Doing Conditions the Souls-Like Way

 I started playing D&D around the same time that I first played Dark Souls, two gaming obsessions (oddly not Dark Souls itself - I'm much more into Bloodborne and Elden Ring, but it's all of the same genus of game, from the same studio) that have stuck with me now for a bit over a decade.

While I personally prefer a class-based RPG system, I really appreciate how Souls-likes use a skill-based system to create very different kinds of characters (admittedly less for Bloodborne, which has a narrower style of gameplay for the most part).

It would be fun, I think, to find a way to make a system that works on the same principles for TTRPGs (basically using item scaling and stat requirements to govern what a player can do, and thus allowing different flavors of magic, for instance, to build into by focusing on certain spellcasting stats or spreading between them).

But while that's a really tricky bit of design to work out (we need to keep numbers manageable where you can just roll some dice to get your result and not need a calculator or an abacus) there is one element of these games that I think could be kind of interesting to work out:

The manner in which conditions work.

Ok, for those who aren't familiar with these games, or have never played them, there are often various conditions that can stack up on your character, or which you can inflict on foes. The most basic is Poison, which we'll use as our main example.

Getting poisoned in these games is pretty nasty, as while the condition lasts, you'll continually lose health. But you can avoid it if you're careful:

When an enemy has an attack that inflicts poison, you'll get a little bar on your screen, roughly below your character depending on your camera angle. Each poison-inflicting attack will fill that meter (or if you run through one of the many, many, many poison swamps in these games, it'll tick up for every second you stay in the fetid waters). Until that meter fills, you're actually fine. And if you go for a while without getting any more poison build-up, the meter will start to drain until it's empty and no longer displayed on the screen.

But if it does fill, you are hit with the condition - in the case of poison, that damage over time will continue onward. At that point, the meter will actually start to drain, with the condition lasting as long as the meter still has anything in it. (This actually means that once you are poisoned, you're effectively immune to poison build-up, though the second that the poisoned condition ends on you, if you're still wading through a poisoned waters, you'll start to build it up again.)

This is how all conditions work - some of them have instantaneous effects, like Bleed, which will cause a sudden burst of massive damage, which then instantly drains completely but of course makes you vulnerable to the next bleed. There's often a more powerful poison variant (in Elden Ring it's Scarlet Rot. I think in Dark Souls it's Toxic, and in Bloodborne it's just... fast poison).

Now, one of the interesting things is that often in these games if you equip an item that helps defend against these conditions, raising, say, your Immunity in Elden Ring, you'll actually see these bars appear on your screen, partially filled, and draining.

And that, to me, implies something about the way these work:

Typically, in these games, you have stats that affect your resistance to these conditions (as well as resistances to different damage types). What I think these resistances do (it might be more complicated than this, but bear with me,) is essentially make that meter longer. If you have, say, 135 Immunity, that means that you'll need 135 "poison points" before you actually get poisoned. If an enemy has an attack that inflicts 40 poison points on a hit, you'll thus be fine (other than the damage it causes) if you take three of them, but the fourth gives you this further problem.

The reason that equipping an item that increases your immunity causes that meter to show up on your screen, then, I'd guess, is that if you had 135 and now suddenly have 160, there's 25 points within that meter that suddenly have been added, and rather than just start you off with an empty meter, it's basically treating it like you permanently have Poison Points up to your maximum. I imagine they do it this way to prevent weird shenanigans that might be caused by swapping gear mid-fight. If we invert it - if we figure that with 135 Immunity you're "135 points away from being Poisoned," and suddenly your maximum is 160, then the game needs to drain your now-larger meter to get to your new maximum.

The point, though, is that this could be a system we replicate in a TTRPG.

Poison, of course, is different in D&D - you can be poisoned without taking any damage, and that damage-over-time association that it has in most games is not there in D&D (though there are some effects that have that).

But the way it generally works is that an effect subjects you to a Constitution saving throw, and if you pass the DC set by the effect (and/or the monster producing said effect,) you avoid being poisoned.

But let's say we built a system in which, say, your Constitution Score instead set your Poison Tolerance (Resistance and Immunity already have meanings in D&D, so we'll say Tolerance for now). We might then have monsters that inflict, say, 5 Poison Points on you with an attack. As it is now, higher Con makes it less likely for you to get poisoned, but it's more predictable.

Now, does this make sense in a game where we generally want combat to only last 3-4 rounds? Perhaps not. But if we were to build a new system that has a different attitude toward how fast combat can flow, maybe this would be an avenue worth exploring.

Single-Playing WoW and the State of Online Multiplayer

 So, I have a confession.

And it feels weird that it's a confession and not just a statement of fact, because I'm actually not doing anything wrong.

I basically play WoW solo these days. On occasion, my best friend, who has been playing just about as long as I have, will have me grab a character (usually one of my tanks) to run a Mythic Plus dungeon. But for me, my focus these days has really been on doing things on my own. Solo play. Delves are truly my endgame.

And I think I was always inclined to play this way. Back when hitting level 30 was kind of a big deal, I really didn't even try to find groups for dungeons until I was level 30, or even level 40. I remember eventually figuring out how to look for groups in trade chat (this was before the Group Finder was implemented). And yeah, by the time the Group Finder was implemented in I believe 3.3, I got into a habit of running a bunch of dungeons on all of my characters each week. I've also got to say that the experience of running dungeons back then was wild. When my Troll Mage hit level 80 and geared up just high enough to qualify for a heroic dungeon, I came in understanding that, yes, I'd be sort of getting carried, but by that point in the expansion, these dungeons weren't really a challenge for established max-level characters, with most clears taking under ten minutes. But the players in that group, whether because they resented me for being just barely at the gearing minimum or because they were just assholes, decided to spend the dungeon getting me killed, the Hunter misdirecting enemies to my squishy Mage, and eventually just kicking me as they raced through the dungeon while I was running back as a ghost. Yes, it's been like 16 years since that happened, and yes, I'm still mad.

Now, I think perhaps because the WoW playerbase has gotten older, my experience with them in more recent years has been less toxic, the people less angry and aggressive, more mellow and cooperative. But it's still frustrating sometimes. Just a couple weeks ago, I was brought in for a Mythic Plus Windrunner Spire run. It didn't go wonderfully - we certainly didn't beat the timer. And one of the players claimed they didn't have enough gold to repair their gear, so my friend gave him what he claimed he needed, before that player pretty swiftly "disconnected" and didn't log back in. We were forced to finish the dungeon with four of us, and it was pretty clear the guy had been scamming my friend. A bizarre thing to scam a fellow player for, given that a thousand gold at this stage of WoW's lifespan is a pathetically small amount - I think I got 18k off of a weekly quest on one of my characters the other day.

But it left a sour taste in my mouth.

I think the implementation of Delves is a recognition of the fact that sometimes, playing with others isn't so fun. WoW's an MMO, built on the very premise that it's cool to be in a game where there are tons of other players also playing. But especially given the game's longevity, some of us older players have lost patience over time for dealing with other players' crap.

Yes, this post is partially about The Duskbloods. I saw a Blue Sky post by Jacob Geller, famed video game video essayist, saying "Sometimes I feel the potential of multiplayer is more exciting as a game design concept than it is to actually play." And I feel that. I think there's often talk about how being with other players can lead you down unexpected and interesting roads - you can't predict what is going to happen because other players will surprise you.

It is, thus, kind of funny that a really refined multiplayer game, like WoW, works really hard to funnel that experience into something predictable. If you're running a dungeon, everything works best if the players are acting in clearly prescribed ways. If I'm your tank, you want me pulling groups carefully, positioning them so that you're not fighting with me to max your DPS. The best players to play with are the ones whose actions you can predict, and so as a player, I aspire to be very predictable to my fellow players. That's how we win. That's how we overcome our challenges.

Back during Wrath, when my guild (which is basically a ghost town these days, probably in part due to my lack of enthusiasm to organize raids, a role I fell into as our guild's most consistently playing tank after our original guildleader quit WoW) was running Naxxramas (well past the point when it was "the current raid," but back then they didn't have this idea of seasonal catch-ups, so it was still reasonable to try to progress through to earn gear that would get us into Ulduar,) we were fighting Heigan the Unclean, with his infamous "safety dance." The funny thing is that I think that mechanic is actually not terribly hard with a modern computer, but back then, there was enough lag that you really needed to anticipate the slime waves well in advance. We were, I think, doing it on 25-player mode, and about 75% of the way into the fight, all but me (protection paladin,) and a shadow priest and a holy paladin were dead. The three of us performed that safety dance for 35 full minutes, clinching victory.

It was unexpected. It was a legendary moment. It might have been a bit boring for the rest of the group (though they were cheering us on in TeamSpeak). But the design of the game these days wouldn't allow that. If that many DPS were down, there would be an enrage timer that would end the fight.

Multiplayer games promise endless predictability, but multiplayer game design requires that the possibilities become narrow enough that the game retains coherence.

Game companies have been pushing online multiplayer a lot in the past decade or so. We've even seen marketing efforts to promote it as a superior way of gaming (I can't remember if it was EA or Ubisoft or one of these big game companies people generally dislike, but there was a tweet or something that was like "He's a ten, but only plays single-player games," which, frankly, I think was part of a corporate psy-op.

I actually don't really understand how the money of it all works: WoW obviously is incentivized to keep people playing because it's a subscription-based service. But I know a lot of these games are still ones you just buy once, so I don't totally understand why this business model would be so much more lucrative.

Anyway, the fact that WoW is accommodating this style of play I think speaks to a broader desire for a calm and private gaming experience. You could argue that this is WoW trying to be everything to everyone (remember how they implemented basically Pokemon back in Mists of Pandaria, which they've only just stopped adding onto?) but I will say, after almost twenty years in this game, I have sentimental attachments to it and my characters. I imagine one day my WoW characters will, inevitably, be packed away in Stormwind or Orgrimmar or their houses to gather dust forever, but it's nice to be able to keep playing the game I started halfway through college, experiencing its story and its thrills, even as my appetite for playing with friends is satisfied far more effectively by my D&D games.

Watching Duskbloods is Making Me Crave Bloodborne II

 I think it's actually a violation of the terms of service for the Duskblood Network Test, but there are some videos of footage from the game on YouTube. Is that ethical to watch? Eh, I don't think it's that bad. This is more like a closed beta test, and that's not something you intentionally release to random players without some expectation that stuff is going to get shown around. Honestly, it's not that much more enlightening than the official footage that the various reviewers were using in compliance with FromSoft's stuff.

Also, hey, I wasn't the one who uploaded it.

But ethical issues aside, I find myself reminded that while I'm incredibly curious about the lore of the game and very impressed with its aesthetics and gameplay systems, I just don't think this is the one for me: these sorts of time-limited match multiplayer games don't really appeal to me. And while the Network Test is only previewing one of the game's multiple (I think 3 at launch) maps and only some of its playable Bloodsworn characters, but it's clear that any sense of story progression is going to take place largely outside of the main game (I assume in a similar manner to Nightreign).

I have few doubts that those stories will be fascinating, and, I mean, look, I'm a total sicko for FromSoft's vague and evocative storytelling style, with its surreal imagery and reframing of established tropes to create something truly new and unexpected.

But all of this is basically making me lament that Bloodborne never got a sequel.

Naturally, there are comparisons to be drawn between The Duskbloods and Bloodborne (including, you know, having Blood in both names,) both having a broadly Gothic aesthetic. Now, I am also curious to see if the Duskbloods is quite as (classically) gothic as we're led to believe: the map in the Network Test isn't totally like Yharnam, but has a similar architectural style - the kind of high stone buildings that vampires might perch upon. I'd argue it's not quite the same - I think the city map in the test looks a bit more late-19th-century or even early 20th in vibes, including a very Big Ben-like clocktower (though I think I learned somewhere that Big Ben is actually the bell in said clocktower, and that the actual tower is just "The Clocktower," later named Elizabeth Tower in 2012). Meanwhile, Yharnam in Bloodborne was likely inspired more by Edinburgh, Scotland, and given the tricorne hats that are so iconic to the Hunter's Attire, I've always thought of it as taking place slightly earlier, kind of Regency period (then again, the alternate Hunter's cap is a top hat, and I'm no fashion historian. Actually, one of my best friends sort of is, so I should ask him).

Still, if Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and Elden Ring all fit in that broad "medieval fantasy" aesthetic with plate armor, shields, and big weapons, The Duskbloods seems to share a lot more DNA with Bloodborne as a revisit about a decade later to this Gothic vibe.

Bloodborne was intentionally designed to encourage a faster pace of combat, including using the Rally mechanic to make players a little less worried if they wind up taking a hit so that they'd keep up the assault. We've seen with Nightreign and with Duskbloods that From is very much experimenting with faster movement speeds, slowly dialing up the pace of combat since the laborious days of Dark Souls. Indeed, I even think that just giving everyone such high starting Stamina in Elden Ring was in part to let people swing their weapons around more.

The high speed of Nightreign and Duskbloods character, though, also makes sense in a game where there's limited time to accomplish your goals. Duskbloods has you racing other players to gather the most Virtue (gained by doing various things across the map) to avoid being Culled from the competition. Given that you'll be racing to the various sources of Virtue, it makes sense that you can move at such high speeds and jump an insane number of times in the air (I believe it's a quadruple jump that can be followed by an air-dash, and also your initial jump can be charged, so it's way easier for you to overcome vertical obstacles).

I wonder if such abilities would be used in a future single-player game.

Now, look, it has only been two years since The Shadow of the Erdtree DLC came out, and while that was DLC for a game that itself was two years old at the time, it was a massive amount of content, one that would have felt like a whole game if the original hadn't been even more massive.

In other words, I don't want to get greedy. Bethesda seems to only finally be moving toward getting Elder Scrolls VI out a full fifteen years after Skyrim came out (and I'd guess we'll be waiting at the very least until 2027). FromSoft did have its crazy 2014-2016 run of Dark Souls II, Bloodborne, and Dark Souls III, but especially if they're developing new IPs that won't allow quite as many development-saving measures (that said, there are for sure some Pthumerians among the foes you fight in Duskbloods) I can be patient.

The main thing, though, is that I'd really love to get a game that looks like The Duskbloods but has a fully fleshed-out single player experience.

I'm fine with - even encourage - them to futz with the formula a bit. FromSoft invented the Souls-like genre, and I think one of the reasonable criticisms of properties like Bloodborne and Elden Ring is that they do borrow a lot from earlier games by the studio. But I think the saving grace is that those two are two of my favorite video games of all time, and the iteration on the existing concepts feels more like refinement than laziness.

Anyway, if it were somehow revealed that The Duskbloods takes place in the same universe as Bloodborne, I wouldn't find it tremendously shocking on a storytelling level. It's the licensing and exclusivity that makes that unlikely. Bloodborne was a PS4 exclusive (and kind of the reason I got a PS4 in the first place) and The Duskbloods is a Switch 2 exclusive - a console I still haven't gotten, though given that I've had every Nintendo home console from the SNES forward, I expect I will eventually.

But I do think that the exclusivity might be a big part of why there is no Bloodborne II. Like Demon's Souls (which was a PS3 exclusive,) FromSoft instead created a new and similar franchise to keep refining the formula. (Actually, funnily enough, a cut voice line from Bloodborne seemed to imply that it took place in the Demon's Souls universe, though it might have just been a cheeky reference).

So, I could just go back and play Bloodborne again. It's tempting. But I've also played so much of that game. I don't think I've actually beaten everything on all of these characters, but I think I've gotten, like, through most of the game and the DLC on something like six characters. Bloodborne, of course, doesn't have quite the same build variety that Dark Souls or Elden Ring do (indeed, while you might make an effective character that blends Strength and Skill, for the most part, the builds for Bloodborne are just "put more into your main damage stat, and maybe ensure you have, like, decent Health and Stamina"). Sure, one of my Strength-focused characters uses the Whirligig Saw and another uses the Boom Hammer, but it's not much of a distinction.

My real hope here is that, after two games in a row with iconic characters whose entire kit is determined by their pre-determined personality, that From has cultivated a lot of new ideas for powers and abilities that a future game can let us build around. Having a game where we get to choose to invest in stats that enhance, say, the weird rocket attack that Zork in the Duskbloods uses, or going for more conventional Dexterity to wield rapiers and scimitars, or blending them some way to create something really weird - I'd love that.

But also, man, I'm a sucker for the Gothic aesthetic. In a way, I worry that because Duskbloods exists, it's less likely we'll get a single-player successor to Bloodborne from them (whether part of that franchise or no).

Greedily Absorbing Whatever Lore I Can From a Duskbloods Preview Video

 No one really does worldbuilding like From Software.

Famously, the head of FromSoft, Hidetaka Miyazaki, has talked about how he used to read English-language fantasy novels as a kid, only sort of knowing the language, and thus only getting a vague sense of the worlds that they described and piecing together what clues he could as to what we going on. That sense of deep mystery - mystery almost in the ancient, religious sense - permeates the worlds of games like Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring. To this day, even in a game like Dark Souls, there are elements of the story that are left open for debate, entire plotlines in the backstory of the world that are only vaguely alluded to.

It's an approach that can turn some people off, but the loyal fans of the company's titles tend to be more fascinated and intrigued. There's an entire secondary "game" of finding a dozen different YouTube channels that explore elements of the games' lore.

What's exciting here is that we appear to have an entirely new world, the first since Elden Ring dropped in 2022 (to be fair, there's only been one new FromSoft game to come out between then and now, which was a sort of spin-off of Elden Ring).

What's frustrating, of course, is that Duskbloods is going to be a PvP, short match-focused game, in other words the kind of game whose structure does not appeal to me (I say structure because the moment-to-moment gameplay looks very cool). So, like Nightreign (which is similar in structure, though PvE-focused, and so at least more in line with my tastes) I'm expecting to experience this vicariously, to absorb the game through the videos people share.

But hey, let's see what we can glean.

First off, the overall setting of the game seems to be kind of Gothic in tone, though unlike Bloodborne, which skewed kind of early-to-mid 19th Century (tricornes might even push it back to the 18th century,) there are multiple characters who carry what appear to be early-20th-century firearms, and there's an event involving a zeppelin that makes it look almost World War One-like in time period.

In a way, this kind of fits: Dracula, the most famous vampire novel, came out in the 1890s, and there are elements of that story that seem to be sort of forgotten, like the fact that one of its heroes is a Texan cowboy. Interestingly, Lies of P, which owes a lot of its gameplay mechanics to the Souls-like games pioneered by FromSoft, has an belle epoch aesthetic, a period at the end of the 19th century in France, which has some real overlap.

Juxtaposed with this kind of Steampunk technological level, though, the environments of Duskblood seem to evoke the gothic. The hub, similar, I think, to the Nightreign version of Roundtable Hold (obviously the one in Elden Ring is also a hub, but for a very different kind of game,) is called the House of Dusk, and from what we can see in preview videos, it has a very "gothic manor" vibe, with elaborately carved wood panels on the walls.

It's interesting: while it of course transforms more into a kind of Lovecraftian tale of Great Ones and alien mutations, Bloodborne initially presents itself as a city taken over by its own take on Werewolves. This ranges from the hunters in the city streets who have more of a Lon Chaney-style "person with a lot of fur on their face" to more extremely lupine monsters (I can't recall if those are all considered Darkbeasts, but you know what I mean: the ones on the bridge near Cleric Beast and the guys who attack you in the Upper Cathedral Ward). Of course, keeping with a classic horror convention, they never come out and call the werewolves werewolves, and it's sort of fitting given that they're... like, yes, they're people who have taken on lupine aspects, but the rules are a bit different.

In Bloodborne, the one tip of the hat to the other most classic Gothic monster (well, I guess ghosts might also be in there,) the vampire, was primarily in the form of Castle Cainhurst, with its Vilebloods. Vilebloods who are basically all wiped out, unless we think that those gargoyle-like foes and maybe the blood tick foes are part of that "genus." Cainhurst is a fun optional side-dungeon with one of the tougher bosses in the game, but by that point you're probably going deep into the weird dream-logic of the full on cosmic horror and leaving the Gothic behind.

In The Duskbloods, the characters you play seem to all be coded as vampires, but I suspect that we'll never hear the word vampire uttered at any point within the game. Again, this is a common convention, such as in the excellent Mike Flanagan mini-series, Midnight Mass, though one of the things that this convention allows is for the creators to set their own rules as to how these things work. Fun fact, did you know that it wasn't until the 1922 film Nosferatu (an unauthorized adaptation of Dracula with the names all changed to avoid legal issues) that the convention that vampires burst into flames if exposed to sunlight was established? Dracula goes out in the day all the time in the novel and the Coppola movie.

Ok, let's talk about other elements at play.

In the preview, we see players fighting against robed figures who seem to be in some kind of religious attire. Notably, most are of human proportions, but there are giant ones who have the same gaunt, pallid faces as the Pthumerians from Bloodborne. I'm inclined to think this is probably a case of re-using assets, something FromSoft does all the time, but it's interesting. I wonder if there's a similar bit of lore here where some ancient civilization has connected with modern humans.

There is apparently a gameplay system called Sigils, which gives players special objectives to increase their Virtue (which Miyazaki describes as being inspired by Victory Points in various board games, and are what you need to maximize to avoid being Culled at the end of different rounds of the game - basically only the three players with the most Virtue get to the game's final phase). One of these has what appears to be a heraldic or religious symbol, and boy howdy does it sure look like it's the rough shape of a uterus.

This isn't surprising: FromSoft's games have often used anatomical themes, especially those related to childbirth and reproduction. Bloodborne is chock full of this stuff, but we also have things like the Formless Mother in Elden Ring (an Outer God referred to as a mother that's all about constant bleeding? That... that make you think of anything?)

I mean, once again, we have a kind of gothic-horror-looking game that literally has the word "blood" in the title. And indeed, since Dracula (actually, since at least Carmilla, the lesbian vampire novel that pre-dated Dracula by about twenty years and to which Stoker was kind of responding with more buttoned-up sexual mores,) vampires have been tied to ideas about sexuality. And FromSoft is the sort of game company I don't expect to shy away from such themes, even if they'll probably approach them from really oblique angles.

I'm actually curious to see if technology plays a major thematic role in this game. Bloodborne gave us the insane trick weapons and firearms (using guns in a way probably no other game has used them) but I think the technology felt largely incidental, with the manipulation of people through religious authority was the far bigger thematic focus.

But in this game, with all the guns and zeppelins and the player character Zork, who wears a giant metal Iron Man-like suit, I think this might be part of the ideas that the game intends to explore. I'm given to understand that the moment the game takes place in is sort of apocalyptic in vibe (which isn't, like, unprecedented in FromSoft games. Weirdly Elden Ring might be the exception as the one in which things have already fallen apart, and the world is desperately waiting for something to change) and I wonder to what degree that apocalypse was driven by technology (certainly World War One was this horrifying revelation to the world about the degree to which the mechanization of warfare had made killing so much more efficient. Interestingly, the US I think was less psychologically wounded by this because we had gone through our first really industrialized war with the Civil War).

The other curious question is what motivates our player characters. In Nightreign, the Nightfarers seem to be there basically to save the world, and even if their individual stories introduce some shades of grey, they're meant, I think, to basically be good guys. But especially with this more PvP-focused game, I wonder if that's quite different here.

The ending cutscene if you wind up winning a match seems to involve you bowing before a sun dripping with blood - a little like the symbolism of the sun at the end of Dark Souls III, actually. Is victory a... good thing in this game? Or are we to play as the monsters that are bringing about the end?

Regarding the individual characters. Naturally, I'm fascinated by the weird Steampunk Iron Man that is Zork. The other characters we've seen are Albert, a messy-haired... um, dude. Bloodhand Jan wears all white and a metallic helmet that covers his eyes. We see him smashing his head into what looks like a rock in order to bleed enough for his blood to form a trail for him to follow to his target, and I wonder if the white clothing is there to evoke a straightjacket, like poor Renfield from Dracula (who, I'll point out, is not complicit in Dracula's plans in the novel, and is basically just another victim who also happens to be mentally ill). Trang Lanh has an east-Asian (I want to say the name sounds southeast Asian, but I could be wrong) who fights with a big chakram that appears to be sort of pitted or rotten in the inner rim. Sniper Layla carries a giant rifle and wears a long duster, and is also bald and gaunt with skin that looks corpse-like. Senator Samir Patres is also gaunt and swarthy, but wears elegant cloths and glasses. And then there's Zork, whose massive bell-shaped helmet has bulbous eyes and a sharp beak that comes out the front, and fights with some kind of weird giant riveted pipe contraption.

Most of the details we've gotten are about gameplay systems, so we'll probably have to wait a fair bit before we learn more.

UA: Path of Ceremorphosis Feats and Mind Blast Spell

 Like the Lich and Death Knight feat paths from the Villainous Options earlier this year, the following feats allow you to make your character slowly turn into a Mind Flayer. Naturally, Mind Flayers are among the most iconic monsters in D&D, and the idea of a bunch of adventurers being implanted with Ilithid tadpoles is, of course, the central premise of Baldur's Gate 3.

What's interesting is that these feats give you various psionic abilites that work similarly to how the Psi Warrior Fighter and Soulknife Rogue do (as well as the upcoming Dark Sun Psion class). Let's check them out:

Tadpole Host

Prerequisite: level 4+

You have an ilithid tadpole in your body, the starting infection that leads to ceremorphosis. You get the following:

Ability Score Increase: Your Intelligence rises by 1, to a max of 20.

Mind Sliver: You learn the Mind Sliver cantrip, using Intelligence as your spellcasting ability.

Psionic Power: You get Psionic Energy Dice (PEDs) to fuel various psionic abilities. You have a number of PEDs equal to your proficiency bonus, and they are each a d6 (but they improve if you take more Path of Ceremorphosis feats). You can only use these specific PEDs for features you gain from this feat path. You can't use a feature from this feat path that expends a PED if you have used up all the PEDs you get from this feat. You regain all expended PEDs when you finish a long rest.

Psionic Overload: When you deal Psychic damage, you can expend a PED and roll it to deal extra psychic damage equal to the roll.

    This is the big prerequisite for the feat path. The fact that it only buffs Intelligence could wind up very limiting, as it'd be hard to justify taking this on anyone but a Wizard, Artificer, or the upcoming Psion. It's also a General Feat, meaning that this is taking one of your precious 5 (really 4 given that you'll want an Epic Boon at 19) ASIs. On its own, I don't know if this is really that exciting, but we'll see what is built upon it.

Ilithid Thrallmaker

Prerequisite: Tadpole Host Feat

Your psionic abilities have made you a master manipulator:

Ability Score Increase: You can raise either Intelligence or Charisma by 1, to a max of 20.

Psionic Energy Dice: Your PEDs from this feat path become d8s.

Telepathy: You have Telepathy with a range of 10 feet, or if you already have telepathy, the range increases by 10 feet.

Persuasive Presence: You always have Charm Person prepared, with Intelligence as your spellcasting ability. You can cast it without a spell slot by expending a PED. You can also cast it with spell slots if you have them. When you expend a PED to cast the spell, roll the die and subtract half the result (rounded up) from the target's saving throw.

    Again, you really want to be an Int-based caster for this feat path. Charm Person can be very helpful in certain adventures/campaigns, but if there are a lot of non-humanoid creatures with which you're interacting, this might feel like a waste. Again, I don't know that this really makes out for missing out on some of the more powerful feats (though admittedly, I think spellcasters are less feat-dependent).

Tadpole's Safeguard

Prerequisite: Tadpole Host

Ability Score Increase: You can raise Intelligence or Constitution by 1, to a max of 20.

Psionic Energy Dice: Your PEDs from this feat path become d8s.

Telepathy: You have telepathy with a range of 10 feet, or if you already have telepathy, the range increases by 10 feet.

Warding Backlash: You always have the Shield spell prepared, with Intelligence as your spellcasting ability for it (though does that matter with a spell that has no save or attack roll? I've never understood that). You can cast it without expending a spell slot by expending a PED. You can also cast it with spell slots if you have them. When you expend a PED to cast the spell and the attack misses, roll the PED. The attack then takes psychic damage equal to the amount rolled.

    This, on the other hand, is really good. Really just getting Shield is always good, and while Wizards and Psions can get that anyway, having it always prepared is nice (and Artificers who aren't Battle Smiths or Artillerists will appreciate it). Also, we can buff the damage by expending a second PED if we want to, though I doubt that's optimal.

Ulitharid's Might:

Prerequisite: Tadpole Host

The tadpole you have is mutating you into an ulitharid, a more powerful and rarer type of ilithid.

Ability Score Increase: You can raise your Strength, Dexterity, or Constitution score by 1, to a max of 20.

Psionic Energy Dice: Your PEDs from this feat path become d8s.

Telepathy: You have telepathy to a range of 10 feet, or if you have telepathy already, it increases in range by 10 feet.

Extended Tentacles: Two long tentacles sprout around your mouth. You can use these tentacles to make an Unarmed Strike, and when using them, your reach increases by 5 feet.

    I think it's clear that you're only intended to take one of these last three feats. This could be good on a Monk or perhaps a character built around grappling. Being able to grapple from more than 5 feet away is actually quite powerful, as you might hold a foe far enough away that they can't attack you back.

Full Ceremorphosis:

Prerequisite: Level 12+ and at least two Path of Ceremorphosis feats.

You've grown four tentacles around your mouth, have an elongated skull and purple skin slick with mucus. You're a mind flayer at this point.

Ability Score Increase: Your intelligence raises by 1, to a max of 20.

Psionic Energy Dice: Your PEDs from this feat path become d10s, or if they're already d10s, they become d12s.

Aberration: Your creature type is Aberration.

Ilithid Specialization: You pick one of the following benefits:

Brain-Seeking Tentacles: When you hit a creature with an unarmed strike as part of the attack action on your turn, you can use both the damage and grapple options. You can expend a PED when you use htis benefit to roll the expended die, and the creature takes extra damage equal to the number rolled plus your Intelligence modifier, and then subtracts half the number rolled from their saving throw to avoid the grapple (rounded up). If the target is reduced to 0 HP from this benefit, the PED isn't expended. You can use this benefit once per turn.

    Ok, before we move on, let's go over this. There are elements here of the Grappler feat, though again, we're now spending three feats to get here and probably need to be an Intelligence-based character, which means that we might not be great at grappling (not sure if the Psion Metamorph gets to use Int to set their grapple dcs, but if they do, these feats would be quite good for them).

Mind Flayer Spells: You always have Detect Thoughts, Levitate, and Mind Blast (a new spell) prepared. Intelligence is your spellcasting ability for these spells. You can cast these spells without expending a spell slot by expending a PED to cast them. You can also spend spell slots on them as normal.

    We've got to go into Mind Blast, but it's a 6th level spell, which is actually kind of nuts to get to cast nearly for free several times per day. Especially given that this feat path really leans into Int-based spellcasters as the ideal candidates, this feels like the best thing to grab.

Repeatable: You can take the Full Ceremorphosis feat multiple times, choosing a different options for Ilithid Specialization each time.

    So, we'll have to be level 12 for this (even if we're a Fighter or Rogue and can get a third general feat before then) and fully invested in this path. Is it worth it?

    Well, flavor-wise, I think it delivers decently. I certainly think you'll only want to take one of the three middle feats: I think a Psion/Artificer/Wizard going Tadpole Host, Tadpole's Safeguard, and Full Ceremorphosis taking the Mind Flayer Spells feels like the best version of this. You could grab a second Full Ceremorphosis at level 16, but frankly, I think we'd be ready to grab something like War Caster at that point.

    Like the Lich and Death Knight, the tricky thing here is that feats are so precious that you've got to make a really strong case to invest not just one but several into one of these paths. Does this do enough? Maybe...? There's a lot of storytelling potential here, but boy will you need real buy-in from both the DM and your fellow players.

Now, let's look at the Mind Blast spell:

Mind Blast:

6th level Evocation (Psion)

Casting Time: Action

Range: Self

Components: S

Duration: Instantaneous

You unleash a concussive burst of psionic energy. Each creature in a 60-foot cone originating from you makes an Intelligence saving throw, taking 6d8 psychic damage and having the stunned condition until the start of your next turn. On a success, they take half damage only.

Using a Higher-Level spell slot: The damage increases by 1d8 for each spell slot level above 6.

    The damage isn't anything to write home about for a 6th level spell (27 average, which is less than a 3rd level Fireball) but an AoE stun targeting a saving throw that a lot of monsters aren't terribly good at is quite powerful. As someone playing a Wizard who recently hit level 11, I can tell you that 6th level spell slots are very precious. But this, then, makes the Full Ceremorphosis feat look way more exciting, as you'd have as many as 4 (and eventually 6) free castings of this per day. A hell of a way to start of an encounter if you can avoid hitting your friends.

UA: Imaskarcanist Wizard

 The third and final of the new Underdark UA's subclass options, we're once again dealing with the culture of Deep Imskara and their magical "Unlight." Like the other two, this subclass has a flavor table to roll on, here detailing how you learned this magic (which seems to assume you're not from Deep Imskara).

As always, Wizards are such a powerful class because of their unparalleled spell list, so your subclass often adds just a bit of gravy on top, but let's see how we feel about this particular gravy.

Level 3:

Unlight Adept:

When you cast a spell that deals Acid, Cold, Fire, Lightning, or Thunder damage, you can change that damage to Radiant. Additionally, dim light created by your spells creates bright light instead.

    The latter part is not super important, though if your DM actually remembers that dim light gives disadvantage on perception checks to see (remember that even people with Darkvision might have a need for some form of light) it could be marginally helpful. The damage type switch, though, is quite good: radiant is among the most reliable damage types in the game, and being able to swap all the regular elemental damage types into that means that anything from Fireball to Lightning Bolt to Tasha's Caustic Brew can be swapped to a different type if you are worried about resistances or immunities. (As a Scribes Wizard, I often plan around having certain "good damage types" at each spell level, but here you just have this feature and are basically covered).

Unlight Invigoration:

As a bonus action, you can choose a willing creature within 30 feet of you that you can see and roll one or two of your hit dice (er... hit point dice. That's a 5.5ism that I haven't gotten used to). You expend the dice and the target gains Temp HP equal to the roll's total plus your Intelligence modifier, and until they have no Temp HP, they have advantage on Strength checks and shed bright light in a 10-foot radius.

    I don't totally understand the reasoning behind the Strength advantage, but this is kind of interesting: if you think about it, you've probably got higher Int than Con, so if you just spend one die, it might be more effective than healing up on a short rest with that hit die. It's less hit-point-die efficient if you roll 2, but if you quickly need a bit of THP, this can help out. The advantage on Strength could be good to throw on a Fighter or Paladin (or Barbarian who doesn't want to use up all their Rages,) which could actually be great when in exploration mode because as long as they don't take damage, they'll keep that advantage basically until they finish a long rest.

Level 6:

Unlight Restoration:

As a bonus action, choose a creature you can see within 30 feet and roll one or two of your hit point dice, expending them. The target regains HP equal to the total rolled and sheds bright light in a 10-foot radius until the end of their next turn.

If you expended two dice, you can choose to end either the Blinded, Deafened, Paralyzed, or Poisoned condition instead of healing them.

    So, this is interesting. Arguably, the healing is a worse choice than the temp HP from Unlight Invigoration unless they're already unconscious (or at higher levels, if you're trying to top people up to protect them from things like Power Word Kill) because it's slightly lower in total than the Temp HP. But again, this can pop friends up from unconsciousness, and while you're tapping into your own potential healing on short rests, the fact that you have a number of d6s equal to your level could actually mean that this keeps your party going quite a while. Wizards rarely get the ability to heal at all.

Level 10:

Secrets of Deep Imaskar:

You gain the following:

Imaskarcana Lore: You can attune yourself to a magic item as a Magic action once per long rest.

    This is fun, but very marginal. It just lets you pretty much start using an attunement item the moment you find it, but after that point, but this is not something you'll be doing every day.

Piercing Unlight: Your spells ignore resistance to radiant damage.

    While this is cool given that you can make nearly all of your spells do radiant damage, it's also pretty rare, I think, that you encounter monsters with radiant resistance (which is part of what makes that Unlight Adept feature good).

Imaskar Seals: You always have Glyph of Warding prepared and can cast it once per long rest without a spell slot. When you cast it this way, you don't need material components, and you cast the spell as if you were using a spell slot equal to the highest Wizard spell slot you have. Any previous glyph created htis way is broken and that spell is ended without triggering.

    This, actually, is pretty nutso. While Glyph of Warding isn't the easiest spell to use offensively, let's just bear in mind that this can eventually give you a second 9th level spell every day. I'm assuming the intent is that even if you multiclass with a pure caster, this is really meant to be cast at the highest level of Wizard spell you can learn (so if you were, say, 13/7 Wizard/Psion, you'd have a 9th level slot but would only be able to learn up to 7th level spells, so I'd assume this would be the level you could cast the free glyph at, but I could be wrong).

Level 14:

Doom of Unlight:

When a creature takes Radiant damage from a spell you cast, you can use a reaction to curse the creature with Unlight. The creature makes a Con save against your spell save DC, and is cursed on a failure. Until the curse ends, they suffer the following:

The target emits bright light out to 20 feet.

Attack rolls against the target hav advantage.

At the start of each of the target's turns, they take radiant damage equal to your character level.

The target has advantage on Strength checks and melee attack rolls.

If the target hits another creature with a melee attack, they can repeate the Con save, ending the curse on a success.

If the target is reduced to 0 hp, it explodes. Roll d8s equal to half your character level, and each creature in a 10-foot emanation around the target takes radiant damage equal to the total rolled.

Once you attempt to curse a creature this way, you can't do so again until you finish a long rest or expend a 6th level spell slot (expending taking no action).

    Boy, this is crazy. So, first off, there's no range on this. I don't know if we could know that a creature took this from our Glyph of Warding, but that seems ideal. The thing that's so strange about this curse is that it creates, sure, big problems for the creature (taking our character level - not wizard level, so if we put those last 6 levels into something else, it should still do 20 - damage every turn will be enough to melt a lot of creatures if they can't get uncursed,) but the curse also buffs them with advantage on their attacks, so it's a real gamble.

    I'm a little skeptical here: 5E subclasses typically don't come with downsides to their abilities (the exception being the Wild Magic Sorcerer, though that became, I believe, less risky in 5.5), and the game is balanced around assuming that the dangers come more from monsters and environments. I think all in all this is probably going to be worse for your foe than it is for the party, but the fact that there's even a question that that might not be the case makes this run counter to established design conventions.

Overall Thoughts:

    I think that, of the three subclasses presented here, this one feels the most likely to actually see play. Not knowing much about the lore being related here (and possibly established; I don't know if Deep Imskara is a new thing or not) I can't really get a feel for the "vibe" of this or the Barbarian subclass.

    Using hit point dice as a resource is a cool idea, though one we saw in one of the Dark Sun playtest options as well. I believe Grim Hollow also had some Blood Magic spells that work this way, but that's third party.

    Anyway, that's it for subclasses. Last we just have the Path of Ceremorphosis feats.

UA: House Agent Rogue

 Ah, Menzoberranzan. One of the deadliest places in the Forgotten Realms. Center of Lolth-worship among the Drow and basically a place where deadly intrigue rules over all. A fitting place for a Rogue.

The House Agent is meant to represent the kind of fixer/problem-solver for one of the houses of Menzoberranzan that is called in when something needs to be taken care of brutally and discretely.

As with the Unlight Barbarian, there's a flavor table to roll on or pick from describing how you passed your loyalty test to your House. There's a lot of fun flavor here. How are the mechanics?

Thematically, this is a Rogue with some spellcasting, but not in the traditional sense like an Arcane Trickster. It's mainly spells that can be cast once a day, and some alternate Cunning Strikes.

Level 3:

House Insignia:

You have a magical token with the insignia of your sponsor house. Using it, you can cast certain spells (Charisma is your spellcasting ability). If you lose the Insignia, your house will get you a replacement when you finish a long rest, whether by courier or magical teleportation or whatever.

You know the Friends cantrip, and you can cast Find Familiar only as a Ritual, and can only choose the Spider form for it. You get a few other spells, each of which you can cast once per long rest using your insignia, gaining new spells as you hit higher levels.

At 3rd level, you have Charm Person. At 5th level, you have Suggestion. At 9th level, you have Hypnotic Pattern (essentially half-caster progression).

    So, on one hand, this is a lot of cool stuff to get. On the other hand, however, you could get this stuff and more as an Arcane Trickster. Sure, you get Suggestion two levels earlier and Hypnotic Pattern four levels earlier, but the flexibility of an Arcane Trickster, to me, would almost certainly be preferable.

Charming Presence:

You can take the Influence action as a bonus action, and you also gain proficiency in your choice of Deception, Intimidation, Performance, or Persuasion.

    This depends, I think, a lot on how strict your DM is about what kinds of ability checks you can make in combat. Generally the way my best friend/DM and I do it is that if you want to significantly affect a creature's behavior, like talking a foe out of fighting or just taunting them to go after you, you need to commit your full action to this, and so this feature would be pretty useful. But DMs who are less strict with the rules might make this feature, at least the bonus action Influence part, useless.

Level 9:

Backstab:

You have advantage on attack rolls against creatures that are within 5 feet of you and are Friendly or Charmed (interestingly it doesn't say they have to be charmed by you.). You also get a new Cunning Strike option:

Stunning Betrayal (costs 4d6): If your target was Friendly to you or had the Charmed condition when you hit them, they have the Stunned condition until the start of your next turn.

    I love Cunning Strike in theory, even if I think sacrificing damage on a class that already does less damage than it feels like it should is a little problematic. I will also say that the fact that they become un-stunned at the start, rather than end of your next turn, makes this a little less powerful. It's sort of a no-save stun, except you have to have gotten them into a good state to make use of it.

    One thing that might be a problem here is that DMs might not always think in terms of the Friendly/Indifferent/Hostile attitudes that are part of the rules, but might be overlooked by more intuitive roleplayers. It's something where you should talk to a DM about making sure that the meaning of these terms is clear. Flavor-wise, I think this is really fun for transitioning a social encounter to a combat encounter. But when you're sacrificing most of your Sneak Attack damage at this level, I don't know that it'll make for the kind of assassination vignette that it wants to evoke.

Level 13:

Infiltration Partner:

Your familiar through Find Familiar now has Darkvision out to 120 feet and Truesight to 30 feet.

Additionally, when you cast Find Familiar or finish a short or long rest while you have a familiar, you can grant Temp HP to the familiar equal to your Rogue level.

    30 feet of always-on Truesight for your Spider buddy is actually not too bad. Also, that Spider might actually be able to take a hit now and then if they're cushioned with double-digit Temp HP. What I'd love is if we could also give the Spider scaling Stealth bonuses - A Spider has a +4 by default, but by this level we might have as much as a +15.

Silver Tongue:

A creature's Hostile attitude does not impose Disadvantage on Charisma checks to influence them.

    Again, I imagine a lot of DMs might not even know what that means, so talk to your DM to make sure this subclass feature is actually coming into play.

Level 17:

Subtle Manipulator:

You gain an additional Cunning Strike option:

Confound (5d6): The target must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw (using your spellcasting DC, which is Charisma-based) or be Charmed for 1 minute. They can repeat the save when they take any damage to end it early.

Additionally, you can cast Friends as a bonus action, and the target no longer automatically succeeds on the save if you're fighting it or they're not a humanoid.

Finally, when a spell you cast gives a target the Charmed condition, they don't know they were charged by you.

    I mean, the benefit here is that you never run out of Cunning Strikes. And unlike Charm Person, Confound isn't going to give them advantage on the save because you just hit them.

    Here's what I'll say: in the right campaign, this could be very fun. But also, by high levels like this, a massive number of monsters are immune to the charmed condition.

Overall Thoughts:

    I really like the flavor of this subclass. But I just think, not unlike the Unlight Barbarian, that while there are some cool ideas at play here, it's A: underpowered and B: will only work in a very specific kind of campaign.

UA: Path of Unlight Barbarian

 Seems like Barbarians are getting a lot of subclasses. Let's check this one out.

One of the major throughlines of this UA is the city of Deep Imaskar, which seems to be the remnants of an ancient empire that exists in the lowest depths of the Underdark, and among their powers is Unlight, a powerful magic that helps them survive so far from the surface.

Unlight Barbarians basically have a lot of radiant-damage elements, with a flavor table (something all three of these subclasses get) that describes how their inner light manifests.

Level 3:

Radiant Rage:

This is your only 3rd level feature. When a creature hits you with a melee attack while you're raging, they take Radiant damage equal to your rage damage bonus. Additionally, you shine with 20 feet of bright light when you rage.

    This feels underwhelming. If you get hit by a ton of attacks, this could add up, but even at high levels, if a foe hit you three times in a round, that's just 12 damage. Compare this to a Zealot Barbarian who could do a bonus of up to 13.5 without taking any hits.

    The light aspect is cool, but also potentially a problem if you're trying not to draw attention to yourself (granted, the sounds of combat likely already do that). I think we just need something more here. My homebrew Inner Shadow Barbarian has the reflective damage, but also buffs to Unarmed Strikes as part of its level 3. Maybe if they bumped up the damage here, like Rage bonus plus Strength, this might feel a bit more substantial.

Level 6:

Unlight Revelation:

You gain proficiency in Perception if you don't already have it, and also gain expertise with it. While raging, you have Blindsight equal to the radius of the bright line you shine.

    One little note: I think that there needs to be compensation if you already have Perception. Maybe let you pick a different Barbarian class skill if you already have it. The blindsight is cool (and as this hints, the radius expands later on). But once again, that's something that will be situationally useful but might not come into play very often.

    Perception is great, though: it's probably the best skill proficiency to have in the game, and expertise is a way to really make it feel like you're truly good at something.

Level 10:

Infectious Unlight:

Damage you deal with Brutal Strike can be Radiant or its normal type (your choice). Also, you gain a new Brutal Strike option:

Radiant Infection: The target becomes infected with Unlight for 1 minute. While infected, it sheds Bright Light in a 10 foot radius and takes 1d6 radiant damage at the start of its turn. It can make a Con save (DC based on your Strength) at the end of each of its turns to end the effect.

    This is interesting: building on the Brutal Strike mechanic is fun. One thing I'd probably add in there is to make it so that if you infect an invisible creature with this, it no longer benefits from being invisible, which would make this a really cool feature to make the Unlight Barbarian the ultimate "hidden foe" finder (with their Blindsight to help them find it in the first place).

Harbinger of Unlight:

You have resistance to radiant damage.

    This is a pretty rare damage type for monsters to use, though often when they do, it's very high damage. But I don't think this will come up very often.

Level 14:

Brilliant Rage:

The aura of the light you shed when raging increases to a 30 foot radius (and thus also your blindsight). As a bonus action, you can force each creature of your choice within 30 feet to make a Con save (DC based on your Strength) or take 1d12 Radiant damage and be blinded until the end of your next turn (or take half damage only on a success). You can do this once per long rest, but you can expend a use of Rage to restore your use (no action required to restore the use).

    While Rage is a much easier resource to fling around now in 5.5, I don't think you can do this every turn. Mainly, I think the damage is kind of secondary - 6.5 average damage isn't much at level 14, though at least it's multiplied by how many targets you can hit. But the AoE blinding effect is actually quite nice, if you can get it.

Overall Thoughts:

    Yeah, ultimately I think there are some cool themes and a visual aesthetic to it that I like, but I just don't think there's enough going on with this subclass to get me excited to try playing it. Admittedly, I'm not much of a Barbarian player, but given the relative simplicity of the class, I really need a Barbarian subclass to give me some very cool tools to make up for that.

    I also think the power level here is overly conservative.

UA: Underdark Options

 We have a new Unearthed Arcana. While there is a bit of a backlog of tested options compared to the announced books, in fairness, we have sort of been working through them (for example, a few of the old Xanathar's subclasses are getting revamps in the World of Warcraft book).

The Underdark is, of course, a storied part of D&D lore, and an environment that they generally assume you have in your campaign setting despite having no true real-world equivalent (sure, there are subterranean biomes on Earth, but I don't think any are as extensive as the Underdark).

The UA brings us three subclasses and a "villainous feat path" similar to what we saw with Liches and Death Knights, in this case being the Path of Ceremorphosis, where you become a Mind Flayer.

I'll be honest: I'm not generally that fascinated by the Underdark as a setting, and my initial impressions of these options are not... well, I'm not blown away by them, even though I applaud the efforts to create truly new things. We'll get into them with individual posts.

We got a lot of big announcements at GenCon, but we do still have a few things that have gone through testing without an official announcement of a corresponding book - primarily the "villain" book. This, I imagine, could be for a separate Underdark-themed sourcebook or perhaps an adventure set there (which they have done before in 5.0 with Out of the Abyss, but that was a while ago now).

The Duskbloods Looks Really Cool But I Don't Think I'll Play It

 I've been a pretty consistent fan of FromSoft's games, admittedly never beating either Dark Souls game I've gotten (though I got very far in DSIII, with only the last two DLC bosses and the final boss unbeaten) but adoring both Bloodborne and Elden Ring.

When Elden Ring: Nightreign was released, I considered playing it, but ultimately decided that the kind of short match-style multiplayer system is just not what I'm into (I've been more or less a solo player in WoW of late, thanks in large part to how the game now accommodates such a playstyle with things like Delves as my endgame).

Gameplay-wise, though, Nightreign seems like far more of a fit for me than The Duskbloods, as while the former is entirely built around co-op, the Duskbloods is ultimately a competitive PvP multiplayer game (though with environmental threats to face largely as a way to earn character progression and avoid being "culled." I am also given to understand that there are scenarios not available in the initial demo that end in boss battles rather than PvP free-for-alls, but it's still built around competition with other players).

So, once again, I'm left with a game I'll probably be curious to hear a lot about, but I doubt I'll actually play it (I don't have a Switch 2 either, though that feels like an eventual inevitability. I've had every Nintendo home console starting with the SNES).

But on an aesthetic level, The Duskbloods actually looks incredible.

The game has more of a gothic look than the medieval look of Dark Souls and Elden Ring, though in contrast with Bloodborne's more "early to mid 19th century" look, this really appears more Steampunk in vibe, arguably more of an early 20th century feel.

Like Nightreign, you pick from established characters with their own built-in capabilities. Probably the most distinctive is a guy (actually, I'm making an assumption here. I don't know that they're male) in a big steampunk armor suit whose signature attack is to use rockets to shoot forward and ram into their foes. There's also evidently an event that can bring a big airship overhead that you can call upon to bombard large groups of foes.

If Bloodborne is... sort of... about werewolves, Duskbloods is far more vampire-coded, with the player characters having vampiric abilities, including the ability to bite foes and temporarily make them into allies (I assume only for the NPC ones).

FromSoft is known for re-using assets, so I wouldn't read too much into this, but many of the non-player foes that I saw in Vaati Vidya's preview looked like the Pthumerians we encounter in Bloodborne. Now, I don't think we can draw any direct lore conclusions from that - Bloodborne was a Playstation exclusive and Duskbloods is a Nintendo exclusive, so I think it extremely unlikely that there will be any canonical connection between their stories.

But thematically we might see some similar ideas. What I find interesting here is the presence of, well, kind of World War 1-era weaponry. I believe the idea of the game is that it's an era called "humanity's twilight," and massive wars like WWI felt pretty apocalyptic to those who lived through it. Again, unlike Nightreign, this game does seem to be oriented toward competition, with only one victor arising from each match, and I wonder to what extent that theme of competition winds up being part of the story as well - a world brought to perdition because of endless competitiveness.

FromSoft's combat has undergone an interesting evolution. Early games like Demon's Souls and Dark Souls had very slow, methodically-paced combat. But over time, they've pushed for faster styles of combat that still maintain the meaning and weight of each strike. Duskbloods actually looks kind of insane, with what appears to be all characters getting several in-air jumps and the ability to clash mid-air.

Anyway, it's a little frustrating that, two games in a row, I'm finding myself likely to be looking in through the window. But maybe we'll see the next single-player game from the company incorporate some of the cool ideas developed for Nightreign and Duskbloods.

What Can the WoW D&D Book Cover?

 One of the biggest questions I've had regarding the WoW book for D&D is what a single sourcebook can possibly cover amongst the elements of a 22-year-old MMORPG, one with eleven expansions, each of which brought with it zones with their own questlines, dungeons, and patches that act as kind of mini-expansions.

While the folks from Blizzard and WotC have pitched this book as allowing you to create adventures in any era of WoW, up to the present day (last week, patch 12.1, the second major phase of the Midnight expansion, just launched) I truly don't think that you could possibly cover every plot thread and worldbuilidng element that has shown up in the game in a single book. But beyond that, I'm also inclined to believe that you couldn't really cover every single expansion without giving short shrift to all of them.

So, what are the essentials?

This is a subjective question, but I'll give my opinion. Essentially, what are the expansions that had a giant impact on the overall world, and what elements within them do I think would be essential to fleshing out the world.

Vanilla (aka "World of Warcraft"):

Not an expansion, but the original game. This is an obvious one, and necessary to lay the groundwork. Blizzard was new at making an MMO, but WoW became popular in large part due to the focus on storytelling through questing (where a lot of older MMOs were explicitly grindy). Anyway, we establish the home territories of the Alliance and Horde and the conflicts they find themselves in. If there is anything guaranteed to be covered in this book, it's the overall continents of Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms. And we'll have elements about the lingering impact of the Third War, from the Scourge to the Burning Legion's devastation of northern Kalimdor, then probably something about the Black Dragonflight and the devotees of Ragnaros, the Firelord.

The Burning Crusade:

WoW's first expansion feels, at least in retrospect, like it was continuing to just flesh out the world. The world of Outland, formerly called Draenor, is a big part of Warcraft lore because it is here that the Orcs come, and where the Horde was originally founded. But BC also established the lands of Quel'thalas (which is also the centerpiece of Midnight) as well as giving us the Draenei (well, an updated version of them that involved an accidental retcon, but boy I'm glad they did because I love the Draenei). Again, I suspect that a lot of the elements of this expansion will be there in the book.

Wrath of the Lich King:

Among the most popular expansions, Wrath both featured Warcraft's most iconic villain, Arthas Menethil (not the original Lich King, but the most notable one) and also did a lot to establish the lore of the Titans, god-like beings who brought order to Azeroth and also created a number of beings who would be the ancestors of a lot of the playable races (or in the case of the Earthen, who would come out far later, just directly created them). Once again, Northrend was established as part of the world back in Warcraft III, so this felt a bit like Burning Crusade just giving us something we were going to need anyway.

Cataclysm:

For the first time, we find ourselves with an expansion that is more, I think, about the specific events taking place in it than expanding the world. To be fair, we do get a bit of established lore territories, like Mount Hyjal, Gilneas, and a brief glimpse at Kezan. Cataclysm saw a massive revamp of the old Vanilla zones to update their quests and in some cases landscape to reflect both time moving on and the devastation wrought by Deathwing, but I actually think very little of what happens in the expansion is truly essential to giving us a world to play in, so this might be touched on only lightly. The main things, here, though, were the establishment of the Goblins and Worgen as members of the Horde and Alliance, respectively, the last of the non-neutral, non-"allied" races in WoW. (Allied races are basically variant races built on existing models, though... it's a little more complicated, like the Fox-like Vulpera aren't actually related to Goblins even if they use the same 3D skeleton, and the Kul Tiran Humans and Zandalari Trolls have, I think, unique skeletons. That's not relevant to the D&D book, though. What is is that the Worgen and specifically the Bilgewater Cartel Goblins become established as core populations within the two major factions).

Mists of Pandaria:

For the first time, this expansion gave us an entirely new continent that had no precedent in the RTS games, with the Pandaren even being treated as a non-canonical joke by some. However, despite the outcries that this was adding a childish element to the game, Pandaria was actually a richly conceptualized region that has left this among the most popular expansions in WoW's history. Historically, this was an expansion that saw the conflict between Alliance and Horde flare up more than we had seen before, here giving us a showcase of what happens when two Great Powers use a foreign land to fight their battles. If nothing else, given the popularity of the expansion, I expect to see the monsters and territories of Pandaria covered at least a bit.

Warlords of Draenor:

Infamously conceptually bizarre, Warlords of Draenor had the disgraced former Warchief of the Horde, Garrosh Hellscream, teaming with a rogue bronze dragon to travel to an alternate timeline version of the orcish homeworld of Draenor to form an alternate-history Horde with all the leaders from his father's generation who could use modern technology rather than demonic magic to invade Azeroth. If there's one expansion I can imagine them just kind of skipping over, it would be this one, an expansion that literally had less content than other expansions, and is commonly held (certainly I think so) as the worst WoW expansion. While it had some plot elements that led to Legion, which is my favorite expansion, we could more or less breeze past this.

Legion:

All about the Burning Legion's largest, seemingly final invasion of Azeroth, this gave us the Broken Isles (a region that was actually established as early as Warcraft II, I believe) which largely centers around the ancient Night Elf city of Suramar (the elves there forced to subsist on pure arcane magic for ten thousand years and are now known as the Nightborne). Interestingly, one of the things we might get here is some really iconic magic items, as one of the parts of the expansion was that each spec (basically subclass) got its own unique Artifact Weapon, which you'd use the entire expansion and just upgrade over the course of the expansion instead of replacing it. This also gave us the world of Argus, the home world of the Draenei (back when they were called the Eredar) and also effectively the home base of the Burning Legion. The expansion sees us deal a massive blow against the Burning Legion, and while it hasn't been explicit, it seems that the Burning Legion is more or less defeated and scattered to the winds. Again, I think that the expansion's popularity is a big part of why we might see a lot of elements from it in the book, but it's also a very big "event" in the history of the franchise.

Battle for Azeroth:

While not a very popular expansion, BFA does have some important elements to include in the D&D book. Lore-wise, it saw the culmination and ending of the Alliance/Horde conflict that flared up again starting in Legion. It adds the island nations of Kul Tiras and Zandalar, both pretty important in the grand scheme of things (Zandalar in particular is basically the oldest humanoid civilization on Azeroth, the original empire of the Trolls). We also had the Naga center-stage with the reveal of the underwater realm of Nazjatar, and got to see the nightmare demiplane city of Ny'alotha (which had been teased for years as essentially the WoW equivalent of R'lyeh).

Shadowlands:

This one's a real big question: among the least popular WoW expansions (though I personally didn't dislike it as much as many did - it suffered a lot from Covid hitting right before its release). Shadowlands takes us to another plane of reality, and therein lies the question: how much time do they want to spend fleshing out these afterlife realms that, sort of by their nature, don't really play into what's going on in the world of the living all that much? The expansion's villain, the Jailer, was meant to be the ultimate chessmaster who had been manipulating everything for eons, but he was far too flat and generic of a bad guy to really feel like he made an impact. So, to be honest, if there's one expansion I expect them to gloss over, it's... well, it's Warlords of Draenor. But if there's two, the other will be Shadowlands.

Dragonflight:

In terms of longterm impact on the game's story, it's still a little early to guess how big a deal Dragonflight will be. Praised as a "back to basics" approach for the game after the problems with Shadowlands, Dragonflight, I'd say, didn't give us anything profoundly new (though it did establish some new, complicated villains with the Primal Incarnates, expanding out the kinds of dragons we might encounter in Azeroth) and might get featured more prominently again because it was just a popular expansion.

The War Within:

The first expansion of the "Worldsoul Saga" trilogy, of which we are now on chapter two with Midnight, this did actually establish some interesting new lore: for one thing, making the Titans seem a lot less benevolent than we had previously been led to see them as (there had been hints). Mainly, we had an expansion largely taking place underground. Now, as I posted about recently, I'm fascinated by the existence of the Hallowfall Arathi, a culture of half-human/half-elf people who do not fit into the lore of the world in a way that makes sense unless they're from an alternate timeline, but that's more of a question that has been posed than one that has been addressed. We also got the world of K'aresh in this, but given that Ethereals are still not a playable race (and won't be a playable species in this book,) I honestly think they might gloss over that. Mainly, though, the idea that there's a route down to the Worldsoul of Azeroth built by the Titans feels like it could be important to establish.

Midnight:

We're still in the middle of this expansion, with the latest patch probably the last major one before the book comes out. I think we might get a bit about Quel'thalas and Zul'Aman, and the underground realm of Harandar, home of the Haranir and also the original location of Azeroth's Worldsoul before the Titans moved her is a fairly big deal. The expansion has fleshed out a bit of the elements of the Void as a cosmic force (which is related to, but evidently separate from Azeroth's Old Gods and their creations).

    But let's get real:

Frankly, I don't think even what I've tried to boil down here is going to be covered.

We don't know in quite how much detail the various dungeons presented in the book will be, but if they're even quickies like Dragon Delves, that's going to be a huge chunk of the book. All but one of them are from Vanilla WoW, meaning they're in the Eastern Kingdoms or Kalimdor. This is but one book, and I frankly think it might mean that the book will really only cover the Eastern Kingdoms, Kalimdor, and maybe Northrend (given that Azjol-Nerub is there).

If you covered those three continents and Outland, you'd have covered the main locations that were known to exist by the time WoW first came out (yes, the Broken Isles were established, but the region wasn't known to be as extensive as it wound up being in Legion).

There is plenty in those regions to make a sizable D&D campaign in, and DMs who are familiar with World of Warcraft will easily be able to flesh the rest of the setting out. What we need for the book, I think, is monsters, magic items, and player options that help thing feel like Azeroth.

If I were to run a campaign set in Azeroth, I could just pop WoW open and check the map to get a ton of specific names for locations, and probably could recall what sort of plots were going on there if I want to use them as a basis for an adventure.

Compatibility and Universes Beyond in D&D

 When the upcoming World of Warcraft book for D&D was announced, it seemed like a no-brainer: WoW is a game all about heroic fantasy, and is already built on the race/class character-building system that D&D pioneered. There's even been precedent for Warcraft-based books released for D&D, though I believe the 3rd edition (or 3.5) books were based on the original RTS games. WoW released in 2004, about halfway through 3rd edition (counting both 3.0 and 3.5,) and of course, the MMO became a far bigger, denser, and long-lived property than the RTS precedent. Way more story has been told through the MMO than the original games ever told, and the world has been expanded profoundly.

Indeed, if there's one thing I'm skeptical about with this book, it's the attempt to cram such a profound amount of lore into a single volume. There's no way that it's going to have the space to go into the intricacies of Zandalari politics, the threat of the Botani on Draenor, and the story of the Tol'vir when trying to give us the core fundamentals of the Alliance and Horde. It'll be a massive effort in judicious editing and selecting the things that are most necessary to translate into D&D terms.

Warcraft has its own cosmos with its own cosmic rules. While there are some elements very clearly inspired by aspects of D&D, like the Emerald Dream, a reality that sits to the side of the mundane world as a realm of pristine nature never adulterated by humanoid civilization, which could be argued as its equivalent of the Feywild. But making Azeroth just another world of the Prime Material Plane would probably not really work, especially if we tried to situate all the cosmic forces at play within D&D's Great Wheel cosmology. The demonic Burning Legion, for example, doesn't really fit into a clear "lawful evil" or "chaotic evil" alignment, as while demons are embodiments of the primal force of "disorder," they're also basically all members of the extremely regimented regime headed by the Dark Titan Sargeras, whose mission is to save the universe from the chaos of the Void (by destroying it before the Void can claim it).

Now, when it comes to setting sourcebooks, I'm always eager to "plunder" them for my own uses. Even though I've wound up running a Ravnica-based campaign for now most of my D&D career, I've always thought of myself as being more inclined toward homebrew settings (I've put a lot of work into fleshing out my own, which is kind of a pleasure in and of itself).

So, a big question I have is whether I can take elements from the Warcraft book and incorporate them into my own setting.

I actually think I can in many cases. For example, in my world, the continent-spanning Lupinian Empire has a corps of knights who answer directly to the Emperor (in an empire that is generally more modern and whose government is really mostly run by semi-democratically-elected Parliament). This corps of knights is called The Reapers, and are basically the "in case of emergency, break glass" option when the Emperor needs something handled swiftly and ruthlessly. Assuming it's mechanically sound, I think the Ebon Blade Paladin might be a really good fit for this.

But yeah, Warcraft is already pretty D&D-like as it stands, so it shouldn't be too hard to incorporate monsters and character options into an established world.

Star Wars might be a bit different.

There's no release date for that set just yet, and I suspect that it'll probably be a late 2027 book if not even further out. Star Wars is still, I argue, a fantasy setting, but it's also about 50% sci-fi.

Now, the good news is that I actually think this could solve some of the problems I had with Spelljammer. There's certainly something whimsical about sailing a tall ship across the stars, but I far prefer the Star Wars-style rusted spaceship aesthetic. Truthfully, you could argue that Star Wars is really a sci-fi setting with fantasy elements (maybe that's even the more popular stance). Funnily enough, Warcraft also has a lot of sci-fi elements, where there's a wide mix of technologies at play: from rough stone tools favored by the Tauren to more modern-style technology used by Goblins, and then far-future crystal spaceships employed by the Draenei.

But the presence of technology in a D&D game doesn't seem too game-breaking if you just keep it balanced (like Warcraft does - that stone-bladed axe might be a better piece of gear than that sword made out of hard light if you got it in a later expansion). Instead, where I'm curious to see things go with Star Wars is how Jedi and Sith are handled.

See, the idea of a mystic knight isn't that hard to accomplish in D&D: a Paladin, Bladesinger Wizard, Eldritch Knight, Psi Warrior, etc., might all fit. But are Jedi/Sith going to be their own separate full class? Or is this going to be bolted onto an existing one. (On an aesthetic level, you never see Jedi wearing armor, though armor in Star Wars generally seems to be pretty ineffective, as famously demonstrated by Storm Troopers).

I wonder here if the cultural ubiquity of Star Wars might be the main impediment: while WoW is certainly popular (especially among fantasy RPG nerds,) it's not nearly as universal a set of cultural reference points the way Star Wars is.

All that being said: I really hope that this will give us a good space-faring way of playing D&D. I briefly ran a Spelljammer campaign for my friends (only hit level 5,) using my homebrew world as the basis for a futuristic setting taking place about a thousand years later, and I certainly imagined far more of a Used Future aesthetic to the place, which made the party's Living Ship stick out a little awkwardly.

I might file off some of the serial numbers: maybe that Corellian Light Freighter the party gets will be instead called an ISC Civilian Transport Freighter (one of the forces in my future space setting is the giantocratic Garvox Imperium, which has a real 1970s Soviet utilitarian aesthetic). We'll have to wait and see how extensive character options really push us deep into Star Wars lore, and to what extent we can kind of extract those mechanical ideas for our own original, homebrewed "IPs."

Baseless Speculation on the Demon Hunter Ranger

 The Death Knight and Demon Hunter were World of Warcraft's first two "hero classes," which is a somewhat ironic name.

In fact, in WoW's entire 22-year history, the game has only added four full classes to the original 9-class roster: the Death Knight in 2008's Wrath of the Lich King, the Monk in 2012's Mists of Pandaria, the Demon Hunter in 2016's Legion, and the Evoker in 2022's Dragonflight. In fact, of these four, only the Monk was not a "Hero Class." Hero classes required you to have a character of a certain level (usually the previous expansion's level cap, though Death Knights only started at level 55 when Wrath raised the cap to 80). The logic here was that it would be weird to have a low-level Death Knight going around in low-level areas doing relatively low-stakes quests, and so they wanted to start them off with a fair degree of power.

The game has changed significantly since 2008, of course, including the introduction of level-scaling, so you can, in fact, now level up a low-level Death Knight in regions like Westfall (traditionally the second zone human characters go to when they move on from their starting zone in Elwynn Forest).

While Evokers were basically unprecedented in the lore prior to this, the Death Knight and Demon Hunter were both the classes of iconic characters from Warcraft III, specifically Arthas Menethil and Illidan Stormrage, respectively. WCIII had a sort of vague RPG system within its real-time-strategy campaigns, where you'd have kind of hero unit that would be leading your units in all the base-building and such, and would be a formidable force. These hero units were the major characters of the story.

While the Death Knight has plenty of precedence in lots of fantasy RPGs (and I'd argue also in fantasy media in general, with figures like the Ringwraiths from Lord of the Rings and Darth Vader both occupying that archetype,) the Demon Hunter is a bit weirder.

To be clear, there certainly are Demon Hunters, or monster hunters in general in fantasy media. Indeed, one of the classes in Diablo III is also called a Demon Hunter, but I think that it adheres much closer to the way that such a character class is usually portrayed: in Diablo III, the class is more like Diablo II's Rogue (and I guess also Diablo IV's,) with a flavor of having lots of cool gadgets and traps to fight demons, but basically being your black-clad, acrobatic, kind of Solomon Kane-like figure.

WoW's Demon Hunters have an entirely different aesthetic, strongly informed both by WoW's Night Elf culture and also the aesthetic of its demons.

In WoW, a Demon Hunter is not just someone who hunts demons. Indeed, there's actually a Hunter class, which is much closer to D&D's Ranger, typically fighting with ranged weapons and/or an animal companion, with a lot of "nature survival"-themed abilities along with their weapon attacks.

The premise of the Demon Hunter is that it's a highly specialized path that fundamentally changes you on a physiological level. Demon Hunters don't just use fel magic - they literally absorb a demonic soul into their own, becoming half-demons themselves. Demon Hunter characters typically have horns, and might have scaly skin or cracks where the bright-green Fel energy shines through.

 Part of the ritual to become a Demon Hunter involves gouging out one's own eyes. The fel energy inside replaces them, allowing Demon Hunters to see, and even see through disguises and invisibility. Thus, as a cosmetic option, Demon Hunter characters can select a number of blindfolds, or they can just let the bright glow of their fel-filled eye sockets shine unencumbered.

While the current expansion, Midnight, introduced a third specialization (WoW's version of a subclass) that both allows them to act as a ranged spellcaster and channel Void, instead of Fel magic (which is color-coded in blues and purples, as opposed to Fel's neon green and occasionally deep red,) for the most part, Demon Hunters fight in melee, dual-wielding weapons - most iconically, Warglaives, which are massive, double-bladed weapons. They are absolutely fantasy BS kinds of weapons, because A: they would weigh a ton each, and B, it would be hard not to slice your own thighs while swinging two of them around at your foes. But in a video game, they look really cool.

Anyway, the motive of Demon Hunters is to use the power of demons to fight demons - in WoW, basically all demons are part of a massive interstellar army called the Burning Legion that seeks to conquer and destroy the universe - the conflict that started the series was caused by the Burning Legion manipulating the orcs into acting as a proxy army to invade Azeroth, which they had failed to conquer 10,000 years earlier thanks in part to people like Illidan Stormrage, who basically invented Demon Hunters and was the first one.

I do think there's some logic to building Demon Hunters on the bones of the Ranger, conceptually: while very different in aesthetic from your typical Ranger (again, WoW's Hunter class is the clear equivalent,) the Demon Hunter does have a focus on taking down monsters (even if in WoW, they've obviously got to be fine at fighting any type of foe. We haven't really had demons as a major threat since Legion, which ran from 2016-2018). Ironically, this might have made them a better fit for the 5.0 Ranger, with its Favored Enemy mechanic (naturally picking "Fiend" as your first favored enemy type).

As we talked about with the Death Knight being represented by the Oath of the Ebon Blade subclass for Paladins, I suspect that Demon Hunter Rangers will also see some significant changes to the level 1 and 2 class features, as hinted at in that James Wyatt interview.

Oddly, I almost think you'd need more distinct features than the Death Knight - DKs in WoW do have some cosmetic differences, such as glowing blue eyes (at least starting with Wrath of the Lich King, the power of necromancy is often represented with a bright, icy blue, though this was more specifically the color associated with the Scourge and the Lich King, as there are several colors of death magic when we went to the realm of the dead in 2020's Shadowlands expansion) and a few partially-rotten skin textures you can pick, but it's not nearly as dramatic as the Demon Hunter customizations (which was maybe just because of 8 years of development).

There are various aesthetic things I'd really suggest should be part of the Demon Hunter subclass, and represented mechanically:

First, the missing eyes. It might be too powerful to give them a baseline 30-foot blindsight, but perhaps they can activate blindsight in a reasonable range a certain number of times per day. This could upgrade to Truesight at higher levels.

Next, their tattoos: the Demon Hunter aesthetic is classically one with a lot of skimpy clothing: Illidan would typically go shirtless. In WoW, your armor is a huge part of your character progression, but when designing Demon Hunter-specific sets, they've often made them more revealing. Demon Hunters have magical tattoos that help protect them, and thus, I think giving the subclass Unarmored Defense would make a lot of sense - Dex+Wis would work fine, just like it does for a Monk.

Then, we've got their wings. In WoW, Demon Hunters can double-jump and also pop out wings to glide down and prevent falling damage. Maybe this is a Slow Fall-like feature, or maybe we set this one aside.

Then, we have Warglaives. In WoW, this weapon type is available only to Demon Hunters (and thus is always statted-out to be ideal for them, with the addition of the spellcasting Devourer spec adding Intellect to all Warglaives in addition to the usual Agility). There's not really an obvious equivalent to them in D&D. I might be tempted to make them d8 Light weapons, though perhaps for balance they need to be d6s. The other issue is that, thanks to Weapon Mastery, we'll want to either have two types of Warglaives (one with Nick and one with something like Vex or Sap,) or Demon Hunters will, weirdly, find themselves probably not dual-wielding them, which feels wrong. (Fun fact, in the expansion that Demon Hunters were made playable in, every spec got a single weapon or set of weapons for the entire expansion that simply got upgraded over the course of it, so Demon Hunters naturally only used Warglaives the whole time. It was only later that they started to use the axes, swords, and fist weapons that they were also capable of using the whole time). (Also, ironically, when we fought Illidan in 2007's Burning Crusade expansion, he had a small chance to drop his legendary Warglaives of Azzinoth, but because that weapon type didn't exist yet and the class that could use them wouldn't be there for 9 more years, those actually just count as one-handed swords. Illidan kind of got handed the villain ball in BC, but Legion did a lot to rehabilitate him as the rash but ultimately well-intentioned anti-hero he was always supposed to be).

Now, how much of this is going to be stuff we get at level 3? No clue. I actually have far less of a sense of what Demon Hunter features will be subclass features and what will be spells we can pick up. Even more than the Oath spells for the Ebon Blade Paladin, I feel like Demon Hunters have to get more than the typical "one per spell level" subclass spells that Rangers typically get. We know Demon Spikes will be one of them (a defensive ability used by Vengeance Demon Hunters, the tank spec for the class).

Still, I think that mobility has to be a major theme - Demon Hunters have a ton of mobility features in WoW, and a big part of their overall vibe is being "speed demons," so to speak (one of the major rotational AoE abilities for Havoc, their melee damage spec, called Blade Dance, has them rushing faster than you can see in a kind of X pattern, slashing all foes in the surrounding area.)

I will say, I'm far less enamored of the Ranger class in D&D than the Paladin one, so I'm a little more concerned over whether the Demon Hunter will be appealing to play in an Azeroth-set game. But we shall see.

Expedition 33 and the Use of Levity and Relief to Just Make the Gut-Punch Harder

 Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 lets you know very early on that you're in for an emotionally devastating ride. Our time with Sophie, Gustave's ex-girlfriend, is brief and more or less just a tutorial, but she stands in to represent the utter agony that is living in Lumiere with the Gommage.

It's a remarkable feat: before you really get to the actual meat of the game, you're already bawling your eyes out (unless you're some kind of robot).

But even in that segment, there's a bit of silliness: you can find a guy hiding in a trash can, somehow thinking that the mystical power that erases people above a certain age will just pass him by if he's hidden. It's dark, sure, but it's really silly.

And while we go from profound grief and sorrow to horror when the expedition arrives at the beach, and then see as Gustave, our optimistic hero, contemplates just getting it over with and shooting himself, the tone starts to lift once we get to Falling Waters. Finding the Manor and the Curator gives us mystery, rather than despair, and some relief at finding Maelle alive. But we also meet our first Gestral, Noco, and suddenly, in this deeply sad game, there's something profoundly silly.

It doesn't hurt that Flying Waters is a gorgeous area, and while Spring Meadows has plenty of beautiful vistas (also, the Mime fight does introduce some of that silliness earlier than Noco,) the surreal beauty of Flying Waters really was the thing that wowed me.

The beauty of the world of Expedition 33 is one thing - I think tragic stories often incorporate stunning beauty. But I think it's the humor of the game that really works to disarm you.

Let's go into deep spoiler space. It's crazy to think the game came out only last year, when it feels like it so quickly cemented itself into the canon of the medium. Spoilers Ahead. Er... actually, spoilers for both this and Christopher Nolan's film The Prestige