New Details on New Capenna

 As we've been aware for some time, New Capenna as a setting is focused on five "shard" color trios. Indeed, we'll be getting "hideouts" that are the equivalent of Ikoria's Triomes. The five tribes are each an organized crime syndicate within the massive metropolis of New Capenna.

The urban nature of the setting (not to mention the multicolor factions) certainly draws some similarities with Ravnica, but the background on Capenna as a plane is very interesting, and also hints at the emphasis for future Magic stories.

First off, New Capenna and Old Capenna are not exactly separate locations. Capenna is the plane upon which the city of New Capenna stands. We're told that Old Capenna was what the plane was like prior to a catastrophic disaster. Fleeing the destruction and threat, the people of Capenna built the city in order to live in safety. It was during this time that the angels who safeguarded the plane made an alliance with the plane's demons - and by now, the angels are all gone, and the demons are in charge.

Each faction has what appears to be a former mortal (or vampire or dragon) who has become a demon and continues to rule their crime family.

But here's the interesting thing: it appears the big disaster that struck Capenna was none other than the Phyrexians - and not the new ones, but the old, Yawgmoth-era Phyrexians - and they're still out there, int he wilds.

Capenna was, previously, a classical fantasy world with knights and kingdoms. When they people were forced to hunker down together in New Capenna, their roles shifted. The knights-errant and paladins became the Brokers, essentially an army of lawyers. The nobility and historians became the Maestros, a league of assassins. The great wizards and sages became the Obscura, knowledge brokers and blackmailers, etc.

Another big reveal we've gotten is that Elspeth, the famed planeswalker, originated on this plane. She has tried to live up to a Bant-style ideal of nobility and valor, but she's forced to confront the fact that her home plane is now soaked through with corruption.

Just one set after Jin-Gitaxias showed up on Kamigawa, we now have Urabrask, the "actually pretty chill" Phyrexian Praetor from New Phyrexia on Capenna, who has come here to try to learn about the previous generation of Phyrexians. It also looks like we've got Vivien and Ob Nixilis, the latter of whom looks like he's trying to make a play as a mob boss.

I'm personally very excited to see Magic exploring post-medieval aesthetics and settings. New Capenna has magic-driven cars and firearms that shoot magical energy (and sometimes look like musical instruments - the old "tommy gun in a violin case" being made much more literal.

New Capenna runs on a resource known as Halo, which I'd assume was some final gift left behind by the angels of the plane, and so I now wonder if it's sort of the counter-agent to Phyrexian oil. (Given the subject matter of my current D&D campaign, I'm really curious to see what this place is like).

Elden Ring's Nonlinear Difficulty

 Weirdly enough, my level 130 sorcerer is having an easier time farming runes than my level 83 paladin. (To be clear, these are not actual class names - just how I'm describing the characters). In large part, that's due to the fact that my sorcerer has access to nearly every area of the game (maybe all of them, actually). He's also powerful enough that he can take down tough enemies with a burst of powerful magic.

I've been working on Ephael, Brace of the Haligtree, which is a sort of doubly secret area - you first need to get the Haligtree Medallion to access the Consecrated Snowfield, which then has portals that take you to Moghwyn Palace and the Haligtree (Ephael is the city built around the base of the tree - you need to make your way down from the branches, which have their own gateway boss).

There are some very tough enemies here - Cleanrot Knights who have either powerful spells or aggressive attacks, some of which can inflict Scarlet Rot - but most are sort of rank-and-file soldiers, and each drops 2-4k runes. As such, even when you need over 100k runes to level up, it doesn't take that many passes to get enough for a level.

My paladin character, though, is not quite there. He's reached the Mountaintop of the Giants and made it to Castle Sol, but that's an area with very tough enemies that don't actually drop many runes.

Essentially, there are places in any Souls games where enemies are not that difficult to defeat but also give a lot of Souls/Runes/Blood Echoes. I remember in Bloodborne, the path from Hemwick Charnel Lane's lantern to the Witch of Hemwick one (once you unlock the shortcut) is a great early/mid game farming location. Likewise, the stretch from where you defeat Micolash to Mergo's Wet Nurse's boss area.

But sometimes you hit points in the game where you'd need to truly do a mindless, long grind if you wanted to farm the... let's call them "experience points" to level up. These games also have a slow, incremental leveling system, so each level doesn't necessarily feel that significant.

With Ephael, given the fact that I'd tend to die at the same place, and often stepping toward a group of enemies with very powerful ballistae, it was pretty easy to go grab my runes, realize I had enough to level up, and then warp back to the Prayer Room site of grace, level, and start the process again (in fact, the very tough enemies that barred the way past that point can actually be run past, and you'll find yourself at a new site of grace shortly thereafter).

On the paladin character, I finally took down Astel, Naturalborn of the Void, which gave me a lot more trouble on a melee class than it had on my sorcerer. That netted me two levels, and I've started to boost his Dexterity as I think both the Winged Scythe and Treespear, which are the weapons I've focused on, scale best with Dex.

On the Sorcerer, I'm high enough level that I'm kind of searching for things to actually level up. I don't think I'll have that issue with the Paladin, who ideally wants high Vigor, Endurance, Faith, Dexterity, and Strength (and maybe a little Mind as well). I'm eager to hit a point where I can pour levels into him like I've been doing with the Sorcerer - I'd like to see how powerful he gets when he's got high numbers in all of those stats.

Nearing Malenia: I Might Be Getting to the End of Elden Ring

 At this point, I've got three +10 weapons (all Somber-stone ones, so maxed out,) which are the Carian Regal Scepter (one of Rennala's remembrance items,) Lusat's Staff (which burns 50% extra FP on spells to do 15% more damage, but also has very high spell buff) and the Moonveil, which is a pretty solid melee weapon for an INT build. I've also just hit level 140 - and honestly, I think if I farmed Ephael, Brace of the Haligtree, I could get up to 150 without breaking much of a sweat.

Of course, being this high level means I hit the Intelligence softcap a while ago - at 80, subsequent points in the stat only increase your staves' spell buff by tiny amounts. So, instead, I'm shooting for 40 Mind and 40 Vigor (I've currently got 36 in each). I might go for the Prince of Death's Staff, which scales equally in Intelligence and Faith, and I believe can get an even higher spell buff than Lusat's, but of course requires some split investment - if I can keep leveling up, I might drop some into Faith.

Anyway, I'm starting to get the sense that I've really seen most of the game at this point. But I'm hesitant to actually finish the game in case we get some DLC - I'd like to be able to do that DLC on my first playthrough. That's likely a very long time away, but I also have plenty to do with alts - my Paladin character is only level 70 or so, and has just hit the mountaintop of the giants. I also started a Samurai and a Prophet character, each of whom I've barely played, but on whom I might try some new builds. I also figure I should make a super Strength/Endurance/Vigor build to wield colossal weapons (the Samurai might focus on archery, actually).

On my main character, I've diversified my spells a bit, and I'm having a lot of fun: my new boss rotation is to hit them once with Ranni's Dark Moon and then chug my flask of Wondrous Physick, which has the tear that negates all mana costs for about 10 seconds, and then I let loose with Meteorite of Astel - which is not a precise weapon, but if it's a big enough target, I can dump asteroids on them that do about 5000-6000 damage when they hit. The key is just making sure I have enough distance to keep channeling the spell while they get very angry with me.

It's always easy to miss things in these games, and I think the massive world that is Elden Ring makes that even more likely - I did manage to finish Milicent's quest chain - which is sort of ambiguous (what was the needle doing to her that Gowry wanted?) Likewise Latenna's. I actually finished Fia's as well, even though I intend to go with the Age of Stars ending.

Anyway, my go-to Soulsborne series YouTuber, VaatiVidya, has been uncharacteristically quiet, but then again, I never want to blame someone for taking time off from the unending "content" machine.

One thing I was thinking about is the Albinaurics. The name, I believe, means "white gold" ("albin" like albino or alba, and "auric" meaning "goldlike"). Gold and silver are very clearly important things in this game's story. White gold in the real world is an alloy of gold and other metals like nickel.

Miquella's Haligtree, Moghwyn Palace, and the "Omega Ruins"

 When I was a sophomore in college, I played Final Fantasy X. The game is very linear until you hit the end, at which point you can return to various locations via the airship and also go to a few new areas. One of these areas is the Omega Ruins.

The Omega Ruins is a difficult place - it's not necessary to go there to beat the game, and instead provides a kind of extra challenge. The monsters there are tougher than anywhere else, but if you just want to see the conclusion to the game, you don't have to go there.

I played through the Omega Ruins a lot. This being an RPG, generally the harder the enemy, the more experience points it gives, and so I was able to level up a lot by playing through the Omega Ruins. I leveled up a lot. So, Final Fantasy X's leveling system was the "sphere grid," a vast chart of different bonuses that would, say, increase your attack power by a certain amount, or your defense, your HP, or teach you new spells or abilities. It's actually just one grid, and the things that give different characters their different specialties is mostly where they start on the grid (Tidus, for example, gets a lot of speed upgrades early on).

As you gain experience, different character get more items to unlock spheres, progressing down the various spiraling tracks. At very high levels, the characters have unlocked enough of the grid to start getting to spheres the other characters have gotten, allowing a bit of an overlap and even or characters to get spells and abilities that were previously only available to a different character.

I got Yuna, the "healer" of the group, to a point where she was actually the strongest at melee hits with her staff, simply because, as the healer, she was pretty much always in the group and so was leveling up the fastest.

Point is: I think I've hit the Omega Ruins of Elden Ring.

Both actually require you to get the secret Haligtree Medallion, which, like the Dectus Medallion, comes in two halves. The first half is given to you by Albus, an Albinauric man who survived the massacre of his village. This starts a simple quest chain where you meet Latenna (and get her spirit ashes) and she tells you to find Sol Fortress, which is in the Mountaintop of the Giants. Beating the boss there lets you get the other half of the medallion, which then allows you to take the Grand Lift of Rold up to an area called the Consecrated Snowfield.

The Consecrated Snowfield begins as a sort of Gerudo Desert (from Ocarina of Time) challenge where visibility is super low. But once you get out of the blizzard area, it opens up to become visible. From here, there's a town in the north with a kind of puzzle/challenge where you need to go into an Evergaol in the town and light four candles, all while Black Knife Assassins patrol, invisible, and can basically one-shot you if they sneak up on you. The Sentry's Torch, purchaseable at the shack near the battlefield north of Leyndell (inside the outer wall, but not in the city proper) will help tremendously to spot these guys.

Lighting the four candles opens a gate to a teleporter that gets you to the branches of Miquella's Haligtree.

This one I haven't progressed far in - the branches are full of difficult jumps to descend, and you're surrounded by those rotund heralds seen in Leyndell (though there's an even bigger variant) as well as giant ants. Honestly, no individual enemy has been unfairly difficult, but there's basically no space to roll out of the way of attacks, making it far harder than it would be on flat surfaces.

Mohgwyn's Palace can be found by traveling to the west/southwest edge of the zone. There's a blood-covered transporter there that you can't enter until you beat the invader NPC - they're tough (at least on a caster) because they're insanely fast and relentless (and build up bleed with their attacks). Also, there's a runebear nearby that you really want to try not to aggro.

Mohgwyn Palace is actually the temple-like structure you can see from Siofra River in the distance. It's another area I haven't explored extensively - I kind of just went straight to the boss (and then used Comet Azur to blast him into next week - a strategy that works great on him, but is somewhat more limited on bosses that don't slowly walk toward you).

I'm pretty much at the boss of Crumbling Farum Azula, which as also been handing out Runes very generously. Ironically, despite being about 50 levels higher, I've found leveling up my Sorcerer character easier just because of the ample runes available and the relative power of his attacks. The tanky character can, genuinely, block attacks from bosses and keep fighting, but he could definitely use a bit more offensive capabilities (I'd love to get enough Endurance to wear the full Radahn set without needing the Arsenal Charm, but I think it's time to invest more in Faith and possibly Strength or Dexterity).

I exhibited some restraint, as I considered making a Prophet character with the intention of making them an Arcane dragon-priest, but for now I'm focusing on really getting my other characters where they want to be (honestly, the Sorcerer is pretty much fully effective - I'm two levels away from being able to swap out Radagon's Soreseal and still be able to use my Moonveil.)

Elden Ring and the Big Reveal

 So, I don't worry about spoilers for Souls games because, well, A: I don't know how much I'm going to see and B: the lore is complex and open to interpretation enough that I don't think anything can really "spoil" it.

But, in the interest of people reading who might be a little more spoiler-sensitive, I'm going to do a page break.

SPOILERS AHEAD:

The DMG Monster Stat Table

 I love new monsters out of the books, but as I've run D&D over the years, I've gotten a lot more comfortable making homebrew monsters. Sometimes, you don't have quite what you want when you look at a monster's stat block, and making your own is usually the way to do it.

Now, a lot has been said about the problems with CR. I disagree with the notion that it's "useless," because a new DM should still have some rule somewhere that tells them not to send a Beholder against a level 2 party - it seems obvious to experienced players, but there's got to be a rule (even if it's more of a guideline) somewhere.

If you make your monsters according to the stat table in the "Dungeon Master's Workshop" section of the DMG, in my experience you'll have some pretty good monsters that will give your players a challenge when you use the Xanathar's rules for encounter building, without them being total pushovers.

One of the reasons for the revisions in Monsters of the Multiverse is to bring those more in line with the CR math found in the DMG - I've seen criticisms that some monsters still don't quite hit it (like Bael, the archdevil) but it seems like a good overall goal.

Here's how the table works, when homebrewing your monster:

The table has columns for things like attack bonus, average damage per round (assuming every attack hits,) armor class, total hit points (with coefficients to use when the creature has damage resistances or immunities) and saving throws for their abilities (which is sort of a different way of saying attack bonus).

The leftmost column is Challenge Rating, so the "average" monster of that CR should have the values in that row for each of the aforementioned attributes.

Because not all monsters are the same, you don't necessarily make all these match the row. Instead, you calculate an "offensive CR" and a "defensive CR." For the OCR (as I call it,) you take the attack bonus (or saving throw DC if it uses that more) and find the CR row it rests on, then find the average damage it does per turn (sometimes getting more complicated if it has recharge abilities or those that hit multiple targets, like a dragon) and find the CR row that rests on. You then find the average of those two CRs to get its OCR.

For DCR, you just do the same thing with the CR of its effective hit points (for creatures you assume have lower CRs, resistances and immunities put multipliers on their actual hit points to give the effective HP) and average that with the CR of its AC.

Then, you average the OCR and the DCR to get your monster's challenge rating.

It's not an exact science, of course - for example, a creature with resistance to acid damage is far less likely to be much more resilient against a party than it would if it had, say, resistance to bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing damage from nonmagical attacks. If your party's biggest damage dealer is a paladin, radiant resistance is going to play a much bigger role than it would in a party with no paladin or cleric. And a monster ability that paralyzes foes might not do any damage, but that can be a really devastating condition that might make up for less potent damage output.

Still, I think this kind of tool is really useful, and exactly the sort of thing you want in the DMG. I have one quibble, though: the AC column never gets higher than 19.

Yes, once you hit the row for CR 17, the armor class column never goes any farther, even though the table goes all the way up to CR 30, which is the highest CR of any monster in 5th Edition (currently held only by the Tarrasque, Tiamat from Tyranny of Dragons, and the Aspects of Bahamut and Tiamat out of Fizban's). These monsters all have either 25 or 23 AC.

In fact, if we look at high-CR monsters that could serve as tier 4 endgame bosses, very few have an AC that low - of all the CR 25+ monsters in 5th Edition, only Orcus has an AC of 19, with all the others having more.

Without having higher ACs on the column, it's harder to tell at what a high AC should count for when making a high-CR monster. Consider, for example, that your party might be fighting a well-armored knight with plate armor and a shield - something player characters can acquire around mid tier-2. The knight might have 80 hit points and just do two attacks that deal, say, 11 damage per hit (+4 strength and a greatsword,) which, damage-wise, would put it in the OCR range of a CR 3 monster (something a level 8 party could handle a couple of). But when calculating its DCR, its AC would be literally off the chart, meaning that even if the thing had only, as discussed before, 80 hit points (which the chart puts as a CR 1 number of HP - which seems a bit low) the DCR winds up being, essentially, infinity as even CR 30 is listed as having an ideal AC of 19. Even if we say that 20 AC is just "31," that still makes its DCR 16, and thus puts this monster that's supposed to be around CR 4ish at CR 9 - which in theory would be a solo boss monster, when in practice the party is probably going to fry him in one round.

So, I hope to see some revisions to this in the 2024 DMG - I think the system as it stands is still pretty useful, especially for mid-level monsters. But it'd be nice to get a bit more flexibility for things that are easily achievable without things like natural armor.

Blockmaster Paladin - Elden Ring

 So, playing a bit with the Paladin build from Fextralife, I've been playing my Confessor character. While initially I intended to more or less recreate my Strength/Faith character from Dark Souls III, the way this one is built, he's actually more Faith/Endurance. I just beat the Godskin Noble in Volcano Manor, and while the fight wasn't easy (taking a few attempts,) I've been able to do something I don't remember ever being able to seriously do in these games: blocking a boss.

The Brass Shield is the centerpiece of this: this shield apparently can eventually hit 65 Guard Boost (the reduction of Stamina cost for blocking,) which can be pushed to 100 if you have the Barricade Shield Art of War on it - thus meaning your blocks won't cost any stamina.

The build is thus all about guard-counters, the new maneuver in Elden Ring that allows you to more easily punish your foes than parrying - after you block a hit, you can use R2 to immediately strike back, doing extra damage and I believe extra poise damage. It's not foolproof - if your foe is in the middle of a multi-hit combo, your attack might be interrupted as you get hit.

Barricade Shield doesn't last super long - only 10 seconds or so - but while it's up, you can take a massive amount of punishment from a boss and not get staggered. While I had it up, the Godskin Noble's rapid-fire rapier thrusts only diminished my stamina by a little bit, allowing me to hit back with a nice, punishing guard counter.

To be fair, I think you could go with a lot of different options for your other stat, but Faith at least gives you some heals and weapon arts like Sacred Blade, which lets you launch a ranged attack and then buffs your weapon for extra holy damage for a few seconds.

I'm beginning to think that if I really want to do a Faith Caster, I might actually be better off doing an Arcane build, pushing for the dragon incantations. That might be a whole other character.

Anyway, having played a squishy wizard (who's high enough level that he's not actually all that squishy anymore) it's fun to play a tank character. Now that I've gotten to Rykard, Lord of Blasphemy, I think I'm going to be heading back out into the world and maybe do some underdark stuff (especially to get the Mimic Tear, which is pretty clutch in his fight).

On this character, once I hit 24 faith to use the Winged Scythe (which I don't use all the time anymore,) I've basically put almost every level into Vigor and Endurance. Sitting at 30 Vigor a little earlier in the game has given me some wiggle-room that is greatly appreciated - and as long as I upgrade my weapons, the damage isn't that bad.

There are a lot of different builds to play with in Elden Ring, and it's a huge game. I think this is going to be one I come back to from time to time over the years.

Action Economy vs. the Crawl

 The characters in my Ravnica D&D campaign are level 13 - though they're probably only a couple sessions from hitting 14. In my campaign, there's a traitor in each of the ten guilds who is part of a conspiracy to bring the corruption of Phyrexia to the multiverse's most populous plane. The party spent all of tier 2 working against and ultimately slaying the Simic member of the conspiracy, who had a massive laboratory building Phyrexian monsters. Following that, after they took down the Rakdos and Izzet members of the cult, I decided it would be easiest to simply tell the players that each time they took down one of the traitors (which I'm calling the Praetors) they'd level up. It puts a little more agency into the players' hands, while still giving me a bit of milestone-like control.

One of the things that I've tended to find in D&D is that the higher-level a character is, the less likely they are to run out of resources. If you have a level 1 Wizard, you can cast two leveled spells in a whole day, and then you're stuck with cantrips. More importantly, your level 1 Cleric can only cast Cure Wounds twice, meaning that every fight needs to be approached pretty carefully, and any bad luck or mistake could be lethal.

But at higher levels, the DM gets a bigger problem: players not only have lots of resources, but they can also spend those resources very quickly to utterly devastate your monsters. This is not a bug, of course: the whole point of the game is that the players get more powerful.

But a DM's job is to maintain a sort of razor's edge of difficulty. I feel I've done my job right if the party is panting, bleeding, but ultimately victorious. I don't want them to feel like the victory wasn't earned, but at the same time, I don't want them to feel like they've got no chance (I've never TPK'd - in fact, the only times I've killed PCs have been through somewhat BS abilities like a Banshee's scream, or when a party member did something stupid and charged into the boss room alone with only half their hit points, or in a horror-themed one-shot where the very premise was that the monster was a deadly threat to a bunch of ill-equipped level 1 PCs).

Lots of people disparage the CR system in D&D - and I think that the difficulty of an enemy is certainly more nuanced than a single number. I still think it is useful as an "at a glance" tool. A monster that hits for 9 damage twice a turn is certainly a bigger threat than one that hits for 4 damage once a turn.

But, and this is a bigger deal the higher level they are, if the party arrives well-rested to a single big fight, they're going to do fine. They can blow all their most powerful abilities and the CR encounter-building system is not built to deal with that. If you want to do that, you need to go far beyond the recommended CR to actually give them a challenge.

However, the other way to do this is "the crawl." In this case, you have the party face many monsters in the run up to your climactic battle. Now, it becomes a question of strategic resource management. Yes, your Paladin can crit on that smite and probably do a ton of damage to the lesser demon barring the way to the big boss, but perhaps they want to save that spell slot for the big fight.

On the other hand, if not smiting means the demon lives and then gets off some nasty ability that does thirty damage to half the party, it'll mean expending more resources to heal people up to full than it might have to smite.

Right now, my party is in the middle of what is probably the biggest dungeon I've sent them in. It's a nasty one - there's a persistent miasma of poison throughout it, so the party needs to make periodic saves or take 4d10 poison damage and be indefinitely subjected to the poison condition (I think if they take a long rest outside of the Plagueworks - the name of the dungeon - they'd see it drop).

Now, granted, part of me expected the Cleric to use Heroes' Feast before they entered, which would have not only made this a non-issue, but also made the final boss significantly easier. I don't want to signal too hard for them to do this - in part because I don't want to make it too easy on them and also because I don't want to be seen as playing for them (one of my personal flaws is a desire to help that sometimes veers into control-freak tendencies, and is something I'm working on).

D&D does have healing potions, which can help alleviate the pressure on the healer characters, but there's no such thing as "mana potions." However, there is something that's almost as good: Spell Scrolls (and any magic items with charges that can be spent to cast spells).

I think a lot of DMs will talk about how they really want to feel their players are having a good time - nothing is better to me than seeing my players really excited after a session, looking forward to what is coming next. But the flipside of this is that when players feel frustrated or fatigued, it really raises some self-doubts.

The sessions I ran last night involved a puzzle inspired by the Grand Archives in Dark Souls III. In that game, this massive library is filled with spellcaster enemies whose heads are drenched in candle wax. There are also pools of liquid wax around the building that players can dunk their heads into. At first, there's no real obvious reason to do so. But farther up, you find books out of which ghostly hands will reach, inflicting the "curse" status effect (if it builds up to full, you instantly die). However, dunking your head in wax will give you a couple minutes of immunity to these hands.

Using Walled Horrors (from the Kobold Press books) and modified Wights, I recreated this in a wing of the dungeon - the librarians were non-hostile, and mostly meant to provide illumination and hint that the players should put wax on their heads. But for probably an hour and a half, the party debated what to do and then charged in, fighting the first of these walled horrors, and I realized that we'd be there the whole night if they tried to just fight all of them, so I called for lots of arcana and insight checks to hint a little more that they should dunk their heads in wax.

It... basically it didn't work out so well.

See, I think that, at least for my players, they're all very into roleplay, and so they want the fights to be climactic and challenging, but spaced out somewhat so that they can lean into non-combat solutions. And I think that, in future adventures with this group, I might try to de-emphasize the less climactic fights.

However, as we've seen, that means that the challenge needs to be far bigger. By tier 3, the party has resources out the wazoo, and most of those resources will carry through a single combat encounter, even if it's a long one.

To correct, then, you need to overwhelm them with action economy.

One of the future Praetors they're going to be fighting will be a Storm Giant Quintessant - the Gruul Praetor is one of the members of the conspiracy I think is less clear on what the actual end goals of the conspiracy are - she's just been told that the End-Raze is coming if she participates. The Quintessant is a cool stat block, but even though it's a beefy monster with hard-hitting attacks (some of which are automatic hits, which I'm going to have to account for,) it would not last long against the party on its own.

I don't want to make this adventure nearly as long as the current Golgari one, which has taken months as the players have delved deep into the lower parts of Ravnica's undercity. The Gruul one is going to be kind of shock-and-awe (and have lasting implications that lead to the Boros one).

So, rather than having the party go on a lengthy trek into the Red Wastes (which would be redundant anyway as they've had a long trek through a different Rubble Belt in a homebrewed district where they fought the Izzet Praetor) I think that's going to be more of a quick session-or-two adventure after we handle a lot of character-focused story beats.

I've been thinking that we should more or less roll the combat into one big event. However, to get a sense of a climactic build, I think the boss is going to be up on a hill, tossing Wind Javelins at the party while they face down lesser enemies below.

Anyway, my sense is that the party should be pretty resource-rich for that fight - the challenge will come from the action economy.

We'll see how it goes.

Journey to the Radiant Citadel

 It's not Spelljammer, but that's ok, because the newest book announced for D&D is Journey to the Radiant Citadel, a new adventure anthology (in the vein of Candlekeep Mysteries and previous ones) that takes place entirely in new worlds and setting.

Notably, Radiant Citadel is the first D&D book to be written entirely by people of color - while we don't yet know the details of the various worlds that the Radiant Citadel connects to, it appears we'll be getting some worlds and stories that come from new perspectives.

The central premise of the Radiant Citadel also introduces a very cool new location with the potential for great new planar adventures.

The Radiant Citadel is a city in the Deep Ethereal Plane, and is built out of the fossilized remains of a vast creature that curled itself around a massive, life-giving diamond. Other crystals in the Ethereal Plane sort of orbit the Radiant Citadel and can bring great swaths of people to the city, and as such, the city is a place of many cultures from different worlds of the Prime Material Plane.

Inside the massive diamond, ancestral stories and myths are given life, with crystalline beings who embody the myths and stories of the peoples found on the Radiant Citadel.

In a sense, you could call the Radiant Citadel a new campaign setting, though this is definitely an adventure book rather than a campaign setting sourcebook. I'm sure we'll be learning more details about the book soon, but it certainly seems conceptually cool.

Elden Ring's Encore Bosses

 So, Elden Ring is enormous. But, like many games that are so big, it does sometimes reuse things.

One of the first JRPGs I played was Secret of Mana. Squaresoft's big RPGs of the mid 90s were generally epic in length and scope, and you'd often see "palette swaps." You might see grey wolves early in the game, and then see blue wolves in an icy area that were tougher, and then maybe green wolves in some later area.

FYI, there are Elden Ring spoilers here.

Hitting Those High Levels

 So, my Sorcerer in Elden Ring has hit the soft cap on Intelligence of 80 - after this point, more Int increases my staff's sorcery scaling by a smaller amount. So, I've been investing my levels in other stats. At this point, both Mind and Vigor are at 30, putting me at just under a thousand HP. These haven't hit caps just yet, but I'm wondering if I should move on to other things - I've been considering investing in Arcane so that I can use some new sorceries (though my sense is that Faith builds require more Arcane to get things like Dragon incantations).

With the help of Radagon's Soreseal, I have the Dexterity to use the Moonveil, a katana that scales with Intelligence and has a pretty fantastic Ash of War ability. Moonveil, like most katanas, has a bleed effect, which I think (I think) becomes more powerful with more Arcane, so it's another reason to consider getting into it (actually, between Moonveil and the fact that I have enough Endurance to wear mostly heavy armor, I'm actually not terrible as a melee combatant - though I'm obviously still best as a Comet Azur Death Star).

I do think the existence of Moonveil has made me less excited to make a true Samurai build, as I kind of have access to the aesthetic already. My Paladin (Strength/Faith) is still waiting in the wings, though.

Honestly, the open-world nature of Elden Ring has lessened, somewhat, the appeal of alts, though I should recall that with Dark Souls III and Bloodborne, I didn't really get into playing alt characters until I'd seen most of the game on my main character.

Still, the game is massive. I've had it for weeks, playing a substantial amount most days, and there's still more to be discovered. And unlike Dark Souls, I haven't really gotten super-stuck on any bosses so far. I think Rykard and the Draconic Tree Sentinel were probably the only ones I truly had to take a step back and go elsewhere before I could take them down. (In fact, having now done Fya's quest line, I realized that you can skip the Draconic Tree Sentinel to get into Leyndell, though I'm skeptical that that's easier, given the challenges presented in beating the Valiant Gargoyles and Fya's Champions).

One thing that is itching at the back of my mind is DLC. Historically, Dark Souls and Bloodborne each got some DLC that expanded the game, but by the nature of these games, beating the final boss means starting over and not necessarily having access to said DLC just yet. So, I'm tempted to avoid finishing the game until DLC is released, which might not be fore several months or even a year.

There are, of course, areas of the game I have yet to go to. I haven't gotten to the Haligtree (though I think I'm very close and just have to finish a puzzle in the Consecrated Snowfield that involves assassins who pop out of invisibility and one-shot me before I can dodge) and I still have to fight the big fire giant (though given that I think this transforms Leyndell, I want to try to progress Dung Eater's quests - I fought Mohg the Omen, which is some kind of rematch (or maybe intended to be the first fight) with The Lord of Blood, but I must have missed the Dung Eater in the labyrinthine sewers below Leyndell.

Also, apparently the new patch added more NPCs and ways to progress NPC quest chains, so it's not like there's nothing for me to do.

Tin-Foil Hat: WoWHead's Jailer/Primus Theory

 So, the timing of 9.2 was a bit tough for me in terms of game enthusiasm, because, as this blog can show, I've fallen deep into Elden Ring, and honestly, I just haven't been playing World of Warcraft.

This is going to have spoilers for stuff in 9.2, including the finale to the raid, so be aware.

D&D's New Tease

 The D&D twitter account just released a fun little tease:

Through the depths of the Ethereal Plane is a beacon of possibility and adventure...

Gaze into the crystals and tell us what you see? 🔮 pic.twitter.com/9UHDtCS7dZ

— Dungeons & Dragons (@Wizards_DnD) March 18, 2022

 We get a gif of a set of crystals with what is probably the cover of a soon-to-be-announced book.

Mirroring the text seen in the crystals, the title appears to be "Journey to the Radiant Citadel."

So, what does it mean?

Well, we've been expecting that WotC would be releasing a Spelljammer book some time this year. Crystals play an important role in that setting, given that each solar-system-like region that houses a material plane world is said to exist within a Crystal Sphere.

It has been a very long time since the last official Spelljammer release, and I would not be shocked to see some shake-ups to the "mechanics" of the setting, similar to how we saw the elimination of the "Core" in Ravenloft, which put each of the Domains of Dread in physical relation to one another, instead favoring the notion of each domain being sort of adrift in the Mists.

Thus, it's possible that a new take on Spelljammer might involve the use of the Ethereal Plane in place of something like the Phlogiston.

Another thing to note: if the title really is Journey to the Radiant Citadel, I think this seems to suggest an adventure book more than a campaign setting book. We have, to be fair, seen a kind of blurring of lines between those of late, with the introduction of playable races in The Wild Beyond the Witchlight (which, to be fair, had precedence with Princes of the Apocalypse).

I'll be honest: if the Spelljammer book is an adventure rather than a setting sourcebook, I'll be pretty disappointed. I like to run homebrew adventures, and I find the campaign sourcebooks more inspiring than individual adventures. But something is certainly better than nothing.

Supposedly Tuesday is going to be when WotC makes some new announcements for D&D, so I expect we'll get the official word then.

And... We Broke the Game with Sorcery

 Comet Azur is a very strong sorcery in Elden Ring that is balanced by the fact that it will chew through all your FP in seconds. With a bit of a wind-up, you just channel the spell and blast in a wide, Death Star-laser-like beam that does insane damage. But, again, you're going to probably only get it to cast for a second before you run out of FP.

The Cerulean Hidden Tear is a tear you can mix into your Flask of Wondrous Physick that will, when consumed, eliminate the FP cost of all spells and abilities for 10 seconds.

I think you probably already see where this is going:

With this flask, you can cast Comet Azur for about 10 full seconds, doing insanely high damage continuously.

And I blasted down Mohg, the Lord of Blood, in about 5 seconds with it. I got enough runes to level up five times, and I was already level 107 or so. As far as I can tell, Mohg is an endgame boss - you can't even access him without beating a really tough invader in an area that requires you to have beaten another tough boss in a high-level area.

To get these two pieces, you need to head to Mt. Gelmir, where you'll find Azur near a site of grace as you climb the mountain (you might need a minimum Intelligence for you to give him his spell - this also starts Sorceress Selen's quest chain) while the Cerulean Hidden Tear can be found by fighting a world boss just beyond the Road of Iniquity site of grace.

From there, the rest of your goals are to pump up your sorcery power as much as possible. One good option is Terra Magicus, which you can get in a mini-dungeon that is accessible via a tunnel in the western side of the cliffs beneath the Academy of Raya Lucaria - you'll need two Stonesword Keys to get in, and have to fight a pair of those crystal bosses (Rock Sling I believe does blunt damage, which is good for those) and then take the elevator beyond the bosses rather than warping out of the dungeon. This spell creates an area on the ground that buffs your spell damage by about 35% while you stand in it.

Anyway, this chewed through Mohg before he could even get to me, so I think it's seriously going to be powerful for the rest of the game. However, just remember you only get one Wondrous Physick charge at a time, and bosses with cutscenes in the middle will probably interrupt the spell, so I'd save it for the final phase.

In other news, I did Fya's quest chain, which, in true Souls tradition, ends sadly, though the antagonist will not realize they're too late. It involved a boss fight that, again, I think I was over-leveled for. This, I believe, unlocks another ending for the game, though I'm going Age of Stars on my Sorcerer.

Also, with Radagon's Soreseal and one level investment in Dexterity, I can now use Moonveil, which is a pretty powerful katana with an excellent Ash of War effect - I managed to devastate the boss-rush fight toward the end of Fya's quest chain (ok, I died a couple times until I realized I could summon the Jellyfish).

World of Warcraft's Ongoing Story, Stakes, and Establishing Villains

 WoW has been around a long time now - this year will mark its 18th (yes, it'll be a legal adult!) and when you have a game that is telling an ongoing narrative, things get tricky when you, for obvious reasons, can't really have an "end" in mind.

Consider Legion. Since Warcraft III, The Burning Legion had been the ultimate big bad of the Warcraft cosmos. It was always felt that the "final boss" of all of Warcraft would be Sargeras. Legion could have, and you could even argue, should have, been the finale of WoW, if it were the sort of game for which a finale made sense. Look at, say, Mass Effect, where you knew it was all building to a full-on war between the galaxy and the Reapers, and the third game in the series made that its main focus.

Now, Mass Effect also demonstrates the pitfalls of trying to tie up a massive story. The third game in that series was, to most, a bit of a let-down (really just in its ending,) but the series also struggled to remain a relevant IP. Mass Effect Andromeda by its nature had to tell a story that was isolated from the original trilogy, and I think that's why (among other reasons) the game was an even bigger letdown.

WoW is never really meant to end - the whole model of the game is more or less built on players feeling like they're constantly progressing. Now, the gear reset with each expansion (and arguably each patch) and especially the item and level squishes we've experienced have sort of laid bare the fact that we're not really getting more powerful over time, but ideally, the players always feel like they're gearing up for a bigger fight.

The first several expansions really pushed this sense of raising stakes. Vanilla was more or less "look at this cool world with these dangerous monsters in it" while Burning Crusade had us going up against Illidan, and later a half-baked Burning Legion invasion (which was tacked on because they released Black Temple too early). Then, Wrath of the Lich King established Arthas and the Scourge as a bigger existential threat than Illidan had ever represented. Then, though he was a far less fleshed-out character (and sadly remained so during his own expansion,) Deathwing was presented as even a bigger threat than the Lich King had been.

Mists of Pandaria, then, turned the focus inward - the inter-faction conflict took center stage, with a new land to explore and subject to light colonization. While I had mixed feelings about Mists, it's remembered by many as a favorite expansion, which I think is in part due to the sense that it was very story-focused and introduced a charming and interesting new part of Azeroth.

And, at least for the Horde, the stakes in Mists felt different - the big bad was one of the two factions' leaders. Rather than some external threat, Horde players had to reckon with their own leader becoming more and more monstrous over time (sadly, aside from Jaina being too zealous in punishing the Sunreavers for their acts of collaboration with Garrosh, the Alliance mostly experienced this is as yet another external danger, which was part of the "Horde bias" feeling that felt turned up to eleven with Warlords).

Warlords, I think, sought to reestablish the ever-rising stakes established in the first few expansions, and Blizzard really pushed the Iron Horde as these world-threatening menace, but the logic of it never actually made sense: how would a bunch of pre-industrial orcs who had only just acquired modern technology be a threat to the combined Alliance and Horde who are from the time period from which that technology was derived? 

Anyway, if Warlords marked the start of a decline in WoW's quality (though I'd argue Cataclysm was the real start of that) Legion was a big peak that suggested perhaps this old game had some tricks up its sleeves. My sense is that for most people, Legion was a pretty big success.

But Legion also started a pattern of domino villains. We did not actually fight Sargeras himself, and his presence in the expansion was shockingly minimal given that this was, in theory, the big Burning Legion expansion. Mainly, he was defeated (though not killed) in a more serious way than ever before.

However, over the course of Legion, there was this subtle and not-so-subtle hinting that the invasion was actually a long-term machination on the part of the Old Gods - specifically N'zoth, who was known to be the "weakest" Old God who somehow always managed to come out on top. N'zoth would go on to be the final boss of Battle for Azeroth, but was he really the Big Bad?

See, BFA was two stories simultaneously - it was the crisis of saving Azeroth's World Soul while also being a big battle between Alliance and Horde. And N'zoth really played more into the former while the manipulator in the background wound up actually playing into the latter.

Thus, is Shadowlands, we got the Jailer.

There are a couple problems with the Jailer. First, he's boring as shit. For an embodiment of death - and not just death in all its forms but the domineering, necromancy-infused, oppressive sense of death - he's weirdly just... a big dude. I get that they didn't just want to straight up make him the Grim Reaper, which would be a bit cliche, but in terms of visual design, he's just profoundly boring. And then, personality-wise, he doesn't have one. This might have worked if he were kept as a sort of dark presence - I think it would have been cool if, say, he never spoke, or if he were more intensely inhuman, maybe a kind of unmoving form that radiated a voice more than speaking. But given the more human-like form they gave him, he really needed to have a personality beyond "pitiful mortals."

One of the frustrations about Zovaal is that he was, in many ways, given credit for much of the long-term plotting that it seemed should have been N'zoth's. Here we had a character established Cataclysm, and whom we had seen hints about for many years, who had been built up as this really cunning, clever manipulator, but who ultimately was just fried at the end of BFA in an expansion that was only half about him in the first place.

The Jailer, who came out of nowhere, then got to be the one who was behind everything, kind of usurping the agency of many of WoW's longrunning villains.

Furthermore, his last words imply that his goal to dominate the entire cosmos was actually intended to unify the universe to fight off "what is to come."

Now, I think that having villains believe they're the good guys is actually a good call - it's true to the real world. But I also think that this constant nesting doll of who the actual big bad of Warcraft is leads to diminishing returns. If every villain is actually less of a threat than the next one, no victory actually feels significant.

So I'd propose the following model for future WoW expansions:

First, let them stand on their own. Since the end of Mists of Pandaria, we've had each expansion's finale kind of push things into the next one, and while that creates a sense of momentum and continuity, it also makes WoW's story feel like a run-on sentence. WoW is a big enough world that we can have multiple stories going on that don't immediately follow from one another. One thing that those first few expansions had in their favor was a sense that we were getting something totally new each time, and it also meant that killing Arthas or killing Deathwing felt like we had truly ended the threat.

To be fair, Shadowlands looks like, for all its flaws, there's no real specific threat on the horizon. The chain of expansion stories that started in Mists seems to have finally come to a real sense of finality, with only a vague threat of some greater cosmic danger.

I think we need to allow expansions' stories to stand on their own a bit more - naturally character development can still be a thing, but I think we should have a moment to celebrate. I think we could use a story that begins not with some massive crisis to be resolved, but with a sense of curiosity and exploration.

Second: give us time to build up a big bad. The Jailer was introduced and dispatched in less than two years. Yes, given that WoW doesn't work on comic book/Arkham Asylum rules, it tends to chew through its villains. But the Jailer suffered in part because he had come out of nowhere - indeed, the whole of Shadowlands as a metaphysical element of the Warcraft cosmos was added in the expansion that most focused on it, and I think to a lot of people, that felt jarring - we knew that Death was a major force, one of the six primordial forces in the cosmos, but there were practically no specifics. Indeed, outside of the Scourge, the only other element in the physical world we saw of it was the magic of the Drust, and they were ultimately kind of a minor side-threat within the grander Shadowlands story.

I think the game should give itself time to build up lore - not just threats, but other elements as well. I think it would have been really cool if we'd heard about Ardenweald while doing the Emerald Dream content in Legion, or if we had heard about the connection between the Val'kyr and the Kyrians prior to our arrival in Bastion. Basically, don't play things so close to the vest. If we hear about a place before we get to go there, it makes it that much more exciting for us to actually see it.

D&D Supposedly Planning a Big Press Release Tuesday the 22nd

 Rumor has it (I heard from Nerd Immersion, which seems to always get this moments after it hits the internet) that Wizards of the Coast is planning to make some announcements next week. With Call of the Netherdeep out, every previously-announced D&D book has already been released (other than the stand-alone Monsters of the Multiverse, though my roommate just got the rules expansion box set, so I think I'm good on that one).

I think there are two very obvious releases that I expect will be announced or at least alluded to: namely Spelljammer and Dragonlance.

The D&D community has been begging for Spelljammer for years - maybe somewhat cheekily, given how zany and out-there the setting is. But teases of the Hydro74 art for the cover of an unannounced book with Boo, the Miniature Giant Space Hamster, as well as the Travelers of the Multiverse Unearthed Arcana post, have made the science-fantasy setting seem far more likely than before. Spelljammer hasn't been a thing since the early 90s, when fans of the game seemed turned off by its silly tone and mixing of genres. But I think that modern audiences are both far more comfortable with a silly tone and also far more receptive to bending the fantasy genre, meaning the setting is due for a redemption.

Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft made a lot of changes to the Ravenloft setting - most notably dispelling the notion of any coherent, continent-like structure called The Core that gave the Domains of Dread literal physical borders with one another, and instead made each a kind of bubble-reality afloat within the Mists (a change I am about 200% in favor of - I hate the idea of the Core profoundly, and love the new concept). Thus, while I know a little about the way Spelljammer worked in the late 80s and early 90s, I think it's possible we'll see some tweaks to the mechanics and the tone.

The other book is, if anything, even more certain, given WotC's not remotely coy "Heroes of Krynn" UA post. Some longstanding legal disputes over intellectual property related to the Dragonlance setting were recently settled between WotC and the Hickmans (the creators of the setting - also actually the creators of Strahd and by extension Ravenloft). This first manifested with the design of Fizban's Treasury of Dragons - Fizban is a human avatar of the good-aligned god Paladine, which has now been explicitly confirmed to be another name for Bahamut. But Paladine is specifically the Dragonlance version of Bahamut.

I don't really know much about Dragonlance as a setting beyond the fact that there are dragons and there are things called Dragonlances that are very useful for fighting said dragons (and also useful for fighting while mounted on dragons). It was, however, I think, a very popular setting, perhaps even the most popular setting before the Forgotten Realms became D&D's kind of default setting. My sense is that it's a bit more of an epic fantasy setting with great armies and dark lords and such - in contrast with the Forgotten Realms' sort of "adventurers are a dime a dozen" approach (though I could be totally wrong).

Now, the next question is if we're due for any other announcements.

Believe it or not, but Tasha's Cauldron of Everything is now a year and a half old - meaning that a book announced next week might not come out until it'd been two years. If you look at the big setting-agnostic rules expansion and monster books, Volo's came out in 2016 (two years after 5E's launch,) Xanathar's came out in 2017, Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes came out in 2018, Tasha's came out in 2020, and then Fizban's came out in 2021. So, while they didn't have one in 2015 or 2019, for the most part we've gotten a big rules-expansion book every year, alternating between monsters and general rules (Fizban's is admittedly a bit more mixed - it has monsters and races like a typical monster book but also subclasses and magic items like an "of Everything" book.)

It might not be that crazy, then, to see another "of Everything"-style book announced for release either this year or early 2023. That is, of course, getting close to 2024, when WotC will be coming out with the backwards-compatible new versions of the core rulebooks, but if they are truly backwards compatible, it might not be that bad to throw in some new options and features.

I wouldn't be terribly shocked to see a new "of Everything" book include the Undead Patron, College of Spirits, and even maybe the Way of the Ascendant Dragon and the Drakewarden, as we saw Tasha's consolidate many setting-specific subclasses into setting-agnostic rules. (The Undead Patron feels like a slam dunk). The latter two of these, of course, are not setting-specific, but my sense is that if you're a player-only enthusiast of D&D, you might feel more comfortable picking up a book with tons of new subclasses rather than a monster book with just two.

Anyway, I'm very excited to see what's in store.

It's a Reach, But... Elden Ring and the Story of America

 So, pretty early in Elden Ring, maybe even before it came out, I noticed something: Doesn't "Marika" sound like "America?"

The Souls games are generally thought to be inspired by or based on some fairly heady concepts. Dark Souls, for example, could be read as an allegory for how entropy could lead to the heat death of the universe.

Essentially, physicists think that, after many, many billions of years (like, orders of magnitude more than there have been since the Big Bang,) all energy will ultimately become heat, which is the most disordered form of energy, and that every particle of matter will sort of shake itself apart into a big, kind of undifferentiated mass of nothing in particular. This would simply be a consequence of the fact that there are differences in energy between different parts of the universe - energy is the potential to cause change, essentially, and once all the change has been done, things would settle into a kind of warm stasis.

You can see, then, how the Flame of Disparity, which birthed the Age of Fire, is sort of like the Big Bang, and that the eventual Age of Darkness would be like the Heat Death of the Universe. Gwyn's desire to forestall that eventuality makes sense - he's trying to preserve the world as he knows and loves it (which does also happen to have him at the top,) but Dark Souls III really seems to imply that any attempt to control the growth of entropy is doomed to diminishing returns. Indeed, it's a thing in physics that in order to reduce the entropy of a region, you need to create more entropy than you are reducing elsewhere. The Lords of Cinder were trying to maintain order, but their acts only led to greater chaos.

Now, what about Elden Ring?

As a disclaimer, this is all highly speculative. It's a reach that you might find is based on flimsy logic. But I wanted to get the thematic discussion started, and you have to start somewhere.

First off, we don't really know the extent to which George R. R. Martin was involved in coming up with the world and its stories. I get the impression that it was kind of a consulting gig that was also a boon to the game's marketing, so they played it up. I think he probably sketched out the basics of the world, likely named characters, and perhaps talked about themes and motifs to explore. The presences of so many severed limbs sure seems to be a signature of good old George (also, people have pointed out that there are a lot of G., R., and M. names in the game).

The Souls games have, with the exception of Sekiro, been a kind of Japanese interpretation of Western fantasy. Series creator Hidetaka Miyazaki has said that when he was a kid, he used to read English-language fantasy novels without having a very firm grasp of English, and so he would sort of piece together his own version of the story, taking what clues he could find. As a westerner, I'm highly familiar with the sort of interpretation and appropriation of other culture's tropes and stories, so it's always fascinating to me to see the way other cultures reinterpret stories from my own culture - it gives me insight into how different our versions of other cultures' stories are from the originals. But the presence of Martin in the process here means that this is not entirely a Japanese creation - there's a collaboration between cultures to produce this.

Let's start with that observation about Marika. Marika is, in some ways, the Lord Gwyn of this cosmos. She's the top deity... sort of. She's said to be an embodiment of the Elden Ring, which is a kind of cosmic set of laws that govern the universe, and which was, itself, manifested by something called the Greater Will. The Greater Will may be a true deity, or perhaps more of a universal principle.

Marika is heard of far more than she is ever seen in the game. She's basically an idea made manifest - which is particularly true if she is the embodiment of the Elden Ring. If we are to take the metaphor seriously, Marika represents America as a concept - not precisely a land, not precisely a government, not precisely a people, not precisely a culture, but some kind of intersection of all those things.

And here's the craziest thing:

So, America, as a country, was founded in a different way than previous nations, and that has given us an odd sort of question of identity - we're not a "nation" in the traditional sense of being tied to a particular ethnicity or ancestry (though there have been people who always wanted it to be like that). One of the elements of America that could be said to define the country is, in fact, a written document: the Constitution. It's a code that outlines the structure of American government and the powers and limitations on those powers that define it.

Kind of like the Elden Ring.

See, like the US Constitution, the Elden Ring is a set of laws, though in this case one that takes the form of magical runes. How could Marika break the Elden Ring when she is its very embodiment? The same way that America, as a country, could potentially violate its own Constitution.

One of the somewhat hidden elements in Elden Ring is the vast underground areas - what I refer to as Elden Ring's Underdark (a D&D term for a kind of world beneath the surface in vast caverns with its own cultures and peoples). The people found underground, at least in the Siofra River section, seem to be portrayed as being more in tune with nature - they are said to avoid the use of metal, wielding weapons of bone or wood. They also appear to worship elk- or moose-like ancestor spirits. The Lands Between literally sit on top of their lands.

I wonder, thus, if they are in some way there to represent the Native Americans. I find myself feeling a little uncomfortable making this suggestion, especially as the peoples of Siofra River are depicted as beast-like, horned ogres (or kind of minotaurs?) But it does fit with this model of the story. I don't yet really know what the story is behind these people, but it's a connection that I'm going to keep looking out for.

Now, setting aside my America-themed notions for now, it's also clear to me that there's a combination of Greek and Norse mythology. The Erdtree seems naturally inspired by Yggdrasil, the World Tree of Norse myth, and depictions of Radagon as a warrior with red hair wielding a big hammer call to mind Thor.

Godfrey, the previous Elden Lord, is shown with a great big lion-spirit always at his back, which is a very clear connection to Herakles (Hercules, as the Romans would call him) from Greek myth.

Indeed, the areas in the Underdark, particularly Siofra River, have a very Classical Greek look to them, with white columns and a kind of Arcadian vibe to the hunting grounds (the starry expanse below ground actually calls to mind another Greek-inspired fantasy setting, namely Theros from Magic the Gathering - a game I believe Miyazaki is a fan of).

Marika spurns Godfrey and takes up Radagon as her second consort. Did the world move on from Greek myth to Norse?

There's a whole lot left to unpack here, and I don't know how extensive the American metaphor is through the game - if it's even intentional at all. But games, especially games like Elden Ring, are art, and art is always open to interpretation.

Elden Ring is So Vast

 After taking down Rykard, Lord of Blasphemy, I decided to tool around in various areas that I had kind of skipped past. Siofra River was the first "underdark" region I found, coming across the elevator in the Mistwood in southeastern Limgrave. It became immediately apparent that the foes there were a bit tough for me, so I left, and only just came back to do a pretty thorough clear. I realized, riding through, that there were braziers that could be lit in the lower cliff-side overlooking the starry expanse, and after running around for quite a while (and getting shot with star-arrows that still hurt even at level 97 or so) I got all 8 lit, and went to face down an ancestor-spirit boss that, well, I was a little overpowered for (I did manage to get killed once, but each Glintstone Pebble was taking off like a sixth of its health).

Then, doing some more exploration, I came back to a place I had seen in the Ranni quest chain, going to the "Siofra Aqueduct," which led to an actually somewhat-appropriately-leveled fight against two gargoyles. This, it turned out, gave me another coffin to hop in, but rather than falling down a waterfall, I was lifted up one, and found myself in the Deeproot Depths, which seems to be the "underdark" region below Leyndell and Altus Plateau. I fought a world-boss there, getting a spear I can't use and a suit of armor that I actually can (and was an upgrade over Blaidd's set).

I'm given to understand that there's a questchain that I need to do if I want to get everything out of Deeproot Depths, but it's nice to just have an area where the enemies aren't insanely tough, but are giving enough runes to actually make me feel like I'm making progress (my last level-up was like 57k, so enemies that drop less than a thousand runes feel hardly worth the effort).

I noted when I first came across basilisks in this game that they have a nearly-identical design to the ones in Dark Souls - kind of elongated frogs with big false eyes. I also noted that the gargoyle bosses you have to fight to get to Deeproot Depths seem to have a very similar design to the gargoyles in Dark Souls III.

Now, I doubt there are going to be any explicit connections between Dark Souls and Elden Ring - probably just some call-backs and references (The Lord of Blood apparently is trying to establish a Mohgwyn Dynasty, which did raise some alarms given a certain Gwyn from Dark Souls) but I do think it's interesting to see the patterns that repeat. In Dark Souls, trees were a big part of the imagery associated with the Age of Dragons, and naturally with the Erdtree visible from almost everywhere in Elden Ring, it's hard not to notice that.

If Dark Souls is a fantasy allegory for entropy and the heat-death of the universe, and if Bloodborne is an examination of procreation, I'm trying to figure out what the biggest themes of Elden Ring are. There are certainly motifs - lots of severed limbs, for example, which might be a George R. R. Martin contribution.

I also feel like there's some implication as to the origins of the gods. Actually, it's interesting: Elden Ring seems to effectively have a monotheistic mythos - Queen Marika is this enigma at the center of everything. I've seen some spoilers that complicate her role in the story and just what and who she really is.

I've also been on a quest chain that saw me helping cure a young woman named Millicent of Scarlet Rot. I also just secured a prosthetic arm for her that looks very familiar to a certain person's arm in the trailers for the game, and Millicent talks about how she's seeing Melania up at the Haligtree (I'm a little stuck on a boss that bars the way to the other half of the Haligtree Lift Medallion, though I have leveled up a few times since my last attempt) and I'm 100% convinced that she actually is Melania, as she looks just like her, only normal human NPC-sized.

I'm really in awe of the game's scope, but that also makes me feel more wary of playing through multiple times - I want to try out different fighting styles, but it's a big time investment (though apparently some speed runner has beat the game in under half an hour, which I just... but how?)

Oh, and I found an extra Margit the Fell fight out in the world outside Leyndell - which is odd, because in theory I've actually killed him (supposedly if you skip Stormveil Castle until after you've killed him for real, he doesn't show up at the start).

Rykard Slain!

 So, the boss of Volcano Manor is actually in a deep cavern that you only get to via a teleporter (and, very kindly, has a site of grace right outside the boss room). This is the "Storm Ruler" fight of the game, but in start contrast to Yhorm, the special weapon doesn't so much make the fight trivial as make it... possible.

I'm sure there will be some hardcore players who don't use the Serpent-Hunter, but I doubled down, upgrading my Mimic Tear to use its own version of the weapon. I was still getting one-shot until I got Radagon's Soreseal - while this increases the damage you take, it also increases your Vigor (and Endurance, and Strength, and Dexterity) and ultimately I found the fight more survivable (the endurance also helped me wear heavier armor).

Basically, you just need to dodge attacks, use R1 with the Serpent-Hunter (unlike the Storm Ruler, you don't need to use its weapon art to get the special boss-attack) and then if you stagger the boss, give it a nice R2. Dodging his attacks is quite tough, but as always, you'll just have to learn the rhythm over time.

Now, Mt. Gelmir is a little on the linear side - kind of a spiral path up the mountain - so I don't actually know how much I've truly skipped, but I might explore there a bit more. Basically, I want to beef up a bit more before returning to Mountaintop of the Giants.

I think there are far more optional bosses in this game than mandatory ones, but I'd like to do as much of a "full clear" as I can before I get to the end. Rykard isn't a mandatory boss, but he is a demigod with a Great Rune and a Remembrance.

Anyway, Rykard is also maybe the nastiest boss in terms of aesthetic I've come across (Godrick the Grafted of course is also pretty gross as well).

Volcano Manor is Just as Pleasant as the Name Suggests

 So, my impression of Leyndell, the Royal Capital, was that the "dungeon" itself was difficult, while the bosses were fairly easy by comparison (I'll reiterate that I am playing a ranged caster). I hadn't even realized, upon arriving at Altus Plateau, that you could immediately head on up to Mt. Gelmir, and, it seems, might even be intended to go there after Liurnia.

The dungeon, which I got to with relative ease (though it involved fighting two world bosses, neither of which I think are strictly mandatory, though the star-beast at the top of a spire of rock felt like it, is Volcano Manor. To be perfectly honest, the dungeon itself hasn't been all that hard - there are a few of those wheeled iron maiden enemies that are quite nasty, but for the most part they're not too bad (I also stumbled upon a Magma Wyrm boss, which I think might be the third I've fought - one of which was also in Mt. Gelmir).

The mid-boss of Volcano Manor (and it does seem that all of the legacy dungeons have a midway boss, though Stormveil Castle's is right at the start) is the Godskin Apostle, which is quick and has some dangerous moves (including inflating and rolling over you) but I believe I downed him in one shot.

The final boss, though, is nasty. What begins as the God-devouring Serpent then reveals itself as Rykard, Lord of Blasphemy in the second phase. Like the Storm King in Demon's Souls and Yhorm the Giant in Dark Souls III, you can find a special weapon here that has powerful effects when you attack the boss, but unlike those, the weapon can only stun-lock the boss if you pour many flasks-worth of FP into the special L2 attack - instead, you're better off using R1 for a forward jab and R2 or a sweeping slash, both of which create big waves of light that do pretty significant damage to the boss.

The problem, though, is that the boss has moves that, at least on my Sorcerer, can just flat-out one-shot me. Getting through phase 1 takes some patience and luck, but then Rykard shows up swinging a horrific sword that, yes, one-shots me.

Now, I have barely explored Mt. Gelmir, so I think I might exit the dungeon and see what mini-dungeons and other things I can find to maybe level up (and get my vigor a little higher - it's like 23 at this point).

A Recommendation for Elden Ring Progression

 So, after defeating the main boss of Leyndell, the Royal Capital, I followed the obvious route, heading to the Grand Lift of Rold and up into the Mountaintop of the Giants. And after feeling I'd really become a hardcore badass, I've hit a point where things are killing me real, real quick. I did get to Castle Sol and found the boss there, but I decided that maybe I should do some more exploring.

So, heading to the Altus Plateau, I decided to explore a bit and realized that there was a path through a big canyon that led to Mt. Gelmir.

As it turns out, the foes here are a bit more manageable. And I think that's more or less the rhythm of the game. When I first arrived in Altus Plateau, things were pretty tough, but I found that I was about the right level to clear out some stuff in Caelid, which included taking down Starscourge Radahn. My sense, then, is that even if the main quest puts you on a pretty direct line from Limgrave to Liurnia to Altus Plateau and then Mountaintop of the Giants, but it seems wise to take some detours to Caelid after Liurnia and then to Mt. Gelmir (I assume) after finishing Altus Plateau.

Now, this also includes some character-specific questlines. I did the full Ranni quest chain (and apparently skipped that of her lieutenants - Selivus, who is apparently a real creep, was just dead the second time I went to his tower). I also just did Sellen's quests, which... well, in typical Souls fashion, there's a big be careful what you wish for vibe.

Anyway, I think I'm going to try to get through the major parts of Mt. Gelmir next - I think I've found the Volcano Manor, which I believe is the legacy dungeon of that region. I also need to eventually return to Raya Lucaria as I'm almost certain I skipped parts of that dungeon.

It's a cool game, folks.

My New Homebrew Setting

 When I started playing D&D in 2015, I jumped into the deep end, starting off as a DM. It would actually be a couple years before I ever played, like, as a player character. Outside of the game, I'm a fantasy writer, so it was pretty natural to me that I'd come up with a homebrew setting, rather than using the Forgotten Realms or other established D&D worlds.

That first campaign was set on my homebrew world, and it's one that I have every intention of returning to in the future. Right now I'm in the middle of my epic Ravnica campaign, which is intended to take players to level 20 and even let them do stuff at 20! But Sarkon, that homebrew world, is meant to be my default.

But...

So, over the past few years I've become one of those masochistic madmen who actually enjoys FromSoft's punishing "Souls" games - you might notice that the last several posts on this blog are all about Elden Ring, their new open-world variation on the formula (which I think is a masterpiece).

Difficult in terms of gameplay, but also deeply obscure in terms of lore (and, maybe not so wonderfully, in game mechanics,) the worlds of FromSoft's action-RPG nightmares (literally in the case of Bloodborne) operate on a bizarre logic that invites you to question the morality of your goals. The first Dark Souls, for example, allowed you to either continue the Age of Fire by linking the flame, sacrificing yourself in place of the old patriarchal deity Lord Gwyn, or to embrace darkness and begin the Dark Age of Humanity. That latter one seems bad, right? But later games (Dark Souls III in particular) suggest that maybe artificially extending the Age of Fire has only led to greater suffering.

With Elden Ring, the developers have created a new world (with the aid of George R. R. Martin) that introduces new concepts. It setting, the Lands Between, is a realm filled with demigods and the home of the primary deity, Queen Marika. The eponymous Elden Ring has been shattered, and the very logic of existence seems to have become flawed.

The Lands Between, where Elden Ring is set, thus feel less like a physical world inhabited by regular people than it does a kind of metaphysical plane - the realm of gods (which, frankly, also applies to Dark Souls' Lordran and Lothric - and maybe Drangleic, though I never played the second one).

Thus, we return to D&D.

See, I'm fascinated by Planescape as a campaign setting for D&D. The "outer planes" in D&D are the realms of the gods, and in most campaigns, their influence is only really felt through the actions of divine spellcasters and perhaps some scheme hatched off there. Sometimes players will make a brief journey to the outer planes to acquire some important relic or such.

Planescape, though, imagines these places - the D&D equivalents of heaven and hell (but rather than two there are at least seventeen) - as places where people do live their lives, and where adventure can be undertaken.

But Planescape encourages a very different approach to adventures. In most settings, for example, fiends (devils, demons, etc.,) are basically kill-on-sight, but in realms where fiends and celestials meet, you're kind of a dick if you just attack someone only because they're evil. Planescape mostly centers around the city of Sigil - a nexus where outer-planar beings can meet and trade or socialize. Sigil, not that dissimilar to Ravnica, is dominated by several factions, which each represent very strongly-held philosophical positions taken to extremes.

Because the Outer Planes (which include Sigil and the Outlands, which is the True Neutral plane) are metaphysical places, philosophy and ideas can actually transform the land itself.

So, why did I bring up Elden Ring? Because I think the metaphysical approach to the world shares some ideas with Planescape, and thus I think it's a good inspiration for a general vibe and aesthetic.

Ok, enough preamble:

I've been working on a new campaign setting. It's connected to, but distinct from, Planescape. My reasoning is partially that I just like making my own thing, but also that I'd like to have some freedom to futz with the metaphysics of it without declaring Planescape's version "invalid" at my table.

Thus, we have Escadia: the Shattered Heaven.

Escadia is a realm that was once a promontory that jutted from Mount Celestia. It was the realm of a god who is now known only as The Sovereign That Was . Eons ago, Escadia was sundered from the mountain in an event known as the Severance, and now, it drifts in crumbled, broken pieces across the Astral Sea, now something of a demiplane within that catch-all realm. Not only was the realm thrown into chaos, but The Sovereign That Was has disappeared, and while everyone remembers that there was a god who ruled Escadia, no one can remember anything about them.

Now, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Elden Ring, they're all characterized by a world that has totally broken, where the number of people you can trust not to immediately kill you is a distinct minority. Escadia is not quite like that, or at least it doesn't have to be. Playing more toward D&D's typical rhythms, there are towns and cities in Escadia where players can find shelter and get along all right.

But, I also reserve the right to run a campaign in which things are absolutely fucked.

There are three major factions within Escadia (at least for now,) and each has its own sub-factions and groups with their own agendas. The Arideem are celestials who believe that the most important goal for anyone in Escadia is to restore the realm to Mount Celestia. Among these, some believe that the return of the Sovereign That Was will accomplish this, or at least make it a lot easier. Some are pursuing other means. While the Arideem are mostly friendly, the fervor with which they pursue this goal might lead certain members to dangerous, mad methods.

One of the keys to the setting as a metaphysical one is that the Arideem, despite being inherently lawful good celestials, are no longer in the plane of pure lawful goodness, and as such, they are not infallibly lawful or good as they once were.

Next, we have the Sagrex, which is a less centralized affiliation of various philosophical factions, including many visitors from the Prime Material Plane. The Sagrex generally try to keep the Arideem running Escadia, but different lodges within the Sagrex have different ambitions for Escadia. In general, many of these lodge factions consider the return to Celestia as impossible or not worth it, and intend for Escadia to just become its own thing - or even to reconstruct it as a world of the Prime Material Plane.

Finally, we have the Dyam. These interplanar traders, run largely by genies, have little investment in Escadia's ultimate fate, but instead seek to extract valuable resources from the land and strike it rich on the metaphysical goods that can be found in a fragment of heaven. The Dyam have helped to bring creatures and beings from all over the multiverse, using their clout to maintain a semblance of order in the crumbling realm, which has allowed them to coexist with the Arideem.

Basically, I think you could do this as a more traditional D&D campaign with a lot of inter- (and intra-) faction intrigue, as well as lot of whimsical "we're not in Kansas anymore" kinds of adventures, but it Escadia were presented as being in total chaos, each of these factions could have their own really sinister and iconic foes for the party to fight against, seeking a difficult solution to a metaphysical problem.

I liked mysteries, and I think the nature of the Severance and the whereabouts (and identity) of The Sovereign That Was could be fun things to delve into in a campaign.

Elden Ring's Underdark and Up to the Mountains

 It's amazing to me how sometimes in Souls games I'll find some very difficult route to the next "bonfire" only to realize there was a fantastic shortcut all along.

Following the defeat of the two bosses in Leyndell (which is not the final area of the game, though you might assume that when you start off) I took another tour around the city, eventually discovering the way forward (it was in a direction I expected, though I'm glad I hung back and beat the area's bosses, as I needed an item off them to continue).

Following the defeat of Starscourge Radahn, I followed up with Ranni's quests at Ranni's Rise. I have to say, as the prerequisites for the secret ending, these are more involved than the Lord of Hollows ending for Dark Souls III (which I haven't actually ever gotten, because I still haven't taken down Midir or Gael, and thus haven't gone on to the Soul of Cinder).

One thing I'm really appreciating about Elden Ring is that it is genuinely easier (so far) than Dark Souls III. With the exception of the Draconic Tree Sentinel (whom you need to beat to get into Leyndell, unless there's some alternate route) I haven't ever really felt "stuck" on a boss. Rennala took me a few attempts (and ultimately I co-op'd it) but I've been able to take down most bosses in just 2-5 attempts, which I think is a pretty good sweet spot for challenging but not infuriating. I am playing a ranged character, of course, so I might be skewing things a little.

Anyway, Ranni's quests take you on a fairly extensive quest chain through Elden Ring's Underdark-equivalent, where you travel through ancient, ruined cities where, weirdly, the most dangerous foes are giant spheres (that you can usually wedge into a doorway so you can take potshots).

I do think that I'd recommend every character get some ranged capability. I think I might make a Samurai as my next character and see if I can make archery a viable primary combat option.

Anyway, Ranni's quest chain eventually has you fight a very eldrtich-looking alien monster, which wasn't terribly difficult. Far more difficult was the Lake of Rot that you need to cross before you can face it. This is basically a test to see how fast you can run across a horrific, pink-and-red lake of awfulness filled with basilisks (which, traumatizingly, have the same model more or less as they did in the Dark Souls games).

Something like 30 hours in and I have to say this is a remarkable achievement on the part of FromSoft. I'm skeptical as always about open-world games, and I don't think the game escapes all of that genre's pitfalls (the biggest being the overwhelming sense that there's an infinite number of things to do) but I also think that the open-world aspect of the game softens the hard edges of the Souls-like genre - there is so much to do that you can usually find something that is fairly manageable.

Rumble in the Capital: An Erdtree Rematch

 There's a trope that FromSoft has developed within a number of their titles. You've opened up some mysterious location, exploring down each corner, and suddenly, you find yourself somewhere familiar. It's not the same - the version of this location is a safe space filled with NPCs, or at least some degree of safety and comfort. But here, you find it weirdly abandoned, filled with lore-filled items that have bizarre implications.

Spoilers:

Radahn Down, and Into Leyndell, and the James Joyce of Video Games

 Well, I've defeated Starscourge Radahn, the massive warrior on a tragically normal-sized horse. While he's one of the great demigod bosses, Radahn's "legacy dungeon" is not really a dungeon - or at least not in such a way that requires you to gradually navigate it until you come to some epic boss battle. Instead, you just portal in and find a group of champions waiting for the Radahn Festival - a grand melee in which everyone comes together to fight the ancient champion.

The fight's arena is massive - the enormous desert that makes up the eastern third or so of Caelid is basically just one large boss room. Once you talk to the festival barker dude in the castle, the way opens to an elevator down to a portal that takes you into the boss arena.

There, Radahn will shoot these massive gravity arrows at you that basically one-shot you and are tough to dodge. While I'm just a shrimpy sorcerer, having a shield that at least blocks a decent amount of magic damage allowed me to tank the hits with only a sixth or so of my health, giving me time for what is the key to this fight:

There are tons of little summoning signs here that you can use to summon NPCs. While you need to put the hurt on the boss to beat him, that's going to be one of two jobs. The other is to summon these guys to fight for you. These include Blaidd, the werewolf-like knight, and Iron Alexander, the friendly pot-person. The NPCs basically replace any spirit summons you'd use for other fights, but they play the role of tanking Radahn while you go in for hits.

I'm playing a Sorcerer, so I would typically run up toward Radahn, summoning the first few NPCs while blocking the arrows, and then once he started with other (still ranged) attacks, I'd hop on Torrent so I could dodge them and then get in close enough that he switches to melee attacks. Then, it's a pattern of dodging attacks, summoning more NPCs (even if one dies, you can find other signs to summon them again) and then chipping away at his health with Rock Sling or other spells. He has nasty attacks, so I can only imagine what this will be like on a melee character. As a ranged one, you basically just need to worry about some of his big cone-attacks and one where he slams down and launches some gravity-beams at you (a good Torrent-sprint perpendicular to his attack should let you dodge them).

Radahn's defeat causes a massive shooting star to fall in Limgrave - I have yet to investigate, but I did finally get Ranni the Witch to show up at her tower and was able to start her quests (she tells you to investigate the crash site).

I also beat the Draconic Tree Sentinel, which is one of those fights I felt like I had come close to beating about three million times before I finally took him down. This opened up the Eastern Rampart of Leyndell, and I've been able to get into the capital city.

Here, I get a very Ringed City vibe, mainly in that it feels like there's an utterly massive stretch between sites of lost grace. The first enemies you encounter are some top-tier From Soft design - these odd trumpeters with spherical bodies and spherical headdresses that use their horns/trumpets as bludgeons or cast weird bubble-spells with them. These guys aren't actually terribly hard to kill, and while I still haven't been able to find the next site of grace, just going back and forth and killing enemies here has been a pretty hefty source of Runes - I think I leveled up like ten levels today.

Also, it was here that Melina took her leave of me - I still don't know what her deal is at all.

The open-world nature of Elden Ring means I'm almost surely not doing everything in the order that the designers expected. For instance, I killed a tree avatar in northern Caelid and got 90k runes at a level where I needed like 23k to level up - it was one of those fights where as long as I didn't get greedy, I just had to constantly circle the boss (also, hilariously, the fight starts in an area that is dense with large pots and trees, but by the end, the boss had cleared a wide-open field).

I might finally be graduating from the Meteorite Staff, as I have Lusat's and Azur's Glintstone Staves - while I don't have them upgraded enough to have a higher Spell Buff than the Meteorite Staff (I think I need Somber Smithing Stone 5 or 6 for each) I believe the broader bonus on Lusat's that makes spells cost more FP to do more damage might make up for it. That being said, I still use Rock Sling as my favorite boss-killing spell, and so Meteorite makes sense for that.

Also, a note on Ranni: she seems to have kind of a sinister vibe going on, but this is From Soft, so I can never really know for sure if the "darker" ending is every the "evil" ending. I think Demon's Souls might be the only one with a really clear good or evil option. I'm given to understand Elden Ring has something like 7 or 8 endings, so who knows.

I certainly don't think I've got a strong handle on the lore yet - I think I might just have to wait for VaatiVidya and the like to compile everything. There's so very much to this world, and I think for now I'm really just focused on getting my character strong enough to make it through all the challenges.

My experience has been that the game has fewer points of real frustration than earlier Souls-like games. My roommate, who has always bounced off of Dark Souls or Bloodborne after a single play session, has actually seemed to get into this one. I know there's been some discourse on whether Elden Ring is too hard to draw in new players to this type of game, but I think there has been a marked lowering of the difficulty - it's not that they made it easy, they just made it less crushingly difficult. And that might actually be the result of the open world. You really can just move past things and go elsewhere. Between that and the Spirit Ashes, I think there are a lot of pressure valves here.

Again, though, I don't really get worked up when other people don't like the things I do. I'm glad that From Soft gets to make these games - the video game equivalent of... I don't know, abstract art? Surrealism? I think that the topic of difficulty often gets bogged down in a sort of toxically-masculine dick-measuring contest, but whatever you think of the game's combat, I feel like these games engage with difficulty also in terms of narrative and even game systems. Is that insane? Or will Hidetaka Miyazaki be looked back upon as the James Joyce of video games?

Heroes of Krynn Nitty Gritty; Kenders and Lunar Magic

 Unlike Travelers of the Multiverse, which was basically just races, Heroes of Krynn gives us a race, a subclass, two backgrounds, and associated feats. While I did a broad review in my last post, here I want to get into the depths. You can read the UA here, though I'll be reproducing a fair amount of it to comment on specific elements.

We'll start with Kender. Kender are small humanoids who are said to look like humans with pointed ears. It seems very likely that the Kender are basically Krynn's version of Halflings, but their racial features differ. As with all of the post-Tasha's races, you'll be able to pick your ability score bonuses, and as established with Monsters of the Multiverse, despite being small, you still have 30 feet of movement. Kender are small and have the humanoid creature type.

Like Halflings, they have the Brave feature - this gives you advantage on saving throws to avoid or end the frightened condition.

Next, they have Kender Ace. When you hit 3rd level, you can reach into a container you're carrying or wearing as a bonus action and produce a randomized item. You can do this bonus action a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus per long rest. When you do, you roll a d6, and this determines what you get.

1: 5d6 gold pieces

2: 1 simple weapon of your choice with the light property

3: 1 item of your choice off the adventuring gear table in the PHB that weighs no more than 1 lb and is worth no more than 1 gold.

4: One random trinket from the table in the PHB

5: Your choice of a crowbar or grappling hook

6: 1 item of your choice from the tools table in the PHB worth no more than 10 g.

    So, the weirdest thing about this is I could see this as a way to get a lot of extra money by producing random objects. It won't net you a ton of stuff, but in the early levels, this could really save/earn you a fair amount. This is not a terribly reliable trait, but I could definitely see some instances in which you pull out a random item that could be clutch.

Next, you have Taunt. This lets you, as a bonus action, unleash a barrage of insults at a creature within 60 feet that can hear and understand you. The creature makes a wisdom saving throw with a DC based on your Charisma, and if it fails it has disadvantage on attack rolls until the start of your next turn. You can do this a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus per long rest.

    This is actually pretty good, though obviously best if you're a Charisma-based class. A bonus-action disadvantage can be a very useful thing to help your party survive, and if you're on a boss fight with a lot of charges left, you can use this for several rounds.

So, we have a class with two major features (plus Brave,) one of which I think is more flavorful than powerful (though again, it could be clutch) while the other has a very strong combat application.

    Lunar Magic:

Now, we come to the new subclass.

Lunar Sorcery I think fits pretty well as a source of magical power, and on Krynn, the gods of magic are associated with the world's three moons. There are some fun flavor concepts for how lunar sorcery looks and affects you when you cast it, like your pupils taking on the different phases of the moon or your body glowing with faint moonlight.

At 1st level, you get Moon Fire. You learn the Sacred Flame cantrip, which counts as a sorcerer cantrip for you but doesn't count against your cantrips known. In addition, you effectively get the acid splash effect with it, being able to hit two targets within 5 feet of one another with each cast. Sacred Flame is a solid cantrip - between the radiant damage and the fact that creatures don't benefit from half- or three-quarters- cover from it. Can't complain.

You also, at 1, get Lunar Embodiment. You gain new spells as you level up that don't count against your sorcerer spells known (there seems to be an error here where they say you get Death Ward, which I believe is a 4th level spell, at 5th level, but hey, it's UA). You only get one of these spells per spell level (1-5, in theory,) depending on your lunar phase. When you finish a long rest, you can choose whether you're in Full Moon, New Moon, or Crescent Moon phase, and this tells you which spells you get.

Full Moon: Faerie Fire, Moonbeam, Death Ward, Freedom of Movement, and Mass Cure Wounds.

New Moon: Dissonant Whispers, Darkness, Bestow Curse, Evard's Black Tentacles, and Mislead

Crescent Moon: Sanctuary, Blindness/Deafness, Phantom Steed, Hallucinatory Terrain, Dream

You also get to cast each spell you get from this once for free per long rest, though you can also cast them again with spell slots.

    So, we sort of have a class version of the Eladrin's season-changing feature. Clearly this spell list isn't final, but I think the new model of extra spells for sorcerers is a very smart one, continuing the pattern from the Tasha's subclasses.

At level 6, you get Lunar Boons. Each lunar phase is now associated with two schools of magic. Full Moon is Abjuration and Conjuration, New Moon is Evocation and Necromancy, and Crescent Moon is Divination and Transmutation. When you use a Metamagic option on a spell that is either of a school associated with your current phase, or if you use it on one of the spells from the lunar phase spell list, you can reduce the sorcery points required to pay for that metamagic by 1 (minimum of 0). You can use this reduction a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus per long rest.

    So, Sorcerers love to conserve sorcery points when possible, and this effectively gives you your Proficiency bonus' worth of extra Sorcery Points - though it does push you toward those particular spells. Still, with two schools of magic per phase, your options are somewhat open.

Also at 6 you get Waxing and Waning. As a bonus action, you can spend one sorcery point to change your lunar phase to a different one. This is quite nice - relatively cheap to realign yourself if you find yourself needing to use other spells.

At 14, you get Lunar Empowerment. Whenever you choose a lunar phase, you get the following benefit associated with that phase:

Full Moon: You shed bright light for 10 feet and dim light for another 10. Any creature in the bright light of your choice gets advantage on saving throws.

New Moon: You have advantage on Dexterity (Stealth) checks and if you are in dim light or darkness, attack rolls have disadvantage against you.

Crescent Moon: You have resistance to Necrotic and Radiant damage.

    So, these are all potentially very useful. There are basically two ways for monsters to harm you, and that is by attacking you or forcing you to make saving throws, and you can swap between defenses against those with a sorcery point and a bonus action. The Crescent Moon bonus is, of course, worthless if you're an aasimar, but not many people are. The Full Moon one benefitting your allies is also quite nice (stack up with the party's paladin to make your saving throws very strong).

Finally, at level 18, you get Lunar Phenomenon. As a bonus action, or as part of the bonus action to swap phases with Waxing and Waning, you can use the power of your lunar phase.

Full Moon: Each creature within 30 feet of you of your choice must make a Constitution saving throw against your spell save DC or be blinded until the end of its next turn, and one creature of your choice in the area regains 3d8 hit points.

New Moon: Each creature of your choice within 30 feet of you must succeed on a Dexterity saving throw against your spells ave DC or take 3d10 necrotic damage and have its speed reduced to 0 until the end of your next turn, and you become invisible until the end of your next turn or until you make an attack or cast a spell.

Crescent Moon: You teleport to an unoccupied space within 60 feet that you can see, and you gain resistance to all damage until the start of your next turn.

You can a phase's bonus action once for free per long rest, and can spend 5 sorcery points to use it again.

    All of these feel pretty good emergency buttons - indeed, all make it easier to escape foes, and you can potentially lock down a lot of enemies - a 30 foot radius is pretty huge. As a note: you get a free use of "a phase's bonus action," which to me implies you get one use of each of these for free per long rest - which makes it much better.

Lunar Magic is not simple. There's a lot to go over here, and I think it'll require some careful strategic choices as to which phase to default to, and when you'll want to change it. I think the multi-phase idea fits very well with a lunar theme, and I also kind of like that there's a reason to track which school your spells are. This is a complex and versatile subclass, though I expect we'll see some tinkering and revision given how complex it is.