Holy Crap, It's Finally Happening

 Hey, so you know how I've advocated for the ability for players in World of Warcraft to opt in to cross-faction gameplay?

And how that's something that Blizzard has pushed back against forever, despite the huge demand for it?

Well, guess what?

That's about to change!

Note that this is going to be somewhat restricted - automatic matchmaking like Raid Finder and Group Finder, and the like will not allow this. However, pre-made groups for Mythic dungeons, Raids, and even, it seems, some rated PvP.

The system is opt-in - you can directly invite RealID friends, and if you make a pre-made group using the Group Finder, the group leader will need to check a box to allow cross-faction groups.

Notably, in "outdoor" areas, members of your party or raid that are part of the opposite faction will be unfriendly to you (or hostile, if in War Mode) and you can't cast beneficial spells or the like on them (though you can still communicate in party chat). However, once inside an instance, you'll be fully friendly members of the same group.

This is actually going to be applied to old instances as well, though with a couple exceptions: specifically, the Battle for Dazar'alor, Icecrown Citadel, and Trial of the Crusader, as these are all instances with a significant section dedicated to cross-faction fighting (they don't want your Night Elf to attack Muradin during the airship battle). I'm curious to see if this applies to other instances with minor faction differences - like the party of mercenaries before the Thorim fight in Ulduar, which I think has members of the opposite faction.

This change is huge, and very welcome. It's also, I think, a wise move given the smaller population the game has these days, and will help a lot with faction imbalances. I wonder if we'll see more Alliance races in the World First Mythic races now (hm, two different meanings of the term word "races" in the same sentence.)

The expected release for this feature will be 9.2.5 - they don't think it will be ready for 9.2 (which is coming out any week now).

I'm sure there will be some people decrying this as taking the War out of Warcraft, but as the blue post points out, there's been a history of cross-faction cooperation since Warcraft III, and I think the shift from defining the factions around their conflict toward defining it around their identities is a smart move.

Monsters of the Multiverse: Genasi

 Growing up, we had an audio cassette of stories from the 1001 Arabian Nights, which included Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, obviously the frame narrative of Scheherazade, and what is probably the most famous of those stories, Aladdin. I was already familiar with the story, I think, when Disney came out with its 1992 animated musical that famously featured Robin Williams in the role of the genie. I was six at the time, so I was pretty much the target audience, and I absolutely adored the concept of genies (and have strong feelings about using the last wish to free any genie - though as an adult I now wonder if it's kind of messed up not to just do that first, on an ethical level).

Anyway, as I got older I did some cursory (really, if I'm honest, Wikipedia-level) reading into genies, and the lore behind them is actually really interesting - essentially, they're another kind of human-like people with free will, but where humanity is (by the traditions from which the folklore comes, including Abrahamic mythos) made of earth, the djinn are made from fire. (Genie is of course an alternate transliteration of "djinni," which is the singular form of djinn. Remember, it's not Latin/Italian, so the "i" at the end doesn't make it plural - in fact, quite the opposite).

In some of the fantasy fiction I've written, rather than having a world of elves and dwarves, the only other "humanoid" race is the djinn, who live deep in a massive desert the size of Eurasia called the Sarona Desert. Human in appearance aside from their blue skin and glowing, fiery eyes (which they hide behind dark sunglasses by tradition), they can easily live in the desert because they don't require water to survive.

Anyway, the Genasi in D&D are the closest you can get to a playable genie race. There's a lot of really interesting built-in lore here, including the notion that your genie parent would, by D&D lore, not have parents (and thus siblings,) meaning any genasi has a parent with no personal experience of being raised in a family.

Genasi were introduced to 5E in the Elemental Evil Player's Companion, as well as within the pages of Princes of the Apocalypse. But the race has generally been considered underpowered. While its +2 in Constitution in theory is useful to anyone, I don't really see a lot of people eager to pick them out.

As such, it's exciting to see that they've gotten some big revisions in Mordenkainen Presents Monsters of the Multiverse.

The following information comes from Nerd Immersion, and while I won't be getting MPMM until it comes out independently in May, I think it's fair game especially given that this is a revision rather than a brand new printing.

The four elemental "subraces" are broken out into essentially their own races, which is especially easy to do because, like all races from here on out, ability score bonuses are now fully decoupled from your race - anyone can choose +2 to one stat and +1 to another or +1 to three different stats (I'll be curious how Humans work in the 2024 PHB).

So, let's compare. Starting with the...

Air Genasi:

EEPC Version: +2 to Con, +1 to Dex, Medium Size, Speed 30 ft. Unending Breath (you can hold your breath indefinitely when not incapacitated,) Mingle with the Wind: (You can cast the levitate spell once per long rest without material components, using Constitution as your spellcasting ability)

MMPM Version: +2/+1 or +1/+1/+1, Medium or Small size, Speed 35 ft., Darkvision 60 ft., Unending Breath (as above), Lightning Resistance, New Version of Mingle with the Wind:

You get Shocking Grasp, then you can cast Feather Fall without material components at level 3, and Levitate without material component at level 5. You can cast Feather Fall and Levitate each once per long rest for free, but you can also spend spell slots of the appropriate level to cast them. You can choose Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma as your spellcasting ability for these when you pick this race.

Ok, so the only way this isn't strictly better is having to wait until level 5 to use levitate. By every other measure, this is better - darkvision, lightning resistance, 35 feet of movement, etc. Fun note is that my Wood Elf Monk was originally conceived as an Air Genasi, but AL rules wouldn't allow it. Now, however, I think that it would be legal, and in this form, he'd be pretty comparably good (they'd both have the higher movement speed).

Ok, moving on, let's look at...

Earth Genasi:

EEPC Version: +2 to Con, +1 to Str, Medium, Speed 30 ft., Earth Walk (You can move across difficult terrain made of earth or stone without expending extra movement). Merge with Stone (You can cast Pass without Trace  without material components once per long rest, with Con as your spellcasting ability).

MMPM Version: Your Choice of Stats, Your choice of Small or Medium, Speed 30 ft., Darkvision 60 ft., New Earth Walk (You can now move across difficult terrain of any kind without expending extra movement as long as you're using your walking speed on the ground or a floor). New Merge with Stone (You know the Blade Ward cantrip, and can cast it as a normal or you can cast it as a bonus action a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus per long rest. Starting at 5th level, you can cast Pass without Trace  without material components once for free per long rest, but you can also spend 2nd level or higher spell slots to do so again. You choose between Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma as your spellcasting ability for this when you pick this trait).

All right, this is still an upgrade except for having to wait to 5th level for Pass without Trace. You don't get any inherent resistance, but you do get to cast Blade Ward as a bonus action, which can give you brief windows of resistance to "physical" damage. Earth Walk I'd count as a total upgrade over the old version. I think this mostly just suffers in comparison to the other MMPM genasi.

Fire Genasi:

EEPC Version: +2 Con, +1 Int, Medium, Speed 30 ft., Darkvision 60 ft., Fire Resistance, Reach to the Blaze (You know the Produce Flame cantrip, and at 3rd level you can cast Burning Hands this way as a 1st level spell once per long rest. Constitution is your spellcasting ability for these spells).

MMPM Version: Choice of Stats, Choice of Small or Medium, Speed 30 ft., Darkvision 60 ft., Fire Resistance, New version of Reach to the Blaze: (You know Produce Flame. At 3rd level you can cast Burning Hands with this trait. At 5th level you can cast Flame Blade with this trait, and can cast Burning Hands and Flame Blade for free each once a day, or you can spend appropriate spell slots to cast them. You choose Int, Wis, or Cha as your spellcasting ability when you take this race.)

This is kind of interesting: of the original Genasi, Fire seemed the best kitted-out, and it seems it served as a model for the other revisions - including things like darkvision, an appropriate damage resistance, etc. I think this might be a strict upgrade, though, over the old version, even if that upgrade is a little subtler - letting you pick your spellcasting ability, your stats, and I guess your size (though mechanically I don't know if there's any advantage to being small rather than medium).

Water Genasi:

EEPC Version: +2 Con, +1 Wis, Medium, Speed 30 ft plus Swim 30 ft., Acid Resistance, Amphibious (you can breathe air and water), Swim (the aforementioned swim speed,) Call to the Wave (You know Shape Water, and at 3rd level you can cast Create or Destroy Water as a 2nd level spell once per long rest. Con is your spellcasting ability for this feature).

MMPM Version: Choice of Stats, Choice of Small or Medium size, Speed 30 ft, and Swim equal to your Walking Speed. Darkvision 60 ft., Acid Resistance, Amphibious, and new Call to the Wave: (You know the Acid Splash cantrip. At 3rd level you can cast Create or Destroy Water with the trait, and at 5th level, you can cast Water Walk with it, without material components. You can cast each of these once for free per long rest, or you can cast them with spell slots as normal. You pick Int, Wis, or Cha as your spellcasting ability.)

Phew! Ok, this one's a little trickier. The subtle change to your swim speed (equalling your walking speed) is actually great if you're a fast class like a Monk or Barbarian. However, this is the only genasi to actually lose something, in the form of Shape Water. Still, getting Darkvision is nice, as well as Water Walk.

So, overall, what do we think?

My sense is that the general theme - having element-themed spells for each type of genasi - carries over from the original design, though a little more offensive-based. I see what they were going for with Earth Genasi, but I think it would have been cool if they had gone for something a little funkier - for example, Dao Genie Warlocks get resistance to bludgeoning damage. I wonder if that would have been considered too powerful as a racial trait. But I think it could have been cool and less awkward than their "sort of resistant" solution involving Blade Ward (also, they don't get any offensive cantrip like the other three do).

Still, Genasi suffered I think in part from having kind of thin racial traits. Now, I think the general array of things they get really works out quite well, and we might see more Genasi characters in the future (yes I know that the new campaign of Critical Role has two genasi characters, so they might not be so rare after all).

Anyway, I think this also gives you an initial idea of the kind of reforms we're seeing in Monsters of the Multiverse - these are, if anything, a bit on the conservative side. I'm extremely eager to see what changes we'll see to class design in 2024, but I'll have to be patient for that, of course.

The Jailer and Warcraft's Over-Reliance on Roid Rager Villains

 I love the Warcraft universe, even if I've been forced to confront a lot of seriously conflicted feelings about the company that brought it to the world.

The premise of Shadowlands - journeying outside of the mundane reality of the Warcraft cosmos and entering what I've termed the Outer Planes of Warcraft - is super-exciting and cool. And I've loved a lot of it. The four main afterlives we've visited have been really interesting both in how their culture developed around their purpose and just how they look. The Maw presented itself as the genuine worst place we'd ever been in WoW, and I think they did a good job of making it feel oppressive and hellish (that isn't a snarky criticism of the experience playing there - I genuinely enjoyed the Maw in 9.0, but I'm also the kind of masochist who enjoy Dark Souls, so take it with that grain of salt).

But I think we can all agree that as a big bad, the Jailer is pretty dull. I remember having misgivings when we first saw his model - here was the embodiment of malevolence, death, and darkness, and he was... a buff dude. His first line, as pointed out in a video by Taliesin and Evitel, begins with "Pitiful Mortal." I mean, that's pretty hackneyed. There are a lot of issues with him as a villain - the way that he feels like a retcon, transforming practically the entire mythos of Warcraft into his magnificently complex plan (yes, it's more nuanced than that, but a lot of people interpreted it that way) in a way that feels like it robs established big bads like Sargeras and N'zoth of their due coolness.

Actually, let's talk N'zoth specifically, because I think he was done dirty, and I also think he's an example of part of the problem with WoW villains.

N'zoth was built up to be amazing. We first heard about him in Cataclysm - this other Old God, the only one we didn't immediately kill once we had discovered his existence. More excitingly, N'zoth was built up as being the brilliant manipulator. He was the "weakest" of the Old Gods, which I took to mean he had the fewest forces at his command and was the least magically, psionically powerful of them. But we kept hearing stories about how N'zoth had managed to feint and scheme in a way that every defeat he suffered ultimately turned to his favor.

N'zoth seemed to be the ultimate puppet-master, and I was convinced that he had orchestrated basically everything that led to the Legion invasion in Legion. And it was in character for him to have done so. I mean, we know that Yogg-Saron actually created the Emerald Nightmare, but somehow it wound up being N'zoth's asset. And, let's also not forget that he was the last of the Old Gods to actually be defeated - after manipulating Azshara and us into freeing him.

Our first introduction to N'zoth was in the Azshara: Warbringers short (man, hers and the Jaina one were fantastic). As the waves crash down upon Zin-Azshari, Azshara is desperately using her magic to try to hold them back, and then we get this one flapping, dying fish. And a voice comes to her, this alien intelligence speaking to her through the dying fish's eye.

And Darrin de Paul freaking knocks this out of the park. The playful tone he strikes suggests he recognizes Azshara is smart enough to recognize he's a threat, but he knows she's in too tight a space to truly be able to say no. When she tries to call his bluff, he erupts into rage with a deep, bellowing monster voice. At the time I was convinced that this rage was itself a ploy - a way to make Azshara feel like she had actually frustrated and outmaneuvered him.

Now, I'm not so sure. Because there's a kind of ethos that runs through Warcraft that I think undermines the variety of its villains:

There's a focus on hyper-masculinity

No villain in Warcraft has had as cool of a deep baritone as Michael McConnohie's digitally-altered Lich King voice. (No offense intended toward Liam O'Brien's Illidan). But they've been chasing that sound and tone ever since. Deathwing, Archimonde, and then rage-mode N'zoth.

In fact, talking about Old Gods, when you compare Yogg-Saron's rather generic deep-voice yelling with C'thun's super-creepy whispers, can't we all agree that the latter is a far better voice for a totally inhuman alien entity born of unmitigated malevolence?

I think there's a pattern in character design in the Warcraft games that really idealizes a hyper-masculine look - humans are already profoundly beefy, but then you get orcs, who are sort of the flagship race of the franchise, who are even more hyper-masculinized. There's almost a sense that only big, muscle-bound dudes are allowed to represent a major threat in the Warcraft cosmos.

And thus, we come back to Zovaal. When we got the first reveal trailer for the game, I think the general design now used for the Primus was initially intended for the Jailer. And if you're going to have someone represent not just death, but the terrifying, oppressive aspects of it, you'd think that they'd go for something a little more, say, Grim Reaper-esque, even if that's a bit of a cliche.

Wouldn't Zovaal be a way more compelling villain if he was an emaciated, skeletal figure that spoke from a position of intelligence rather than raw strength? I don't think we need some musclebound gym-rat as the banished, dark lord of death.

For one thing, we've had plenty of musclebound gym-rat villains before.

Indeed, I think this issues actually goes back to Cataclysm. Back when people were datamining that expansion, there was a lot of excitement when the model for human-form Deathwing was found. Of course, dragons in Warcraft (and lot of other fantasy stories) can take on humanoid form, and Deathwing's character history included his time impersonating a human noble named Daval Prestor, undermining the Alliance in the midst of the Second War. Instead, during Cataclysm, we never actually got to see that side of Deathwing - he was always in flying-natural-disaster mode, his cunning and scheming ignored in favor of a purely physical threat. And that was a huge let-down for a character who had been hyped up for a long time.

Basically, I think Blizzard needs to think about trying different kinds of villains. Yes, ultimately, we want to fight them all as a raid boss at the end of the expansion. But they don't have to all adhere to this consistent physical form and presentation to feel dangerous.

Dang, I Forgot How Tough the Ringed City Was

 In my years-later replay of Dark Souls 3, I've mostly found the game somewhat easier on a later playthrough. While there are a couple bosses that remain a bit tough - Aldrich seems to be the big one from the main game before you get toward late-game folks like Oceiros, Nameless King, Twin Princes, and the DLC bosses - I'm sort of shocked to realize how a bit of careful character building and familiarity with level layout can make things pretty easy.

Indeed, there aren't a ton of non-boss areas in the base game that I've really found myself stuck on. The Grand Archives, which is technically the last mandatory "level" is simple enough that I've just been using it as a farming location for souls (the candlestick scholars seem to be vulnerable to fire damage, which has made doing so on my pyromancer build really simple).

This mostly held through the first DLC. Ashes of Ariandel has its tough stretches - simply getting to and then dealing with all the Millwood Knights in their area is pretty tough - but I realized that you can totally skip past a lot of it to get to Ariandel Chapel pretty easily early on, and then the route through the hamlet with all the gross bird people and then the woods with the Followers is not all that bad (it helps that this time I've actually realized that you can use rotten trees to create shortcuts back to the bonfire in that latter woodsy area).

Elfriede remains a tough fight, though the fact that you can summon Gael for free - no ember required - helps a lot (even if he doesn't show up until phase 2).

On two of my new characters, I've managed to get past Elfriede and into the Dreg Heap, which is the first part of the Ringed City DLC, and which is, I'd say, not too inconsistent with the difficulty of the Painted World of Ariandel, though you'll want to prioritize taking out the weird little pilgrim slugs that project the angels, as they make big stretches of that much harder - but there are only 3.

Anyway, I took down the Demon Prince on my "paladin" character (summoning both Lapp and Gael seemed to do the trick) and moved onto the Ringed City proper (naturally, some PvPer invaded me while in that first stretch with the Judicator Giant and his archers, so that ember disappeared pretty quick).

And then I was confronted with how tough this place is.

Throughout DS3, they're pretty generous with shortcuts and bonfires, to be honest. I remember going through Irithyll on these later playthroughs and realizing that there honestly aren't any super gruelingly long stretches of enemies to fight before getting a shortcut or a new bonfire. But, unless I'm forgetting some really important shortcuts, holy crap is the stretch between bonfires 2 and 3 in the Ringed City a slog. And once you get to the third bonfire, the area opens up enormously, giving you the whole abyssal swamp.

Actually, somewhat hilariously, I one-shotted the Dragonslayer Armor, which comes back for a rematch in one corner of said swamp (apparently countless ages later - assuming there are many ages that go between the main game and the Ringed City). I actually did this on my first playthrough as well.

I've also managed to find a weapon for which my 50 Strength is not high enough to wield - Ledo's Great Hammer. Having just done a lot of grinding to get other stats up to prepare for this area, I imagine it'll be a lengthy grind to get the 10 more levels I'll need to wield that weapon (though hopefully with some of my better-scaling strength weapons I'll hit less of a diminishing return - perhaps along the way my Fume Ultra Greatsword will overtake my Greataxe).

The lengthy stretch I'm talking about here starts at the bonfire past the first judicator giant. You go into a corridor where you're immediately ambushed by one of these hunched dudes, of which there are four in a bit of a straightaway, two of whom radiate a curse status effect. Then, you fight your first ringed knight, followed by two more of them. Then you get these crawling clerics, who cast these circular area effects, in a multi-story tower. One of them requires some careful jumping to get to them. Then, when you get out of that area, there's this lengthy stairway with a couple of Harald Knights (who will confront you before the NPC behind a closed door finishes her dialogue, which is frustrating), with a couple of paths that lead off from there. Finally, when you get to the base of those stairs, you get into the big swamp area, and have those locust people to deal with before you can find your way to a bonfire in one of the buildings around a corner.

I just ran after a couple attempts to fight my way past all this.

I feel like there has to be a shortcut I'm missing because it's such a grueling stretch.

Naturally, I think this bears comparison to the Fishing Hamlet in Bloodborne, as the endgame area of the DLC, and thus probably the hardest part of the game. But this is almost like just "the cave with the two giant shark monsters" specifically, rather than just that area in general.

Ships and Alternative Combat Systems in D&D

 Combat in D&D is probably its most polished set of rules. There can be a lot of wiggle room outside of initiative regarding several features of the game, but there are a combat is pretty regimented and consistent, rules-wise.

Indeed, one of the things about D&D design is that any character is meant to function well in combat situations. I've played RPGs where a character might be best served by simply ducking out of the way and waiting for the fighting to be over, but D&D's class system really ensures that everyone is going to be able to contribute something to a fight.

As such, I think a lot of players, DMs, and I'd guess even game designers are hesitant to introduce a bunch of new rules for combat systems.

Ghosts of Saltmarsh primarily served as an update of a bunch of older, maritime-themed adventures, but it also had an appendix with a lot of interesting ideas about how to run nautical adventures. This included rules for building around the party effectively being the primary officers of a ship. This included a lot of magical upgrades a ship could get as well as rules surrounding crew morale and also ship-based combat.

Critical Role actually played around a little with these rules in Campaign Two. But aside from that, I really haven't seen many people talk about them.

Given the apparently high likelihood of a Spelljammer sourcebook coming out some time this year, I'm curious to see if we'll get another crack at ship-to-ship combat.

One of the issues with tacking on a system like this is that characters don't tend to have a lot of avenues to play into their roles on a ship. There is a simple "Water Vehicles" proficiency that Sailors and some of the backgrounds in Ghosts of Saltmarsh get, and you can also possibly use things like carpenter's tools proficiency, but most characters would likely find themselves somewhat like the Maester character I made in the Song of Ice and Fire RPG whenever a fight broke out - just trying to stay out of the way.

As one of the other D&D-like RPG systems I've read, Starfinder has an interesting take on its ship combat - it's written into the core rulebook, and works differently than "on-foot" combat. But that also benefits from the fact that a lot of character skills were written to be useful in such situations - there's a piloting skill, an engineering skill, even a computer science skill for inter-ship computer hacking in the midst of a fight.

Of course, I haven't actually run a game of Starfinder yet, and I don't really know first-hand how it feels.

To an extent, I think that there's a real question of buy-in here. Most of (maybe all) of the people I play D&D with are primarily interested in the game from a role-playing point of view. As such, when I've floated just the idea of trying out a new game system, several of my players have balked, and a lot of them don't want to try to pack in new rules and expectations when they're struggling to hold 5th Edition in there.

I think, therefore, that I'd prefer to see a ship-combat system really tie itself into the normal D&D combat system. Each character should have their own initiative place, and they should have their normal suite of abilities. Having the Sorcerer toss fireballs at the other ship would give players something familiar to do.

But, on top of that, I would like to see a kind of weight toward making "ship actions" more powerful choices in combat. I think it's generally good game design to reward players for exploring new options, and I think that if you've got some massive piece of equipment like a ship, its benefits should feel significant.

I actually think that the Infernal War Machines rules in Descent into Avernus felt a little closer to what I'd go for, though I know there were issues there as well. In this case, the issue might primarily be movement - vehicles should probably go a lot faster than characters can move, but you also don't want to wildly shift the distances between characters on those vehicles.

I don't really have much of a solution here, to be honest. But I'm hoping that if we get Spelljammer next, we're going to see another iteration of this kind of combat, and one that is fun to play and not too difficult to learn.

Phyrexians Breaking the Rules

 Been a while since we've really done much MTG lore discussion.

So, the Phyrexians are starting to show up, and not only that, they're showing up on other planes, with some big and terrible developments for the folks in the Magic multiverse who aren't really into body horror as a lifestyle.

About a year ago, Vorinclex showed up on Kaldheim, but how they got there was a pretty big mystery.

After the Time Spiral block in 2006/2007, the Mending changed the rules of the multiverse. Planeswalkers prior to that time were godlike in power, capable of creating whole new planes with that power. But they also weren't the only ones who could travel between planes. The Weatherlight was introduced back in Mirage block as a magical airship that could journey between planes, taking non-planeswalkers with them. Likewise, the Phyrexians had been able to invade other worlds through the creation of portals.

But the Mending not only severely limited the power of Planeswalkers, it also shut off the old magic and technology that would allow individuals to travel between the planes. As such, for a long time now, the planes have been kept severely isolated except for the rare individuals who can planeswalk.

That changed with the War of the Spark, or, more specifically, when Tezzeret secured the Planar Bridge, built on Kaladesh. Taking the bridge to Amonkhet, Nicol Bolas' forces used it to transport his undead Dreadhorde from Amonkhet to Ravnica in an effort to draw planeswalkers from across the multiverse for spark-harvesting.

This meant, though, that a big post-Mending rule had finally been broken. Non-planeswalkers could finally, once again, travel between the planes.

But there's another thing:

During the Scars of Mirrodin block, the Phyrexians had captured Karn, the creator of the world that had originally been called Argentum, would become Mirrodin, and later New Phyrexia. They attempted to transform him into some sort of new Father of Machines - a second Yawgmoth, even. But Karn was ultimately freed when his planeswalker spark was restored - the spark apparently granting immunity to Phyrexian corruption.

But it looks like they might have worked out a way past that as well.

In previews for Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, not only do we have the second praetor on a different plane - Jin-Gitaxias shows up in Kamigawa, but we also have seen that Tamiyo, the moonfolk planeswalker who has helped the heroes of the Gatewatch in the past, become the first "compleated" planeswalker.

That's... a problem.

As someone currently running a D&D campaign that is built around an attempt by Phyrexia to corrupt Ravnica, this does really throw a lot of conceits I had been working with into doubt. On the other hand, my story is sort of set before this point in the official timeline, so maybe the Phyrexians just haven't figured it out (indeed, the Golgari praetor that the party is currently going after is experimenting with alternate means to open a portal, rather than relying on a misguided planeswalker whose proximity to the glistening oil she ferries from New Phyrexia has rendered it far less potent.)

It is very clear to me that MTG is building up to a new climactic event, similar to how the War of the Spark had years of foreshadowing, but this time, it'll be the Phyrexians. It has been over twenty years since Invasion block, after all.

Warforged and the Future of Artificial People in D&D

 I'm kind of obsessed with the idea of artificial people.

When I was very little - probably 3 or so - I remember seeing a movie that I just remembered as "Conrad," though I believe it was actually "Conrad: The Factory-Made Boy," in which a little artificial child is delivered to a family accidentally. I remember nearly nothing about the plot of this movie, except that this little kid (who was the protagonist if memory serves) was a good boy who just happened to have come out of a cylindrical package (I remember vaguely that he had been in some kind of powdered form that made a kid when water was added, but it's possible I 100% invented that).

Star Trek: The Next Generation also premiered a year after I was born, and while I don't think I started watching that until I was at least a little older, it was the first prime-time TV show I remember regularly watching (though if memory serves, The Simpsons, which was then an even bigger cultural phenomenon, came on at 7:30 after Star Trek started at 7, so we'd often miss the back half). On that show, I loved Data, the android crew member who was on a constant quest to develop true "humanity."

I don't know whether we'll ever be able to know for certain that an artificial intelligence we create is sentient (i.e., has a conscious, inner experience of their thoughts and perceptions) though, of course, we can't be 100% certain that the other humans we speak with do (though I think the vast majority of people assume they do).

In a fantasy world in which "souls" are empirically provable, there's a convenient way to make a clear distinction between a machine and an artificial person.

Given my Jewish heritage on top of this, I have a soft spot for Golems in fantasy. The folklore surrounding Golems is a bit complex, but my understanding of it is that, according to the Torah (what Christians would call "The Old Testament," essentially) God first created humanity out of clay. Thus, a sufficiently righteous person, who had the wisdom and knowledge to do so, would be able to imitate God in this act, bringing lifeless clay to a semblance of life. Obviously, no human could be as perfect as God in doing so, so it's not like this creation would be a full human. But the version of the story of the Golem as I understand it is that this is a righteous and sacred act - a good deed. And because the Golem is created in a righteous act, the Golem itself can do good deeds.

Again, there are a lot of versions of the story that might contradict one another, but that's the version that I prefer.

Many of the playable races in the Eberron setting are, I think, meant to take creatures that have historically been just monsters (not necessarily evil ones) in the Monster Manual and turn them into playable races. Shifters give you something akin to lycanthropes. Changelings are playable doppelgangers. And Warforged, as I see it, are playable golems.

Eberron borrows a lot of 1930s pulp genres as its inspiration, and the Last War is meant to be someone analogous to World War 1. While I think some post-WWII elements bleed into the story (Film Noir detective stories are something I tend to associate more with the late 40s than the 20s and 30s - I guess given that we're actually in the 20s again I should specify the 1920s) pulp literature certainly did become really prominent in that era. And I think the Last War - not a decisive defeat of some great evil but a kind of grueling struggle that ended without any of the inciting causes truly resolved - does seem more akin to the First World War than the Second.

But the Warforged story is closely tied to that idea of the Last War. In Eberron, the entire race is only a little over twenty years old. No one has any idea how long a Warforged will life "naturally," because they've only been around a couple decades.

On top of that, as vestiges of a conflict that is now over, the reason they were created is no longer around, creating a serious lack of purpose. On top of that, their lack of physical needs has given others cause to hate them for being the cheap labor that displaces organic races.

All of this combines to make a really interesting story for Warforged characters in an Eberron-based campaign. But at the same time, it ties them very closely to Eberron as a setting.

Indeed, the very name of the race ties it to that backstory - they were created (forged) in order to wage war. Or even that they were created amidst a war.

Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse is a revision to many monsters and playable races in 5th Edition D&D. I was actually somewhat blown away by the number of races in the book - I believe it's about 30, which goes beyond simply reprinting the ones found in Volo's Guide to Monsters and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, but also adds those from Elemental Evil's Player's Companion, as well as a few others that are from adventure books (the Fairy and Harrengon from Wild Beyond the Witchlight, for instance) as well as some that are from campaign setting books - we're getting the Centaur, Minotaur, and Satyr, for example, which saw publication in the Ravnica and Theros books (only Theros for the Satyr). We actually aren't seeing the Vedalken, Loxodon, or Leonin. I have a suspicion that there's some complexity - whether legal or philosophical - about putting races that originated in Magic the Gathering being put in a setting-agnostic D&D book. (Centaurs, Minotaurs, and Satyrs of course all being directly pulled from Greek myth).

I don't know the precise legal status of Eberron as a setting - Keith Baker did release a book for 5th Edition that was not published by WotC, so he may retain some rights to the setting. I know that the Hickmans retain some ownership over the Dragonlance setting. Still, two races from Eberron - the Changeling and the Shifter - are being published in Monsters of the Multiverse. But I was kind of shocked to discover that Warforged are not. I was surprised by this because I think the Warforged are the most popular and iconic Eberron race.

Now, here's the massive caveat that I didn't even think of until I started writing this post: Monsters of the Mulitverse is forward-looking to the 2024 core book release, which will give us either 5.5th or 6th Edition D&D. Given the depth of the revisions to the races I've seen in the book, I think that WotC is going to be doing some pretty thorough work to revise the game for those 2024 books. And that could mean that the lineup of playable races in the Player's Handbook might change.

For example, the 4th Edition PHB did not have half-orcs or gnomes, but they did have eladrin as a whole separate race from elves. For those of us who started off in 5th Edition, the notion that dwarves, elves, humans, halflings, dragonborn, tieflings, half-elves, half-orcs, and gnomes are the be-all and end-all of "standard" races you'd find in the PHB, might seem really set in stone, but of course, it could change.

Thus, to conclude this caveat: it's possible the reason for the absence of Warforged in Monsters of the Multiverse might actually be that they're going to be in the next PHB.

But, let's assume they're not.

One thing that WotC seems to want to experiment with in the future is diversifying the creature types of playable races. Up until I believe Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, every playable race was considered humanoid. Then, Centaurs were given the Fey type (which is funny given that the Monster Manual describes them as Monstrosities). Fey, it seems, is a type they're comfortable giving to playable races. So we've seen this applied to the Satyr, Hexblood, and Fairy. We're also going to see Changelings in the new book given the Fey creature type as well.

Before the release of Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, the Uneathed Arcana for "Gothic Lineages" presented a bizarre proposal: hybrid creature types. Dhampir were both humanoid and undead. Reborn could be humanoid and either undead or constructs. And Hexbloods were humanoid and fey.

I think the reason for this was healing spells. Many of the spells in 5th Edition that can restore hit points to a creature specify that they cannot do so for constructs or undead creatures.

But, as it turned out, this solution probably caused more problems than it solved. First and foremost, the rules didn't act the way they seemed they should. After all, D&D is a modular "flag & check" system (I have no idea if that's a real game design term, but I'll explain.) A lot of labels in game - things like creature type or damage type - don't have any innate rules to them, but they create something that other things can check for. My fireball does 8d6 damage, and most of the time it doesn't matter that that's fire damage. But when I use it against that horde of scarecrows, who are vulnerable to fire, suddenly it matters quite a lot.

So, the first problem that this proposal created was that, you would think, if my Dhampir was both humanoid and undead, a spell like Cure Wounds that doesn't work on undead creatures, should simply check to see if my character is undead, which should come back yes, and then fail to work because of it. Instead, the intention was that it would see that, oh yes, in addition to being undead, I was also a not-undead creature type, and therefore that "humanoid half" was a valid target for the spell. It's... not elegant.

But on top of that, it also opened a whole can of worms. If hybrid creature types were possible, shouldn't we then go back through and change, like, a lot of them? Shouldn't Genasi be humanoid/elementals? Shouldn't tieflings be humanoid/fiends? And, of course, shouldn't Warforged be humanoid/constructs?

Obviously, being a humanoid if you might one day want to receive a healing spell is a big advantage over being a construct. And, on a philosophical level (bringing it back) the fact that Warforged are humanoids seems to strongly imply that yes, they are sentient, conscious beings with an inner life.

But perhaps we're looking at more adventurousness with playable races. In the "Travelers of the Multiverse" Unearthed Arcana, there are a number of eye-raising playable races that go beyond humanoids and fey alike. Plasmoids have the ooze creature type (in our new Spelljammer campaign, one of our party is a Plasmoid Rogue who's going Soul Knife so they don't have to carry any equipment and can thus make full use of their amorphous form). Thri-kreen are monstrosities (ironically, given that they're humanoids in the Monster Manual - another Centaur-like inconsistency, though even less expected.) 

And then we have Autognomes. Actually, this is particularly funny as someone who plays World of Warcraft, given that not long ago, Mecha-Gnomes were made a playable race in that. However, Autognomes are not cyborgs, but are in fact fully artificial beings constructed by gnomes. While they share some traits with Warforged, Autognomes are, in fact, fully constructs. They have a special feature that allows certain healing spells to work on them, but it's a pretty conservative list: just cure wounds, healing word, and spare the dying. This rider does help them out a lot, though I think only at low levels. By the time you get to tier 3 and 4, missing out on spells like Heal, Mass Heal, Power Word Heal, Healing Spirit (that one's even pretty low level) can be a real liability.

Frankly, I think that Warforged get the better deal out of this, even if their mechanical nature is rendered somewhat less strongly enforced.

Obviously, if Autognomes get officially published, we haven't seen what their final version will look like.

But I do think there are some interesting game design questions to be asked regarding artificial beings. I was actually a little disappointed that, for example, a Reborn character doesn't get to count as undead. In the case of creature types like Fey and Monstrosity, there aren't many spells or abilities that affect those specifically - in many ways, it's just an asset as you become immune to Hold Person, Charm Person, or Dominate Person. Perhaps the issue is not with the idea of having a player be Undead or a Construct, but just that the decision early on was made to make nearly every healing spell worthless to such creatures.

The concept of artificial people, I think, should not be limited to Eberron as a setting. It's a potent and really exciting concept that could work in a lot of settings. In my own homebrew world, rather than a maximum age of 20-something, given the development of the Creation Forges, instead the minimum age for Warforged is over 20,000, because the civilization that created them collapsed and the vast majority of them were locked away, unconscious, in hidden vaults during the intervening millennia. (This also lets me play with another of my favorite concepts: the Time Abyss. One of the Warforged-founded monasteries in my setting has a "statue" of its founder, who is, in fact, a Warforged who has remained in deep meditation for thousands of years.)

I think Warforged would work fantastically in the science-fantasy of Spelljammer. They could be inhabitants of Mechanus in Planescape. They could be (are?) beings built in the Age of Arcanum on Exandria, or could be relics of the Netherese civilization in the Forgotten Realms.

So, I guess fingers crossed that the reason they aren't in Monsters of the Multiverse is that they're getting an even bigger spotlight on them when the 2024 core rulebooks come out.

What We Want in 10.0

 With Shadowlands' final patch getting close to release, there's a lot of speculation on what might come next for WoW.

The game has seen a drop in subscribers and long delays, and after a decade and a half of seeing myriad other MMOs come about and touted as the "WoW-killer," we've actually seen Final Fantasy XIV finally overcome WoW in terms of subscribers. Internal issues at Blizzard might have something to do with this, but also a general sense of fatigue I think has set into the game. New ideas that didn't work out so well (ahem, Azerite Armor) and old systems that maybe don't feel as satisfying as they used to purely because players have been doing this for a long time.

2022 will see, after all, the 18th anniversary of WoW's launch, and if the typical expansion pattern holds, we'll be hitting 20 years of WoW at the end of the upcoming expansion. Blizzard has, wisely I think, chosen not to do a "WoW 2," but it does mean that a lot of old ideas are rattling around in the game.

The first few expansion introduced a kind of pattern of what I call "new character incentives." BC gave us two new races, and Wrath gave us a new class. Cataclysm brought an additional two races, and then Mists gave us both a new race and a new class. Warlords of Draenor then revamped the old Vanilla and BC races models, but didn't give us any new low-level content to play through. Legion gave us a new hero class that finished its starting experience fully caught up with existing characters, so players could jump in with a Demon Hunter main from the start (even getting to play them as soon as 7.0 dropped, without waiting for the expansion launch) unlike Death Knights, who still had to level up through Outland before joining up with the rest of the pack in Northrend. The end of Legion, mostly as a kind of early-access thing for BFA, introduced us to Allied Races, and we got an enormous infusion of playable races - ultimately by the end of BFA we had five new races per faction, though most of these were kind of "variants" on existing races, but with mechanical differences.

Shadowlands, like Warlords of Draenor, didn't give us any reason to start a new character.

And here I'm a bit mixed on my feelings. Early on in WoW's lifespan, I could never get enough of new races and new classes. But classes in particular require continual support for the rest of the game's lifespan. With Demon Hunters, I think the last of the really distinctive Azeroth-specific class archetypes got kind of covered (though I wouldn't mind finding a way to allow other races to be DHs).

In terms of races, I think it's not hard to add more to the game, but I do think you need to take some care to make these additions feel like they get a real stake in the world. You might really enjoy your Vulpera Rogue, but color me skeptical that we're going to get engaging Vulpera storylines moving forward in WoW.

The internal reshuffling of the WoW team and the exit of a lot of truly awful people has also led some to speculate that some of the, frankly, paternalistic attitude toward the game's design might also go with it. I'll always stand on my soapbox and wax nostalgic for the days in Wrath and Cataclysm when you could get seriously good gear by grinding out Emblems or Valor Points, and we might be seeing something like that in 9.2 with alternate methods of acquiring tier set pieces.

But my biggest hope for the game is to finally allow for cross-faction grouping. Given that shrunken population of the playerbase, it would help everyone to allow dungeons and raids to see players of each faction help one another out. I even think that it would be supported by the story - BFA was meant to be the "resolution" to the Alliance/Horde conflict, and I'd like to see that reflected. It doesn't mean all animosity has to be gone, but in an RPG, I'd like to have player characters get the option to opt out of the neverending cycle of hatred. Plenty of NPCs will set aside their differences to work with the other side in the story, so why must our characters be locked into deadly animosity?

Much as before the announcement of Shadowlands, the good money was on some kind of "death-themed" expansion, right now the speculation seems centered around finally going to the "Dragon Isles," which had originally been meant to be a part of Vanilla WoW as a kind of Old God-centric area, but would likely actually involve the dragons pretty significantly this go around.

One of the problems dragons have always had in the Warcraft universe as big scary monsters is actually that most of them are good guys. Dragons were uplifted by the Titans (in a vague way) to serve as guardians of the world, and so whenever we get bad dragons to fight, they sort of have to have this kind of exception to them. The Black Dragons were corrupted by the Old Gods, but the other four flights were basically good except for when, say, Malygos got overzealous in his policing of magic, or when Green Dragons were overcome with the Nightmare (so, corrupted by Old Gods) or the Infinite Dragonflight came back in time to undo what they had done when they were Bronze Dragons (once again, corrupted by Old Gods).

Now, we do have all those excuses, but I think dragon lore in Warcraft is an area that could really benefit from some fleshing out and expansion.

It's probably pretty likely we're going to get an announcement soon. In normal years, we'd already know as of last fall.

Stunning Strike and the Monk

 Yesterday, I did a bit of napkin math to see, roughly, how a Monk versus a Barbarian would do damage-wise under sort of controlled circumstances. This ignored all subclass features, and assumed that each character began with a +3 to their primary attack stat (Strength for Barbarian, Dexterity for Monk). It also assumed what I thought was a reasonable "boss level" Armor Class, with 16 for tier 1, 18 for tier 2, 20 for tier 3, and 22 for tier 4, and calculated it as if they were at the last level of each tier - 4, 10, 16, and 20. I also had each get a magic weapon starting with tier 2 - a +1 Greataxe or Quarterstaff, then +2 at tier 3, and +3 at tier 4.

I calculated the average damage that each class should do going all-out - the Barbarian was raging (though not, admittedly, doing reckless attacks) while the Monk was doing Flurry of Blows each turn.

In the end, the Monk kept ahead of the Barbarian until level 20, when the Primal Champion feature boosted both damage and the chance to hit enough that it overwhelmed the extra damage of the Monk's unarmed strikes.

This is a narrow and somewhat contrived situation of course, with a lot of unexplored factors.

Perhaps the biggest of those factors is Stunning Strike.

Stunning Strike is a potentially devastating ability - if you stun a monster, they get taken out of commission for an entire round, and during that time, the party will be significantly more likely to rain down heavy damage upon that target, meaning there's a good chance it'll be taken out before it gets its next turn.

However, there are a couple mitigating factors that undercut the ability.

The first is that the DC is set by Wisdom, rather than Dexterity. While a Monk that starts off with the Standard Array could get their Wisdom maxed out eventually, chances are they are unlikely to boost Wisdom at the same rate that, say, a Wizard would do with Intelligence. So their DC is unlikely to be quite as high as a caster's would.

On top of that, Constitution, as far as saving throws go, is a tough one. In all of (officially published) 5th Edition, only 38 stat blocks have a negative Constitution modifier, and only one of them, the Eidolon, is of a CR above 2. And 5 of those are immune to the stunned condition anyway.

So, while a Warlock might pick something like Synaptic Static, which requires an Intelligence save, against any number of monstrosities, beasts, or other monsters that aren't terribly bright, Monks aren't going to have a ton of monsters that are easy to stun.

Now, here's a question to consider: what is the unique thing that a Monk brings to a party? Stunning Strike is probably it. In terms of melee damage dealers, certainly Monks can hit many times, but they generally hit for less than other melee classes, and on top of that, they often have fewer hit points due to being a d8 class.

I will note that perfect balance is not something I think is quite as important in D&D as it is in a game like World of Warcraft. It's also a game where the sample size is small enough that any really tight balance tuning would get lost in the noise of big swings like critical hits. And I think that the Monk primarily exists to allow a player to feel like they're really getting that fantasy about the expert martial artist - someone who can fight monsters effectively with nothing but a stick - and even without the stick, if they lose it.

I do wonder, though, about the effect Stunning Strike might have on the balance decisions for a Monk.

As I see it, the Fighter's big strategy for dealing lots of damage is to hit many times - this is why they get action surge and their extra attack eventually gives them four attacks.

But a Fighter is also generally hitting with heavier weapons, and their subclass features often boost the damage in some way - such as through the Rune Knight's runes, or a Battle Master's maneuvers.

Monks actually get the ability to unleash a ton of attacks pretty early on - indeed, by level 2, they can do three attacks in a round (albeit only twice per short rest).

To me, I think the most glaring issue with the Monk is its lack of "scaling" with magic items. It's not that it doesn't have any - the attack action itself can use any magic weapon the class can access. And so, like most martial classes, you get two attacks you can do with a magic weapon. The unarmed strike or strikes that follow are technically just gravy.

But it seems to me that an obvious magic item that we have somehow not yet seen in 5th Edition is one that would increase the attack and damage bonuses to unarmed strikes. Such a thing would give players the option to fully forgo their melee weapons once their martial arts die got high enough, and it would also make the class feel somewhat less disjointed.

In Fizban's Treasury of Dragons, we got the first (I believe) magic item that is designed specifically for Monks, the Dragonhide Belt. However, this boosts the other half of the Monk's toolbox - namely, it increases their Ki saving throw DC. This, of course, makes it more likely that a foe will fail their Stunning Strike save.

And again, Stunning Strike is a hugely powerful ability when it goes off. But I wonder if the Monk would be allowed to get crazier as a damage-dealing option if the focus of the class were moved away from that.

How do you fix it?

So, what we're proposing here is nerfing Stunning Strike in some way with the intention of then improving the Monk's damage-dealing capabilities - none of this nerf would go into effect if there weren't a buff.

The first thing that came to mind was simply making Stunning Strike come later - perhaps even as a level 11 ability (currently it's level 5). This would mean that in adventures that only go up through tier 2, you wouldn't get the ability. This is, to be honest, somewhat harsh, and it might discourage players from actually picking up the Monk if they have to wait that long to get such an iconic ability.

The next thing I'd considered was making Stunning Strike cost 2 ki points instead of 1. This would mean you'd have to be a lot more conservative with the ability - higher risk for the same reward. Ideally, the design would then create more 1-ki options that are attractive. For example, the Way of Mercy's Hands of Harm is actually a more efficient use of ki points than Flurry of Blows until you hit level 6 and get a free one when you use Flurry of Blows. Stunning Strike is huge, but maybe the designers could explore other options that might seem more appealing.

The final proposal here is to simply limit how many Stunning Strikes you can do to one per turn. In this case, a Monk would likely attempt one any turn they hit, but they would naturally be forced to save more Ki, which they could then spend on damaging abilities.

Alternatively, if Stunning Strike is to be the major defining feature of the class, perhaps there needs to be more built into it. Indeed, perhaps the Monk could be the "debilitator," with many abilities that disempower their foes. Stunning might just be the most dramatic of these, but maybe the kind of trips and shoves that an Open Hand Monk can do should be available to the class as a whole.

If this is where they would take the class, I'd suggest that there need to be some things that either use different saving throws or perhaps activate automatically on a hit - you could spend a ki point when you hit a target and they have disadvantage on their next attack, for example.

Stunning Strike is such an enormous all-or-nothing ability that it's hard to make it feel good to use without it feeling too insanely powerful. The DM wants to use their monsters, but the Monk wants to feel like they've done something cool. So there could be some compromise.

The thing is, I find playing a Monk very fun. But while super-tight balance tuning isn't necessarily that important in D&D, I think there is always that potential for frustration if you pick a really cool class and it just... doesn't quite perform as well as you thought it would.

Monks absolutely fit a major fantasy archetype (and one that isn't Western-centric, though admittedly a lot of the concepts here are filtered through a Western lens,) and I think it's great that they're in the Player's Handbook. But I'm very eager to see the kind of changes Wizards have in mind when they come out with the 2024 PHB.

The Future of the Artificer

 Well, I'm trying not to jinx it after we had to cancel the last two weeks, but we should (should) be starting our Spelljammer campaign this Sunday, in which I'll finally be able to play my Armorer Artificer (well, he probably won't be an armorer for a little while - especially since we're starting at level 1 and using XP instead of milestone leveling).

I am, of course, kind of obsessed with the Artificer as a class. I've always liked elements in fantasy games that bleed a little sci-fi into the story, and while you can certainly play an Artificer in a purely magical, rather than technological, way, I like to put robots and laser guns next to dragons and liches.

The Artificer has a strong identity as a class, even from a mechanical perspective, but despite having such a strong central concept, its subclasses also have a huge impact on the class.

Artificers came in as the third half-caster class, more slowly progressing as a spellcaster and only ever capping out at 5th level spells - something that pure casters will be able to get (just) before they even hit level 10. In practice, this places severe limitations on their ability to rely on spellcasting as their primary means of doing business.

While I encourage people to run campaigns at least up through tier 3, a lot of published adventures end around level 10 - Curse of Strahd does, and I believe Tomb of Annihilation ends at level 11, which is the first level of tier 3.

At level 10, a half-caster only has up to 3rd level spells, and the total number of spell slots they get is 9. By contrast, a level 10 pure caster has 5th level spells, but also their total spell slots is 15. If a typical combat encounter lasts 3 rounds and you have, say, four encounters per adventuring day, that means that by this level a pure caster can cast a spell every turn, while a half-caster is going to need to conserve at least a little (this of course ignores out-of-combat situations).

Now, the thing is, the previous existing half-casters, Paladins and Rangers, have a much more obvious "typical action" on their turns - they attack with a weapon. The spells are supplementary, either using Warlock-like efficiency (Hunter's Mark and Hex are very similar, for instance,) or they give you a few emergency buttons. Paladins even have an alternate way to spend spell slots that ties into their weapon attacks, rather than casting spells.

Again, as I said before, Artificer subclasses have a huge impact on the way they play. In the case of the Battle Smith and the Armorer, they replicate this kind of gameplay that the Paladin and Ranger use - focusing primarily on attacking with weapons (in the case of the Armorer, it's their built-in armor weapons) while their spells are situational. But the Artillerist and the Alchemist don't - they're built to rely on spellcasting as their primary function in combat.

In a certain way, this actually makes them a little like Warlocks. Warlocks are full casters in the sense that they get a new spell level every other class level up to 17, and keep pace with Sorcerers and Wizards in terms of the power of their spells, but their tiny number of spell slots encourages them to focus on things like Eldritch Blast as their primary action in combat.

Alchemists and Artillerists almost split the difference. Each gets a bonus at level 5 that allows them to add damage to their spells. In the case of the Alchemist, they add their Intelligence modifier to any spell that deals acid, fire, necrotic, or poison damage, as well as any that restores hit points. Artillerists can make an Arcane Firearm out of a staff, wand, or rod, and when they use that as their spellcasting focus, they get to add a d8 to one damage roll of any spell cast through it. (I've allowed the artificer in my campaign to use their +2 All-Purpose Tool for this).

These affect any spell, but that includes cantrips, so even if they aren't spending spell slots, they get a nice little bonus to their damage output in this way.

Indeed, there are two distinctions Artificers have from other half-casters - one is that they get cantrips, and the other is that they get them at level 1, rather than level 2.

I have high hopes that the Artificer will continue to thrive in D&D - I'm hoping they get printed in the 2024 Player's Handbook, which would allow the game's designers to more easily print supplementary material in future books (I think it might also put them under the open game license, which would encourage 3rd party designers to tinker with the class).

But I was thinking about how this division - between two "martial" subclasses and two caster subclasses - might continue with future Artificer design. It's my hope that we see a balance maintained here, allowing new Artificers to go in either direction.

One thing that's interesting about the class is that they get an optional firearm proficiency if the campaign uses such weapons. But of the subclasses, only one is likely to actually use them, namely the Battle Smith. Alchemists and Artillerists don't really have any support, mechanically, to use weapons, and while an Armorer's extra attack applies to any weapon attacks, the fact that only their built-in weapons get to use Intelligence as the attacking stat means that unless they rolled very high at character creation, they're going to probably be better off sticking with the Lightning Launcher.

Firearms are, of course, tricky, both in terms of tone and theme. In the real world, for instance, I don't intend to ever own a gun, and I think that America's gun culture is profoundly screwed up. But I also think that if we're in a world where our adventurers are already outfitting themselves with armor, weapons, and spells that can cause serious destruction, I don't see any issue with that type of person - an adventurer - outfitting themselves with the most effective armaments available to them. That's the thematic concern.

Tonally, of course, a lot of people prefer that their fantasy world remain in a pseudo-medieval technological level. And, arguably, one of the biggest elements of what makes something pseudo-medieval is that people don't have guns. Guns, of course, are disruptive to the world of military technologies. Before them, a rich noble who could afford a full set of plate armor was far less likely to get wounded in battle - it could deflect the spears and other simple weapons that the rank-and-file members of the opposing army could throw at them. Firearms made such armor obsolete, as a bullet at high speeds can punch right through that sort of armor (to be fair, longbows could as well, but while you needed to be extremely strong and well-trained to effectively fire a longbow, a gun has a simple "point and click" interface, to borrow a joke form Futurama).

The point is, some people feel that the presence of firearms breaks the fantasy world that D&D takes place within. As I've said many times on this blog, I disagree, because I think there's nothing inherent to the concept of fantasy that requires it to take place in a medieval setting.

Actually, the more fundamental point is that I think an Artificer subclass that revolves around using firearms would be really cool. I actually homebrewed one (that has never been playtested and probably needs some math passes). Because Artificers are crafters, the focus on the subclass is largely making special ammunition, which has different effects depending on which kind you make. I also built in that concept because one of the trickiest issues for firearm-wielders in a D&D setting is that, if it is a pseduo-medieval one, you might not be able to buy bullets at the general store the same way an archer buys arrows.

This could be a good niche for a new "martial" subclass. The Battle Smith, of course, can work perfectly fine as a gunslinger, but I think it would be nice to give players an option that allows them to function without a pet.

Now, in terms of spellcasting-focused Artificers:

The Alchemist and the Artillerist cover some big bases - the Alchemist has a lot of tools to make them a fairly effective healer, despite being only a half-caster. The Artillerist is one of the premiere single-target ranged damage dealers (though with Fireball, they are also by default not bad at area-of-effect damage). But spellcasting is a very diverse asset for classes in D&D.

My first instinct, because I'm a secret goth, is to go full Frankenstein. I actually started trying to come up with a homebrew subclass called the Necroticist, though I didn't really have any strong ideas mechanically. This would actually be another pet subclass, and I found it hard to come up with mechanics that were distinct from the Battle Smith - though at the least I think this would focus more on spells than weapons. Just about any Artificer can play the mad scientist trope, but I think that giving them some necromancy spells might be a fun way to get some of that Frankenstein vibe in there. I imagine a lot of lightning damage, as well.

It's a little harder for me to conceptualize it, but I feel that Artificers could have a subclass that is built around vehicles. My sort of "rule" with D&D campaigns as a DM is to always make sure that the party gets access to an airship at some point, perhaps as a reference to Final Fantasy. Now, of course, having all your features tied to some enormous ship would create some issues when you're down in some deep dungeon. Instead, I might focus on mobility - maybe have some subclass that is built around having a sort of jetpack-like device, which would improve their mobility and then could enhance spells or attacks. Yeah, this one needs work.

Moving on from subclasses, though:

There are two major avenues that are obvious places to expand the Artificer beyond subclasses.

The first is Arcane Infusions. Obviously, there are already a lot of options here thanks to Replicate Magical Item. It might be fun, though, to create more artificer-exclusive ones like the Mind Sharpener. I don't have any really strong ideas for this, but it's a place they could add things.

Actually, on the subject of infusions: in the class description, infusions are treated as "prototypes for magic items." I think the Artificer class as a whole would benefit a lot from robust rules about creating magic items in either the PHB or the DMG. I'd love to say that artificers can also make permanent versions of any artificer infusion they know without needing to find a special formula for them - if such rules are implemented in the core books.

The other major avenue for expanding the class is spells!

The Artificer does not have any exclusive spells - everything they can cast is from some other class' spell list. As a new class, I understand this, as it's already a lot of stuff to implement. But I would hope that if the class is published in a new PHB, we might get some Artificer-exclusive spells. I'd love to see some more lightning-focused damage spells, and perhaps spells that can take control of objects or vehicles. One thing this would also allow WotC to do is bend the power level of spells - maybe that 5th level spell is too powerful for a Wizard to get at level 9, but it's the right kind of high-level showstopper for an Artificer to get at level 17, so by making it exclusive to the class, you create a kind of valve on its power - similar to Banishing Smite for Paladins (yes, Hexblades can pick that up at level 9, but that was a later decision).

I don't actually have a great sense of how popular the class is - I haven't played Adventurer's League since it became AL-legal, for instance - but I believe it's a mechanically solid class that deserves to be one of the core options for the game moving forward.

Evaluating the Fighting Styles

 Fighting Style is a class feature that Fighters, Paladins, and Rangers get (as well as some subclasses, such as College of Swords Bards). The idea behind the feature is to have people who pick these classes pick a kind of weapon loadout that will be their standard in combat, though we have seen some less conventional styles pop up in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything.

Naturally, some of these will empower you do do very different things, and the role you play in a group could be largely determined by your choice of fighting style.

Fighters, being the most martial of the martial classes, get the most fighting style options. But Paladins and Rangers also have some that are unique to themselves.

Let's get a rough sense of the benefit you're likely to get from these fighting styles!

Fighters:

Archery:

This fighting style gives you a +2 bonus to attack rolls made with ranged weapons. This is actually one of the really big commitments for a Fighter, given that if you want to commit to it, you're going to have to go with a Dexterity build. But the reward here is pretty significant, as you'll be hitting targets more consistently. How that translates to actual damage is a little fuzzier, math-wise, but you're basically pushing down the maximum roll you can make and still fail to hit. Consider that with the standard array and giving yourself a boost to Dexterity with your "racial" bonus (which isn't really a racial bonus as of the Tasha's rules) you'll have a +7 to hit at level 1, which puts a foe in plate armor at only having a 50% chance for you to miss them. This is a default choice for any ranged fighter, also in part because the other ones are unlikely to be very significant. But it's still good.

Blind Fighting (Tasha's):

This gives you blindsight out to 10 feet. While the range here is very low (and thus not as useful for a ranged character,) this totally bypasses magical and nonmagical darkness, and lets your Devil's Sight/Darkness combo-ing Warlock drop darkness on top of you and give you all the benefits they're enjoying. It's niche and situational, but potentially really powerful.

Defense:

This simply gives you a +1 to AC while you're in armor. My Eldritch Knight has this, as his strategy is generally to make his AC high as possible and then cast Shield in the rare cases where something actually hits him. The 1 AC is a marginal upgrade, but it does make you slightly harder to hit, and these things add up. Still, it's a 1 in 20 chance that this AC bump will be the thing that makes the difference, so that's something to consider.

Dueling:

This adds +2 to damage rolls when you hit with a one-handed melee weapon and don't have a weapon in the off-hand. You can still benefit from this with a shield. This is a solid choice for getting a little more damage out of a sword-and-board build. It also, interestingly, makes two-handing a versatile weapon actually worse than just using a single hand (1d8+2 has a higher average damage than 1d10, even if they both max out at the same amount. It's kind of like a d10 where you can never roll below a 3).

Great Weapon Fighting:

This one can feel very satisfying, as you get to reroll those pesky 1s and 2s (on the initial roll - afterward you have to just take the result on any rerolled die), though WotC has been careful to clarify that this only applies to the weapon damage, and not bonus damage like Divine Smites (which I did not originally realize). The average roll for a d6 is 3.5, but when you re-roll 1s and 2s, calculating the average damage essentially replaces rolls of 1 and 2 with that 3.5, so you get an average of the set of 3.5, 3.5, 3, 4, 5, and 6, which comes out to 4 1/6. So, if you're using a Maul or a Greatsword, your attacks are going to hit for 8 1/3 instead of 7, which is a modest but reasonable boost. This is one that might be more about feeling better than actually being better, but it will definitely increase the damage you deal.

Interception (Tasha's)

When a creature you can see hits a target other than you within 5 feet of you with an attack, you can use your reaction to reduce the damage the target takes by 1d10 plus your proficiency bonus, as long as you are wielding a shield or simple or martial weapon at the time. So, the average damage reduction here goes from 7.5 to 11.5 as your PB goes up. In early levels this will likely often fully negate a strike, though as you fight monsters that hit harder, it might degrade in potency. Still, damage reduction is a bit like healing, though this does cost you a reaction.

Protection:

When a creature you can see attacks a target other than you within 5 feet of you, you can use your reaction to impose disadvantage on the attack roll, but only if you're wielding a shield. The math around advantage and disadvantage can get quite complicated. Unlike Interception, this might do absolutely nothing (Interception has a minimum damage reduction) though potentially, this could fully negate a very heavy strike that Interception could never fully negate. If you're worried about crits, this will make it very unlikely your friends get them. But again, it's your reaction.

Superior Technique (Tasha's):

You learn a Battle Master maneuver and gain one d6 superiority die that recharges on short or long rests. While the Battle Master is clearly a very successful design, I'm skeptical that a single maneuver per rest is worth a fighting style. The rest of these are kind of persistent effects that at most take up a reaction, and many are just always on.

Thrown Weapon Fighting (Tasha's):

You can draw a weapon that has the thrown property as part of the attack you make with the weapon (this gets around limited item interactions per turn) and, when you hit with a ranged attack using at thrown weapon, you add +2 to the damage roll. This will actually let you keep up in damage with someone wielding a longbow, similar to how Dueling bests a versatile weapon wielded with two hands. Indeed, a handaxe, which deals 1d6 damage, will be doing 1d6+2 (plus whatever) for an average of 5.5 damage, compared to a longbow's 1d8, which is 4.5. My only issue here is that thrown weapons have the pesky problem of needing to be retrieved (yes, someone with a bow needs a supply of arrows, but carrying forty arrows around is easier than carrying forty handaxes). If you have an artificer friend who can give you Returning Weapon or some similar way to never run out, this could make you fairly effective with thrown weapons - though you'll also never have the range of a dedicated archer. I feel like this one is almost there, but not quite.

Two-Weapon Fighting:

The style for dual-wielding. This lets you add your appropriate ability modifier to the damage of a bonus action off-hand strike. Ultimately this means adding a maximum of 5 damage per turn (unless you get some ability that lets you boost your Strength or Dexterity beyond 20,) though to be fair, that's actually not far off from some of the other fighting styles. This will peak when you can max out your primary stat, though it'll fall behind when you, as a Fighter, start to get more than two attacks per action.

Unarmed Fighting (Tasha's):

Your unarmed strikes deal bludgeoning damage equal to 1d6 + your Strength modifier on a hit, and if you aren't wielding any weapons or a shield when you make the attack roll, the d6 becomes a d8. At the start of each of your turns, you can deal 1d4 bludgeoning damage to one creature grappled by you. This one's pretty weird - your fist can become as powerful as a quarterstaff, effectively. But... you'll probably just want to have a weapon instead. The grappling thing is interesting - you get some free damage when you do that, but not a ton. I'd say this is a good option for multiclassing monks, though its biggest benefit becomes moot if you hit 11 Monk levels - and it does specify Strength as the damage modifier, so I'm not sure you'd even be able to boost to d8s and still use Dexterity.

And that's all the Fighter Fighting Styles. Let's look at Paladins:

Paladins: 

Blessed Warrior (Tasha's):

You learn two cantrips from the Cleric spell list, and they count as paladin spells for you, using Charisma as the spellcasting ability. When you gain a level in this class, you can replace these cantrips with another cantrip from the cleric spell list. Clerics have a shockingly small number of cantrips to choose from. While you might consider just picking up ranged damage options like Sacred Flame or Toll the Dead, this might be an opportunity to pick up some useful out-of-combat ones like Guidance or Mending. Admittedly that makes it someone less of a "fighting" style, but if you want a little more reliable spellcasting, this is a possibility.

Blind Fighting (Tasha's):

Like with the Fighter, this is a niche option, but also potentially very powerful int he right situation.

Defense:

Paladins can work pretty well as tanks, just like Fighters, with heavy armor and shields, and this can reinforce this.

Dueling:

Things like Improved Divine Smite actually slightly dilute the value of fighting with a two-handed weapon as a Paladin, so if you want to go sword-and-board but still push your damage output, this is a great option.

Great Weapon Fighting:

While RAI excludes this effect from Divine Smite and other bonus damage, RAW this will make each d8 you roll give an average of 5.25 instead of 4.5, and so this could potentially be a noticeable boost to Paladins' big burst damage (until WotC publishes more strongly-worded errata).

Interception (Tasha's):

See my analysis in the Fighter section.

Protection:

See my analysis in the Fighter section.

That's it for Paladins - while it makes sense that there's no support for ranged paladins given the way that Divine Smite requires a melee weapon, it's interesting that there's none for dual-wielding. Even without two-weapon fighting, there are some builds that go for dual-wielding anyway thanks to the extra damage granted through Improved Divine Smite, as well as just having another chance for a critical hit in which to pump a Divine Smite. But now, onto Rangers:

Rangers:

Archery: 

Again, this is a pretty nice boost to their ranged capabilities, which for Rangers is actually the assumed role, even if both Rangers and Fighters can, in theory, both be built for melee and ranged play. I like this one - it's simply and makes it less likely for you to miss, which is always frustrating.

Blind Fighting (Tasha's): 

The 10-ft range for a Ranger here is a bit less likely to be useful, given that most Rangers are, oddly enough, fighting at range. Still, if you're a melee Ranger, this could be useful (if we ever pick up my Tomb of Annihilation game again, I've been thinking of multiclassing into Fighter to take this along with two-weapon fighting on my Gloomstalker).

Defense:

While Rangers can use shields and have a d10 hit die, they aren't usually considered as viable as tanks as Fighters and Paladins are, due in part to the fact that they don't have access to heavy armor. This will turn your half-plate into plate, effectively, but I find this a little less attractive, especially if you're going ranged.

Druidic Warrior (Tasha's):

This works similarly to the Paladin's Blessed Warrior, but in this case, Rangers can get two Druid cantrips. Now, Druids have one special cantrip that can really transform your Ranger's entire build priority: Shillelagh. With this one cantrip, you can only worry about getting your Dexterity to 14 and then toss everything into Wisdom. If you pick a subclass that then focuses on your spell attack modifier, such as the redesigned Beastmaster, this will let you max out your Wisdom to use with your attacks, your pet's attacks, and your spells. So, if you don't mind being a melee ranger, this is a real option. (The one fiddly complexity is that in theory you need your club or staff in one hand and some other components or a druidic spell focus in the other to cast this bonus action spell, which might give really strict DMs a reason to keep you from using a shield. But this could really be a game-changer, either way.

Dueling:

I guess this is fine, though if you're going to be using something like Hunter's Mark, you want to maximize your attacks per turn, and will probably prefer to dual-wield.

Thrown Weapon Fighting:

I think this is basically the same as what I said in the Fighter section.

Two-Weapon Fighting:

Now, this I think actually winds up being a little more significant for Rangers than it does for Fighters. Because Fighters eventually get more than two attacks, things like Dueling can start to outpace this in damage contribution (while yes, hitting with a whole other weapon as a bonus action can then tilt things in favor of this technique in terms of damage, someone with Dueling also benefits from having a shield).

And that's all of them.

What I find interesting is how different Druidic and Blessed Warriors wind up being primarily due to the existence of one spell. Shillelagh can effectively make a Ranger play more like a Battle Smith or Armorer Artificer, turning their spellcasting ability into their primary score, while there's nothing there for Paladins (they're more likely to put at least one level into Hexblade Warlock to get that sort of effect).

I do think the design here is primarily meant to be conservative. I also might be more down on Protection and Interception than they deserve - it could be a pretty big deal that these each basically give you a whole new class feature, as opposed to a marginal damage boost.

I do generally think that for any ranged option, Archery is probably unassailable. And honestly, just being able to hit more often means you're going to have more fun playing your character

The Expanse and Starting Hot

 Matt Colville has a video on the "hot start," a way to start off a D&D adventure or campaign that throws the players into the action right away. His first example has the players starting right before the stairs down into the final level of a published dungeon, with an immediate crisis to resolve.

I was thinking about this and how it relates to a TV show that I love, and that just ended after its sixth season: The Expanse.

Now, The Expanse is a science fiction story, but it shares a lot of DNA with tabletop RPGs - in fact, the show was based on a series of novels that began its life as a tabletop RPG, and the writers initially wanted to pitch it as an MMORPG before they chose instead to write it as novels.

The story is a hard sci-fi story about a future in which humanity has colonized the solar system but then divided into factions - Earth is governed by the U.N. as a western-style social democracy with a number of powerful corporations, Mars is a somewhat democratic but highly militaristic society that blames Earth's aggression for their delayed efforts in terraforming the planet to make it habitable outside of sealed dome-cities, and "the Belt," which represents the people who inhabit the asteroid belt and stations on the outer planets, which has no official legal authority and struggles under the colonial control of Earth and Mars.

Technically speaking, the "party" as it were, doesn't really get a "hot start," as we do get some scenes establishing their initial life aboard the Canterbury, a commercial ice-hauler that brings water from icy moons around Jupiter and Saturn back to Ceres Station, the biggest port/city in the Belt.

But things get really, really crazy by the end of the first episode. A small group from the "Cant" takes a shuttle to check out a distress signal coming from a ship on their route, only for a mysterious stealth military ship to emerge and destroy the Canterbury while they're away, setting up a crisis of survival in which this small group needs to survive the damage to their shuttle, being taken prisoner by the Martian flagship, and then escaping said flagship when more of those mysterious stealth ships come to attack the Martians.

It's in their escape from the Martian's ship, the Donnager, that the main characters, James, Naomi, Amos, and Alex, get their hands on a prototype Martian gunship, which they re-christen the Rocinante, and which becomes their ship for the rest of the series.

This establishes the status quo of the series - that these four people (two Earthers, a Martian, and a Belter) have an awesome ship that they go around on, effectively doing quests to fight evil and protect the solar system. Indeed, in true RPG fashion, they start off as nobodies, but by about halfway through the series, they're famous system-wide as a powerful independent force for good.

What I think is really interesting about the way the series starts, though, is that the kind of climactic, explosive action you'd usually expect to have to build toward for a season finale is actually where things start.

I think this is a really cool approach you can take to a D&D campaign, too.

Essentially, I think that a lot of campaigns start off this way: a group of adventurers meet in a tavern, and they start taking kind of generic bounties - there are goblins in the forest attacking travelers, and the local authority wants them taken out. Maybe the blacksmith's daughter is taken by kobolds to the nearby abandoned mine.

This kind of typical low-level adventure can be very useful in terms of game mechanics, given that 1st level characters are very squishy, and there's a fairly small number of monsters you can throw at them without risking killing a PC with a single critical hit.

Still, I think you hook people more easily by putting them into a serious crisis - without making the encounters overpowered.

The way I think you can do this is by imagining the party as being on a soundstage with a big green screen around them. What they can interact with exists on the stage itself, but what you fill in with that green screen can be something enormous.

Huge battles in D&D don't really work that well if you try to run them conventionally - if you have ten thousand orcs attacking a city with a garrison of five thousand guards, there's no way you're going to go through the whole initiative order with every single one of those creatures. The way you run that is that you have the party fight through vignettes as discrete combat encounters, while the clashing armies are off "in the background."

This frees you up, though, to have crazy, high-level stuff happening out there.

Let's say your big bad is a powerful spellcaster - a lich, or even just a really powerful wizard. Perhaps you start off with the campaign as if it's going to be conventional - the party starts in the capital city of a major kingdom. They're looking for the usual bounty postings and odd jobs. But then, something strange happens - the clouds part suddenly. The party looks up and sees four blazing meteors plummeting toward the city. They watch as one of them strikes the royal palace, destroying it, and then they see another strike much closer - perhaps two blocks down the street, obliterating a small market and all the innocent people who just happened to be there.

It becomes clear that this is the opening salvo of an assault on the city, and the party's objective becomes clear: survive this battle. Surviving the big bad's meteor swarm spell looks like it was a matter of luck - just not being in one of the spots the big bad targeted - though of course it's because the DM isn't actually trying to kill them yet. What dangers the party encounters at this point will be level-appropriate. The lich might send his Death Knight minion in to lead the charge as they break down the front gates of the city, and the party might see this horrible undead knight slaughtering any soldiers who stand in her way, but the party is separated from that fight, and instead is facing off against the skeletons or zombies or mercenaries that make up the bulk of this invading force.

So, the party fights off some level-appropriate bad-guys, but in the meantime, they're ducking out of the way as a dracolich strafes the city walls with a blast of poison. The party experiences the energy of a high-level encounter even as they're playing through level-appropriate content.

And this then sets up very clear stakes for the campaign - the party will have a world where the established order has been overturned, and depending on how you want to run it, you might have them dealing with desperate survivors turning on each other or perhaps a more optimistic campaign to rally the forces of good and turn back this vile threat.

Basically, there's no reason you can't start things off epic in scope, even when the players aren't ready to be major players in such a plot.

Subclasses of Tal'Dorei

 Tal'dorei Campaign Setting Reborn is a new release from Darrington Press, the games publisher wing of Critical Role. While not an official WotC release like Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, this book shares a very similar structure, exploring the continent that served as the primary setting for CR's first campaign with the adventures of Vox Machina.

This is sort of a sequel to the older, and I believe out-of-print Tal'dorei Campaign Setting book that released a few years ago, around the beginning of campaign two, providing updates for the setting twenty years after the events of campaign one. Among other things, it tells the fate of the members of Vox Machina, including stat blocks for every member - whatever form or plane they happen to be in at this time.

In addition to details about the world and its people, Tal'dorei brings nine subclasses (some of which I believe were published in the original version,) including the Way of the Cobalt Soul Monk (a.k.a. Beau's subclass from campaign two) and the Oath of the Open Seas (Fjord's paladin subclass from campaign two).

I don't want to go into minute detail given that this is a 3rd party book that just came out, but I having read through the subclasses, I have a basic gist of them, and overall I think that they're generally pretty decent - I haven't given any of them a really thorough read, to be clear, but I think it looks like there was some care given in the design to make the features feel powerful and interesting.

Barbarians get Path of the Juggernaut. The general vibe of this subclass is that you can really knock your enemies about, with a lot of forced movement. You can even eventually kind of pinball a foe toward one of your allies and give them a chance to make an attack as the enemy gets pushed toward them. There's also a feature here that is sort of the opposite of Reckless Attack, letting you take disadvantage on your attacks to give foes disadvantage on theirs, which seems solid for when you're surrounded by foes.

Bards get the College of Tragedy, which might be my favorite in terms of flavor. Essentially, this class is all about turning failure into a benefit for yourself - it softens the blow when allies roll natural 1s and when foes get off critical hits, with these events fueling your subclass features.

Clerics get two domains: Moon Domain and Blood Domain. Moon domain I think does have a slight overlap thematically with Twilight Domain. Blood Domain plays into a larger theme of Hemocraft (another kind of special magic, like Dunamancy in Wildemount, though tied less to specific spells) where you can more effectively exsanguinate foes and spend some of your own health to empower abilities.

Druids have Circle of Blight, which gives you another "dark" druid subclass, and honestly works really well for a concept I had for a Circle of Spores druid I'd come up with a while ago. This lets you defile the land around you and create blights as combat pets.

Monks, of course, get Way of the Cobalt Soul, which you could see being effectively playtested over the course of Campaign Two, and thus a lot of this will be fairly familiar - you use your abilities to draw forth information from your foes and have the ability to gain multiple reactions.

Paladins get Oath of the Open Sea, which we saw a little of in Campaign Two (though I think Fjord only ever took three levels of Paladin, sticking with Warlock for the rest). There's a strong emphasis on freedom here - including two new spells (which are also oath spells) that emphasize that sense of freedom and mobility.

Sorcerers get the Runechild, which gives you various runes that are activated when you spend sorcery points, and can be used for various abilities - essentially extending the life of your sorcery point resource.

Finally, Wizards get Hemocraft. This lets you spend HP to enhance the power of your spells (while also getting some survival buffs to compensate).

I'm always excited for new subclass options, but I'm often sort of skeptical about 3rd party sources. However, from my first cursory glance at these, none of these subclasses are bogged down in useless features, and I suspect some might be quite powerful.

Once I do more thorough review of them, I might start allowing them in campaigns I run.

Monsters of the Multiverse Comes Out Independently May 17

 Mordenkainen Presents Monsters of the Multiverse is the revision/conglomeration of the content found in Volo's Guide to Monsters and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, along with a couple other things, being packaged in the Rules Expansion Gift Set that comes out this month.

Given that the other two books in said set are previously-published books, those of us who have been keeping up in our 5th Edition collections are unlikely to want to drop the cash to buy this three-book set.

Now, there's an interesting question to be asked: if you have the existing monster books, is Monsters of the Multiverse worth getting?

That's obviously a matter of opinion, but I think that there's an argument to be made for it: what I've seen of the playable races in the book (all previously published in Volo's and Mordenkainen's as well as some things found in Eberron, as well as the Elemental Evil Player's Companion and other supplements,) there's been enough significant revision to some of these to make them mechanically quite different. Even beyond implementing the Tasha's-era rules about ability score bonuses, some races have just been totally reworked. Genasi, for example, who have always had a cool story but underwhelming mechanics (except maybe Fire Genasi) have now been reworked and significantly improved (my dream of an Air Genasi Monk has been looking more viable).

We also got some early previews of how monsters are being reworked. In particular, we're getting a big revision of the way that spellcasters work - transitioning them from a system of spell slots like a player character and more to kind of "signature attacks" that the DM can reliably use each turn in combat, and then some utility spells for them to retain their versatility.

Unfortunately, the release date is four whole months after the box set, which means that those who want this thing a la carte are going to have to wait a long time. In a way, this will serve as something of a preview of 5.5/6th Edition, which comes out in 2024.

Microsoft Buys Activision Blizzard

 Well, that was unexpected.

The megacorporation Microsoft is buying Activision Blizzard for a whole lot of money.

I'm not someone who understands the kind of complexities that this means for the business. I also don't really have much of an idea of what this means for the games we care about.

Blizzard, of course, remained a somewhat independent studio after its merger with Activision, and the horrifying crap that has come out in the past year was unfortunately not some outsider-imposed culture but something that was very much part of Blizzard itself, so I'm skeptical that a different corporate overlord is going to flush out all of the problems at the company.

There is a good chance that Bobby Kotick is going, though officially he's being kept on for now.

For us Mac users, I don't think there's a ton to worry about here that we didn't already have to worry about. While Blizzard started as a Mac gaming company, we've already seen them following the trend of focusing more on PC games, such as with Overwatch. But even though Microsoft makes Windows, they've always made programs that run on Macs, and an existing game like WoW is certain to remain playable on one of its native platforms.

Anyway. As satisfying as it might be to see Kotick fired, this is also another giant corporation amoeba-ing up another giant corporation, which is another example of the kind of late capitalist hell we all find ourselves in.