life: You cast Raise Dead on a creature you touch with the stone, without expending a spell slot or needing to have the spell in your spellbook (given that it's not a Wizard spell, I don't know how you would have it there.)

Restore Youth: You touch the stone to a willing creature, and their apparent age is reduced by 3d10 years, to a minimum of 13 years. The effect doesn't extend the creature's lifespan. (This last part is BS. If you're a Transmuter you ought to be able to get the true Philosopher's Stone effect.)

Well, I was about to write off the Transmutation Wizard as sort of decent but with nothing flashy, but damn if this last feature doesn't change my mind (I should have remembered, because Caleb from Critical Role's second campaign used Master Transmuter to salvage the party during a very dire moment in the big boss fight at the end.) It's really kind of hard to argue with a Wizard who can bring people back to life. And Panacea is the best healing spell in the game, effectively.

Appropriately, a lot of these subclasses have really exciting capstone abilities, which unfortunately also means that most players won't actually be able to use the flashiest stuff. But I think at this point we've calibrated the power levels the designers were going for in the PHB, and we can see how things look in the later books (which generally have meant increases in power for most classes.)

The order of the remaining five subclasses is going to be a little tricky - the Bladesinger was published originally in Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide before its reprint in Tasha's, so I think that will be next, followed by Xanathar's War Magic. Then we'll cover the two dunamantic subclasses out of Explorer's Guide to Wildemount along with the Order of Scribes from Tasha's.

And then that will be a review of all the subclasses! It's been fun going through these (and reinforcing my attempts to have an encyclopedic understanding of D&D, I guess). I've definitely felt a growing appreciation for subclasses I previously didn't think much of, like the Alchemist Artificer or the Circle of Stars Druid, though the reverse is also true, as I've found some disappointments (such as the Great Old One Warlock, which I sadly now think is one of the least powerful warlock subclasses, despite the fact that I adore its flavor.) Anyway, I think we've got 5th Edition around for a long time to come, and of course, the beauty of these all being in non-digital books is that even if some future 6th edition comes out, we can always return to this if we like it better.