Into the Fog of Silent Hill

 I've stepped into the recent remake of Silent Hill 2. I've known about the series for a long time - Pyramid Head is one of gaming's most iconic monsters - but I've never tended toward the survival horror genre. However, after my roommate downloaded the game, and after I'd hit a point in Diablo IV where I was just going to be grinding out marginal upgrades, I decided to try it out.

It's kind of fascinating to see this PS2-era level and even artistic design in this day and age. While the remake's graphics are fully modern and up-do-date, the overall aesthetic feels very much of that period - the time when 3D graphics were just starting to hint toward realism, even if I think the following generation was when things started to look truly "good." Funnily enough, the game has a setting that allows you to wash out the color in the manner that was so popular in the 2000s, though I've chosen to go with basically all the defaults.

My only real experience with survival horror is Alan Wake II, a game that I absolutely adore, but haven't really felt compelled to go back and play again (though it's a game that I can watch countless YouTube video essays about, even watching them again). AWII obviously owes a lot to both Resident Evil and Silent Hill, and I'd hazard to guess more the latter than the former.

Our opening shot (iconic in gaming) is of protagonist James looking at himself in the mirror of a profoundly shitty public restroom just outside of town. The message is clear: this is about the inner life and suffering of our protagonist. The mood here is somber. There are details about the plot I'm aware of via pop cultural osmosis that haven't yet come to light: for now, all the game tells us is that James is there to find Mary, his wife, despite that being seemingly impossible for... some reason.

And it's not, apparently, his first time in town: he and Mary shared some past here in Silent Hill. This is a return.

Aside from one woman he meets in the graveyard he passes through to get into the town (in a lengthy sequence dedicated just to establishing the mood and tone with no fighting) the place is utterly abandoned. Fog chokes the town, making it hard to see more than a few doors down any given street - evidently a technical limitation in the original that enhanced the horror, and which has been carried forward here.

The town map you find upon arriving is marked with different locations, and James evidently makes notes on it, so we get a sense of what areas we've completed. Our first puzzle challenge is to play a record on the jukebox in a bar - we need to retrieve the other half of a snapped record and glue the pieces together, then find the missing button to call up that record, and retrieve a token to get the thing to play. This actually just gets us a key to let us through the back of the bar and progress us further.

It's not the most complex puzzle, but I don't mind that so much: the main thing it does is force us to read notes we find and follow the clues toward various locations on the map, during which we encounter our first monsters: these strange figures who look like they're zipped into some kind of body bag or straight-jacket (I actually think the former is the more likely explanation).

Actually, I think I was wrong: I think we do learn of Mary's fate right at the start, at least in broad terms: she's dead, taken by what James refers to as "that damned disease." Could be anything, but cancer feels like the most likely candidate.

Cancer is horrifyingly common - I believe it's the second most common killer after heart disease. My mom died of cancer eight years ago. It's a very strange thing, because it's such a common thing, but in my mind, her case was unique, its own special cruelty with no precedent.

While I don't want to get into specifics for the sake of my mother's dignity, the thing about it is that it's easy to imagine cancer as weirdly clean: it's just cells that continue to duplicate when they should stop. But the thing is that the human body is a complex machine of fluids and flesh, and that means that the disruptions to the natural functioning order that occurs when cancer spreads lead to byproducts that inspire a natural feeling of revulsion. Especially cruel is the way that chemotherapy, our pathetically most-effective treatment, also provokes these disturbing bodily processes. Vomiting, for example, is common among chemo patients because it's literally pumping poison into the body, hoping that the cancer will die before the patient does.

The body-bag enemies attack us in two ways: first by merely slamming themselves into us, and second by ejecting a dark fountain of bile. Thankfully, the PS5 doesn't have a smell generator, because I can only imagine it would be the most nauseating scent - the kind that inspires you to vomit as well.

There's zero indication that James is anything other than a normal dude. And so, we don't start with any kind of weapon. At my fairly early stage of the game, we have nothing but a plank of wood with some nails in it, torn from a boarded-up window upon the first arrival of this type of monster.

Early on, we find a radio, and the nearer we get to the monsters, the louder the static on the radio plays. This is a source of comfort, actually, as we know that when it's silent, we're able to focus merely on exploration and puzzle-solving. I strongly suspect that this is going to be subverted brutally at some point.

Most of the town's buildings are inaccessible: which is fine, because that would be a ton of building interiors to design, and might bog us down. But there are some buildings whose windows we can smash to gain access, which I found particularly useful when I was being chased by a monster from the street - as it tried to follow me over the window sill, I was able to get a few free swings at it, so that by the time it was inside with me, I could put it down quickly.

At least with these monsters, getting them on the ground makes them less dangerous, and shows you're almost done taking them down. A stomp with James' boot seems to signal that the fight is over (another thing I suspect will be subverted down the line).

One moment of horror that was so over-the-top I had to imagine it was a joke was when you have to reach into a hole in a wall. The game pauses as James reaches his arm in, first wrist-deep, then elbow-deep, and then shoulder-deep, his expression one of greater fear and disgust as he's clearly fishing around in something wet and gross. But ultimately, there's no danger: you get one of the items you need to solve a puzzle.

Does this puzzle make sense? Not really: I don't know why playing a song on the jukebox causes a key to appear. The record, mended with super-glue, shatters after playing, and I guess that reveals the key somehow? Maybe I missed something.

But I think puzzles are a staple of the survival horror genre because of what they do for pacing and mission objectives. In an action game, you go from fight to fight, even looking forward to finding some monsters to take down. In survival horror, a part of you is always hoping that the room you go into will be empty of any monsters, that you can just focus on getting that thing you need.

In that sense, it's much more relatable: if you found yourself in one of these situations, you'd try to avoid contact with any and all monsters.

One thing that's kind of funny is that the game feels like it could be very open and non-linear, but upon arriving in the town, you swiftly discover streets fully blocked off, and there are a lot of one-way passages. The PS2 era of gaming was, if I remember from my late teens and early 20s, much more linear than what we tend to find nowadays. Early on, before getting into the town proper, you pass through a ranch, and I thought "oh boy, I bet this is going to be a big set-piece location later on," and that might still be the case, but I also wonder if that whole intro area is something we'll never really come back to, pushing further and further into the town.

One last note: the town of Silent Hill feels truly depressing, and I think that that's partially informed by the way that America's small towns have been in decline for decades. I don't know if that was a theme they were looking to explore back in 2001, and even if that economic phenomenon had even hits its full swing yet at that point. Silent Hill feels abandoned, but while the supernatural fog and monsters are the obvious culprits, there's also this kind of specter of economic stagnation.

It's a funny thing: I didn't grow up in a small town. I grew up in a fairly prosperous suburb of Boston that remains quite beautiful and bustling today. I've never really lived in a truly remote, small town. But growing up in New England (and Silent Hill is set in Maine - I'd initially guessed it might be the Pacific Northwest, but I guess Maine and Washington/Oregon do share a bit in terms of vibes,) the towns there are old, and thus often have a preserved small town center of some sort. There's an old-fashioned-ness about Silent Hill's layout, with a feeling of local institutions that have been there for decades. But now it's all rusty and boarded up and decrepit - a feeling like the cruelties of time have washed over it.

One last note: barring the entrance tunnel to the town, which forces us to divert through the path to the graveyard, there's a sign that clearly once said "Welcome," but the L and second E have fallen. It might be a clearer thing if only the L had fallen, but I wonder if it's meant to be read as "We come."

The Dark Poem

 Periodically, I re-watch (or at least re-listen to while playing computer games) Monty Zander's mind-blowingly elaborate "Beyond the Lake," a 5+ hour review and critique of Alan Wake II - a video essay that embraces the game's collaborative and mixed-media approach by itself integrating multiple original songs, animations, and even an interpretive dance routine. Much like the game itself, it's one of those works that does more than you thought the medium was capable of.

I haven't actually re-played Alan Wake II since beating its Final Draft new game plus mode in I think early 2024 (whenever it came out,) but the game lives rent free in my mind, as the saying goes. Distance in time from actually playing it has given my brain less fuel to speculate upon its deeper lore, but periodically I remember the feverish, corkboard-and-red-yarn theorizing that the game is built to inspire, and I feel a desire to dive back into it, if not in actually booting it up again and playing through once more, then in getting into that tin-foil-hat mode.

In Control, mention is made of Thomas Zane being a Finnish filmmaker, not the (presumably American) poet that we first met in Alan Wake 1. Jesse insists to her therapist that she knows him as a poet, even quoting the poem that Emile Hartman seemingly misinterpreted to inspire his work, but in her adulthood, Jesse knows him as the filmmaker.

Filmmaker Tom is perhaps the great enigma of Alan Wake II. While Mr. Door oozes mystery, in a sense, the mysteriousness is front-and-center, and seems to be something that he acknowledges. Tom, though, gaslights us. What the actual hell is this guy?

On a meta-level, it's disconcerting that he's sort of a more "real" person than Alan. Alan is of course played by two different actors, with Ilkka Villi providing the physical performance and Matthew Poretta providing the voice. The recording of Tom Zane and Casper Darling's meeting found in the Final Draft introduces this troubling implication that Alan might actually be a creation of these two - played by Villi and Poretta respectively, and in each case, the actor is the only one playing the part.

In meeting Tom, though, the guy cannot stop reciting poetry. He claims that he's just play-acting as the character he played in his most popular film, Tom the Poet. But it just does not seem trustworthy. Among the poems he quotes, some are found only on the This House of Dreams blog, a little ARG project I think possibly just created by Sam Lake alone, but which, if canonical, would have some grand implications.

My favorite theory regarding Tom Zane is that he's some kind of parasite - whether he's a real human person or some kind of Dark Place monster, I think that he's appropriated the identity of Tom Zane for his own purposes, and he seems to be moving on to Alan, casting himself as Alan in the film Yoton Yo.

If we are to assume that the Thomas Zane from the first game was a benevolent presence (something that is admittedly dubious given that he's the one who introduces us to Mr. Scratch in a manner that seems to imply he doesn't worry much about the harm Scratch can cause) it leaves poetry itself an ambiguous signifier.

When Alan visits the murder sites in the three primary locations in the Dark Place, we see poetry scrawled on the walls near the bodies or body-facsimiles of the "boss Taken" that Saga faces. Each death in the Dark Place is similar but distinct from the fates of these people in Bright Falls. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find clear screenshots of these poems on the walls of the Dark Place, and I genuinely don't remember if these are the same words as the Dark Poem that we find in the Final Draft.

The Dark Poem, or perhaps the three dark poems, are found only in the Final Draft. In Monty Zander's video, he has frequent collaborator Marina Ryan perform the three Dark Poems as verses in a song. which is now the way that I will inevitably always hear these words.

The author of these poems is up for debate: is the real Thomas Zane, still the poet, sending these out? Is this probably-fake Tom Zane, whose agenda remains so mysterious through the end of the game, the author? What are these poems or this poem trying to tell us?

Let's go line by line and read them to see if we can come up with some theories.

Dark Poem 1:

The writer of the first word

Not the writer of the last

with the terror of the light

and the shadow cast

    Ok, so right away we've got an interesting question to consider: who is the writer of the first word? There's of course the Biblical idea that "In the beginning there was the Word," from one of the Gospels, which implies God is the ultimate author of reality (and ties into my fantasy/sci-fi philosophical idea about a world of words versus a world of numbers, but that's a tangent). In the most basic sense, though, as the story develops, Alan comes to realize that he needs to collaborate, and to let others into his creative process, in order to escape the cycle. His Dark Place trilogy began as a lonely, frankly solipsistic endeavor, but allowing Saga to become part of his process (not to mention all the other collaborators) allows him to ultimately emerge victorious in the end. That said, in a more sinister reading, if we link this to "parasite Tom," we have the idea of a new author taking over a project someone else began.

    The second part of this verse does draw an interesting parallel with the Herald of Darkness song, which is that the brightness of the light is what allows shadows to be cast. As that song is warning us that Alan carries Scratch within him, being both Champion of Light and Herald of Darkness, that causal relationship between the two sides is a source of terror.

The third eye now opened

to project the night

This is the moment

to write

    Well, we certainly get some third-eye imagery in the end of the game: Alan is shot with the bullet of light once he allows the Dark Presence to enter his head, and its glow appears similar to a third eye, a symbol often associated with wisdom and enlightenment, a kind of spiritual awareness.

    But Alan's third eye projects light. Here, the third eye is opened to project the night. Is this the same ironic conflation of opposites, where that light allows him to project shadows?

    I think we should also consider the following: film is a medium based on the projection of light, using the film itself to filter out some of that light in the form of colorful shadows that form images. The interplay of light and shadow is the very essence of film, which Parasite Tom is so firmly tied to. However, film is derived from photography, and that very same relationship between light and shadow is also the domain of Alice Wake.

    Of course, Alan tried to just give up, to stop writing at one point in the hopes that at least he wouldn't harm anyone else. Ultimately, that decision was untenable - the story would be told one way or another.

This is the ritual

to lead you on

Your friends will meet him

when you are gone.

    The latter half of this, of course, is the deeply cryptic and worrying words of diver Thomas Zane when he introduces Mr. Scratch at the end of the first game. Zane's "don't mind him" comment is worrying because Mr. Scratch's clearly sinister vibe doesn't seem like something a benevolent supernatural force should be so quick to dismiss.

    This whole chorus is what we hear echoes of the Cult of the Word chanting, but it's never 100% clear to me to what extent the echoes that Alan experiences in the Dark Place are actual, real crimes that the real Alex Casey investigated, or if they're closer to the novels that Alan wrote, or if they're neither, and are instead "rough drafts" of the crises Saga will encounter in Return. With the Cult of the Word, there's a sense that this is an occult ritual to lead a victim (Casey maybe? Alan maybe?) to their doom, but simultaneously, we know that Alice is working behind the scenes to try to lead Alan through this confrontation with the darkest parts of his nature to bring him to enlightenment. (Crazy thought, is the "him" that his friends will meet actually the evolved, enlightened Alan, and "you" his current, struggling self? Was this never about Scratch, actually?)

Dark Poem 2:

Lost on the shore

between the forest and the ocean,

the owl and the deer

reflected in motion.

    The game is all about dualities, and here we create a duality between the Forest - Bright Falls and its environs - and the Ocean - the Dark Place - the two places where the game takes place. Both are types of places that have a grand and mythic significance in the collective unconscious, both of which can be mysterious, but in different ways. Here, the forest represents familiar, mundane reality, while the ocean is this realm of imagination. Likewise, the owl and the deer are, of course, symbols representing Alan and Saga, respectively. Alan's writers' room has a taxidermied owl, and Saga's field office (and Mind Place) has a mounted deer's head. Creatures of day and night, a predator and an herbivore. Now, I don't totally get what "reflected in motion" means, though perhaps this is simply talking about how the two reflect one another as the co-authors of this story.

In his room, he will hurt her

In hers he is caught

His story ends

Her story does not

    Boy, this feels freaking potent, but it's not easy to interpret. If this is still referring to Alan and Saga, the two rooms could represent their mental rooms: when we play as Alan, we can always flash back to the Writer's Room, and the implication is that this is actually the "real" Alan who is writing the story of the one that's traversing the Dark Place. With Saga, we can transfer to the Mind Place, which takes the form of her field office at the Bright Falls lodge.

    By writing her into the story, and creating this narrative where Saga is broken by the loss of her daughter, he has done a whole lot to hurt her. But does she "catch" him in her Mind Place? That I can't really say so definitively.

    In a weird way, the idea of whose story ends reflects the non-Final Draft ending - in that, Alan is dead while Saga waits as her phone rings to find out if Logan is alive, and so we get an ending and a non-ending. But the Final Draft kind of inverts this: Alan awakens from this seeming death, now the Master of Many Worlds, while Saga gets a clear answer that yes, Logan is alive and well and they should be able to reunite.

    On a meta level, though, I could also see this as telling us that Alan's story has reached its conclusion: I honestly think it would be fine if there's no Alan Wake III, because he can continue to be a character in future Remedy Connected Universe titles. Saga, however, has only had her first brush with the Weird, and whether she goes to work for the FBC or just continues to explore her parautilitarian powers, I could imagine she's got more story to tell (like exploring her relationship with her father, Mr. Door).

This is the ritual

to lead you on

Your friends will meet him

when you are gone.

    Again, the chorus is the same, its second half being the words that Thomas Zane (poet/diver) left Alan with at the end of the first game.

Dark Poem 3:

A pale balloon in the sky

float and sink deeper.

Night springs when bright

falls for this sleeper.

The surface disturbed

the reflection now a traitor

in the cavity of the skull

turned to a crater.

This is the ritual

to lead you on.

Your friends will meet him

when you are gone.

    The "pale balloon in the sky" is a big question mark for me. It could be a description of the moon, but what significance that would have is not something I can think of. I do find it interesting that we see kind of inversion here: float and sink deeper, which mirrors the Herald of Darkness chorus line "diving deep to the surface." In the song, we have a word associated with descent but a destination above us, while here, we have a word associated with ascent and a destination (deeper) suggesting downward movement. Filmmaker Tom does quote one of the shoebox poems from This House of Dreams when we first meet him that describes "a window in the floor and a door in the ceiling," and this idea of disorientation is a big motif throughout the game, especially Alan's half of it.

    Night springs when bright falls of course both references the TV show that Alan worked on and the town that both games take place within. And, as one could have thought since the first game, the names of both seem to mirror or complement each other. Brightness falling and night springing up are the twin elements of a cycle where day turns to night. Perhaps this also refers to the dark side of Alan taking over, as we later see it does when he becomes Scratch - if he's the "sleeper" named here.

    Now, the notion of a surface being disturbed, revealing a reflection as a traitor, is really, really interesting. Tom, of course, looks just like Alan, despite clearly being a different person (I'm not willing to commit to the notion that they're multiversal doppelgangers, as suggested in Time Breaker). Of course, when we look into a still body of water, we can see our own reflection as clear as a mirror. But if that water is disturbed, the reflection is broken. This will ruin the mirror effect, but might it also allow us to see past the surface of the water and look past to what is actually under the water? Whether literal or not, that's a really, really potent image.

    The idea of a "skull turned to a crater" feels very much tied to Alan's fate to be shot in the head - which actually happens to him twice (at least,) the first time by himself, each version thinking the other is Scratch, and the second time by Saga with the bullet of light. Both moments are tied to his taking in the Dark Presence, first unwillingly, and next as part of a sacrificial ploy. (I was about to reference something about "her heart is a crater and we have filled it" only to remember that's a World of Warcraft thing.)

And we end once again with the usual refrain.

Ultimately, this kind of cryptic poetry is designed to drive fans like me insane trying to piece it all together. Alan Wake's story does certainly have a lot of mystery box elements, though I hope that there's some intentionality to it all. We may never actually know the true nature of Thomas Zane, though I really think the recurring poetry within Alan Wake II continues to cast doubt on the notion that Tom the Filmmaker is telling the truth about Tom the Poet.

Where Will War Within Stand Among the Expansions?

 With the final wing of the final raid of War Within now available on LFR, the expansion itself has more or less come to a conclusion. We're now in the year-ish-long wait until the release of Midnight, which was actually announced back in 2023, but we got significantly more details at this year's Gamescom (a venue that some have said was not really best-suited to introducing a new expansion. I remember how Legion was also announced there, to a near-silent crowd, which might have been a mix of how much ill-will Warlords of Draenor had generated and also just the big distinction between German and American audiences, but Legion wound up being counted as a top contender for best expansion ever).

Naturally, we won't know how history views the expansion until it's been a few years. But I'll tell you my general sense:

War Within followed Dragonflight, an expansion that I think really demonstrated a huge philosophical shift in WoW's design after the frustrations of Shadowlands (the latter of which I think suffered from things outside the team's control, namely the pandemic and the breaking of the scandals surrounding many longstanding Blizzard higher-ups). Indeed, much of that philosophical transformation occurred even in Shadowlands' last patch, but the general sense of "hey, listen to what the players want and give them that" became a guiding philosophy that really shaped Dragonflight.

As such, I think War Within represented an opportunity to discover what the staying power of that philosophy was. I think WoW is in a fairly healthy place, but largely because of what changes came in the previous expansion, though we saw some iteration on these philosophies in War Within.

As I see it, we should mark two things in particular when it comes to what War Within really innovated with on a system level:

First, Warbands as a framework foregrounding player progression rather than character progression is really nice. I love that I don't have to worry about grinding reputation on all of my alts, and now, it's pretty easy to hit all the world quests that earn reputation weekly because I'll naturally want to do different ones on different characters.

Warbands are honestly just an expansion of other things that the game had already started to trend toward, like unlocking all your collected pets and mounts on every character (it was always ironic that I had gotten the Headless Horseman's Mount on my Druid, when I really wanted it on my Undead Rogue). But expanding this out to allow us to, for example, share profession resources between characters on different realms and in different factions has just been, well, great and good. I don't think there's a single player out there who ever felt that it would take away from their alt experience to not have to spend weeks grinding from Honored to Revered on their fifth character.

The other huge systems change is the introduction of Delves.

Arguably since Mists of Pandaria's Scenarios, they've always been trying to build some kind of more informal content that can have significant rewards without requiring you to get a tank and healer. I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for the structure of the 5-man dungeon, and later experiments, like the Deaths of Chromie, the Horrific Visions, and Torghast, always promised this rewarding truly solo-able experience that never quite clicked.

Delves finally solved it: they truly feel like dungeons, but they've figured out a way to balance it so that it is both a challenge but also doable as a single player. And I think they've had some really great, creative ideas: I love that each Delve has several different scenarios that can change up what the objectives are, sometimes reversing the direction through which you clear it, or otherwise changing it up. Blizzard has shown a willingness to continue adding scenarios to these delves or even altering core elements to them (such as how The Sinkhole and Tak'rethan Abyss are both now drained of water in 11.2 - which arguably robs them of some of their distinctiveness, though it does make me more willing to run them on characters who aren't my Undead or Warlock who can breath underwater).

Interestingly, I do think that Delves also draw some attention to some of the challenges of class balance. For whatever reason, my Enhancement Shaman feels very squishy in Delves, whereas even my cloth-wearing Frost Mage and Shadow Priest feel quite capable of tanking swarms of enemies relying only on the periodic Dwarven Potions that Brann tosses out to them.

I will say that Delves do create the following: it really lets you tune out a lot of the rest of the game. It's so, so much easier to just solo some high-tier delves to get heroic-raid-level gear than it is to, say, be part of a heroic raiding guild (when my guild wasn't a total ghost town, we struggled to just do Normal raids.) Thanks to the item upgrade system and some lucky drops, I was able to get a full set of the Mythic Death Knight set appearance in the previous patch (by upgrading heroic pieces to 5/6). Now, this is kind of working as intended - they want you to be able to play the way you want. I will say, I really applaud the introduction of Dark Souls-style records of other players' deaths in delves added in this patch. This is a kind of hands-off multiplayer that takes advantage of WoW's offline nature while still letting you play alone if that's the style you prefer (I especially like how you can get a buff for slaying the creature that slayed another character - a buff I think they also get if they're still working on the delve).

War Within also did something very bold - though I'll note that this boldness was kind of pulled back on. With Zaralek Caverns as a clear test-run for this kind of thing, War Within's four initial zones were 3/4 underground. Even if the Ringing Deeps, Hallowfall, and Azj-Kahet are ultimately also spaced out horizontally, there's a sense of progression over the course of the default leveling campaign, where you descend deeper and deeper into the earth with each zone.

Unfortunately, I think Blizzard got a little gunshy here, and if there's one major criticism I have for War Within's story, it's that it doesn't really commit to anything. The promise, when we arrive on the Isle of Dorn, is that we're going to follow the Coreway down toward the World Soul of Azeroth. The Nerubians are blocking that path, and so we need to make our way down there to get past them, but once Ansurek is defeated, our downward momentum is halted and we don't ever actually go deeper.

11.1's Undermine patch does remain on theme, at least, keeping us in a subterranean environment, and I think constant readers of this blog who recall my love of modernity in fantasy will not be surprised that I loved Undermine: it's one of my favorite environments I've ever seen in World of Warcraft. And yet, as much as I adored it, the story felt kind of tangential to the one that I thought this expansion was about.

K'aresh's introduction in 11.2 is even more of a swerve. Once again, an expansion's final boss is not even barely hinted at in the patches leading up to it, and also, the K'aresh story was one that in the past I'd always assumed would be something we'd get an entire expansion about: though admittedly, I might have said the same about Argus (are they really so hesitant to do a full science-fantasy alien world expansion? The only one we really got of that was Burning Crusade).

Now, don't get me wrong: on an aesthetic level, I love K'aresh (next to my love of modernity in fantasy is my love of science-fantasy that really leans into the sci-fi aesthetic). And I'm happy to see the Brokers again (even if I feel like Ve'nari's reveal as just an altruistic hero feels like it undercuts the delightfully shady vibes we got when we met her in the Maw). But the biggest issue I have with K'aresh is the way that it comes out of freaking nowhere (I mean, it was clearly always planned, given Ky'veza in Nerub'ar Palace) and doesn't fit into the "deep underground" theme of the expansion. If they wanted to have Dimensius as a big bad but not center an entire expansion around K'aresh, wouldn't this have worked better as a middle patch, like Yogg-Saron?

The War Within was conceived as the first part of the three-expansion Worldsoul Saga, and I think one of the hazards you run into with something like that (especially when this isn't the first expansion, but the tenth) is that you need to tell a complete story while still leaving room for the rest of the saga.

And I think War Within's biggest failing is that I don't feel like I really experienced an expansion story with it. Instead, this has felt like three patches in what I presume will be kind of a nine-patch expansion. Will all these threads come together by the end of The Last Titan? In, like, four years?

Again, I think a lot of WoW's trending has been to smarter and more player-friendly design. And I think there's been a lot of intriguing story stuff going on here, even if I don't really have a sense of its cohesion.

Oh wow, I didn't even talk about Hero Talents. I guess what I'm hoping is that they'll work very hard to balance them. Granted, I guess you'll always see some level of optimization pushing you one way or another, but I'd really like my Undead Subtlety Rogue to go Deathstalker instead of Trickster.

Death and Draw Steel

 As someone who played video games long before I ever rolled a d20, one of the things that I've always found kind of challenging in TTRPGs is figuring out failure states. In a video game, from Mario to Dark Souls, you're often playing as a character in some kind of dangerous situation, and in order to master the game, the vast majority of players are going to get their character killed here and there. But death is also kind of cheap in these games - to use those examples, in Mario games you have multiple lives, so you can keep attempting whatever level you failed at, and in modern Mario games, usually the worst penalty you take for losing all of your lives is that you don't get to re-try that level from whatever midway checkpoints you've reached. In Dark Souls and its ilk, death is expected and even canonical - each has a conceit that explains why you're coming back from the dead over and over, and while you can lose all of your Souls/Runes/Blood Echoes/Ergo/whatever if you die and then die again before retrieving them, which can be a real pain, the expectation is that this is going to happen many times over the course of your game.

In TTRPGs, though, a character's death can often mean that the player needs to roll up a new character - the original character's story has ended tragically, and a new figure must come and take their place (so that the player still has something to do).

Now, depending on the game's genre and overall vibe, death might be very permanent or it might be something that can be dealt with: given that most popular RPGs, and the most popular RPG, are set in fantasy worlds, miraculous magic can be worked to bring someone back from the dead.

Draw Steel doesn't stray too far from this. But I do think there are some interesting wrinkles to the way they approach death and dying.

One of the central design conceits in Draw Steel, less famous than its "every attack hits" element but I think of a similar ethos, is that control over your character is almost never taken away from you. Status effects like D&D's stunned and incapacitated don't exist. There is a Medusa that can petrify you (and once again, I'm heartbroken that they didn't take the opportunity to name this creature a Gorgon, finally correcting the baffling misnomer from D&D,) but for the most part, the game wants you to continue to participate.

And nowhere is that more radically enforced than in the Dying condition.

When you are reduced to 0 Stamina or less, you get the Dying condition. This doesn't impede your abilities in any way - except that you are now Bleeding, and you can't take the Catch Breath maneuver. Bleeding means that when you take a Main Action or Triggered Action, you lose 1d6+your level of Stamina. Unlike D&D, you do track negative Stamina, because if you get the negative of your Winded level (half your max Stamina,) you die.

Catch Breath is the maneuver that anyone can usually take to spend a Recovery and heal up a third of their max health, so it means that if you're Dying, you're in a rough spot and are going to need some kind of ability or the help of a friend to rescue you.

Draw Steel is meant to feel cinematic, and I think that this mechanic really reflects the drama of an epic fantasy action scene. The clearest example, to me, is the death of Boromir in Fellowship of the Ring. We see Boromir, after he has had his lowest moment and tried to take the ring from Frodo, reawaken his true, heroic nature, and goes to fend off the Uruk-hai coming after the Hobbits. Slaying them in droves (minions,) he ultimately takes an arrow to the chest. He's now Dying.

(As a note, I actually like the idea of "Stamina" over Hit Points in the way that it suggests that you aren't actually getting injured until you're at 0, like Stamina is your energy to parry and deflect attacks. Does this clash with abilities that say they, like, impale you and pull you toward the monster? Yes. But it does have an interesting flavor.)

Now, Boromir could just stop and hold his wound, but tactically, this wouldn't necessarily be smart: the Uruks are probably just going to hack him to death, and then go for his friends. So, Boromir, despite the damage it's doing to his body, continues to fight on. He knows he's doomed to die, but he figures at least he can do something to help his cause before he drops. Ultimately, it's a partial success: he gives Aragorn the time to get the drop on the Uruk-hai leader (Leader?) but Merry and Pippin are taken nonetheless.

Indeed, beyond pure altruistic heroics, there are probably some times when fighting on while Dying is the best choice - monsters aren't going to stop attacking you just because you're wounded, and so you might need to finish them off quickly before they can do so to you.

But what about when you do finally hit that -50% mark? How does the game treat things when you do fall in battle?

Well, first off, some Ancestries have unique relationships with death. Revenants, the free-willed, sentient undead, have a trait called Tough But Withered, which actually prevents you from dying even if you hit that point, only causing you to go inert for 12 hours - as long as you don't take any fire damage, which will burn your dried out dead husk of a body. Notably, Revenants can purchase an ancestry trait that gives them immunity to Bleeding, which means that they can be nearly at full strength even if they're on the verge of death. Hakaan, the stony half-giants, have a purchasable trait (I haven't gone over ancestries yet, but there's a cool system there) called Doomsight, which essentially gives you visions of the battle in which you are doomed to die, but until that point, if you'd normally die, you instead turn to stony rubble for 12 hours before you reassemble and revive.

For others, the most obvious way to bring someone back is via a Scroll of Resurrection, a consumable treasure that can bring back anyone who has been dead for less than a year, if they're willing (though not a Hakaan who used the Doomsight feature).

However, working with the Director, there's yet another route: Titles.

Titles in Draw Steel are a bit like feats, but rather than earning them as part of your normal level progression (Perks are the closer analogue there,) Titles are rewards for quests and adventures, and the prerequisites can be quite strange: among them are various ways in which your character died.

Presumed Dead can be earned if you die in a way that prevents your body from being recovered or examined, such as falling off a cliff. What the title does is that you only appear to have died, but instead, you regain 1 Stamina and can spend 1 recovery, and you even get a minor treasure. You and the Director coordinate for your hero's triumphant return (once again, this is almost precisely like Aragorn's seeming demise in Two Towers, when he goes over a cliff on a warg).

Saved for a Worse Fate is a title that the entire party can earn if there's a TPK: rather than dying, you're all captured by the monsters you were fighting, and various scenarios can play out from there.

There are more of these titles, and what I think they do is give the Director and the players permission to use whatever comic-book shenanigans they need to keep a player character in the narrative.

I will note that I think these Titles require buy-in from the Director - meeting the prerequisites is not a guarantee that you get the title. But I'd recommend that Directors look at these and try to award them when it helps keep the narrative going, and especially to use these death-reverting titles if a player doesn't want to give up their character just yet.

Just another element of TTRPGs that I think Draw Steel has a really cool and refreshing (that makes it sound like I'm describing an iced tea) take on.

Figuring Out What You Can Get Away With Using Kits in Draw Steel - The Mountain Shadow

 Draw Steel doesn't use practically any of the familiar terminology one might know from D&D. Hit Points are Stamina. Intelligence is Reason. Tiers are Echelons. Among these unfamiliarities are the names of classes. While you could consider each of Draw Steel's nine classes a rough equivalent to one found in 5E D&D (though in the case of the Talent, the equivalent is either WotC's UA-tested Psionic class, or it's MCDM's own 5E Talent,) not one of them shares the name with a D&D class. Spellcasters channeling divine power are Conduits rather than Clerics. Warriors who channel a primordial might are Furies instead of Barbarians.

But while I think you could create a pretty satisfying "conversion chart" if you wanted to play your D&D character in Draw Steel, there's a nuance here that I think is worth noting:

D&D classes, and most fantasy RPG classes, have an aesthetic that they achieve both through abilities and the kind of gear they wear. Classically, a Paladin is a knight in shining armor - specifically, they wear heavy armor and tend to have some bulky weapon that they're either wielding with two hands, or using along with a shield.

But Draw Steel does something really interesting: roughly half of the classes (the Censor, Fury, Shadow, Tactician, and Troubadour) get something called a Kit. These are, on the surface, a kind of set of equipment, but what they really are is "what vibe are you going for?" Kits do have a significant mechanical impact, but they're designed in such a way that you are not by any means forced to go the traditional route regarding what your character will look like when fighting monsters.

And Kits are designed to be usable by every (with some small exceptions) class that uses kits.

Naturally, if you're thinking of the Shadow as Draw Steel's equivalent of the Rogue, you'd assume that the best option is something like Cloak and Dagger, or perhaps Sniper. These would probably work out just fine for a Shadow, and I don't feel like I have the play experience to even begin to determine whether they're more optimal choices.

Kits do a few things: the kind of armor they come with is reflected by increasing your maximum Stamina (though sometimes it's not armor, but just hardiness associated with the kit). They'll also tend to come with some kind of damage bonus, and it's here where we really wanted to be thinking about how we create our character.

Each also comes with a Signature Ability, which will be one of the things you can do for free when you're conserving your Heroic Resources (or still earning enough to use any Heroic Abilities). Nearly all of these abilities allow you to choose Might or Agility with which to make your power roll. And that's notable, because every single class that gets kits will have either Might or Agility as one of their highest stats. There are a handful that require you to choose between one of those two and the three "mental" characteristic scores, but given the way that stat progression is always good, you should be fine taking these as well (I'd thought perhaps that Furies might not be able to optimally use these, as they don't get automatic scaling with Reason, Intuition, or Presence, but given that each also allows either Might or Agility, the two stats Furies also always get the best progression with, they should work for them as well).

So: let's talk about this idea that I've had: The Shadow, while being the game's analogue for the Rogue, can use any of these kits, and I'd like to see how effective I can be if I take a really off-label kit: not Sniper, not Cloak and Dagger, not even Spellsword. I want to take The Mountain.

The Mountain is, actually not entirely unlike the character of the same name from A Song of Ice and Fire, a heavily-armored warrior who fights with a heavy weapon. Examples given are Greatswords, greataxes, mauls, and morningstars (this latter one I generally view as a one-handed weapon, but that might be D&D's influence on me).

The other bonuses that we get with the Mountain kit are the following:

We get +9 to our Stamina per echelon (not level - so we get 9 at level 1, then another 9 at level 4, another 9 at level 7, and finally another 9 at 10, meaning a total of 36 by the time we hit the cap).

We also gain a +2 bonus to our Stability. Stability is a stat that is essentially your defense against forced movement. If something tries to Push, Pull, or Slide you, you get to subtract your stability from the distance they do that, and of course if that reduces it to zero, they don't get to move you at all.

We then get a melee damage bonus of +0/+0/+4, which means that we get a big bonus when we get a tier 3 result on strikes that have the melee keyword, but no bonus on lesser rolls.

    This, I think, will be the big limiting factor: Shadows have a pretty hefty mix of ranged and melee abilities. If we go with the Mountain kit, we'll really want to focus on melee because that's where we're getting our bonus damage. Now, the good news is that Shadows are going to be able to hide pretty easily. As per the rules on Hiding (Heroes p. 258) if you're hidden from a creature, you gain an edge on ability rolls against them until the end of your turn, even if you break out of hiding before you make that roll (such as, for example, emerging from cover to strike at them). Edges (and especially Double Edges) are going to be massive for this kit, and a Shadow has a pretty reliable way to get one.

Before we get into other build choices, let's finish up with this kit:

The Mountain signature ability is Pain for Pain, which is a melee attack that does 3+A/M (agility or might, naturally we're choosing agility, and so I'll just show that option) or 5+A or 13+A (the tier 3 result incorporates the kit's damage bonus, so we don't add 4 on top of this). At level 1, that'll mean 5, 7, or 15 damage.

The ability has a special effect, which is that if the target dealt damage to you since the end of your last turn, this deals additional damage equal to your Agility (again, or Might if you were some other class).

And here's where my theoretical understanding could use a bit of real-world play experience: I don't know how often Shadows can expect to take damage. Naturally, in Draw Steel, every attack hits, so a certain amount of damage is unavoidable. But while a Null, Censor, or Fury is always wading into the thick of it, I don't know if a Shadow's general game plan is going to be more about not being in a position to be attacked in the first place. Certainly, if we're committing to this kit, we'll get some benefit from taking a bit of damage, though of course that comes with the drawback of... taking damage.

The stability bonus for a Mountain kit is also potentially going to push us into a role we might not necessarily want to take: a Mountain is hard to move, so it seems suited to being a kind of immovable object on the battlefield. However, this might still benefit us in the sense that monsters that try to drag us where we don't want to go will have a harder time doing so.

So: let's talk subclass and general build.

For subclass, we're picking this based on vibes. Shadows have three subclasses, the Colleges of Black Ash, Caustic Alchemy, and Harlequin Mask. The first is all about magically teleporting around and using abyssal magic (conveniently, Draw Steel's demons come from the Abyssal Wastes, so D&D veterans will have an easy time associated abyss and demons,) the second is about poison and smoke bombs and such, and the last is a trickster that uses illusions and guile.

The vibe I want to go for is a kind of gothic phantom: a nightmarish implacable dread knight hunting the monsters down. And so, Black Ash is the one I'm inclined to pick here.

This is going to make you very mobile: you can teleport 5 squares as a maneuver (or more if you spend Insight for each additional square) and you can also teleport as a triggered action when you take damage, halving the damage as you do so, with the same Insight-for-increased distance deal.

I think the assumed use for both of these is to get away from foes and slip into cover (the maneuver lets you attempt to hide even if observed). But consider this: you will be so, so freaking good at chasing down enemies trying to stay at range. Indeed, if there's one thing that melee-focused characters can always use, it's mobility.

Vanishing from sight only to appear behind a foe, potentially without their noticing, before you hack them down with your greatsword, is a real vibe.

So: we're using our extreme mobility to position ourselves easily in melee. Naturally, this is going to encourage us to take mostly melee abilities. We can always make ranged free strikes if we can't get into melee with a foe (though this is going to be somewhat underwhelming damage). I believe that even if we use an ability that can act as both a melee and ranged strike, we only get the +4 bonus if we are using it in melee, but it might be good to pick such abilities just to give ourselves some flexibility.

I Work Better Alone, a melee/ranged strike that deals 3+A/6+A/9+A damage and gives us a Surge before we make the power roll if none of our allies are adjacent to the target certainly fits in with our style. We're going to be hunting the foes on the edge of the fight. Alternatively, we could go the opposite route and take Teamwork Has Its Place, which does the same base damage but gives us 1 surge if there is an ally adjacent to the target (this one also works on objects).

Here, I might say you should really consider your party's composition. If you have a lot of melee allies, THIP might be the better option, but if you've got mostly ranged friends, IWBA will be more reliable.

You Were Watching the Wrong One does nearly as much damage (3+A/5+A/8+A) and gives you a surge if there's an ally within 5 squares (a pretty decent range,) and then further gives an ally a surge if you're flanking with them (and flanking will be a little easier for us to manage given our mobility). This is an obligatory melee ability, though, so it's a commitment. That said, flanking will be very good for us, especially if we can pair it with hiding to get a double edge and let us get that juicy +4 bonus on any roll above an 11.

I honestly think any of the Shadow's four abilities could be good, but I'm inclined to take I Work Better Alone for the theme of what we're doing, and if we can't get the bonus effect on it, we can always go with Pain for Pain if we get its bonus effect. IWBA will also work at range, if we need to do so - I'd flavor this as perhaps throwing a barbed knife or even chipping some piece of the terrain off and pelting the foe with it.

Now, let's pick Heroic Abilities.

Once again, I think we might steer clear of any abilities that can't be melee strikes, though hybrid options are of course more flexible.

Now, is our job to focus primarily on damage output? Or do we want a bit of battlefield control? Once again, party composition is something to consider, but I think if we're trying to feel like a monster out of a nightmare... damn, I guess both options make sense.

The options that speak to me are Disorienting Strike and Eviscerate.

The former is pure melee, but it lets us deal damage (slightly more than our signature abilities) but also lets us slide the target 2/3/5 squares, and we can then shift into any square the target leaves when we slide them (once again, giving us insane mobility). Sliding is very good - it's the most versatile type of forced movement and can set our allies up nicely. Also, if we slide them right into a wall, they could take additional damage

Eviscerate can be either ranged or melee, and actually does the same damage as Disorienting Strike, but instead of sliding, we can impose the Bleeding status if their Agility is below our potency (remember that we can spend the surges we get with IWBA on making those potencies higher). The Bleeding is Save Ends (meaning each turn there's just a 50% chance that the status ends) and can mean more damage if they want to actually do anything on their turn.

I'm kind of obsessed with forced movement, and I do like the idea of this implacable shadow dragging a foe back into the danger they've been trying to escape, but I also think that the horror-movie vibes of inflicting bleeding could be hard to pass up. 1d6+the creature's level is not a small amount of damage to inflict possibly multiple times per round.

For our 5-Insight ability, in terms of pure damage, Coup de Grace is pretty appealing: it's pure damage, but that damage is 2d6+7+A/2d6+11+A/2d6+16+A, for both ranged and melee. So, if we assume we're doing this in melee, our averages at level 1 are 16, 20, or 29 damage. To put that in context, most Platoon-level monsters (the ones that a Director can throw at a 1:1 ratio with players of the same level) at level 1 have 30 Stamina. Most of what you face are Horde or Minion monsters, and so this is going to nearly always kill a level 1 monster that isn't something like a Brute or Defender.

Shadowstrike is another option that just lets us make two strike signature abilities in a row. I Work Better Alone, if we assume we're using this with the right conditions (and surely we are if we're spending our 5 Insight on this heroic ability) will deal 5/8/15 damage in melee, so two of them would mean around 10/16/30, along with two surges, which we could pour into damage to add (at this level) 2 to each strike, so potentially around 14/20/34.

It's honestly comparable. Shadowstrike will be better if we can consistently get Edges on our rolls, and I think you could also make the argument that it's more flexible, as we might find that Pain for Pain is more optimal. So, Shadowstrike might be the one to go for (there are two others but one is ranged-only and the other is built for multi-target, and I think we're orienting around single-target burning).

    So, this gets us through level 1. I don't think I'm going to go through further levels, just because I don't know that I have the energy or the level of Insight (haha, get it? The Shadow Heroic Resource) into actually playing the game to know if these are good choices.

But I do think what it shows is that you can build a functional character that goes a really different route from the conventional. I think we could really terrify some enemies with this build, and I just love how much kits let you go off the beaten path with these classes.

The Summoner in Playtest for Draw Steel

 While the game has only been out for a couple weeks now (and still only in PDF form,) MCDM is testing out a tenth class for Draw Steel that didn't make it into the core rulebooks: The Summoner.

The Summoner does what it says it does: you summon minions to do your bidding and fight alongside you. Most classically, the "iconic" subclass for it is the Necromancer, or "Undead Portfolio," but you can also specialize in Elementals, Fairies, or Demons as the other three subclass options.

As I've been playing Diablo IV since it came for free on the PS+, I of course gravitated to the Necromancer, and I think that the design here seeks to replicate the feeling that you get in Diablo games where you have a massive number of minions fighting for you.

Summoners use Essence, like Elementalists, as their Heroic Resource, but Summoners also effectively get a second resource in the form of Minions. You get to pick two Signature Minions from your subclass, and you'll automatically get two brand new minions at the start of each of your turns, as well as two when combat itself begins (so 4 by the start of your first turn - if they're still alive).

Your minions work like minions controlled by the Director does - you organize them into two squads, and each squad pools its stamina together in the same way. Squads make actions together. You can  attack with them via Strike for Me, a free triggered action that goes off when you either make a triggered action to make a free strike or use a signature ability, which then has a number of minions determined by your power roll make free strikes instead of using the triggering ability.

    So, in case you weren't already getting this: this is a complex class. They actually warn players that this is an advanced class that you probably want to save for after you've gotten a bit of Draw Steel under your belt. I imagine this will be very popular among Directors who get a chance to play and are very familiar with playing with minions.

    I do wonder a bit about this Strike for Me feature - that it might be easier to simply make a Signature Ability for Summoners that allows them to have a certain number of minions make their strikes.

Summoners have their two types of Signature Minions that get automatically summoned, but they can also spend Essence to summon more powerful minions. For example, your standard Signature Skeleton has 2 Stamina and a Free Strike damage value of just 1. But a Grave Knight, which comes at two knights for 3 Essence, and this one has a Signature Ability that can do up to 9 damage and inflict bleeding and has 6 Stamina.

    As a note, one thing I'm trying to wrap my head around is that it looks like one of the 3-cost minions for each subclass has a signature ability, while most only have Free Strikes.

Summoners all have the Call Forth ability that lets you spend Essence to summon additional minions - 1 for each Signature minion and then the set number of minions for the higher-cost ones.

    The point is: Summoners are built to fill the battlefield with minions that will fight for them. I think it has the potential to be very powerful - if nothing else, you can crowd the battlefield to restrict enemy movement by putting a bunch of minions in the way.

    What I worry is that I'm not sure there's any way this isn't going to bog down combat by a lot - a Summoner is going to need to take the time to position all of their minions and then figure out what they're doing. I think holding to a strict interpretation that any given squad can only do one main action is going to make this a little better, but you're still commanding yourself and two (and I think later more) squads.

    It's kind of fascinating to see, given how D&D's 2024 revamp really tamped down on the ability to summon lots of creatures into battle. I know that MCDM is somewhat contrarian toward the direction 5E has gone (in some places justified, in other places I think it comes off as contrarian for the sake of itself). That being said, I understand the impulse: the class fantasy of a Necromancer is very much that "army of the dead" feeling.

Naturally it's a very different thing in video games, but I think about the two class specializations in World of Warcraft that very much fit into this mold: the Unholy Death Knight is the game's necromancer equivalent (though you're a heavily-armored melee character) and the Demonology Warlock is the equivalent of this one's Diabolist (I will quibble here a bit: like D&D, Draw Steel draws an - arguably more dramatic - distinction between demons and devils, and the Diabolist summons demons, despite the fact that Diablo means very specifically devil. In a lot of languages, Vs and Bs are interchangeable. This subclass should be Demonologist. /End soapbox rant.) Anyway, WoW's examples both find ways to get a lot of minions out there. Demonologists have one of their core rotational abilities summon up to 3 imps that blast targets for 12 seconds, and so at any given time you might have as many as 18 or more of these guys shooting at your enemies in addition to the larger demons you have summoned. Unholy Death Knights have a somewhat more cyclical experience, where one of their 1-minute cooldowns can summon up to 4 undead minions on top of your permanent ghoul.

The thing is, in WoW, as well as in the (also Blizzard) Diablo games, the behavior of these minions is automated, so it doesn't really slow the game down in any way.

I think even as someone who feels pretty confident that I could run Draw Steel as a Director at this point, I would really want to have this class well and truly internalized before I'd inflict a 15-minute turn on my fellow players.

I'll be curious to see how things develop as the playtest goes to a wider audience. I think they might just embrace the complexity and sell it as an advanced class, which might be fine. But I do imagine that Directors might feel the need to ban it if players aren't really on top of their shit.

UA: Sorcerer-King Patron

 Yeah, it's Dark Sun.

The last of the Apocalyptic Subclasses options, this Warlock subclass has you working for one of the tyrannical Sorcerer-Kings, or potentially any grand and powerful tyrant.

And yes, before we get into it, it's a little funny to have a patron who is just straight-up a member of another class. But I also think the Sorcerer Kings are meant to have gone beyond mere mortal status, more along the lines of Emperor Leto Atreides II from God-Emperor of Dune.

Sorcerer-King Spells:

1st: Command, Compelled Duel, Wrathful Smite

2nd: Hold Person, Mind Spike

3rd: Fear, Sending

4th: Compulsion, Staggering Smite

5th: Dominate Person, Synaptic Static

Also, this feature allows Psionic Casting, which allows you to ignore verbal and material components (except those consumed or that have a cost) with any of the spells on this list.

    Weird that they make the material component specification given that none of these spell use consumed or costly material components.

    But this is a cool list - lots of spells that upcast well for a Warlock, and some all-time bangers like Fear and Synaptic Static. There's a bit of a pressure to go Bladelock, which is fine, but I think you'll be ok as a Blastlock as well.

Level 3:

Tyrant's Herald gives you the following:

Intimidating Presence: You gain proficiency in Intimidation and also have Expertise in it.

    I mean, expertise in Intimidation does feel like something Warlocks should get more easily.

Voice of Tyranny: You can cast Command as a bonus action for free Cha times per long rest.

    Command is a solid spell, and while we won't be upcasting this, getting several free casts of it that we can also do along with our action is really cool. As a note: Command is 100% the Voice from Dune, as used by the Bene Gesserit. You can do some nasty things with Command (I think the 2024 version is theoretically more limited, but I'll always allow a creative player to do cool things if they can come up with a one-word directive).

Level 6:

Decisive Edict:

When you cast a spell using a Pact Magic slot, you can cause a 30-foot eruption of magic around you. Within that area, you can choose for each of creature to either Marshal them, giving them advantage on attack rolls until the end of their next turn, or Oppress them, Frightening them on a failed Wisdom save until the end of their next turn.

Once you use this feature, you can't use it again until you finish a Short or Long Rest or use Magical Cunning (so basically, until you regain a Pact slot).

    I don't worry too much about that limitation, because the activation on the expending of a spell slot is already going to be close to that same limit anyway. This is a nice bit of tide-turning, making the following round much better for you and your allies, and the 30-foot emanation means you can do it even if you're fairly far from the action. Of course, advantage is cheap in 2024 rules, but the fear effect could be very handy if the monsters fail their saves.

Level 10:

Vindictive Rebuke:

When an enemy hits you with an attack roll, you can use a reaction to force them to reroll the d20 and use the new result. If this causes the attack to miss, the creature takes psychic damage equal to your Warlock level.

You can use this Cha times per long rest.

    This is a decent defensive ability, and even if you still get hit, it can be some insurance against critical hits. The damage you can deal with it is quite decent, but definitely the main attraction is the chance to prevent a hit.

Level 14:

Absolute Tyranny:

When you cast Command, you can target one additional creature within the spell's range. A creature frightened by you automatically fails its save against your Command spell.

    Ok, I love how this brings features together. Command upcasts to target more creatures, so if casting with a spell slot, this is less exciting (as by this point we'll be hitting 5 targets, so a 6th is not that much). But consider this:

    You cast Synaptic Static on a group of, say, four enemies. As you do so, you use Decisive Edict, so in addition to a bunch of psychic damage, some of them are now frightened. You can cast Command on the ones that are frightened as a bonus action using Voice of Tyranny, because you're not expending a spell slot so the "one spell slot spell per turn" rule isn't violated, and it works automatically.

    Notably, Command is not a charm effect, so it will work on any kind of creature. At worst, an auto-failing creature will waste their action following the command. (Immunity to fear is not uncommon, though.)

Overall Thoughts:

    There's certainly some light pressure to go Bladelock here, as I mentioned above. I do think that you'll want to have some source of better armor - starting off as a Fighter before multiclassing into Warlock the rest of the way is going to solve several of your problems.

    I think this could be a lot of fun to play. Once again, like many of these subclasses, it might be a fun challenge to figure out a way to play these as heroic characters (though D&D has always allowed for villain protagonists). This one's certainly a subclass for the Dune fans.

And that concludes our look at the Apocalyptic subclasses. My general impression is that they're all decent, and possibly quite powerful indeed. Each has a strong central mechanical concept that ties to its theme, which is always what you want in a subclass.

I feel like we're due for some announcements of future D&D books, but so far, no official word.

Critical Role Campaign 4 Details

 Today we got some big announcements for Critical Role's 4th campaign!

As we already knew, Matt Mercer is going to be changing seats to play as a PC in this campaign, while Dimension 20's Brennan Lee Mulligan (who has run stuff for CR in the past) will be helming the campaign. But what about the new details?

First off, somewhat to my surprise, the game is going to be using D&D - specifically the 2024 version of 5E. While they're very proud of the huge success that Daggerheart has been, they decided that for now at least they'll continue doing shorter-form games like Age of Umbra with Daggerheart while leaning on the familiarity everyone has with 5E. (I've been going through Age of Umbra, and it's entertaining, but much as there were a lot of rules questions in the early days after converting Vox Machina from Pathfinder to 5E, the game does encounter a little friction with the brand-new system).

Another reason to stick to 5E: with Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins working for Darrington Press now, the two of them have been able to help create bespoke character options and flesh out the world for the 4th campaign. They are, after all, two of the central figures behind 5E, and lead the 2024 revamp.

Secondly, the campaign is going to be a broad, West Marches-style game. What this means is that there are 14 - yes, fourteen - core cast members for the campaign. This includes all 8 of the core Critical Role folks, along with Robbie Daymond, Luis Carazo, Aabria Iyengar, Alex Ward, and Whitney Moore.

However, the thirteen players aren't all going to be at the table together. The players are divided into different groups: Soldiers, Seekers, and Schemers, based on the style of adventure that the players prefer.

The Soldiers will have a more combat-focused story in the campaign, with classic monster-fighting. Schemers will be involved in a lot of cloak and dagger and political intrigue. Seekers are going to explore and discover lore across the world.

And what world is that? Aramán.

Aramán (sorry, as an American, we don't have accented letters on the keyboard, so this is probably going to be come Araman in these posts very soon) is a fully new world. 70 years ago, the gods and mortals of Araman went to war, and the gods were slain. Now, in the power vacuum that has followed, various factions and individuals vie for power and seek to determine how the world will work in the absence of such powers.

Evidently, Perkins and Crawford are heavily involved in helping Mulligan build out this setting, and I have to imagine we'll get a Darrington Press campaign setting book for it (perhaps for both 5E and Daggerheart?)

The three groups' stories will be happening simultaneously, and I think the idea is that individual characters might migrate between groups at times.

It's a profoundly ambitious project, but I also think that if anyone has the resources to pull off such a thing, it's this group of people. I'll be excited to check it out when it launches in October.

UA: Defiled Sorcery

 If you had any doubts that this UA was Dark Sun themed, this and the Warlock to follow really cinch it. Dark Sun is ruled over by warring Sorcerer Kings whose magic has blighted the land. If you want a bit of that dark magic, look no further than this subclass, and become a Sorcerer King/Queen/Monarch yourself!

Defiler Spells:

1st: Inflict Wounds, Ray of Sickness

2nd: Blindness/Deafness, Ray of Enfeeblement

3rd: Bestow Curse, Vampiric Touch

4th: Blight, Hallucinatory Terrain

5th: Antilife Shell, Contagion

    So, off the bat I don't know if I'm crazy about any of these spells, except maybe Antilife Shell and Blidness/Deafness. Attack spells are obviously better now for Sorcerers thanks to Innate Sorcery.

Level 3:

Defile and Empower:

(Buckle up, this one's a big one).

Once per turn, when you roll damage for a spell you cast using a spell slot, you can roll a number of your unexpended Hit Point Dice (Hit Dice? What are we calling them these days?) up to a number equal to half the level of the spell slot expended, rounded up, and add the total rolled to one damage roll of the spell, expending the hit point dice.

Life Steal: Alternatively, instead of drawing on your own life force, you can try to steal life from another creature you can see within 30 feet. The creature makes a Con save versus your spell save DC (creatures immune to exhaustion succeed automatically). On a failure, in place of rolling your Hit Point Dice, you roll a number of the creature's unexpended hit point dice (up to half the level of the spell slot expended, rounding down, but still with a minimum of 1 die) and add the total to one damage roll of the spell, and the creature's hit point dice that you rolled are expended for them.

Once a creature fails their save against this Life Steal aspect of the feature, you can't use Life Steal again until you finish a Long Rest or expend 3 Sorcery points to use it again.

    Whoo boy, that's a lot. Flavorfully, this is freaking awesome. My reading of how this works is that if you try to use Life Steal for this, and they succeed on their save, you just don't get to empower the spell. Targeting larger creatures with Life Steal will give a better reward, but big monsters also tend to have higher Con modifiers, so it's a risk.

    As a reminder, in 2024 rules, you get all your Hit Dice/Hit Point Dice back on a long rest, rather than just half, so you can actually afford to be more liberal with this - as long as you aren't also going to need to heal up a bunch on a short rest.

    The bonus damage here is going to be decent - a bit like upcasting. If you use this with Blight, for example, you'll add 2d6 to the spell's typical 8d8. That's a little less than if you were casting Blight at 6th level. A Fireball could also add 2d6, so for the cost of your own potential healing, you could effectively upcast it to 5th level.

    The real shenanigans here is Magic Missile, which officially only uses a single roll for all of its missiles. Is that how, like, any DMs allow you to run it? Not that I've seen. But RAW, even a 1st level Magic Missile will do 1d4+1d6+1, an average of 7 per dart, or 21 guaranteed damage (ask your DM about this outside of the game before trying to pull it out in the middle of a fight, and don't be shocked if they shut it down).

    Also, as a note, if the party is willing to lend their vitality to this, they can opt to fail their saving throws. Have a Barbarian who is willing to toss a d12 or two your way?

Level 6:

Corrupted Caster:

You gain the following benefits:

Defiler's Ward: when you take a bonus action to transform Sorcery Points into a spell slot, you can roll a number of d6s equal to the level of the spell slot created, and gain Temp HP equal to the total rolled.

    My general experience has been that Sorcerers tend to convert spell slots into Sorcery Points rather than the other way around, but if you make a 5th level spell slot, you'd get an average of 17.5 Temp HP on top of the spell slot, so... a decent bonus.

Strengthened Rot: Damage dealt by your Sorcerer spells and features ignore resistance to Necrotic and Poison damage.

    Sadly, this is probably worthless. Almost no monsters are resistant to either of these damage types. Full immunity in both cases is far more common.

Level 14:

Withering Aura:

When you use Innate Sorcery, you create a 15-foot aura originating from you for the duration of Innate Sorcery, which gives the following benefits:

Defiling Shroud allows you to reduce the damage of enemies within the aura when they hit you with an attack roll by an amount equal to your Charisma modifier.

Essence Siphon lets you regain 1d4 Sorcery Points when a creature dies within the aura, but you can only benefit from this once per use of Innate Sorcery.

    Hot damn, this is good. The damage reduction doesn't take any action or have any limit, so if you get swarmed in melee (not great for a Sorcerer, but it happens,) this can potentially save you a lot of damage, and at least help out even against single big hits. The Sorcery Point restoration can be enormous: you don't have a ton of Sorcery Points to begin with. Using Sorcery Incarnate (the level 7 feature for all Sorcerers,) this could potentially make Innate Sorcery a SP-neutral feature if creatures die near you often enough.

Level 18:

Superior Defiler:

You gain the following:

Fouled Soul: You have immunity to the Poisoned and Exhaustion conditions.

    That's freaking great. Immune to Exhaustion? With the nerfing of Exhausion in 2024, more monsters can actually inflict it, and that's a scary condition. Poisoned is more common, but also less scary (and I feel like maybe less common at these high levels?)

Furthered Defilement: Your Withering Aura increases to a 30-foot emanation, and enemies within it cannot restore HP.

    Bigger aura is good. Shutting down healing is situationally good (and pairs well with the Gladiator Fighter).

Overall Thoughts:

    Conceptually, this subclass is very cool. And I do think Defile and Empower, which is the central subclass feature, has the potential to be very powerful. I also think it'd be an interesting challenge to play one of these in Dark Sun - maybe you're the child of one of the Sorcerer Kings, or you have the potential to become one. Can you be a hero when your power is so destructive?

UA: Gladiator Fighter

 For some reason, we tend to imagine that as civilization crumbles in an apocalyptic catastrophe, entertainment becomes more brutal and cruel. The clear pop-culture analogue I can thing of here is the Thunderdome, from the third Mad Max movie, but pit-fighting does seem to be a signifier of a cruel and anarchic world (even if, historically, the most famous gladiators fought under an unprecedentedly advanced empire).

The Gladiator in this UA is a Fighter subclass that strongly encourages you to go heavy on Charisma, as your fighting is part of a gory performance. As a note, I think that this could pair well with a Warlock dip, though of course remember that most good melee feats will still require at least a minimum of 13 in Strength or sometimes Dexterity.

Also of note, many Gladiator features here require a melee weapon to use, so while most Fighter subclasses are perfectly viable as a ranged build, this one's obligate melee.

Level 3:

Brutality:

The central feature of the subclass allows you to augment your weapon hits. Once per turn (though not only on your turn) if you hit a creature with a melee weapon attack, you can add one of the following effects. You can do this a number of times equal to your Charisma modifier (minimum 1) per Short or Long Rest. Each of these lets you tack on an additional weapon mastery effect specific to the brutality effect along with an additional bonus. The mastery is in addition to whatever mastery you're already getting.

Bleed lets you activate the Sap property in addition to another mastery (likely the weapon's default, but of course Fighters can swap those out by mid-levels) and also deal extra damage equal to your Charisma modifier (minimum 1).

Bluff lets you activate the Vex property and also gives you advantage on the next saving throw you make before the end of your next turn.

Stumble lets you activate the Topple mastery and the target can only take an action or bonus action on its next turn, not both.

    I quibble a bit with Bleed here, as it doesn't create some kind of periodic damage effect. Of course, at higher levels as Fighters we can already swap in Sap, Push, or Slow, but we could potentially do that along with this with these strikes. Naturally, I'll always feel inclined to compare this with the Battle Master, but I think the effects that come with the bonus mastery are an interesting wrinkle. You get all three of these (and later more). But unless you're emptying the tank, you'll need to be a little conservative with them.

Combat Theatrics:

This gives you two benefits:

Athletic Flair lets you add your Charisma modifier (minimum 1) to any Strength Athletics check or Dexterity Acrobatics check you make.

    Again, you need to have a decent Charisma modifier for this subclass to work, so this will be a nice bonus when it comes up.

Bonus Proficiency gives you proficiency in your choice of Acrobatics, Athletics, Deception, Intimidation, or Performance.

    Nice, but clearly not the headliner.

Level 7:

Flourish Parry:

As a reaction when someone hits you with a melee attack, you can use a reaction to increase your AC against that attack by an amount equal to your Charisma modifier (minimum 1).

If the reaction causes the attack to miss, you can retaliate as part of the same reaction, making a melee weapon attack against the triggering creature. If this hits, you can use a brutality effect without expending a use of the feature.

If you use this counterattack, you can't do so again until you finish a Long Rest or expend a Second Wind to restore your use of it.

    The real headliner here is that this is a defensive reaction you never run out of. Sure, the counterattack is limited, but every single round, you will be able to potentially parry an attack. Once again, you'll really need a high Charisma for it to be reliable, but unless you have a DM who doesn't tell you the actual attack roll, you'll be able to gauge when it's time to use it. I actually think this makes the Gladiator really attractive as a sword-and-board build - as someone who played an Eldritch Knight with the Shield spell, I can tell you it's very nice to be very hard to hit. This isn't quite Shield, as it's only against one attack, but the unlimited nature is very cool. The counterattack is also nice, but not the thing that gets me excited about it.

Level 10:

Bolder Brutalities:

You gain new brutality effects you can use.

Rive lets you activate the Cleave mastery, and you get to add your ability modifier to the damage of the bonus action attack.

    Cleave's pretty hard to come by - only on Greataxes and Halberds. And this makes Cleave better. One of the big problems with Cleave is that it's useless if you don't have multiple enemies standing next to each other. But being able to choose it situationally, I think, makes it a lot better.

Rush lets you activate the Push mastery and also you can move up to your speed without provoking opportunity attacks.

    I like this: while the obvious thing would be to pursue your target after pushing them, you can also get a ton of extra movement to reposition somewhere safer.

Stagger lets you activate the Slow mastery, and the target has disadvantage on the next saving throw it makes before the end of your next turn.

    This could be a really good set-up to help out one of the spellcasters. Slow is not the most exciting mastery, but disadvantage on the next saving throw? Quite nice.

Level 15:

Brutal Resurgence:

When you use Second Wind to regain HP, you gain an expended use of Brutality. You also regain a use of Brutality when you use Action Surge.

    This is going to significantly increase the amount of brutality you can use. You'll want to ensure you're using enough to not "cap" uses.

Level 18:

Mutilate:

When you hit a bloodied creature with an attack roll, you can attempt to critically injure it. The target makes a Con save (DC based on your Charisma). On a failure, you can choose one of the following effects:

Maimed prevents it from taking more than one attack with the attack action.

Sluggish halves the target's speed and reduces their AC by 2.

These effects last until the creature regains HP.

Once a creature fails its save against this, you can't use it again until you finish a long rest.

    Lots to unpack here, but I love that the target needs to heal up before the effect ends. Against most monsters, that's never going to happen. It is very limited in use, but I love that you have bad-luck protection. If the target succeeds its save, you can use this on your next turn. By the time you get this feature, monsters have hundreds of HP, so bloodied can still mean there's a lot of fight left to go. Also, you can gauge which effect to use: if it's a Marilith or some other monster with a ton of attacks, Maimed will almost neutralize it. If it only does like 2 attacks, it might be more helpful to use Sluggish.

    I'd love to have some way to restore uses of this.

Overall Thoughts:

I think with any Fighter subclass, giving you a menu of things to do is always a good call - and it's a design we see a ton. I'm curious to see if the way this is tied to weapon masteries remains the final design. Only Bleed actually adds damage, and in that case only a modest amount (though at low levels, an extra 3 or 4 damage can be a big deal). The limitation on once per turn does have a little negative synergy with the Fighter's ability to make so many attacks per turn. I really like Flourish Parry and Mutilate here. And I do think Mutilate in particular really gives you that flavor of brutality.

UA: Circle of Preservation Druid

 In a devastated post-apocalyptic world, having Druids who can restore some vitality to the planet is a real asset. The Preservation druid seems to focus on healing and protecting the party while conjuring forth life from the devastated ground.

Before I get into the mechanics, I think this is a clearly desirable hero for a setting like Dark Sun, though in a way I wonder if that might clash with the setting's themes. We'll have to see how they present them.

Circle Spells:

1st: Bless, Sanctuary

2nd: Lesser Restoration, Protection from Poison

3rd: Beacon of Hope, Plant Growth

4th: Aura of Life, Death Ward

5th: Greater Restoration, Hallow

    This has some bangers in it - Bless is a solid workhorse, and Death Ward can be a nice insurance policy. Plant Growth is one of those spells I've heard is very useful, but I don't think I've ever seen it in play (which is likely because I haven't been in a lot of campaigns with druids. I had one in my Ravnica game before the player stepped away, but she was very conservative with spell slots, sticking largely to cantrips).

Level 3:

Preserved Land:

As a bonus action, you can expend a Wild Shape charge to create a 15-foot cube (haha, been reading so much Draw Steel that I almost wanted to say a 3-cube) originating on a point within 120 feet. It lasts a minute, and ends if you're incapacitated or die, or if you move more than 120 feet away from it. You can move the cube as a bonus action up to 30 feet.

Within the cube, nonmagical vegetation sprouts from the ground. If a creature its turn in the cube, you can give them one of the following benefits: They gain 1d4 plus your Druid Level's worth of Temp HP, or you can end a Frightened or Poisoned effect on them. (This is your choice and doesn't require any action - if a foe is there, you don't have to give them anything in it.)

    Naturally, you'll want to maintain this in most fights, and probably use it primarily to bolster allies with the Temp HP. The amount of Temp HP isn't enormous, but it's a nice little buffer to keep them safe.

Student of Preservation:

You gain multiple benefits:

Frugal Casting lets you ignore material components to spells, except those that cost money or are consumed. However, if a material component is consumed, there's a 10% chance that the component isn't consumed.

    This is cool, but I also wonder how often it's likely to come up: how often to people cast spells with consumed components? I doubt it happens often enough to make a 10% chance at a refund feel that impactful.

Tool Proficiency gives you, you guessed it, proficiency in a type of Artisan's Tools.

    Great. Nothing huge, but nice.

Level 6:

Improved Preservation:

You gain two benefits:

Fortify Protectors gives you and allies in the Preserved Land cube a bonus to Con saves equal to your Wisdom modifier (minimum +1).

    This is really nice: Con saves are very common (and include concentration saves). Couple this with a Paladin's aura of protection and you could have some massive bonuses to Con saves.

Reject Desecrators gives your Preserved Land an offensive option. When the cube enters an enemy's space, and when an enemy enters the cube or ends their turn there, the enemy makes a Wisdom saving throw, taking 2d10 radiant damage on a failure and getting their speed halved until the end of their next turn, or half damage only on a success. An enemy only has to make this save once per turn.

    Naturally, moving the cube to encompass your melee characters as well as the monsters they're fighting is a pretty strong move here. Also, because this can deal damage multiple times per round (just not on the same turn,) you could move this into an enemy, and then if they move out of it, have an ally with a Push weapon knock them back into it. It's decent damage at this level, though it might start to feel a bit underwhelming at higher levels.

Level 10:

Facilitated Restoration lets you cast Lesser Restoration or Greater Restoration without expending a spell slot or any spell components. You can do this a number of times equal to your Wisdom modifier (minimum 1) per long rest.

    This. Is. Freaking. Good. Greater Restoration is one of those spells that always feels like it prevents classes who don't have it from truly being a party's healer (even if it doesn't actually restore HP). Getting 5 of these for free every day, with no gold cost, is amazing. Will it come up all the time? Maybe not. But boy is this going to be fantastic for dealing with foes who might, say, inflict Exhaustion (which I'd bet a lot of Dark Sun monsters could do).

Level 14:

Sacrosanct Land expands your Preserved Land cube to 30 feet. Also, when a creature you can see in the area of it is hit with an attack roll, you can take a reaction to halve the attack's damage.

    So, a conditional but targeted Uncanny Dodge. This is actually the kind of thing that starts to be really useful at high levels. Did the Fighter just get crit by that Colossus? This will help a whole lot.

Overall Thoughts:

    I think this is probably a pretty solid healing subclass. I'm actually really happy that they're making Druids more capable healers to give an alternative to Clerics, and these features are solid. Is this the most exciting subclass? Perhaps not. But it's going to be a real solid utility player.

UA: Apocalyptic Subclasses

 Phew, I was getting ready to make a post about Critical Role's 4th Campaign (that will come eventually - exciting news about it) but then WotC came out with a new subclass UA. Apocalyptic Subclasses all have a certain vibe to them, but the clear implication is that, should this see official publication, we've for sure got a Dark Sun book coming in the future.

Dark Sun is a world that takes inspiration from Dune and Mad Max - a blasted, hot, devastated world called Athas ruled over by tyrannical Sorcerer-Kings whose use of magic drains the life force from the world. It's a world of scarcity, where water is more valuable than gold, and metal is hard to come by, forcing people to improvise with natural materials. Psionics are more common here (I believe the Thri-kreen were introduced with this setting).

Anyway, the UA doesn't explicitly name Dark Sun, but certain terminology makes it unmistakeable. All that said, we don't know to what degree the various UAs have truly presaged upcoming books or are just exploratory designs.

The subclasses on offer here are the Circle of Preservation fro Druids, the Gladiator Fighter, the Defiled Sorcery Sorcerer, and the Sorcerer-King Patron. I'll be doing a write-up on each of them in separate posts.