The Red Squares in Silent HIll 2

 There's a moment that thrilled me when playing through Silent Hill 2, perhaps not sending a chill up my spine or causing me to exclaim in shock, but one that really got the juices flowing, got me thinking "wow, I did not expect that."

In Silent Hill 2 (no idea if this is true in the other games,) when you first begin, walking down a path from the rest stop where the game opens (and where we're introduced to James staring at himself in the mirror in a profoundly dingy public bathroom) we pass by an old well along a forest path. The forest seems ominous and spooky because it's a horror game, but if we were to look at Silent Hill as just an ordinary New England town, it's really not that bad: just a little nature path for people to walk along that goes by the lake. I grew up in New England - a suburb of Boston rather than a resort town in Maine, but I'm familiar with the vibes - and when I go visit home, my dad and I often take walks by a lake about half a mile from his house that is, admittedly, in a more densely residential part of town, but still not too dissimilar from Toluca Lake (I don't know if the developers realized that Toluca Lake is actually a neighborhood in Los Angeles, where I live now). There are nature trails that go through a little forested park/nature preserve in the middle of town (attached to a number of playgrounds where I used to play soccer and baseball) that very much match this little path.

Anyway, as you pass this well, you notice an ominous red glow emanating from it. It's truly the first genuinely unusual, off-putting thing you see in the game. Naturally, I went to investigate (as the developers were sure I would,) and discovered that the glowing red square in the well was, in fact, our first save point.

These red squares are the game's save points, and you'll encounter dozens if not a hundred of them over the course of the game. When you engage with them, you see a reflection of James staring with a kind of blank expression behind the UI for selecting which file to save your progress in.

That's fine, a bit weird, but sure.

Far later, after we finish our first "dungeon" in the Woodside and then Blue Creek apartments (apparently in the original game, there was just one apartment building and we don't actually go to the Otherworld until the hospital) and meet Maria, who leads us to the strip club, Heaven's Night, we pass through a motel, and the motel's save point is, unlike most of them (which are typically just on a wall somewhere) sitting on the trunk of a car parked in the lot there.

If we save the game there (and I was pretty diligent about saving my progress whenever possible,) Maria comments on it - asking why James has suddenly gone dead-eyed, staring blankly, as if in a fugue state.

I never actually ran into this is a problem, but apparently these save points don't actually pause the game. They, and your map, don't prevent monsters from attacking you. But given the start-stop action of a survival horror game, where fights are moments of sheer panic followed by a lot of stillness and quiet, I was never in a position to be attacked while saving - I'd be sure to clear any nearby monsters, and in nearly all cases, as I recall, save points tended to be in rooms or areas where you wouldn't be bothered by any monsters anyway.

Now, sure, Maria's commentary on this might have just been something a bit cheeky from the developers, a scripted moment. And maybe there's not that much of a need to read into them.

But what the hell are those red squares?

From all my lore-digging about the game online, comparing it with its 2001 original version, I don't think I've seen anything that actually explores what the red squares genuinely are. Red is a color we associate with Pyramid Head - he's first introduced to us surrounded by a red glow of light (which might fool us into thinking that there's a save point nearby) and of course, his rusted helmet and butcher's apron stained with blood have a natural association with that color. There's also the subtle nods to esoteric alchemy, with its duality of red and white (constant readers will know that Stephen King's Dark Tower series was a huge influence on me, and I remember as a teenager wondering why his order-versus-chaos forces were described as the White and the Red, but perhaps he was thinking of the same things). The Red King and the White Queen combine to form the Rebis, the completed ideal form of humanity, so Red being associated with masculinity would certainly fit with its association with Pyramid Head. Perhaps the squares are reflections of James?

At the end of the game (if memory serves, right before the dual-pyramid head fight,) you arrive at an array of nine of these save points - any of them will work to save your game. The most direct reading of why there are these nine is to just emphasize that you really should save because you're going into two pretty serious boss fights.

I didn't notice this when playing, but apparently when you save your game here, James actually doesn't look directly into the "camera," averting his gaze. The general interpretation here is that he can't actually bear to look at himself now that he knows what he did.

This array of nine is actually foreshadowed, though, far, far earlier in the game. In Woodside Apartments, the game's first "dungeon," (or half-dungeon if we consider Woodside and Blue Creek to be collectively a single dungeon) you'll find yourself trapped in a room where all the walls, ceilings, and floors (and windows) are painted black (weirdly reminding me of a black box theater) and there's a safe in the middle of the room, along with strange writing on all the surfaces in white paint. The puzzle here requires you to find the painted messages that only appear in the light of your flashlight (which you got fairly recently) to get the combination to the safe. But among the cryptic writing and symbols, on the door whose key is kept in the safe is an array of nine white squares. These look like they could be the outlines of window panels in the door, of course, but I do find it odd, especially because, if memory serves, the actual structure of the door doesn't have those nine panels.

On a certain level, of course, a game of this sort needs save points. While the game does auto-save, even doing so mid-boss fight (my fight against the final boss saw me dying I think at least once on each phase, maybe not the second one, and I'm honestly fairly grateful I didn't have to start over from the start every time,) the save points give you a little flexibility. Did you totally screw up some room with a few monsters in it and use up all your ammo and healing items? Well, you can always revert to an earlier save and try it again and do better. I didn't actually do this (maybe like once).

Still, it does make me really wonder about what, if anything, the game's creators were trying to say with these save points.

I know at least in early Resident Evil games, you saved at typewriters, with a kind of in-universe justification of being that saving was, effectively, writing the record of what you had done since your previous save as a journal - and in a weird way, almost saying that anything that you didn't save wasn't truly part of the story. Chris, Jill, Leon, Claire, etc., don't canonically get eaten by zombies no matter how many times you see it happen to you when you die in the game.

Plenty of games don't really bother with an in-universe justification for saving the game - the game as a narrative is a work of artifice, and just as James doesn't have a little set of numbers floating next to him whenever he downs a "Health Drink" or injects himself with a Syringe, we're allowed to just chalk it up to a willing suspension of disbelief.

And yet...

There is something so mysterious and intriguing about these weird little red squares. Why are some of them neatly aligned on vertical surfaces, but sometimes they're laid out haphazardly on a horizontal surface, as if they were a piece of paper tossed there? Why does Maria notice that James has gone nigh-catatonic when staring into the red square at the motel? Maria sees all the monsters that James sees, unlike the other characters (for reasons that are quite clear,) but does she not see these squares? She doesn't comment on them or ask what they are, but she does notice the effect they have on James.

Given his aversion to looking directly at them at the end of the game, are we to interpret these as mirrors? That seems the most likely - that saving is something like "self reflection," and in his delusional state through most of the game, James believes he has no difficulties looking at himself because he's a good guy, right? But when his dark truth, the memory that he's repressed, is exposed, now the shame of his own appearance is too much for him.

Alternatively, if we wanted to get even more meta: What if it's not a mirror, but a window? What if it's a window into that true otherworld - the one in which a stranger is holding a video game controller and guiding him through this ordeal. We've taken him on, helped him survive this journey, because we reasonably believed that he was a hero. But now, just as he does, we now know the dark thing that he did. Is it himself he cannot bear to look in the eye, or is it us?

The red squares are likely to remain a mystery. If they were treated more simply, we might be able to dismiss them as a video game contrivance, not truly part of the world itself. And I think the inconsistency of them - that the vast majority of them are perfectly aligned, their edges parallel to the walls and floors, while a small few are so haphazard - is just one of many details in the game that are just off-putting enough to register our human pattern-recognition alarms. We get a weird, uneasy feeling when things that are normally consistent are not so, and psychological horror in particular really thrives in this subtle undercurrent of discomfort. Perhaps that's all there is to it - just something weirdly off.

Or perhaps it's a little crack in the surface of the world that hints at the eldritch depths beyond.

Draw Steel Class Deep Dive: The Talent

 We might be getting through our "spellcasters" (though these guys don't strictly cast spells) quickly given that we're following up the Elementalist. But I do think this is a notable class to look at because it's the only one that (at least until they publish the Psion, which appeared in playtesting a few months ago) doesn't really have a strict D&D analogue, at least in WotC-published content (MCDM actually published their own 5E Talent, so that's your clear analogue).

The Talent is Draw Steel's full psionic class. While the Null uses a lot of psionic abilities, arguably actually using psionics just as much as Talents, the Talent is the more traditional "I fight with mental powers" class, and is another flavor of primarily ranged "caster" to go along with the Elementalist (the Conduit being the other, which is your divine spellcsater).

I realize one thing I've neglected to point out in my deep-dives is things like your max Stamina and number of recoveries you get from your class. Talents are among the "squishier" classes, with lower max Stamina and fewer recoveries. Ideally you'll be fighting from afar to avoid your foes' assaults.

Talents' primary characteristics are Reason and Presence, which both automatically scale up as you go to new echelons of play.

Like Elementalists, there are a lot of psionic traditions that could theoretically form the basis for a subclass in future releases, but there are only three presented in the core rules (unlike Elementalists, though, we get a number of abilities that belong to the traditions that don't get subclasses here).

Heroic Resource: Clarity (and Strain)

Talents have a unique relationship with their heroic resource in the form of Strain, which we'll get to in a moment. Like everyone, when combat begins, you gain an amount of Clarity equal to your Victories. At the start of each of your turns, you gain 1d3 Clarity (which subtly places this on the "chaos" side of the classes - interesting given that the other psionic class, the Null, is an Order class).

The first time in each combat round that a creature is force-moved, you'll gain one additional Clarity.

The big thing, though, is that you can spend Clarity you don't yet have. You can essentially go into Clarity debt equal to 1+ your Reason score (so -3 at level 1 and eventually -6). While you're in debt this way, at the end of each of your turns, you take 1 damage for each negative point of clarity, being your psychic nosebleed from pushing yourself beyond your limits. This can allow you to, right at the start of a fight, use an ability that would usually take you a turn or two to build up to, but with the following consequence:

While below 0 Clarity, you are strained, which will alter some of your abilities - often these create negative side effects, but on some abilities, Strain can actually enhance them as well. Both Clarity and Strain reset to 0 outside of combat.

Subclasses:

While there are eight psionic traditions, only three are presented as subclasses in the core rules. These are:

Chronopathy: giving you the ability to see across and manipulate time.

Telekinesis: giving you the power to physically manipulate objects and creatures.

Telepathy: giving you the power to read, communicate with, and manipulate the minds of others.

Core Features:

Mind Spike is a special ranged free strike (not unlike the Elementalist's Hurl Element) that does psychic damage and uses your Reason rather than Might or Agility. It does extra damage when you're strained, but you also take that extra damage.

Psionic Augmentation, similar to the one the Null gets, gives you one of several bonuses that can be swapped as a respite activity. Battle Augmentation increases your Stamina, increases your damage with weapon abilities, and lets you wear light armor and wield light weapons, as long as you don't already have a kit. Density Augmentation increases your stamina and grants some stability. Distance augmentation increases the range on your ranged psionic abilities. Force augmentation increases rolled damage from your damage-dealing psionic abilities, and Speed Augmentation increases your speed and the distance you can shift when disengaging.

Talent Wards are protective bonuses you can choose from, and can swap as a respite activity.

Entropy Ward reduces the speed of creatures that attack you and prevents them from taking triggered actions. Repulsive Ward lets you use a free triggered action when an adjacent creature damages you to push them. Steel Ward gives you some damage immunity after you take damage until the end of your next turn. And Vanishing Ward lets you become invisible after you take damage until the end of your next turn.

Talents also get Telepathic Speech, giving the the Mindspeech language and also lets you communicate (two-way) with creatures in your Mind Spike range if you share a language.

At level 3, all Talents get Scan. Once on each of your turns, you can search for hidden creatures as a free maneuver, and also, once you establish line of effect to a creature within distance of your Mind Spike, you always have line of effect to them (meaning that they could duck behind cover and you'd still be able to target them).

At level 4, you get Mind Projection, which lets you project your mind outside your body as a maneuver. Your mind is treated as a separate entity that can move through solid objects and automatically has concealment. Your psionic abilities originate from your mind, and both body and mind can take damage, which is deducted from your stamina. If you take damage, your mind returns to your body and this effect ends, or you can end it as a free maneuver.

Also at 4, Mind Recovery lets you spend a recovery while strained to regain 3 Clarity instead of restoring stamina, and also increases the clarity you get from creatures being force-moved.

Additionally at 4, you get Suspensor Field, which allows you to fly. While flying, your stability is reduced to 0 (and can't be increased). If you could already fly, you get a +2 bonus to fly speed instead. And if you are flying while strained, if you are force-moved, the effect is increased by 2 squares.

At level 6, you get Psi Boost, allowing you to spend varying amounts of Clarity to enhance any ability with the psionic keyword. You can apply as many of these boosts to a single ability as you want, but never the same boost multiple time on the same use of an ability. These can do things like increase the forced movement of an ability, expand the area of area-effect abilities, grant extended range, increase rolled damage, increase potencies, hit additional targets, or give you an edge on the power roll.

At level 7, you get Ancestral Memory, which allow you to replace some of your skills at the end of a respite with different ones from the interpersonal and lore skill groups until the next respite.

Also at 7, you get Cascading Strain, which lets you cause an enemy to take the damage you get from being strained as well.

And you also gain more Clarity at the start of your turns.

At level 9, you get Fortress of Perfect Thought, which gives you several benefits: You can breathe even when there is no breathable air. You get psychic immunity 10. Creatures can't read your thoughts unless you allow them to. You get to treat your Reason and Intuition as 2 higher for the purpose of resisting potencies, and you can't be taunted or frightened.

Finally, at level 10, you get a few features to cap things off:

Omnisensory increases the distance of your ranged abilities by 10 (doubling most of them). You also don't need line of effect to a creature capable of thought that you had previously had line of effect to.

Psion increases the Clarity you gain at the start of each turn again, and you can also simply choose not to take damage from being Strained, and you can also choose to use the Strained effect on your abilities even if you're not strained.

Vision is your epic resource. You gain an equal amount of Vision whenever you gain XP, and you can spend it as if it were Clarity. You can also spend Vision to use an additional psionic ability per turn (I assume this means you can effectively get another main action, maneuver, etc.) as long as you pay its entire cost in Vision. Abilities that don't cost any Clarity require 1 Vision to use this way. Like other epic resources, you only lose Vision when you spend it.

The Oddity of Through the Omenpaths

 So, there's a new set for Magic the Gathering, but it's got a secret identity.

I play Magic on Arena, the Hearthstone-like app that is purely digital (I have no idea if Magic Online still lets you redeem a digital set for a printed one - I suspect not - but Arena's whole economy is built not around actually trading, but being able to craft cards with "Wildcards," meaning that basically everyone can, fairly easily, have the absolute top-tier decks. Is this good for the game? Not sure, but it does mean that I think it's probably easier to limit how much money you spend on it).

For the past few years, MTG has been putting out "Universes Beyond" sets based in other IPs, usually owned by other companies. Most are print-only, and if you play Standard, the format that only allows for cards from the last three years of releases (it used to be two years. Also, as a note, while this format does require you to keep getting new cards and new decks, I think it's also probably the most inviting format because the constant rotation means that the power level doesn't get too high - you don't have to ensure your win on turn 2, necessarily,) tends not to allow them.

There have been a couple of exceptions. Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms came out a few years ago, and was Standard-legal. D&D, of course, is also owned by Wizards of the Coast, so the legal use of it as an IP was, I imagine, relatively simple to clear for the company. But on top of that, there's already been some crossover between the brands, such as a few campaign sourcebooks for D&D set in Magic planes (I myself have been running my longest-ever D&D campaign set primarily in Ravnica, one of Magic's most popular planes, and the first to get a full campaign setting book for D&D).

More recently, we got a set based in Final Fantasy. And this, honestly, felt like a bit more of a shock, because while Final Fantasy fits within the fantasy genre that Magic has always had, it's also probably a stronger brand than Magic the Gathering (D&D, as beloved and storied as it is, and as popular as it is today compared to earlier eras, has never been as big of a thing as MTG).

I will say that I actually enjoyed seeing the Final Fantasy set, even if there was a part of me that felt it odd as an addition, not as a kind of fun side-product like other Universes Beyond sets (which have done everything from Warhammer 40K to Doctor Who) but as a core, standard-legal set.

Which then brings us to this: the latest Standard-legal set is a Spider-Man set. I don't know the exact numbers, of course, but I'd guess that, at least in America, Spider-Man is a bigger brand than even Final Fantasy - probably the most popular and beloved of all the Marvel superheroes (though admittedly the MCU did really raise the profile of Iron Man and Captain America).

But if you play on Arena, it's not a Spider-Man set at all.

The folks on the Magic team at Wizards built an entire set around Spider-Man, and then their creative team (I'm assuming that was who was in charge of this) went through every single card and changed names and art to make mechanically identical digital cards that were just set in the Magic multiverse.

Spider-Man has been pushing a bit of its multiverse theming lately - which honestly probably has a lot to do with the fact that Sony still retains the rights to the character, and wants to make movies that focus specifically on Spider-Man and not branch out into the larger MCU, even while they've made agreements to allow Tom Holland's Peter Parker to play with Disney's cinematic universe (hope he gets better - apparently he had a nasty injury on the set of his fourth Spider-Man movie recently).

But Magic has also, within its lore, entered a new era in which inter-planar travel is far easier than it was after the Time Spiral block's Great Mending, which de-powered planeswalkers but also made them the only beings (other than Eldrazi) that could travel between planes. The conclusion of the Phyrexia arc a couple years ago ushered in a new era in which A: lots of planeswalkers became de-sparked and B: the paths the Phyrexians had used for their invasion made that less of a problem.

The point is, as seen particularly in sets like Aetherdrift, plane-hopping is now available to the masses, and so it makes sense for a set to explore what happens when the multiverse becomes more easily traversable.

But there is something very kludgy about all of this: one might ask why there's so much spider-theming in this set about people traveling the Omenpaths. The real answer is because it's a Spider-Man set with the serial numbers scrapped off.

As fun as it was to get the Final Fantasy set (I think mechanically my favorite thing was how they treated Summons) I do think in the long run I'd prefer that they keep these Universes Beyond sets out of at least the Standard set rotation. I believe lead designer (who has been in that job since I was in high school or even earlier - I remember discovering his weekly Making Magic posts back when, like, Onslaught block was coming out) Mark Rosewater has been not happy with this move, preferring to focus instead on in-universe (or in-multiverse) sets and build out Magic's own brand and IP, which I do think is probably the right position.

That said, I think that the re-skinning of this set is far more likely to be a legal thing - after all, the physical cards are being printed with the whole Spider-Man theming (otherwise what would be the point?). I think Sony might have some special rights to Spider-Man appearing in digital games (like their PlayStation games that have come out to some acclaim in recent years) on top of film rights and thus it might be a legal headache to wrangle those while also making a deal with Disney/Marvel to print the cards, so this re-skinning is probably just a way for Wizards of the Coast to be able to just fully make their own digital product without having to deal with any of that.

This is all pure speculation on my part, to be clear.

However, to me it feels like this suggests that perhaps this set should have just been like other Universes Beyond, and kept out of Arena entirely like most of them have been. Then again, I imagine that standard-legal sets sell better, and with an IP like Spider-Man, WotC decided that they wanted to increase the likelihood of selling more of this, even if the advantage from the IP didn't translate to Arena.

I'm with Rosewater here (assuming I got his opinion correct). The cosmos of Magic the Gathering has plenty of value to me, and I would prefer to see them continue to flesh it out - something I'm sure they'll still be doing, of course.

And maybe this is the wrong post for it, but I truly miss the Block model. Starting with probably Ice Age and then going until only a few years ago, each "standard year" of sets would tend to introduce a new plane (or, in those early years, not always a plane, but often an arc of some sort) and tell a three-act story, with a set introducing that plane in the first set, showing some dramatic disruption to it in the second, and then coming to some conclusion with the third. In particular, it gave years more mechanical cohesion, and it allowed new mechanics to grow and evolve. So many recent planes have introduced cool new mechanics, like Ikoria's mutate creatures or Duskmourn's rooms, that I'd have liked to see evolve. I think by jumping around from plane to plane, we also tend to see more generic deck archetypes dominate the formats. Mouse tribal was able to briefly have a moment in the spotlight when Bloomburrow came out, but with no subsequent sets enabling that archetype, it was naturally subsumed into a more generic Red Deck Wins (the archetype that I get the most bored playing against, as it seems to be the one that is popular every single set rotation).

More to the point, though, is that I think the old block model allowed for the worlds of Magic to grow and develop their lore. Ravnica would not, I think, be as beloved if we had been forced to learn about all ten guilds all at once in a single set.

Scattered Thoughts I Had About a Survival Horror TTRPG

 This post will probably wind up having a Silent Hill tag, but it's not really about the game (I just like to keep my posts ostensibly organized via these tags, though actually searching by tag is kind of a mess).

Playing through the evidently-quite-faithful remake of the beloved classic of the genre, I got thinking about Survival Horror as a genre, and how it might translate as a TTRPG.

Now, of course, there's already plenty of horror RPGs out there. Call of Cthulhu is, I'm given to understand, more popular than D&D in some countries, and there are other systems like Candela Obscura (itself built on the bones of Blades in the Dark, as I understand it, which is less horror than dark gaslamp fantasy).

And I'm certain that someone has built some RPG system directly inspired by the Resident Evil and Silent Hill franchises.

But still, it got me thinking.

Like most TTRPG players, I got my start and still primarily play D&D - while I got in only a year or so into it, I'm a 5th Edition baby (that does make me something of a veteran given that the edition is now 10 years old, but I still think of myself as something of a newcomer because in a better timeline, I'd have probably started playing in, like, early 3rd or 3.5 edition, which came out when I was in high school).

I've heard early D&D described (I think by Matt Colville) as survival horror, where players managed dwindling resources in deadly dungeons. In fact, MCDM, his company, which recently launched its heroic fantasy RPG Draw Steel (which you may have noticed is something I've posted a lot about lately,) is in the early days of testing another RPG called Crows, which aims to be the grittier, count-your-torches-and-rations-style dungeon-crawler cousin to Draw Steel's "I'm here to save the world, not to amass gold."

Having played both Alan Wake II and Silent Hill 2 (again, I'm new to the genre,) one thing that really struck me as a contrast to other games I've played (even the first Alan Wake) is how there's never any hard reset in which you regain all your HP or other resources. There is no resting to recuperate in either game: every bit of healing you receive comes from an item that you find, which is consumed and gone.

Now, I know that Alan Wake II, at least on the easy and standard difficulty modes, has a bit of a difficulty-smoothing element, where if you're running really low on health or ammo, enemies will stat dropping some. However, Alan Wake II is also less linear - if you want to explore all the secrets of Bright Falls, you're going to be going back into previously-explored areas, and while you can find ammo and healing items in the optional areas, there's a certain lack of certainty about where you'll go. Silent Hill 2, on the other hand, is, I think, more or less a totally linear experience, and as far as I can tell, the remake has a set, finite number of items to find (though I also think it has a set, finite number of monsters to fight).

I know that in horror RPGs, recuperating from adventures is usually a limited thing - in Candela Obscura, your scars don't go away, and eventually you're forced to either retire a character or they'll likely die. In Call of Cthulhu (a game whose rules I think I remember less - I got a starter set a few  years ago and ran the included solo adventure, but that was it) you can also accumulate things like Insanity that will eventually mean your character has to sit out future adventures.

The thing is, in Survival Horror video games, at least ones of these kinds, the design does allow you to keep going indefinitely as long as you play carefully. Once again, the key is that you always need some item that you have to find somewhere to recover.

Now, before we get into the weeds of the mechanics that I've got brewing in my head, let's acknowledge some hurdles:

TTRPGs are typically played in a group, with players cooperating. Survival Horror thrives on isolation. James Sunderland's interactions with the people in the town are all strange and ephemeral - the only character we really spend extended periods of time with is Maria, whose presence is more of a mystery and a source of unease than of being a reliable ally. In Alan Wake II, Alan's interactions with people like Mr. Door or Tom Zane are at best dizzying, and meeting Ahti or Tim Breaker is always just a brief respite. Saga, on the other hand, has periods of relative safety when she gets to talk with friendly NPCs, but when she goes off on her own to look into things, she's often rapidly cast in isolation and darkness, like when she chats with the Koskela Brothers but only like 20 yards away from them, she's deep in the dark woods heading toward their spooky-as-hell amusement park filled with Taken.

While I suppose you could design a game for two players - a GM and a single player - I suspect that just the nature of a TTRPG starts to feel weird with just two people (though I know some have done that). If we're going to try to make a system that allows for a group of players, we'll need to find a way for players to distinguish themselves, and to make the horror still land despite there being a group of characters rather than one isolated character.

Again, this is a very, very rough draft, and I honestly don't think I've got the real hook to allow for things to feel scary for a group as much as they do for an individual. On a deep, deep instinctive human level, we feel safer when we're around other people. Horror sometimes uses this instinct ironically - to pull off a reversal in which the people the protagonists find themselves with are the real threats - but more often, it's the separation of the characters that lead to the horror. Just like in an RPG, a group of people can shore up one the weaknesses of the others, making the entire group more effective.

So yeah, I haven't solved that issue, but for a "back of the napkin" kind of idea, I'm ok with that. I don't know if this will ever develop beyond these ideas.

Enough preamble, though!

The structure of the game would be using maps divided into clearly distinct rooms. A path through a "dungeon" (which, given the genre, would likely be some kind of iconic type of building, like a school, a police department headquarters, a hotel, a hospital, etc.,) is limited in large part by navigational puzzles, with things like doors that can only be unlocked from one side, keys (and key-like items) that need to be retrieved, and the like, as well as some more traditional puzzles to unlock further progress.

Entering a room (for the first time in most cases) will prompt some kind of die roll to search it. A player can invest in building their character to make them better at finding items, and maybe as a separate skill, finding hiding monsters.

If there is a monster or monsters in the room, combat will break out. I think combat is probably best handled as theater-of-the-mind, abstracting things like moving to put some object between you and the monster as some part of your die roll.

Here's how I see combat working (borrowing a little, actually, from the Elden Ring 1-shot they did on Critical Role, though I don't know if that system was based on some other existing system). I think the player and the monster alternate turns (spotting a monster maybe lets you act first, while failing to lets them act first).

Now, I think this might be an asymmetrical system - the GM might not even roll any dice, or if they do, it might be simply to randomize the kinds of attacks that the monster uses.

The player, based on one of the stats they determine at character creation, has a certain number of actions they can take on their turn. These actions can be used to, say, fire a weapon, reload a weapon, or dodge an attack. In other words, you can spend your whole turn attacking a monster, and if you're lucky, you might kill it before it can hit you. But if you don't kill it, and you didn't use up any of your actions dodging, you'll take some damage.

Now, if we randomize our monster behavior, perhaps a monster like a Mannequin (to come up with a totally random term for a monster with no precedence) will roll to determine whether they do a leaping charge, which is just one attack on their turn but does more damage, or a two-hit combo that does less damage each. Let's say that the player has the stats to take three actions on their turn. If they attack twice and dodge once on their turn, they'll be fine if the monster does its leaping charge, but if the monster does its two-attack combo, they'll take one of those hits.

The "skill" here the player could employ would likely be based on the repeated use of monsters - Survival Horror tends to have fairly small enemy variety, because it's useful for players to learn the patterns of the monsters in these games to better survive their encounters. The GM would roll a die to determine which attack pattern the monster uses each turn. I'd be hesitant to say that there needs to be some telegraphed cue for which attack pattern was coming, because a player could just figure them all out and never take damage, but I think the table for the attacks would be skewed such that some attacks are far more common than others.

Instinctively, I like the idea of this system just using a d6 as its die, though I recognize the value of having, for example, larger dice to allow for better tuning. But if we imagine that our basic Mannequin-like enemy just has those two attack patterns, perhaps we make its Charging Leap what happens on a 1-4, and the two-hit combo on a 5 or 6. After a few encounters with these things, the player might start to understand that they should probably always dodge at least once, but that, to play it safe, they really should dodge twice.

Now, I've noticed a problem right there: if a player dodges twice every time they fight one of these things, they'll never take damage.

Perhaps we make dodging not 100% reliable - perhaps we have a roll for how successful your dodges are. You might have a stat that determines how likely your dodges are to fully negate incoming damage.

Likewise, attacking requires a roll, and I think the results are probably different for each type of weapon.

Again, if we assume you're just rolling a d6, maybe there's a range for missing, a range for hitting, and a range for getting a critical hit (or a deadly hit, or something). Different weapons might have different damage values for each type of hit - maybe a handgun does just 1 damage on a hit and 2 damage on a deadly hit, while a hunting rifle does, say, 2 damage on a hit and 6 on a deadly hit. But you have to reload the rifle after 4 shots and the handgun after like, 10.

And perhaps, at base, if you roll a 1-3 on a handgun, you miss, get a hit on a 4 or 5, and a deadly hit on a 6. But if your character has the stats for higher accuracy, maybe those ranged get pushed down by 1, so that you're only missing on 1-2, getting a normal hit on a 3-4, and getting a deadly hit on a 5 or 6.

Likewise, your dodges might use a similar system. Maybe when you dodge, you avoid the next hit if you roll a 4-6, but you still take the hit if you roll a 1-3. If your character has invested in evasion, perhaps you now successfully dodge on a 3-6.

A couple thoughts on stats: while characters in Survival Horror games do, sort of, get more powerful because of the new weapons they get, and they can feel a bit more secure if they're good at avoiding damage and conserving ammo, I think the character shouldn't truly get more powerful over the course of a game.

As such, I don't think there's any stat progression to have in this game. You build a character at the start, and that's it.

Between this idea and the notion of truly committing to just a d6 as the die for this system, I think these stats only bump things by a little bit. Your accuracy stat will improve your attack results by 1, but that's it. Your evasive stat will improve your dodge chance by 1, but that's it.

Indeed, I think "stat" might not be the right term for these, as I think overall you're probably just going to build a character by picking some small number of these rolls that you're better at, and you're rolling everything else at baseline.

As a rough list of what skills you might have, we could have Evasive, Accurate, Perceptive (for finding things - though maybe we make this two separate ones, one for monsters and one for items,) maybe Resilient increases your max HP (not sure by how much - we might need to figure out how much damage things do and how much healing items heal for before we can figure out what that should be.) Depending on how many skills we can think of (yeah, separating Perceptive into two things, maybe Perceptive and Resourceful? would be good) I think you build your character by choosing maybe two of these. Oh, and of course, something like Vigorous, which would give you an extra action on your turn.

Now, regarding resources and monsters, I think that these should be pre-determined, along with the layout of the "dungeons" and puzzles. But I think, if I were to ever actually try to playtest and really get into the math of it all, there would be some guidance on how many monsters and how many resources to put in there (probably giving them in some regular ratio, so a long dungeon would have more monsters but also more resources).

Again, there are some challenges: how do we handle fights against multiple monsters, when in theory they might take more attacks than the player has actions to dodge? I think it's important that each fight should theoretically allow the player to get through it without taking damage.

Likewise, I think we could add some nuance and complexity: for example, in these games, you can often buy yourself some time by shooting a foe in the leg to slow them down. (In fact, if I go back to play Silent Hill 2 again, I'm likely to try that more often, as I think it might have made it easier to conserve ammo by using a single shot to drop a monster to its knee and then I could wail on them with the wooden plank/steel pipe.) Maybe the player has different options for where to aim - extremity, center mass, or head shot - with different result ranges for each.

Yes, I wouldn't want to get too complex with all of this, but if we keep everything else really stripped down, we might have room for more complexity with how we use weapons.

Ideally, we'd be able to fit it all on a single character sheet, perhaps only with a second sheet to track key and puzzle items.

I do also think that another challenge would be useful guidance on building these navigational puzzles, not to mention the more traditional puzzles.

But anyway, this is all just scribbled notes. Not sure if this could go anywhere, but hey, it's fun to consider.

Draw Steel Class Deep Dive: The Elementalist

 While Draw Steel works pretty hard to break the mold on character classes, most of them fit a fair approximation of D&D classes, like the Fury for the Barbarian or the Shadow for the Rogue. The Elementalist is interesting, because in many ways, it fits the classic Wizard archetype, if you want to cast magic spells, dropping fireballs and the like. Of course, 5E also has the Sorcerer, which fills a similar role. Likewise, D&D's Druid can be something of an "elemental spellcaster." While they have talked about the possibility of some kind of "wizard" class in the future, an Elementalist, of the exiting 9 classes, truly is the closest of the "classic magic user."

We've looked at the Shadow and the Null, but this is the first true "spellcaster" class we're examining. That said, Draw Steel doesn't make as stark a distinction between magic spells and physical abilities. You will be, in most cases, fighting from afar with this class.

Elementalists, being the game's classic mage, use Reason as their primary characteristic, which will always be the highest it can be as you level up.

Elementalists are built around the fundamental elements of Draw Steel's cosmos, but while the four classical elements, Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, are part of this class (though we'll see that only two of those are given a real focus in the core rules) this cosmos actually has seven, adding Void, Green, and Rot.

While the class has more subclasses than most, having four subclasses themed around an element each, we can likely expect to see the missing elements granted their own subclasses in some future product. Note that Elementalist abilities tend to have keywords for an associated element, which some subclass features will interact with.

Heroic Resource: Essence

At the start of each combat, you gain Essence equal to your victories (standard for all heroic resources) and you also gain 2 Essence at the start of each of your turns (subtly indicating this is a more "order"-aligned class). Additionally, the first time in each combat round that you or a creature within 10 squares takes damage that is neither untyped (like the damage dealt by mundane weapons) or holy, you gain 1 Essence. It's likely that you'll be doing damage that triggers this every turn, and there's a lot of this that flies around.

Subclasses:

There are four subclasses (so far) that you can pick from.

Earth focuses on earth elemental powers, which tend to be forceful, protective, and stable (you can increase your stability as you cast earth spells).

Fire focuses on destruction and change, and increases your damage when you cast fire spells.

Green is the magic of life and nature, rejuvenating and protecting, allowing you to grant temporary Stamina when you cast your Green spells. This also allows you to change shape into various animal forms.

Void is the magic of mystery and the distance, and your ranged Void spells gain additional range.

Core Features:

Hurl Element can be used in place of your Ranged Free Strikes, dealing your choice of acid, cold, corruption, fire, lightning, poison, or sonic damage and using your Reason as the associated characteristic. It also deals greater damage as your Reason goes up.

Persistent Magic is probably the most unique feature for the Elementalist. Some abilities have an effect called Persistent X. When you cast a persistent spell, you can choose to maintain it. If you do so, you reduce the Essence you gain at the start of your turn equal to the persistent value. You can maintain a persistent effect until the end of an encounter, but if you take damage equal to 5 times your Reason score in one turn, you stop maintaining any persistent effects.

    As an example, Behold the Mystery is a heroic ability you can get at 1st level that costs 3 Essence. It deals psychic damage to each enemy in a 3-cube within 10 squares. If you maintain it, you can use the ability again as a maneuver at the start of your turn without spending any more Essence (in other words, it's more efficient to just maintain this than to cast it multiple turns in a row, as you're effectively just spending 1 Essence rather than 3.)

Practical Magic is a maneuver that lets you do one of a few effects: you can use the Knockback Maneuver, but the distance becomes the range of your Hurl Element feature (at base, 10) and you can use Reason instead of Might. Or, you can choose a creature within range of Hurl Element and deal damage equal to your Reason score in your choice of acid, cold, corruption, fire, lightning, poison or sonic (remember how you gain an extra Essence when a creature takes non-untyped, non-holy damage?) Finally, you can teleport a number of squares equal to your Reason score, and you can spend essence to teleport 1 additional square per Essence spent.

Next, you get Enchantment, choosing one from a list, which can be changed as a respite activity.

Enchantment of Battle lets you wear light armor and a light weapon, giving you a +3 bonus to Stamina and another +3 at each Echelon of play. You also gain a +1 damage bonus with weapon abilities, including free Strikes. If you somehow have a kit, you can't take this enchantment.

Enchantment of Celerity increases your speed by 1 square, as well as the distance you can shift when you disengage.

Enchantment of Destruction increases your rolled damage from any magic ability by 1 (rolled damage is just any time you make a power roll to see how much damage an ability uses, which is most abilities).

Enchantment of Distance increases the range of your magic abilities by 2 squares.

Enchantment of Permanence gives you a +6 bonus to Stamina, with an additional 6 at each echelon of play. You also get a +1 bonus to stability (reducing forced movement used against you).

Finally, other than your class abilities, you get an Elementalist Ward. Like the Enchantment, you get one from a list and can swap it as a respite activity.

Ward of Delightful Consequences gives you 1 Surge when you take damage.

Ward of Excellent Protection gives you immunity to acid, cold, corruption, fire lightning, poison, or sonic damage equal to your Reason score.

Ward of Nature's Affection let you, when a creature within a number of squares equal to your Reason score deals damage to you, use a free triggered action to slide that creature a number of squares equal to your reason score.

Ward of Surprising Reactivity lets you, when a creature that's adjacent to you deals damage to you, use a free triggered action to push that creature a number of squares equal to twice your Reason score (note that's twice the movement as Nature's Affection, but only as a push, and only if the creature's right up next to you).

Levels 2 and 3 both have subclass-specific features.

At level 4, you get more Essence from creatures taking non-untyped and non-holy damage, up from 1 to 2.

Mantle of Essence gives you an aura when you have 3 or more Essence, with a radius equal to your Reason score. The effects of the aura are determined by your subclass, and you can activate and deactivate the aura at will (no action required).

At level 6, you get Wyrding.

Wyrding lets you spend 10 uninterrupted minutes to create a freeform magic spell, which can take numerous forms: you can create a mundane object (with a size equal to your reason score, so at the level you get this, already size 3). You can construct a shelter suitable for twenty creatures that lasts 24 hours that can't be detected by enemies. You can restore all stamina to a mundane object with size equal to your reason score or lower. You can fill an cube area with a size up to your reason score that's within 5 squares of you with difficult terrain or natural phenomean like water, fire, plant life, etc., you clear an area of those things. You can preserve a corpse or up to 5 pounds of food for a week, or cause the corpse or food to rot instantly. Or, you can create a seal on a surface that can't be seen or felt by anyone but you. If a creature comes to an adjacent space to the surface, you can see through the seal as long as the creature's adjacent. You can also limit which creatures activate the seal, such as picking a keyword like undead or a specific individual's name. You can only have one seal up at a time.

At level 7, you get Mantle of Quintessence, which will increase the patience of creatures in your Mantle of Essence aura by 1, maximum of 5, (giving you more time in a Negotiation to make your arguments,) and you and any ally gain an edge on tests that use the Handle Animals skill. If you have 5 or more victories, the bonus to patience increases to 2 and you now grant a double edge of Handle Animals tests.

You also get Surging Essence, giving you 3 Essence at the start of each turn, up from 2.

At level 9, you get Grand Wyrding, allowing you to use Wydring as a main action (rather than taking 10 minutes). Also, if you have 5 or more victories, you gain damage immunity all to your choice of acid, cold, corruption, fire, lightning, poison, or sonic damage (damage immunity all means full immunity - you don't take any whatsoever).

At level 10, you get an epic resource called Breath. When you take a respite, you gain Breath equal to the XP you earn. You can spend Breath to gain Essence (no action required,) gaining 3 Essence for every 1 Breath. Breath persists until you convert it into Essence.

Essential Being now grants you 4, rather than 3 Essence at the start of each turn.

You also gain One, which makes you the embodiment of your chosen element. Elemental motes float around you when you cast magic, and your appearance changes to reflect your chosen element. Each subclass grants a different feature.

    For example, Master of Void lets you teleport whenever you move, and you no longer require project sources for research projects, and you automatically complete any research project on the first project roll. Master of Fire increases your damage with all spells and also lets you melt non-artifact supernatural objects, and when you melt a treasure, you gain Breath equal to its echelon.

Draw Steel Class Deep Dive: The Null

 So, last time I looked at one of these classes, I went with the Shadow. It's a class I'm probably most excited to play, but also one that is arguably one of the simpler classes (the Summoner, currently in playtesting, is being framed as an "advanced" class, and one that I almost feel like you should have some experience running the game as a Director before trying out).

The Null is, I think, likely one of the more complex classes, though we're going to kind of explore whether that's truly the case in this deep-dive.

If you squint, the Null is roughly Draw Steel's equivalent to the Monk, as an unarmed, unarmored martial melee class. But there's a bit more specificity here - Nulls are one of two heavily psionics-themed classes (along with the more traditional Psion in the Talent,) and the ethos of fighting without weapons or armor extends to the Null's theme of using psionics to become kind of the anti-magic class.

Nulls have two characteristics that automatically scale up to the highest you can get: Agility and Intuition (5E veterans will recognize these as the equivalents of Dexterity and Wisdom, reinforcing the "Monk" comparisons.)

Again, my intent is not to just give you the entire class here, focusing on class features. Of course, abilities are really where these classes get most of their power. Null abilities tend to be melee-range, so you'll definitely be something of a front-line fighter. Unlike other martial characters, you don't get a Kit, so you'll need to rely on your class features like Psionic Augmentation to make up for it.

Heroic Resource: Discipline

Like all Draw Steel classes, you fuel your abilities with your Heroic Resource. Nulls have Discipline. When combat starts, you gain Discipline equal to your Victories (same as any class) and then at the start of each of your turns, you gain 2. (Again, there's a subtle order versus chaos theme in the classes, with Nulls landing on the order side of things. Ironically, the other psionic class, the Talent, gets 1d3, so clearly psionics are alignment-agnostic). You'll also gain one additional Discipline when an enemy inside your Null Field (a very important core mechanic we'll discuss below) uses a main action each combat round. Additionally, the first time in a combat round that the Director uses an ability that costs Malice (the "villainous resource,") you'll get one as well.

This means that there's a very good chance you can get 4 Discipline in a round, unless your Director is banking Malice (given how much they generate each turn, though, when I eventually run this, I'm probably going to be spending Malice like it's going out of style).

Subclasses:

The "Null Traditions" you can choose from are your subclasses.

Chronokinetics gives you time powers, allowing you to treat time as another dimension through which to move.

Cryokinetics tap into absolute cold, the essential energy of stillness, manifesting icy effects with your body.

Metakinetics see through the illusions of the universe to understand their body and psionic potential. (I think this is the more "physical mastery" subclass).

Core Features:

At level 1, the first and really core feature is your Null Field. As a maneuver, you can emit an aura around you that lasts until you are dying or willingly end it, even persisting outside of combat (meaning I'd expect you're going to keep this up at all times, though I guess you have the option of dropping it). Each enemy within the aura reduces their Potencies by 1 (potencies, remember, are attached to various abilities, where you might say "if your Might is less than 1, you're restrained." If an enemy used something like this, you could tell them "actually, only if my Might is less than 0, because they're in my Null Field.)

Additionally, as a free maneuver on each of your turns, you can spend 1 discipline to gain one of the following benefits until the start of your next turn: Gravitic Disruption lets you slide a target 2 squares the first time they take damage. Inertial Anchor says that any enemy who starts their turn in the Null Field can't shift (meaning they can't move away without drawing opportunity attacks). Synaptic Break increases the potency of your and your allies' abilities against enemies within the field.

Also at 1, you get Inertial Shield, your primary triggered action. You can use this when you take damage, halving it. You can also spend 1 Discipline to reduce the potency of an effect associated with the damage by 1.

In other words, Nulls are very much about avoiding the nasty non-damage effects of most monsters' abilities (though note that some effects don't involve potencies).

Discipline Mastery, also at level 1, gives you various benefits as your pool of Discipline grows higher. You gain the benefits as soon as you reach that amount of Discipline, and they last until the end of your turn, even if you spend enough to put you below the threshold.

Each subclass has different "tracks" of mastery benefits, with buffs you receive for having 2 (meaning every turn unless some monster prevents you from gaining resources,) 4, and 6 Discipline, and at higher levels, 7, 10, and 12.

Next, Null Speed increases both your speed and the number of squares you can shift when you Disengage by a number of squares equal to your Agility.

Yes, we're not done with level 1.

Psionic Augmentation lets you choose from three different augmentations, increasing your Stamina, adding damage to your psionic abilities, or increasing you speed further. You can swap these as a respite activity.

Lastly, before the abilities, you get Psionic Martial Arts, which lets you use Intuition instead of Might for the power rolls for the Knockback and Grab manuevers, and when you use the Knockback manuever, you can slide targets instead of pushing them (meaning you can send them in any horizontal direction, and even change their direction mid-forced-movement.)

Notably, Nulls are the only martial class that doesn't get kits, so you pick two Signature abilities from your class.

At level 3, you get Psionic Leap, which lets you long jump and high jump a distance equal to twice your Agility without making a test.

Also at 3, you get Reorder, which lets you use a free triggered action at the start of each of your turns to end an effect on you that can be ended with a saving throw or that ends at the end of your turn. You can also use this on a creature within your Null Field.

At 4, you get Enhanced Null Field. Your aura now removes temporary supernatural terrain effects of your level or lower when it overlaps with any part of them.

Regenerative Field now increases the Discipline you get when a creature uses their main action in your field from 1 to 2.

At level 6, you get Elemental Absorption, which, when you use Inertial Shield, gives you immunity to acid, cold, corruption, fire, lightning, poison and sonic damage equal to your Intuition score against the triggering damage (one note I'd love to see clarified, is whether this immunity applies before or after halving the damage. That might be buried somewhere in the rules, like what order you apply these generally.)

Elemental Buffer (also at 6) says that when you reduce the aforementioned damage types with damage immunity, you gain 2 surges that can be used only to increase the damage of your next strike. (So, using both will mean adding two times your Agility to the strike).

At level 7, you get Psi Boost. When you use an ability as a main action or maneuver that has the Psionic keyword, you can spend additional discipline to grant additional effects, which last until the end of the turn in which you use the ability. You can apply as many psi boosts as you like, spending discipline for each one, though you can't use the same boost multiple times at the same time.

The psi boosts range in cost from 1 to 5 discipline, and will do things like allowing you to target additional creatures, deal more damage, give area effects a larger area, etc.

Also at 7, Improved Body increases the amount of Discipline you get at the start of your turn from 2 to 3.

At level 9, you get I am the Weapon, which increases your Stamina by 21 and you can't be made bleeding, even when dying (which normally gives you bleeding). You no longer age or have need of food. Also, you can use Intuition instead of other characteristics when resisting potencies (given that you've got, at this level, a 4 in Intuition, and then also your Null Field, you're only ever going to be affected by potency abilities of very powerful monsters).

At level 10, you get Manifold Body, which increases the discipline you get at the start of each turn from 3 to 4.

Manifold Resonance allows you, at the end of a respite, to shift yourself and any creatures in the area of your Null Field to any location in the Timescape (Draw Steel's multiverse) that is known to you, or a creature in the area, or where any supernatural treasure in the area has been before.

Also, whenever you use an ability, you gain 1 discipline that can only be used to apply a Psi Boost feature to that ability.

Also, you and any allies in your Null Field ignore banes and double banes on your power rolls.

Finally, Order is a new epic resource that you gain when you gain XP. You can spend order as if it were discipline, and it remains until you spend it.

At the start of each combat encounter, you can spend 1 order to increase the size of your Null Field by 1 until the end of the encounter.

    So, there you have it. I will say, I think the class gets a lot of its complexity at level 1, but seems fairly manageable beyond that. Truly, the key here is that they're going to be able to shrug off a lot of effects, especially in the endgame.

UA: Enchanter

 Looking at the last (at least in the order that I've done these) Wizard subclass to get a revision to the previous UA which itself was a revision of the 2014 PHB subclass, we've got the Enchanter.

I'll confess: this is one of those subclasses I've never been particularly drawn to, because I feel like if I wanted to be the character that charmed and beguiled by foes, a Bard seems like the obvious choice to go with. That said, I think you could make the argument that this is potentially a very sinister subclass (actually, come to think of it, I may have considered an Enchanter Wizard to play as a House Dimir character in Ravnica, which, you know, sinister). Indeed, while Necromancy gets all the heat for being gruesome, there's an argument to be made that raising soulless bodies of the dead isn't really harming anyone (well, except the monsters you have them fight) while Enchantment is a deep violation of a person's free will and autonomy.

That said, I think you can play this very whimsically, perhaps with a Fey theme (maybe you were instructed by an Archfey,) though again, that can also be quite sinister. Or, you could play this as kind of a psychologist - a student of the human(oid) mind.

Once again, because I'm too lazy to cross reference three versions of this subclass, but also to try to look at this with the freshest eyes, I'm going to, for the most part, take the UA subclass' features on their own terms.

Level 3:

Enchanting Conversationalist:

You gain proficiency in your choice of Deception, Intimidation, or Persuasion. Additionally, when you make an ability check with the chosen skill, you can add your Intelligence modifier to the check (minimum of a +1 bonus).

    In effect, this sort of makes the chosen skill an Intelligence one - you still probably want a decent Charisma modifier. This is fine, but nothing huge.

Enchantment Savant:

This one works like all the 2024 Savant features.

Hypnotic Presence:

As a magic action, you can choose a creature that you can see within 10 feet. They make a Wisdom saving throw, and on a failure, they're charmed by you for 1 minute or until your Concentration ends, or if they are more than 10 feet away from you, or the target can neither see you nor hear you, or they take damage. While charmed, the creature is incapacitated and has a speed of 0.

You can use this once per long rest, but you can also restore a use by expending a 1st level or higher spell slot.

    Ok, this can be very powerful if it works. There are a lot of ways to break the effect, but we're basically treating it like a 1st level spell. It's crowd control, and the fact that they can't just repeat the save to break out of it is nice. Still, it's a bit fragile. Sure, you might effectively steal a monster's turn, but you've also spent one of your turns using this, so you'd better hope you can get more than one turn out of it.

Level 6:

Split Enchantment:

When you cast an Enchantment spell that can be cast with a higher level spell slot to target an additional creature, you raise the spell's effective level by 1.

You can use this Int mod times per long rest.

    A lot of enchantment spell work this way, which is pretty nice. I'm not sure this is very exciting for your only 6th level feature.

Level 10:

Instinctive Charm:

When a creature within 30 feet of you that you can see hits you with an attack, you can use a reaction to force them to make a Wisdom save against your spell save DC. On a failure, the attack misses instead and if there's another creature in range of the attack other than the attacker, they target that creature with the same attack roll. If multiple creatures are within range, you pick which they go after.

You can do this once per long rest, but you regain your use when you cast an Enchantment spell with a spell slot.

    Ok, having played with a Rune Knight that uses the Cloud Rune, this sort of shenanigan is a lot of fun - turning a crit against an ally into a crit against a monster. However, there are multiple ways the Cloud Rune, which is one option of many that a Rune Knight can get earlier than this, is better: this one requires the attack to be against us, and it requires the target to fail a wisdom saving throw. Given that this is all that we get at level 10, I wonder if they could just let this automatically happen.

    You can potentially get a lot of uses out of this feature, if you're constantly refreshing it. But I also think it's notable that as a Wizard, you should be staying the hell away from foes that would attack you. In an ideal world, you're very rarely using this feature. And it's all you get at 10.

Level 14:

Alter Memories:

You always have Modify Memory prepared. When you cast the spell, you can target a second creature with it that is within range of the spell.

    Thematically, I love Modify Memory. And anyone who watched Critical Role's second campaign knows that it was behind maybe the most awesome moment in the entire campaign (the cupcake incident). But it's very situational. Now, granted, just having this spell prepared at all times means that you're likely to use it more often, and it is kind of the ultimate in enchantment/brainwashing. It can solve a lot of problems, narratively, allowing parties to get away from the mayhem they caused by tampering with the witnesses. But is modifying it to target two characters that exciting? How often do you have precisely two NPCs who need to get neuralyzed?

Overall Thoughts:

So, I don't think there's anything wrong with this subclass, per se. But I think it's kind of boring. Perhaps it's damning that I can't really think of much to say about it.

UA: Transmuter

 So, as anyone who has been reading this blog in the last few years, I've found myself fascinated by the apparently-ubiquitous references to Alchemy within all manner of fantasy fiction. Its symbolism and model for how the world works is profoundly compelling, despite or, I think more likely, because it was the irrational tradition out of which the great rational tradition of modern science was born. Likewise, its resonance within the field of psychology makes it a really powerful point of reference for all manner of fiction.

I've never loved the Alchemist subclass for the Artificer, which is a shame because I think that, thematically, it ought to be a slam dunk (it's also the one artificer subclass that requires zero aesthetic re-skinning to put it into a perfectly standard medieval fantasy world).

But I also think that, given some if its features, the Transmuter Wizard might actually better represent a Alchemist. Part of that might just be that Artificers maybe should have been full casters (though I don't mind that they're half-casters on any of the other subclasses).

Anyway, let's take a look at this and see how it works. Again, rather than comparing every little change from its 2014 version and its previous UA version, I'm going to take this on its own merits.

Level 3:

Transmutation Savant:

This works like all the other Savant abilities as they were updated in 2024.

Transmuter's Stone:

When you finish a long rest, you can create a magic stone that lasts until you use the feature again. The stone is a tiny object, which you can use as a spellcasting focus for wizard spells. A creature that has the stone on their person has proficiency in Constitution saving throws and gains one of the following benefits, which you choose when you create the stone. You can also swap the benefit when you cast a Transmutation spell using a spell slot:

Darkvision out to 60 feet, or if you already have it, increasing your Darkvision range by 60 feet.

Increases your Speed by 10 feet.

Grants resistance to your choice (when you create the stone or swap the benefit) Acid, Cold, Fire, Lightning, Poison, or Thunder damage.

    Ok, while I'm not here to compare this with the older version, it's clear that this does fix one of the old one's issues, which is by making the proficiency in Con saves universal. Wizards don't get Con save proficiency without a feat (or starting off as a different class,) and so this was always the by-far most obvious choice for the stone's function. Now, you always get it, and the other three, all situationally useful, are a little more balanced with one another.

Wondrous Alteration:

You always have the Alter Self spell prepared and can cast it once per long rest without expending a spell slot. While under the effects of the spell, you gain additional benefits for each of its options:

Aquatic Adaptation now also allows you to Dash as a bonus action while underwater.

Change Appearance now also grants you Advantage on Charisma (Deception) checks.

Natural Weapons increases the damage of the new growth to 2d6 (up from 1d6 - remember that the baseline one also allows you to attack with your spellcasting modifier).

    This is all fine, though I guess my issue with "giving you advantage on Deception checks while disguised" is my usual problem with features that seem to give you a bonus that I, as a DM, would be giving you anyway. To be fair, you could be lying about something other than your identity when under this effect, so maybe it's good to explicitly spell it out. But a generous DM like me might de-value a feature like this unintentionally. That said, it's one element of one of three 3rd level features, so maybe that's not such a big deal.

Level 6:

Empowered Transmutation:

When you cast a Transmutation spell that doesn't deal damage, such as Fly or Magical Weapon, using a spell slot, you can treat the spell as if it were cast one level higher. You can use this feature Int times per Long rest.

    This looks, on the surface, like a kind of "limited Twinned Spell for Transmutation spells," except as the example of Magic Weapon (wait, is it "Magical?" Was that a change? After checking the PHB, no, that's a typo in the UA) shows, it might alter the spell in different ways to upcast it. I'm not fully convinced we need this limiter on uses, but I also don't think it'll be too much of a burden.

Level 10:

Potent Stone:

Now, when you create your Transmuter's Stone, you choose up to two benefits. You can only choose each benefit once, except for the damage resistance one, which you can choose twice as long as you choose different damage types (though given that resistance doesn't stack, you'd want to anyway). You can change either or both benefits when you cast a Transmutation spell with a spell slot.

Additionally, you have new benefits to choose from:

Mighty Build gives the bearer advantage on Strength saving throws and doubles their carrying capacity.

Tremorsense grants 30 feet of tremorsense.

    So, I think this is a pretty well-designed upgrade to the feature: new benefits to choose from to go along with more power by being able to choose more options. Once again, the benefits here are mostly situational utility.

Shapechanger:

You always have Polymorph prepared and can cast it once per long rest without a spell slot. Additionally, when you target yourself with the spell, you can modify the spell to gain additional benefits once per long rest:

Game Statistics: You retain your personality, memories, and ability to speak, as well as your Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma scores, class features, and feats.

Transmute Spells: you can cast transmutation spells while shape-shifted, except any with a Material component that has a cost or is consumed.

    I really like this: Polymorph is a fantastic spell, and it makes sense that a Transmuter would be able to treat it a little more like a Druid's Wild Shape (though getting forms that are more powerful than even a Moon Druid will ever be able to use with that feature). On my Wizard, I often use Polymorph as a protective measure - if a party member is close to going down, I give them a fully-healthy temporary form with a boatload of hit points to keep them in the fight. It's interesting that it says you retain your class features but then specifies you can cast Transmutation spells - I assume this is meant to clarify that your beast-form cannot cast other spells, despite the fact that you can still speak (I can understand perhaps saying that most forms can't perform Somatic components, but surely a Giant Ape with a Wizard's intelligence could pull that off?) A free 4th level spell once per day is also pretty nice, even if it comes three levels after you first got the spell (I have to imagine that any Transmutation Wizard would have picked that up before level 10).

Level 14:

Master Transmuter:

While you carry your Transmuter's Stone, you can take a Magic action to consume the transmutation magic within it and choose one of the following benefits. After using the stone this way, it crumbles into dust (you can make a new one after a long rest). You can, however, prevent the stone from crumbling by expending a spell slot of 5th level or higher. The benefits:

Major Transformation: You can transmute one non-magical object, no longer than a 10-foot cube or eight connected 5-foot cubes, into another nonmagical object of similar size and mass of equal or lesser value. You spend 10 minutes handling the object to shape it.

Panacea: You touch a creature as part of this Magic action and restore half their maximum hit points (rounded down) and cure all magical contagions, curses, and attunement to a cursed item. This will also clear the Poisoned and Petrified conditions.

Restore Life: You cast Raise Dead using the stone in place of the normal material component, without expending a spell slot.

Restore Youth: You touch a creature and decrease their Exhaustion level to 0 and permanently make them appear 3d10 years younger, to a minimum of young adulthood.

    I think the big difference here from the old version is that you can retain the stone if you spend the spell slot. Another way of thinking of about that is that each of these effects can be thought of as a 5th level spell. Raise Dead, obviously, is a 5th level spell. But I think if you look at the effects of Panacea and Restore Youth, they're comparable to Greater Restoration, another 5th level spell, only they're better: Greater Restoration doesn't do any healing and it also only reduces a single level of Exhaustion. Major Transmutation is, I suppose, comparable to the 4th level spell Fabricate.

    The point is, if we were to frame this as "you always have Raise Dead and Greater Restoration prepared, and you can cast one of those spells once per day without expending a spell slot," that would probably be a pretty decent feature, and this is better.

Overall Thoughts:

This is certainly more of a utility subclass than a flashy one with crazy damage, but Wizards are already kind of the best utility class, and Transmutation is a school of magic that leans very heavily into utility. I think it's a very solid subclass, and one that I think any party would be happy to have.

Sympathy for the Doppelgänger: Doubles and Darkness in Alan Wake and Silent HIll

 Having beaten Silent Hill 2, and having enjoyed the game (enjoy seems like an upbeat way to describe a game like that, but oh well,) I've found myself in my usual internet deep-dive, looking it up on TV Tropes and YouTube, scratching away at the game's mysteries and interpretation.

The remake came out actually the year after Alan Wake II, and both adopted similar gameplay developments, moving toward a 3rd-person-shooter style popularized in the Survival Horror genre by Resident Evil 4 (Alan Wake's first game is also, arguably, a 3rd person shooter, but in a manner I feel is looser and more action-oriented, which makes sense as that game was more of a horror-themed action game than survival horror).

While RE4 inspired a lot of AWII's gameplay, I think it's pretty clear that Silent Hill's more psychological/surreal horror were a bigger inspiration for Alan Wake's story (though I think in both cases, works like Twin Peaks played a big role, though SH2's debts to the movie Jacob's Ladder are certainly front-and-center.)

While conceptualizing a potential Ravenloft campaign (one that's honestly probably many years away given that I want to return to my homebrew setting after running a Ravnica-set campaign for over five years) I hit upon the idea of doppelgangers.

I think the doppelganger is one of the most potent tropes in horror, especially in psychological horror (a genre that, itself, melds well with both Gothic and Cosmic horror, as well as surreal horror).

Jung's idea of the Shadow lingers over much of the horror genre - even outside of psychological horror, the primal fear inspired by monsters harkens back to a pre-civilization version of the human mind, in which we're always threatened by animal predators. The very act of engaging with fear as an emotion, something that we try to avoid in most contexts, is, I think, something that Jung's theory of psychology would find healthy: a confrontation with parts of ourselves we usually keep hidden.

Indeed, the very idea of drama often has some related element to horror: think about how potent the classical tragedy was - we witness characters like Oedipus discover utterly shocking and revolting truths about himself. We, as a form of entertainment (and also worship of Dionysus, which was how Greek theater was treated back then,) imagine a story in which the protagonist is tormented and destroyed by terrors (in Oedipus' case, the terror of realizing what he had done in his ignorance). Even in heroic tales, our great heroes fight monsters - from Pericles to Superman, we yearn to see a confrontation with terror and death. Genre dictates mainly what the outcome is, though there's plenty of horror in which our heroes do succeed and survive, and one is left to ask what, on a fundamental level, is so different between a horror story with a happy ending and a rollicking adventure.

The answer, I think, is mainly tone.

But lest I go spiraling off in a discussion about drama itself, let me bring things back to the doppelganger.

Gothic horror is funny, because I think I'd argue that it's defined more by aesthetics than dramatic mechanics. Born out of the 19th Century Romantic movement, it's rare that we see examples that stray out of an 18th/19th century time period (perhaps sometimes in the very early 20th Century). Classic monsters like vampires, werewolves, and ghosts are the great staples of the genre (reanimated corpse-constructs are also a staple, but the trope codifier there is so iconic that it's hard to escape Frankenstein's shadow.)

But I think that another key element to Gothic Horror, and here I mean beyond its aesthetics, is the idea of the monster within - again, one thing that unites vampires, werewolves, and ghosts is that all of them were once people. These are not dragons or trolls. These were once people like us. And that means that within their very existence is the proof that something could push us to become a monster just like them. Vampires and werewolves in particular are notable for their infectiousness, and I think a lot of ghost stories are also predicated on this idea in a certain way: the ghosts in a haunted house might kill people (or at least drive them to their deaths) and thus make restless spirits of their victims, adding to the power of the haunting, just as a vampire's brood or a werewolf's pack could grow with each victim.

The victim is a potential villain: as we see with Lucy Westenra, this innocent young woman who is preyed upon by Dracula, and in the heroes' failure to protect her, she becomes a monster herself, preying upon children she abducts. Lucy begins as a sympathetic figure, but you could imagine that, if not put down by her former suitors (not going to get into the sexual politics of that novel right now, other to say boy,) she might have become her own legendary monster and figure of terror if left to her vampiric devices (I'm honestly kind of shocked that I've never heard of a horror story with her as the primary monster.)

Humans are, you know, complex beings. We have admirable traits, traits that have allowed us to thrive as a species, like altruism, cooperation, love, and empathy, but we also have inverse impulses as well: selfishness, factionalism, hatred, and contempt. Most of us, I'd hope, would favor that first group of traits, but even if we do, there's an awareness of the presence of those other traits, whether conscious or not.

Again, though, I'm not here to talk about Gothic horror. I'm here to talk about psychological horror and the presence of the doppelganger.

See, the doppelganger, unlike the vampire or werewolf, whose beastliness, whose monstrousness, is self-evident in their form - claws, sharp teeth, animal-like fur (in Dracula's case, though the modern image of the vampire goes almost in the opposite direction by making them typically very smooth-shaven and pale, as if they're inhuman by means of not being animal-like enough,) the doppelganger naturally poses a question: Which of these is the real one, and which is the monster?

Psychological horror is built on the fallibility of perception. And perhaps no perception is more important to us than our sense of self.

Now, I will say, while Alan Wake II and Silent Hill 2 both deal with doppelgangers (fitting that these are both "2s" in their franchises - something I'm certain was intentional in the case of AWII but not so sure about with SH2,) they do so in very different ways, and from different perspectives.

Let's go to the spoiler cut, with spoilers for both games as well as the movie Jacob's Ladder.

UA: Tattooed Warrior

 The only brand-new subclass in this UA, or at least it would be brand new if it weren't in the previous Arcane Subclass UA, the Tattooed Warrior is a cool concept: a Monk who gains powers from the various tattoos or other markings on their body.

The problem I had with the previous version, though, was that I found it committed some of the sins of the Way of Four Elements Monk from 2014 (the Warrior of Elements is far better, and the 2024 subclass I actually have the strongest character concept for,) namely that activating anything in the class required the expenditure of Focus Points at the expense of other Monk features.

But let's look at this fresh.

Level 3:

Magic Tattoos:

You gain magic tattoos from other features in this subclass. Damage and injury doesn't impair the function, and the tattoos can also take the forms of brands, scarification, birthmarks, patterns on scales, etc. If their effects have a DC, you derive it from your Wisdom, like most Monk features with DCs. If the tattoo gives you a spell, your spellcasting ability is Wisdom.

On a Long Rest, you can swap one of your tattoos, changing it out with another choice from the same list.

    Basic stuff: the key is that you're not "upgrading" your old tattoos with the swapping mechanic. Instead, you're going to be able to swap with tattoos of the same power.

    As a note, my concern going forward is if the choices presented break up too many things that could be a single feature - choice is fine and fun, as long as it's not giving you a fraction of what another subclass would be getting automatically.

Beast Tattoos:

You get two animal tattoos, choosing from the following options:

Bat: You know Dancing Lights and gain Blindsight out to 10 feet.

    Thematically, I love Blindsight on a Monk.

Butterfly: You know the Light cantrip, and you can use Dexterity instead of Strength for calculating your High Jump distance.

    I wonder if this could also work with Long Jumps? Also, I feel like Moth would be the better animal for this, given their association with light.

Crane: You know Guidance. When you miss a creature with an attack from Flurry of Blows, you have advantage on your next attack roll against the target before the end of your next turn.

    Hm, a bit of concern: the others have been more utility, while this is a damage output feature.

Horse: You know Message, and when you expend 1 Focus Point to use Step of the Wind (getting Disengage along with your Dash) your speed increases by 10 feet until the start of your next turn.

    The good news is that this is attached to an existing use of a Focus Point rather than costing one independently. I don't know if I'd really bother with this because Monks are already pretty fast, and that 10 feet is kind of proportionately devalued. Then again, if you want to get the absolute hell away from a monster, this can be good.

Tortoise: You know Spare the Dying, and when you expend 1 FP to use Patient Defense, you also get a +1 bonus to your AC until the start of your next turn.

    Ok, so, spending the FP on Patient Defense gets you the Dodge effect (on top of a free Disengage). The extra AC will make the dodge somewhat more effective. I'm not really inspired by this one.

    Overall, I feel like you've basically got to take Crane, though at least the second choice is a bit more open. But how does this compare with the Mercy, Shadow, Elements, or Open Hand Monk's 3rd level features? I'd say it's not, like, profoundly less powerful, but I do think we might be hitting that "paying for the ability to choose" thing that worried me.

Level 6:

Celestial Tattoo gives you a new tattoo category, with three options, from which you choose one.

Comet: When you take the Search action (which covers most Wisdom skills, like Perception or Insight) you can expend 1 FP to roll your Martial Arts die and add the number to the check.

    Uh oh. Yeah, I know FP is easier to get back than Ki Points were in 2014, but this concerns me.

Eclipse: When you take the Hide action, you can expend 1 FP to roll your Martial Arts die and add the number to the Dexterity (Stealth) check.

    Yeah, this is a theme. Here, though, it's limited to a single skill.

Sunburst: When you take the Study action (i.e., most Intelligence checks) you can expend 1 FP to roll your Martial Arts die and add the number to the Intelligence check.

    You get it.

    Yeah, I think I hate these. You can't even choose to roll these after you've seen your initial roll, so sucks for you if you already rolled a natural 19 or something.

    As a tentative redesign, I might make it first that you get to see what you roll on the d20 before you commit the FP to boosting it. I would then probably also add in something like a Soulknife's Psi-Empowered Knack protection where the FP is only expended if this makes the check a success.

    But I still kind of don't like this. De-couple this from FP, maybe? I get that they want to give them a not-necessarily-combat ability. Couldn't we have one that boosts Influence actions? And what if this was just, like Wis times per long rest?

Level 11:

Nature Tattoo:

We get another tattoo list, this time themed on natural phenomena.

Sea Storm: You gain resistance to one of the following: Cold, Lightning, or Thunder damage. When you finish a short or long rest or use your Uncanny Metabolism feature, you can change this choice.

Volcano: Same idea except it's Acid, Fire, and Poison.

    I think you could just give all three all the time, just picking between one tattoo or the other. I don't think this is overpowered, in part because this subclass still hasn't gotten anything really powerful enough for me to want to play it. This is literally all you get at this level - effectively just one damage resistance at a time, with the privilege of being able to change which one if you can predict what kind of damage you're going to take.

Level 17:

Monster Tattoo:

Our last tattoo, we can pick out one themed on a classic D&D monster.

Beholder: At the start of your turn, you can expend 1 FP to gain a Fly speed equal to your speed for 10 minutes and can hover. Additionally, as a magic action, you can expend 1 FP to make four eye ray attacks with a range of 120 feet. You make a ranged spell attack for each ray (remember Wisdom is your spellcasting ability,) dealing damage equal to a roll of your Martial Arts die plus your Wisdom modifier on each hit.

    Ok, finally something cool. While spending the FP on the eye rays isn't as FP-efficient as attacking and then making a Flurry of Blows, as you'll be able to make 5 attacks after level 10 that way, it's more efficient than taking the Attack Action in action economy terms. You could potentially make 7 attacks in a turn if you spend an FP on this and Flurry of Blows, though just make sure you start at range and then close before your bonus action. The fly speed is fine, too.

Chromatic Dragon: When you take the attack action, you can expend 1 FP to replace one of your attacks with an exhalation of magical energy in a 30-foot cone. Creatures in the cone must make a Dex save, taking your choice of Acid, Cold, Fire, Lightning, or Poison damage equal to two rolls of your Martial Arts die plus your Wisdom modifier, or half as much on a success.

    I get that Beholders have to fly to get around, but it feels cheap that the dragon tattoo doesn't also do that. The damage here isn't enormous - at level 20, assuming you maxed your Wisdom, we're talking 2d12+7, or around 20. But the fact that it's only replacing one attack does help, and a 30-foot cone is decent. Beholder seems better to me.

Displacer Beast: When you expend an FP to use Flurry of Blows or Step of the Wind, you can expend 1 FP to cast Mirror Image as part of that same bonus action.

    Mirror Image is better than it was in 2014, as it now only goes off if the attacker would have hit you, making it far better for high-AC characters. That said, waiting until level 17 for a 2nd level spell?

Troll: At the start of each of your turns, you regain HP equal to 5 plus your Wisdom modifier if you are bloodied and have at least 1 HP. Any severed body part regrows after you finish a short or long rest.

    Interestingly, this is a feature that will be very good in a lengthy dungeon crawl that really drains the party's health and resources. In combat, though, damage comes so fast that I don't know if will be all that impactful. Also, very few genuine game mechanics will sever a limb, so the regrowth is kind of a fun ribbon, but that's it.

    Personally, I think that some of these might work better if moved earlier. Let me get these monster tattoos at level... 6 or something. Sure, you might need to nerf one or two of them, but they're at least interesting.

Overall Thoughts:

Yes, my early concern feels validated. I think that when you look at all these features one after another, they look like a lot of cool things to have, but when you consider that you only get one from each list (ok, two from the first) it feels like the actual experience of playing this subclass will be constantly feeling like you should be getting more.

I think the tattoos could have cooler effects, but I also think it might be better to model this more like the Battle Master, where you just have one big pool of tattoos to choose from, and try to balance the options there.

I also feel like there's some obvious thing missing here, like the ability to summon forth or even transform into the shape of your tattoos, which the Monster Tattoos start to hint at

I know this was already a big redesign, but I think this version probably deserves to be scrapped too.