Drops: Sorrow Knight Fighter

 I think this might be the first time we've gotten a full-on subclass from D&D Beyond Drops, and this one's a fascinating one.

Hey folks, it's October! That means it's spooky season, all leading up to my favorite holiday, Halloweeen. Getting into the spook spirit, D&D Beyond Drops has unleashed a whole bunch of scary monsters, feats, and this subclass.

Sorrow Knight Fighters are attuned to the magic of the Shadowfell, with some tragedy or horror in their past that connected them to this realm of gloom and despair. The Shadowfell is probably my favorite D&D plane, and I love fighting (and running) spooky monsters in shadowy settings.

Broadly, the Sorrow Knight has some similarities with the Battle Master, but let's get specific:

Level 3:

Despairing Strikes:

You have a resource called Despairing Strike Dice, which can be used to enhance your attacks. You begin with 3 of them, which are d8s. At level 10, they become d10s and you get a fourth. At 15, they become d12s and you get a fifth. After expending them, you get them back on a short rest.

    So, this is, I think, a bit fewer dice than a Battle Master, and I think there's less versatility for your options, but it's reasonably comparable.

When you hit a creature with a weapon attack, you can expend a DSD and roll it (one die per attack maximum, though no limit on uses per turn), adding psychic damage to the attack equal to the amount rolled, and then get to add one of the following effects:

Abandoned: The target must succeed on an Intelligence saving throw (DC based on your Wisdom) or have the Deafened condition until the end of your next turn. While deafened, the target regards all creatures it can see as enemies until the end of your next turn.

    Hey, so this won't work on a Gulthias Blight, who is immune to being Deafened. Still, while deafened is a pretty weak condition to impose (it does almost nothing to hinder a foe) the "treat everyone as enemies" option is potentially useful. While it won't guaranteed that a foe will attack its allies given that you and your allies are still there to be targeted, it is something you might use on a healer or some other creature that is trying to do things to benefit other creatures. Or, you could use it on an enemy with a big AoE to ensure that they don't avoid hitting allies when going after your friends. Situational, and of course, not very useful against solo monsters, but interesting.

Dread: The target had Disadvantage on the next saving throw it makes before the end of your turn.

    This is pretty broadly useful, either setting up a spellcaster or someone else who has a clutch saving throw ability, or even just setting you up for Abandoned or one of the other options you get later on.

Solemn Gaze:

You gain Darkvision with a range of 60 ft, or if you already have Darkvision, the range increases by 60 feet.

    Nothing huge, but not bad to have.

Also, as a Magic action, you can attempt to search the mind of a creature you can see within 30 feet. They must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw (DC based on your Wisdom) or you learn an emotion that looms large in their mind, such as worry, love, hate, etc. If the target can see you, it knows you have read its emotions. You can do this Wis times per long rest (minimum 1).

    The utility of this feature depends a lot on DM interpretation. This isn't detect thoughts - you just get an emotion that looms large in them, not necessarily that they're feeling particularly strongly at the moment. In other words, I think this could add a ton of flavor to NPC interactions, but the degree to which this information is actionable is not obvious. Flavor-wise, though, it's amazing. And this is on top of the other level 3 features we're getting.

Level 7:

Dreaded Appearance:

When you use Tactical Shift, you can teleport 30 feet instead of moving. Immediately afte ryou appear, you can briefly take on the appearance of a creatures' fears, visible only to those creatures. Each creature of your choice within a 10-foot emanation muse make a Wisdom saving throw (DC based on your Wisdom) or take Psychic damage equal to a roll of your DSD (this does not appear to expend it) and is Frightened until the end of your next turn, or on a success, they take half damage only.

Once you take on this appearance, you can't do so again until you finish a short or long rest.

    Note that I think the alteration for Tactical Shift is unlimited (other than by, you know, how many times you can do that). The damage here is pretty trivial, but an AoE fear is not a bad thing to have. And we're getting that as a free carry-on with all the other benefits of Tactical Shift, so I think this is pretty good. Obviously, as we've seen a lot of features with DCs based on Wisdom, you're going to want to pump that up as much as possible with this subclass.

Level 10:

Unsettled Strikes:

You have the following new options to use with your Despairing Srikes:

Apathetic: The target must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw or have the Incapacitated condition until the start of your next turn. While incapacitated, the target can only give one-word responses when spoken to.

    Damn. I mean, the one-word thing is fine, but incapacitation can be enormous. For one thing, it breaks concentration, but obviously the bigger thing is that it prevents them from taking any actions, bonus actions, or reactions.

Lost: The target makes a Charisma saving throw. On a failure, the target is Blinded and its speed is reduced to 0 until the end of its next turn. On a success, its speed is halved only instead.

    That's not too bad either - Blinded is usually a Con save condition, and so you're probably more likely to succeed with this one. A good way to lock down an enemy and then give everyone advantage on attacks against them.

Weary: The target must succeed on a Constitution saving throw or gain 1 Exhaustion level. The effect cannot increase the target's Exhaustion above 2, and the levels from this effect are removed at the end of your next turn.

    So, this is... you see Exhaustion and your eyes go wide, but this isn't quite that. That being said, giving a foe a -2 or even a -4 to all d10 tests (and the -4 will be more likely to happen if they're already at -2 to Con saves) isn't bad. But it's only for one turn. Essentially, I wonder if I'd be more enthusiastic about this if I weren't thinking about how insane it would be to have long-term and unlimited exhaustion from this. Don't forget that it also slows a target.

Level 15:

Grim Constitution:

You have resistance to Necrotic and Psychic damage.

    Right off the bat, these aren't bad ones to have, especially if you're in a spooky Shadowfell/Ravenloft game, where you're likely to encounter both damage types a lot.

In addition, when you are subjected to an effect that reduces your HP maximum, you can make a DC 15 Con save, and your HP is not reduced on a success. Each time you make this Con save after the first, the DC increases by 5, but taking a short or long rest resets it to 15.

    Less broadly useful, but it could be good when fighting particularly undead (again, common foes in a Shadowfell/Ravenloft game). I'm surprised this doesn't just give immunity to such things. Eh, this one's not amazing, though the damage resistances are pretty good.

Level 18:

Grieving Mantle:

When you use your Action Surge, you attune yourself to the Shadowfell for 1 minute or until you become incapacitated. For the duration, you have the following:

    Before we get into the specific functions, I do kind of like how this turns Action Surge into the trigger for a "super mode" for Fighters. While this does then kind of discourage using it multiple times per combat, it's an interesting bit of tech.

Shade Form: When you are hit with an attack roll, you can use a reaction to become insubstational for a moment and reduce the attack's total damage to zero.

    Wow! Not halved, not gaining resistance. This just full-on nopes out of an entire attack. Obviously this depends a bit on how many attacks you're taking in a round, but the ability to use this if you get crit by some massive monster is really clutch, and while Action Surge is a limited resource, this means that for a whole combat you're going to be undoing one attack that hits you each round, which is quite nice.

Unwavering Resolve: You have immunity to the Charmed and Frightened conditions, and if you have either when you activate Grieving Mantle, the condition ends for you.

    Naturally if you have a Devotion Paladin in your party, this won't do anything for you, but it's still pretty nice if you don't have those bases covered.

Overall Thoughts:

    I actually think this is a pretty solid subclass. It's doing a lot of things that Fighters can't really do in most cases - indeed, some of these effects are pretty rare even for spellcasters (is "Abandoned" kind of Enemies Abound, a spell from Xanathar's?)

    You will be pretty dependent on getting a high wisdom, because there are a lot of saving throws that enemies will be making against these effects. Fighters can afford a secondary ability score a bit, but if you have a way to somehow attack with Wisdom, that could be very helpful. Taking magic initiate Druid and grabbing Shillelagh could work pretty well here, and maybe Polearm Master to enhance the power of a Quarterstaff (as the cantrip won't let you grab something that works with Great Weapon Master). Multiclassing with Druid or Ranger could also make some sense here, though if the campaign is going high enough, I'd be pretty excited to get Grieving Mantle.

    Yeah, generally I think this is a pretty solid subclass, and it drips with flavor, which is always a big positive.

Warlock Patrons of Azeroth

 The WoW D&D book is going to give a lot of guidance for player to re-create WoW classes and specializations within D&D rules. In some cases, this will be trivial: a Guardian or Feral Druid can just go Circle of the Moon (though I'd freaking love it if they create a scaling template for Bear and Cat forms we could use at any level). But in some cases, namely the Death Knight and Demon Hunter, they'll be doing some unprecedented re-works of existing classes and creating subclasses that are sort of more than subclasses and really extensive re-works of the base classes they're being grafted onto (we've only seen level 1 and 2 features for Ebon Blade Paladins, which replace Lay on Hands and Paladin's Smite - though Rune Strike, which replaced Divine Smite, is basically the same spell except it does Necrotic damage and only gets a bonus die against Celestials).

But while it could be fun to play with restrictions to require players to build characters to fit with WoW's existing classes and specs, I think think it would be more fun to take adventures in Azeroth to places you can't replicate in the MMO.

Let's consider the Warlock.

In D&D, of course, a Warlock is a character who has forged a pact with a powerful magical entity (though 5.5 broadens this a bit to allow you to draw from multiple sources, as long as they're sort of in the same category.

By contrast, Warlocks in World of Warcraft are scholars just like Mages (the Wizard equivalent,) but while Mages study in very socially-acceptable learning institutions (though for a long time, their practices were forbidden among the Night Elves,) Warlocks are scholars of forbidden knowledge, specifically the knowledge of Fel magic, which is the inherently destructive power that suffuses demons.

Warlocks in WoW have three different specializations, like most classes, but all three are still Fel/demonic magic. Affliction is the one that might be easiest to reflavor as instead some kind of necromancy, but the other two, Destruction and Demonology, are both firmly in that Fel/Demon category (Destruction focuses more on blasting foes with demonic fire and raw chaos while Demonologists summon tons of demons to attack their foes).

D&D's Warlocks, thus, have a broader array of options in where they get their magic, and so I figured what I'd do is go through each Warlock subclass and talk about what kinds of patrons you might choose.

    Archfey:

While WoW doesn't have a Fey creature type, they do have some entities that would probably fit with the Fae, most notably the explicitly named Night Fae, who are the caretakers of the realm of Ardenweald, one of the afterlives in the Shadowlands. Here, natural creatures and people dedicated to nature go to take part in the cycle of life, eventually being reborn in a cycle of reincarnation. The Winter Queen is the leader of the Night Fae. But more broadly, the Wild Gods might fit this category - Wild Gods cover a lot of animal spirits worshipped or revered by various cultures across Azeroth. The Night Elves have their Ancients (not to be confused with the giant walking trees also called Ancients, who are... also nature spirits of course, but in a less divine way,) the Trolls have their Loa (which also include some beings that aren't quite as animalistic or even associated with nature) and the Pandaren have their August Celestials. Even the Orcs have animal gods like Lo'gosh (who might actually be the same as the Night Elves' Goldrinn...?) While not necessarily as fickle and tricksy as Fey tend to be, these are probably your best equivalents.

    Celestial:

It's really up in the air which of WoW's creatures would count as Celestials, but the ones that I don't think you could argue against are the Naaru. These are crystalline beings of pure holy light that are particularly important to Draenei culture. While it's supposed to be very rare, in game we often see Naaru go through a horrible cyclical transformation, turning to the Void as Dark Naaru (who are probably more on the Aberration/Great Old One side of things). Other options potentially include, actually, the Titans or their Titanforged creations. While the Titanforged act very much like constructs, beings like Tyr, Odyn, Thorim, Freya, Mimiron, or Ra-Den (the latter of which is dead by the end of Battle for Azeroth, but then, Tyr was dead for a very long time before we brought him back during Dragonflight) I think they'd fit pretty well in this category as well.

    Fiend:

I mean, there's plenty of demons in WoW. Warlocks in World of Warcraft tend to invert the patron relationship, with demonic minions bound to serve Warlocks through contracts that make any Warlock worth their salt the more powerful person in the relationship, but bargaining with power from a powerful demon certainly feels plausible on Azeroth. I think you could play a Fiend Warlock easily enough as a standard WoW warlock (just remember that Fel fire is typically green!) Another possibility is actually Illidan Stormrage. While sort of a half-demon (though he sure looks more demonic than even the Demon Hunters who he's trained) Illidan is WoW's ultimate edgelord antihero, a firm and hard Chaotic Neutral. (Also, Critical Role fans, if you didn't know already for some reason, will be excited to know that he's voiced by Liam O'Brien!) But also a somewhat more benign source of Fel power.

    Great Old One:

Two really great categories here: The most obvious is the Old Gods. While all four of Azeroth's Old Gods are (in theory) dead in the current state of the game, we did have to kill three of them as the final bosses of their respective raids (well, there was an optional extra-hard boss in Ulduar after Yogg-Saron). But these ancient flesh-mountain monstrosities certainly fit the bill. Alternatively, you could go for something less fleshy and more cosmic with the Void Lords. The only one of these we've ever actually seen or had named is Dimensius the All-Devouring (who was the final boss of the last expansion) but I think you could lean into the mystery of what your patron is if you went with an unnamed Void Lord. (The game's current antagonist, Xal'atath, and likely the final boss of the current expansion, is a former mortal turned void-entity that was probably not a true Void Lord, but might fit this, though she'd be an absolute perfect Hexblade patron).

    Undying:

This subclass... is weird because it could just be an undead patron, but it's also explicitly not just undead beings. If you for some reason really wanted to play this not-very-good and conceptually thin subclass, though, there are tons of extremely old beings on Azeroth. Maybe you go with Nozdormu, the Bronze Aspect, leader of the dragons who manage and safeguard the timeline (or his alternate-timeline-self nemesis, Murozond).

    Hexblade:

There are a few sentient weapons, most notable of which was Xal'atath, Blade of the Black Empire, which was the artifact weapon granted to Shadow Priests during the Legion expansion, but whose resident conscious being transferred into the body of a dead elf (that we provided for her) and has now been leading a deadly assault on Azeroth with her void-creature army called the Devouring Host. Two other weapons for Legion had personalities, with Aluneth, a staff that contained a powerful arcane consciousness, and the Skull of the Man'ari, the remains of an Eredar summoner who got into demonology before it was cool on Argus and ironically was arrested by future demon lord Archimonde for dabbling in such magic. Other weapons like Ashbringer, Doomhammer, or Frostmourne might fit here, though it's dubious whether they're actually sentient (technically I guess Frostmourne might be a conduit for the Jailer).

    Genie:

WoW does have genies, but they're a pretty rare category specifically of air elementals. If you wanted to take the idea of a powerful elemental, you could possibly instead go with the Elemental Lords, of which there are conveniently one for each element. The OGs are Ragnaros the Firelord, Al-Akir the Windlord, Neptulon the Tide-Hunter, and Therazane the Stonemother. However, there's been some turnover over the course of WoW. Ragnaros is dead, and was replaced by Smolderon, though we also had to take him down as well (though this was outside of the Firelands, so I actually think he's probably still alive and still the Lord of Fire). We killed Al-Akir as well, though his son Thunderaan I believe remains the Windlord. Basically, depending on when in WoW's timeline you want to set your campaign, you might need to pick alternatives. Note that the elemental lord of Draenor, the Orcish homeland (and sort of adopted Draenei homeland, though they were only there for about a thousand years, which isn't much for a people who seem to naturally live to be tens of thousands of years old) you could pick them.

    Fathomless:

Ok, there are probably some other options here, but I think the best one is Queen Azshara. Once the radiant and beautiful queen of the Night Elves in ancient times, when her capital sank beneath the waves, she struck a deal with the Old God N'zoth to save her people by transforming them into the serpentine Naga. Azshara is one of Azeroth's most dangerous villains, but she's a pragmatic and patient one (while her royal palace in her capital, now called Nazjatar, was a raid with her as the final boss, she survived this attack and we actually wound up rescuing her from N'zoth, a decision that will probably bite us in the ass somewhere down the line).

    Undead:

Boy howdy. So, the obvious options here would be members of the Scourge. The most powerful of which is certainly the Lich King. But if you're playing in a post-Wrath timeframe, the Lich King could be Bolvar Fordragon, a heroic paladin who sacrificed his freedom to try to hold the Scourge on a tight leash, and while Bolvar certainly did some questionable things as Lich King, he was certainly more benevolent than Arthas had been. WoW does have its fair share of Liches and Death Knights. I actually think making the entire Knights of the Ebon Blade a patron could be fun, or perhaps specifically having the Four Horsemen, the Ebon Blade's most elite knights (aside from the Deathlord, the player character, of course) as your patron would allow a DM to play the varying personalities between them (this latter option doesn't totally work if you're doing the Scarlet Monastery dungeon, as I'm confident its final boss will be High Inquisitor Whitemane, who is later raised as a death knight and becomes one of the Four Horsemen, ironically "redeeming" herself by becoming an undead killing machine. Better than a religious fundamentalist!)

    Vestige:

This new subclass from Arcana Unleashed ironically might actually make you play a little more like a WoW Warlock, who generally have a minion fighting alongside them in battle. (I play a Demonology one, who would always have a minion out, but I can't remember if the other two specs even have the option to not play with one). But mechanics aside, I do think there are some options here, even if they're a bit non-obvious. We have a few dead god-like beings, such as the nascent Titan Argus, or the lost (and very much beloved - the fans got up in arms) bear ancient Ursoc. Rezan, the Zandalari Troll Loa of Kings (he's a T-rex!) died to the treachery of the Prophet Zul. It also turns out that the Titans were, actually, for most of WoW's history, already in a state of more or less death - Sargeras slew them right around the time that he founded the Burning Legion, and it wasn't until we liberated their tortured souls at the end of the Legion expansion that they were able to return to their full power.

I think that's all of them? I'm actually quite pleased that there seems to be at least one pretty good option for every subclass, and there are probably more if you go digging.

Ironically, though, I think you could argue that these subclasses almost see representation in other classes in WoW. Shadow Priests, for example, have some abilities based around the Old Gods. And actually, the lore of the Shaman class is that they act essentially a mediators and negotiators between elemental spirits, which I actually think is pretty Warlock-coded (though it seems they'll be represented more by Barbarians - which is surprising on a mechanical level but sort of makes sense as two classes really deeply rooted in ancient/primal powers).

Mysterious "Project Lamordia" Announced, and Thoughts on Modding 5E

 WotC released a teaser for... something called "Project Lamordia." Details are scarce as to what this will actually be, whether it's some book or other product or, as I, frankly, suspect it will be, an actual play show (and look, I watch plenty of actual play, but it's not necessarily as transformative as something we can take home and read and use in our own games).

What's interesting about it is that the setting here is altered, imagining a modern techno-thriller version of Lamordia as, rather than a vaguely steampunk-meets-Bloodborne/Frankenstein riff the setting is presented as in Van Richten's and Horrors Within, instead a company called Mordenheim Kinetics, with something about a "longevity program" seeming to be some kind of experimental medical treatment.

Horror, of course, is a genre that can exist alongside many different other genres and settings, and the trope of ethically abysmal, corporate biotech companies committing unspeakable crimes against nature is well-established (the Umbrella Corporation from the Resident Evil games probably being the most iconic example).

This got me thinking:

I think D&D has historically been very hesitant to really mess with its own rules. We saw this with the rollout of 5.5, which prioritized backwards compatibility over rebalancing. While I'm happy that my 10 years of 5.0 book acquisitions aren't washed away with a full new edition, it has also left certain classes really struggling, like Rogues, who still need to wait until level 9 for their second subclass feature for the foreseeable future.

But I also think this is one of the reasons (though not the entirety) for the disappointment I and many other felt regarding the release of 5E's Spelljammer supplement. Anticipating a way to play D&D adventures in a science-fantasy space opera setting, we instead got a version of space adventures in which you'd fight out on open decks with swords rather than shooting laser cannons or piloting starfighters. As a note, this isn't really 5E's fault - Spelljammer has always been this "fantasy in space" setting rather than a true science-fantasy setting. But... I think most players would prefer the latter.

The thing is, doing so would require actually tweaking the rules of the game, at least somewhat.

Now, I know that Starfinder 2E is built less as an independent game from Pathfinder than its first edition was, but in that case, they really reimagined the whole game from the ground up to build around sci-fi tropes. It's still science-fantasy, because there are magic/supernatural things in it, but it's more in line with Star Wars, where the bulk of the world is built on technology and aliens, and there's this mystical underpinning that is exceptional and wondrous.

Again, my prediction is that Project Lamordia is an actual play show, where if there are tweaks to the system, it's likely not audience-facing. I could be wrong, though, and maybe this will be something like an adventure or other player/DM-facing thing that gives us guidance on doing a modern-set Ravenloft adventure. We truly don't know.

However, here's a reason for optimism:

Previews of the World of Warcraft D&D book have shown that they're doing some pretty extensive work to reframe things to fit the setting. And these aren't just side-systems that might fall by the wayside in a campaign, but pretty core reworks of class features, like how the Oath of the Ebon Blade subclass for Paladins replaces features like Lay on Hands and Divine Smite to work as a WoW-style Death Knight (whether the resultant class winds up being good is another question that I don't have enough information to answer, as we really only have these 1st and 2nd level feature adjustments so far).

WoW, of course, is pretty damn close to D&D in genre, or arguably simply the same genre but with just a few different proper nouns here and there (demons don't reform in the Abyss, but the Twisting Nether, for example).

What will be interesting is when we see the Star Wars Universes Beyond book. Indeed, the Spelljammer example here is particularly salient, as I think that basically anyone 50 (maybe 60?) or younger probably thinks of Star Wars first when thinking about any example of space adventures. While I'd probably prefer to shave off the serial numbers here and have the tools to produce my own science fantasy space opera setting that isn't beholden to the lore choices of George Lucas or Dave Filoni, I'm 100% into the idea of running a D&D game in a world with rust-bucket used future spaceships rather than 17th century sailing ships (or a bunch of weird bug-shaped ships for some reason).

The Star Wars book is still a ways out, and I think probably the overall balance of the game is likely to remain more or less the same. But here are some other thoughts that this brought up:

Ravenloft is, of course, a storied and beloved campaign setting for D&D, but one of the issues you run into with it is that D&D, particularly later editions like 5E, are kind of fantasy superhero games, where player characters tend to emerge victorious against the kind of monsters they're expected to face.

5E has had two Ravenloft setting books and one of its earliest and most beloved adventures was set there. Van Richten's in particular suggests a few special rules systems, like Stress, to up the scares. But I wonder if a more comprehensive rework of the game's rules might instead serve the setting better.

I'm going to try avoid getting fully in the weed here, but this could be something as simple as adjusting encounter balance math, maybe upping the challenges of combat, or giving guidance on running encounters with monsters too difficult to defeat and where the challenge is escape instead.

But wouldn't it also be cool to make a whole separate game from D&D that works on the same principles (classes, levels, species, ability checks, attack rolls, saving throws, etc.,) but is built to function in a horror setting and adhere to its genre conventions?

Sure, this might fly in the face of the modularity that D&D prefers. But it would be an interesting experiment.

One consideration for such a "mod" would be to take D&D's general medieval/renaissance assumptions about technology and armaments and rework them for a different genre. As firearms grew more reliable, accurate, and easy to shoot quickly, people basically stopped wearing big heavy plates of metal to protect themselves. Armor is still a think for modern soldiers, of course, but I think there's actually something of a gap there, between the obsolescence of metal armor like plate or chain mail and the development of stuff like kevlar, such that a soldier from maybe the 18th century through most of the 20th was just wearing, like, a thick jacket. (I'm sure that there's nuance and complexity to this that I, who am not anything like a military historian, am ignorant of.)

While Project Lamordia is obviously reimagining that Domain of Dread as a modern, high-tech setting, I think that broadly, Ravenloft in general tends toward classic Gothic Horror aesthetics, which tend toward a kind of 18th/19th century look and feel. If I were to build out Ravenloft as its own independent game, I'd probably focus on that era to look for my genre inspirations: for example, I'd likely make firearms the default ranged weapon, and thus make A: a greater variety of them and B: them seriously cheaper than they are in 5.5, and C: easier to use for martial classes without needing a special feat (I determined early in 5.5 that ironically, the people best able to use Pistols and Muskets are Druids and Clerics who take the Warden/Protector orders, though Gunner from Tasha's at least solves the biggest problem for actual martial characters).

Likewise, I'd find a way to represent armor in a way that doesn't fall into the D&D categories of Light/Medium/Heavy, because heavy armor isn't really a thing in that era, and maybe medium isn't really either.

A few months ago (not a year ago yet, right?) I did some thought experiments on a possible game called Deathblow, that would be about sort of Gothic Horror monster hunters. Some of the ideas in that, I think, would be really good for a game like this, such as capping the max level at 5. Horror needs the characters to be underdogs for the monsters to be threatening, but I also think that TTRPGs get some of their satisfaction from character progression.

That game was meant to have a tighter and more regimented adventure structure, where you'd spend a good while investigating the aftermath of monster attacks and then determining what methods you'll need to defeat said monster, really focusing on singular climactic fights against individual epic boss monsters. But I think there's room for a less dramatic modification to D&D that would allow for a more diverse set of scenarios and stories and retain more of D&D's base rules (even being able to potentially use a lot of the same monster stat blocks) but still limit and kind of alter things enough to fit better into the distinct genre's conventions.

We'll find out about mid-October what this thing actually is, but I'm tempted to start working on this Ravenloft mod (modification rather than module).

WoW D&D Bestiary Monster List (Not Including Dungeon Bosses)

 All right!

The WoW D&D book looks like it will have some really interesting and innovative designs in an effort to replicate the feeling of WoW within D&D. I'm going purely on the information from Insight Check's video about the monster design, which only gave us a couple of (fairly generic) stat blocks, but the details about the blocks he couldn't actually show suggests that the book is going to have some really interesting fights, including the use of Mythic phases to replicate the feeling of a multi-phase WoW boss fight.

Speaking of bosses: the 30 "dungeon boss" stat blocks are not on this list. Presumably, we'll have figures like High Inquisitor Whitemane or Onyxia detailed in that earlier chapter. While I'd love to have an array of memorable bosses from outside of the seven included dungeons, I'm going to avoid getting my hopes up and just assume that we'll be getting the ones that go specifically with Dire Maul, Deamines, etc. The dungeons they picked are generally quite good (I don't really care much about Blackfathom Deeps, but I'll be curious to see how they handle it). Still feels like we should have gotten Hogger as a CR 1 legendary monster.

    (Brief aside: Hogger was the objective of an infamous quest in Elwynn Forest, the human starting zone. He's the leader of a group of gnoll bandits. But he's also the first "elite" creature many players came across when first playing the game, which are designed to be fought in a group and not alone. Players who didn't realize that they were meant to take him on with friends died in droves, giving this fairly nondescript gnoll creature a legendary status as a peerless and savage killer. In Cataclysm, they largely reworked group quests at low levels to be something you could complete on your own, but while players would face Hogger in more or less the same circumstances in Elwynn, the quest ended not with you killing him, but having him arrested. Then, in the Stormwind Stockades dungeon, he became the dungeon's final boss, leading a prison riot. While he was intended to be a challenge for players just about ready to move on from Elwynn around level 10, players have also formed 40-player raid groups of level 1 characters to fight him as well.)

Anyway, let's not beat around the bush and look at the list:

CR 1: Fel Imp, Murloc Forager, Voidwalker

CR 2: Shadowstalker Satyr

CR 3: Murloc Oracle, Voidcaller

CR 4: Felguard, Felsworn Satyr, Furbolg Totemic

CR 5: Felhound, Furbolg Ursa, Naga Myrmidon

CR 6: Green Dragonflight Whelp

CR 7: Blue Dragonflight Whelp, Naga Sea Witch, Quillboar Thornweaver

CR 8: Red Dragonflight Whelp

CR 9: Black Dragonflight Whelp, Naga Siren

CR 10: Bronze Dragonflight Whelp

CR 11: Doomguard, Moonkin, Nerubian Warrior

CR 12: Abomination, Green Dragonflight Drake, Infernal

CR 13: Blue Dragonflight Drake, Nerubian Crypt Fiend

CR 14: Ancient of War, Nerubian Venomancer

CR 15: N'raqi Faceless One, Red Dragonflight Drake

CR 16: Black Dragonflight Drake, Shivarra

CR 17: Bronze Dragonflight Drake

CR 19: Green Dragonflight Dragon

CR 20: Anduin Wrynn, Blue Dragonflight Dragon, Pit Lord

CR 21: Alleria Windrunner, N'raqi Faceless General, Red Dragonflight Dragon

CR 22: Black Dragonflgiht Dragon, Jaina Proudmoore, Thrall

CR 23: Bronze Dragonflight Dragon, Ragnaros, Sylvanas Windrunner

CR 24: Illidan Stormrage

CR 25: Lich King Arthas

    That's actually an impressive spread of CRs. Particularly, it's interesting to see certain monster categories like N'raqi only showing up at quite high levels. I do find it interesting that the Bronze dragons are the most powerful, given that in theory, the Red dragons are the "leaders" of the dragonflights (though the Dragon Aspects are pretty egalitarian, even if there's deference toward Alexstrasza, the Red aspect, who is basically the most benevolent living creature on Azeroth, sometimes to a fault.

Rather than spread out across all the expansions with all their different monster types, it looks like they've focused on a few iconic categories, which is probably wise even if it would have been cool to get, say, Titanforged constructs or something.

There are also a few individual people, and it's pretty impressive that they start at CR 20, though given how superheroic characters in WoW tend to be, that's not terribly shocking.

But let's go category by category here for those who are unfamiliar with WoW terms.

    Demons:

Demons in WoW are pretty much all associated with the Burning Legion, an apocalyptic army under the command of the rogue Titan Sargeras who seek to burn the universe to cinders rather than let it fall to corruption by the Void. (Demonic Fel magic is also corrupting, but think of this as, like, nuking the world to try to save it from horrible mutations.) While the Fel is inherently chaotic, the Legion itself is actually a bit more Lawful Evil, given Sargeras' leadership over it, and sees the madness of the deeply chaotic Void to be the ultimate enemy. Demons include the Fel Imp, Felguard, Felhound, Doomguard, Infernal, Shivarra and Pit Lord. While the Felsworn Satyr and Shadowstalker Satyr are also demons (satyrs are former Night Elves turned demons in WoW,) they sort of may or may not be affiliated with the Legion, as they're more likely to be associated with the Emerald Nightmare, which is actually a phenomenon created by the Void-affiliated Old Gods. Xavius, the first satyr, fought on behalf of the Legion during the War of the Ancients ten thousand years ago, but after the Legion's defeat, he got in good with the Old Gods. Another little asterisk here is that Voidwalkers were long considered demons (they're one of the minions that player Warlocks can summon, and are great for soloing as they basically tank for you) but over time, and as Blizzard has honestly just locked down their lore a bit tighter, Voidwalkers are now generally considered aberrations affiliated with, weirdly enough, the Void.

    Murlocs:

Among the most iconic and beloved (/hated) WoW creatures, Murlocs are silly little fish people. Honestly, not too far off from Kuo-toa, though less weird god-creating powers and more just being silly little guys who tend to be tightly-packed so that it's hard to pull just a single one at a time (this was a bigger problem when soloing out in the world was harder). Unofficially the mascots of World of Warcraft, they had to show up here.

    Void/Old God Creatures:

So, there's a bit of a divide here. The Void is one of the great cosmic forces in  WoW, and while there are benign aspects to it as a source of mystery and cosmic possibility, we usually interact with it as an antagonistic force - the "mystery" often leading to "horrifying abominations" and the yawning darkness of the void being more ravenous and consuming than an invitation to explore. Notably, beings called the Void Lords (only one of which we've actually had named, Dimensius, who honestly just looks like a massive Voidwalker, and was the final boss of 2024's The War Within expansion) send globs of void energy to Azeroth, which took on a physical form to become the Old Gods, eldritch, Lovecraftian flesh-mountains who spawned countless servitors. The Old Gods ultimately settled on Azeroth and created their dystopian Black Empire. Thus, Void-associated monsters come in two pretty distinct categories: ethereal blue/purple energy beings, which I'd say include Voidwalkers and Voidcallers, and then the more fleshy tentacle monsters like the N'raqi, which we see with the Faceless One and the Faceless General. (As a note, the Faceless General is likely technically a C'thraxxi, which are often associated with the N'raqi, but I think might be their own species. When both monsters were introduced in Wrath of the Lich King, they were both simply referred to as "faceless ones," and only later did we get these proper noun terms).

    Furbolgs:

Yes, that's not a typo, and Furbolgs are actually distinct from Firbolgs. Furbolgs are Bear people. That's about it. Just essentially sapient bears. They can be friendly or hostile, and are often affected a lot by whatever is happening to the natural world around them. Generally found in forested lands.

    Naga:

When the War of the Ancients ended and the destruction of the Well of Eternity led to the Sundering of the ancient Pangea-like continent of Kalimdor (the western regions of which retain that name,) the Night Elf Queen Azshara, the greatest mage to ever live on Azeroth, watched as her capital city was about to be consumed by the rushing ocean (Azshara had allied with the invading Burning Legion, so it was partially her fault). Desperate to survive along with her loyal Highborne followers, she accepted a deal from the Old God N'zoth, who transformed her and her people into aquatic, serpentine monsters called Naga. For the next ten thousand years, Azshara rebuilt her empire under the waves. Naga forces periodically raid the surface, and might seem to be just a threat to sailors and fishers, but they're basically the de facto superpower of the ocean depths.

    Dragons:

Dragons in WoW are a bit different from those in D&D. For one thing, broadly speaking, dragons were originally all pretty much good guys, though the Dragonflight expansion complicates that narrative a bit. Originally elemental beings who evolved into living creatures of flesh, the Titanforged Keeper Tyr allied with a group of proto-drakes to fight a dire threat, and upon recognizing their power, "uplifted" them to become the five Dragon Aspects, created modern dragons and having each become demigod-like beings who would sire broad draconic clans known as Dragonflights. The five flights are the Red, Blue, Bronze, Black, and Green. Each was given a domain over which they were supposed to serve as protectors: Red Dragons over life itself, Blue over magic, Black over the deep places under the world's surface, Green over the natural world, and Bronze over time itself. Among the Aspects, Alexstrasza was the most beloved and served as their leader, the Dragon Queen. Infamously, though, during the War of the Ancients (but sort of unrelated to the Legion's invasion,) Neltharion, the Black Aspect, was driven mad by the Old Gods and consumed with a desire to wreak utter chaos upon the surface of Azeroth. This madness spread to nearly all the Black Dragons as a sort of infectious corruption. Other flights have periodically played antagonistic roles: the Blues at one point turning on mortal spellcasters, Green dragons affected deeply by the Emerald Nightmare, and weird alternate-timeline Infinite Dragon versions of the Bronzes fighting to split the timeline into countless branches.

    Quillboar:

Strange that we just get a single Quillboar statblock. These are weird sort of boar-people that also have porcupine-like spines on their backs. Never really front-and-center, they're basically always hostile, though don't seem to be inherently evil on a fundamental level.

    Nerubians:

The Nerubians are spider-folk who were once vassals to the Old Gods' Black Empire. While a humanoid people in and of themselves, our first exposure to them (and where we're likely to see them the most) is after the Nerubian kingdom of Azjol-Nerub was conquered by the Scourge. Thus, the undead armies of the Scourge often have undead Nerubians among their ranks.

    Moonkin:

Weirdly sort of WoW's take on Owlbears, but only very loosely, Moonkin are considered favored creations of the Night Elves' Moon Goddess, Elune, and walk upright with bear-like bodies and owl-like beaks (though no wings other than their feathered arms). Possessing very rudimentary intelligence, they also have the power to call upon astral and lunar magic, and are the preferred form for Druids who wish to focus on offensive spellcasting (there's guidance that if you want to play a Balance Druid, you can take Circle of Stars and just flavor your constellation forms as a Moonkin instead).

    Abomination:

One of the most fearsome and gross weapons of the Undead Scourge, Abominations are massive flesh-golems with several arms and tend to wield hooked chains.

    Ancients:

Ancients are basically Treants, sapient trees that are often allied with Night Elves and help protect their settlements or fight in their wars.

    Individuals:

There are several named characters here. I won't go into a whole biography, but here's the basic rundown:

Anduin Wrynn: The young king of Stormwind after the death of his father Varian during the final Legion invasion. Anduin is a priest/cleric and deeply kind but also has experienced a lot of trauma.

Alleria Windrunner: Former Ranger-General of the High Elves, she left with the Alliance expedition to Outland and, thanks to weird time-warping, spent a thousand years fighting against the Burning Legion. During this time, she cultivated a connection with the Void, using its dark cosmic power in the fight against evil, which makes things... complicated with her husband Turalyon, one of the most devout paladins wielding the Holy Light.

Jaina Proudmoore: Now Grand Admiral of Kul Tiras (effectively the head of state of this deeply nautical nation,) Jaina is also one of the most powerful living mages. Allying with the Horde during the Third War, and ultimately allowing her father to be killed to save the nascent Orcish nation of Durotar survive, this act was thanked with the destruction of the city-state of Theramore that she had founded by an aggressive Horde, which has put her at both extremes of Alliance-Horde relations. Also, she was close friends with Arthas Menethil before he fell to evil (the characters in these games have lived through a lot of trauma).

Thrall: Former Warchief of the Horde, and one of the greatest living Shamans, Thrall was actually the first Orc ever born on Azeroth. Liberating his people from their internment camps they were put in following the Second War, he became a beacon of hope for Orcs who wished to see a Horde free of demonic corruption, but when he stepped down as Warchief and named the hot-headed and, well, honestly, fascistic asshole Garrosh Hellscream as his successor, he found himself weighed down by the erroneous decisions he had made as a leader. Now, basically a private citizen of the Horde but with a lot of power and influence, Thrall mostly tries to live as a family man with his two kids and wife.

Ragnaros: The Elemental Lord of Fire, Ragnaros is staggeringly ancient, having existed pretty much as long as Azeroth. Embodying fire's drive to spread and consume, Ragnaros is a force of pure destruction, and was the boss of WoW's very first raid, The Molten Core. (He would also be the boss of The Firelands later on, when he was killed permanently within the plane of fire).

Sylvanas Windrunner: Sister of Alleria, Sylvanas took over for her older sister as Ranger-General of Quel'thalas right in time for the Undead Scourge, led by Arthas, to carve a path of death and terror through her homeland, killing off 90% of the High Elf population, including her. Arthas personally tore her soul from her body to turn her into a banshee, though she later found her own corpse and possessed it. When the Frozen Throne weakened, Sylvanas was among the first to regain her free will, and led an attempted assassination against Arthas, driving the future Lich King from the Plaguelands. She then rallied the free-willed Undead to become the Forsaken, serving as their "Banshee Queen." However, while she had regained her free will, any semblance of morality had more or less drained out of her, and her rule as Banshee Queen was marked by atrocities. Sylvanas is one of those characters who see-saws between antihero and full-on villain.

Illidan Stormrage: The first Demon Hunter, Illidan was a lowborn Night Elf and twin to Malfurion, who would go on to become the first Druid. Illidan was ambitious, and worked his way up through the ranks of Queen Azshara's mages despite his lack of aristocratic status. When the Legion invaded and Azshara's elite partook of their fel powers, Illidan feigned collaboration but instead used his position to learn all he could about the power that the Legion held and found a way to use it against them. While he played a crucial role in defeating the Legion, many still thought of him as a collaborator, earning him the epithet of The Betrayer. For his crimes, he was imprisoned for ten thousand years, only freed during the Third War so that his expertise could be used again. Truly WoW's most classic antihero, Illidan is ruthlessly pragmatic and makes bold moves that many will... not agree with, though his goals are ultimately for the greater good.

Arthas Menethil: WoW's most iconic villain, Arthas Menethil was the Crown Prince of Lordaeron and protege to the first Paladin (well, the first human paladin,) Uther the Lightbringer. However, his actions when the Scourge began to ravage his kingdom led him to acts of reckless violence and callousness that many would argue showed he had already fallen to evil before he gave his soul to the runeblade Frostmourne. However, with the evil sword in hand, Arthas fully lost his humanity and became a Death Knight, acting as the Scourge's mightiest champion. Ascending the Frozne Throne following his victory over Illidan Stormrage (why Illidan was there is... too complicated for here,) Arthas merged with the Lich King, absorbing Ner'zhul's mind into his own to become the sovereign of the undead and one of the greatest threats Azeroth has ever faced.

Details for the Oath of the Ebon Blade and Forsaken Species

 Insight Check recently posted a video with a bit of content out of the upcoming D&D World of Warcraft book related to the Oath of the Ebon Blade subclass for Paladins, which allows us to create the equivalent of WoW's playable Death Knights, as well as the Forsaken species, which equates to WoW's playable Undead race.

Notably, both of these are doing some unprecedented things.

Let's actually hit up the Forsaken first, as I think it's less dramatic:

Forsaken are free-willed, sentient undead. Mostly former humans, the collective identity is linked less to their original species than their shared experience of having come back from the dead and reconciling their free will and memories of life with the grim reality of being a walking corpse.

For the first time in all of 5E, the Forsaken are a species with the undead creature type (something even Reborn don't have). This, thankfully, is much more viable now that healing spells like Cure Wounds work on Undead and Clerics' Turn Undead allows you to pick which targets are affected. Note, though, that Raise Dead and Resurrection won't actually work on them. Crazily enough, True Resurrection will actually turn them back into humanoids, so you might want to talk to a DM if that means you become a Human (or High Elf, potentially, depending on your backstory). Revivify and Reincarnate will both still work, though. Given the special nature of your undeath, I would talk with DMs to see if you could get special dispensation to allow you to be brought back with these spells.

(As a note, in WoW, despite the race being called, literally, just Undead, your creature type is actually humanoid, for game balance reasons.)

From there, the features are a little more standard. You are Medium or Small, have a 30 foot movement speed, and 60 feet of darkvision. You get resistance to Necrotic damage as well, and like Reborn, you don't have to eat, drink, or breathe, and you only need to stay inert for 4 hours to get a long rest.

Touch of the Grave lets you, once per long rest, add a number of d4s equal to your PB of necrotic damage when you deal damage to a creature, and then you regain HP equal to the amount rolled.

Finally, Will of the Forsaken gives you advantage on saving throws to avoid or end the Charmed or Frightened conditions.

    So, overall, I think this reflects the WoW race pretty effectively. I do think the issues with resurrection magic might potentially pose a challenge, though I think at the very least, building some alternate means of bringing a fallen Forsaken PC back ought to be in the cards. Frankly, I think it would be reasonable to allow Animate Dead to work in place of Raise Dead, for example, or maybe you need to conduct some kind of necromantic ritual that works similarly to Raise Dead.

Now, let's talk Ebon Blade Paladins, aka Death Knights.

Here, the video doesn't get the whole subclass, but we get a number of interesting features that are, interestingly enough, for levels 1 and 2, which you'll note is not a pair of levels that any established subclasses get anything for.

That's because while Ebon Blade Paladins use the Paladin class as a framework, they aren't actually meant to be Paladins. Even if a lot of canonical Warcraft Death Knights were Paladins in life, not all of them were. Essentially, this isn't going so far as to make a whole new class, but it's retrofitting the 5.5 Paladin to make it fit the Death Knight better.

First off, more of a flavor thing, you can carve a rune into your weapon, giving you the flavor of Blood, Frost, or Unholy - the three Death Knight specs in WoW. According to the video, this doesn't have extensive mechanical implications, but we'll just have to see.

Next, the first big change: like Forsaken, Death Knights are undead. Similarly to all the issues we discussed before, this will give you immunity to certain spells that affect humanoids, but it also means you have to worry about resurrection magic not working. Once again, the funny thing is that in WoW, even if Death Knights were raised in undeath, they're mechanically still humanoids for game balance (though they do have a class ability called Lichborne that temporarily turns you undead for various reasons, including something we're going to touch on right now:)

Death Coil fully replaces Lay on Hands. Yeah, that's right: you don't get Lay on Hands as an Ebon Blade Paladin. Instead, Death Coil lets you use a bonus action to send out necrotic damage or bursts of healing that affect only undead targets. You have a pool of d8s equal to your Charisma modifier (minimum 1). As a bonus action, you can spend up to your Charisma modifier of those d8s (makes me wonder if our pool gets bigger at higher levels, otherwise this limitation seems redundant) to force a creature you can see within 60 feet to make a Con save. On a failure, they take damage equal to the number rolled, or half as much on a success. You can also target an undead creature (and you are an undead creature) and heal them for the amount rolled.

You regain these d8s on a long rest.

    So, to break this down: this is obviously more aggressive than Lay on Hands, which is purely defensive. Makes sense given the priorities of a Death Knight. The damage will be great at early levels, but I think unless that pool expands to, like, twice your Charimsa modifier or somehow also gets expanded, I'm not sure that this is quite the compensation for the loss of Lay on Hands. Again, unless we get a larger pool later on, we're talking like 5d8 at most extra damage once per day by level 17.

    As self-healing, or potentially healing for minions or allies (maybe you have a non-Death Knight Forsaken party member in the group?) it's a bit better, though again, I think it starts to fall behind Lay on Hands pretty quickly.

Runic Smite replaces Divine Smite.

Here, there's a much more direct parallel to the Paladin feature. Runic Smite has the Rune Strike spell always prepared, and lets you cast it once per day for free.

Rune Strike works identically to Divine Smite except for the following changes:

Its damage is Necrotic, and rather than dealing an extra d8 of damage to Fiends and Undead, it instead deals an extra d8 to Celestials.

    This makes perfect sense as a flavor change. But we do run into a couple problems: First off, more monsters can resist or be immune to necrotic damage than radiant damage. Second, there are far more Fiends and Undead monsters that we tend to fight in D&D than Celestials. Even in an Azeroth-based campaign, we're far more likely to be fighting Fiends like the demons of the Burning Legion or Undead monsters in the Scourge. In fact, the only creatures I can think of off the top of my head that would inevitably be Celestials are the Naaru, who are both rare and usually friendly (in fact, when they go "dark," they probably become aberrations). Maybe Val'kyr?

Obviously, we need to get the full picture before we can really get a sense of how the subclass transforms the Paladin into the Death Knight. These changes certainly don't make the class unplayable or anything, and I really applaud the boldness to tinker with the inner workings of the base class beyond simply plugging in subclass features at the appropriate levels.

Indeed, if this proves effective with the Death Knight and Demon Hunter, this could be some exciting "tech" for WotC to bring to other supplemental products outside of the Universes Beyond line.

Level Ranges of the WoW D&D Dungeons

 I don't know how big the WoW D&D book is, but it sounds like it might be pretty hefty, given that it details seven different dungeons along with various player options and other stuff.

One of the complaints we often got during the 5.0 era was that very few published adventures actually took people all the way to the level cap. Indeed, many adventure books would only take players to level 10, cutting things off before hitting tier 3, or sometimes going about halfway in, like Descent Into Avernus, which wrapped up around level 13.

This, combined with a relative dearth of high-level monsters (not that there weren't any, but the balance certainly skewed more to CRs below 5) led a fair number of DMs to feeling like they didn't have the tools or examples of how to build high-level adventures.

At this stage, I think I've run more D&D at high (11+) levels than low level simply because of the epic length of my ongoing Ravnica campaign, in which I (foolishly, in retrospect,) really sped players through levels 1-10 building on the very generous Adventurer's League rules from 2019 (I also imagined the game as a more rotating cast kind of thing).

This party doesn't have a Wizard in it, and I think that a surprising number of shenanigans that high-level characters can pull are not quite as difficult to build around (read: preserve challenge) if you don't have someone who can, for instance, Scry-and-Fry. It's not that there haven't been any challenges - with a Bard who has expertise in all four Charisma skills and also has Glibness, it ironically makes social challenges involving attempts to influence NPCs sort of dull, because he can't roll below a 27 (all the character at some point or another got the equivalent of Tomes and Manuals that raise their primary ability score and max for that score by 2. The Artificer has an Ioun Stone of Mastery, so between that and Tool Expertise, any tool-based Investigation or Arcana check gives them a +20 and advantage).

Still, I've found that at the end of the day, a crapton of damage will challenge even a high-level party, or at least put the fear of God in them.

Also, as a note here, WotC has actually for quite a while tried to address this, adding a lot of high-CR monsters in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes and then releasing Dungeon of the Mad Mage (the epic mega-dungeon crawl that goes from 5-20) and Vecna: Eve of Ruin (which goes from 10-20) and most recently, Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall, which goes 11-20. While some of the issues of how vastly capable PCs can get at those high levels does sort of remain an issue, you at least have a lot of creatures to choose from to send their way, and I think the 5.5 Monster Manual helps a fair bit with high-CR humanoid monsters and souped-up versions of lower-CR monsters.

But this is all preamble!

The WoW D&D book (it's going to be awkward to just call it "WoW" given that this blog is also pretty heavily dedicated to World of Warcraft) is meant to be pretty comprehensive and cover potentially any era in WoW's 22-year history (though it won't have the "filling in the gaps" stuff from the just-announced WoW Forever - a game that I somewhat reluctantly feel like I should try out even if I wouldn't want to swap to it at the expense of the mainline version of the game). That being said, the dungeons presented in the book are all, with a single exception, from WoW's "Vanilla" era, prior to any of its expansions, which ran from 2004 to the very beginning of 2007 (I think The Burning Crusade came out on like January 7th of 2007. Hang on, Googling... Damn, Jan. 16th. Off by 9 days. Still pretty close).

Now, D&D broadly has some notions about how different tiers should reflect different stakes in a campaign. Tier 1, meaning levels 1-4, is when your characters are regional heroes, dealing with issues that are pretty local - the kind of classic "small town with a bounty board" in which you face bandits or the kind of monsters that create problems for the local farmers. Tier 2 steps things up to more serious threats, where an entire kingdom might be under threat by some more organized and serious villain. Tier 3 is when you really get into super-hero mode (though I guess that's imprecise given that sometimes Spider-Man and Batman are just dealing with bank robbers while other times they're dealing with reality-warping threats) but more precisely, you're dealing with global threats. Tier 4 is then when you're dealing with stuff that could affect multiple planes of reality.

In practice, of course, this doesn't necessarily play out that way. For example, Deadfall sees the party trying to thwart the plans of Szass Tam in trying to wrest full control of Thay away from the rest of the Zulkirs and reduce most of the country to his own mindless undead servants. As epic as that is, technically that counts as a tier 2, or "nation-wide" threat, though it's not much of a stretch of the imagination to think that that could then become a big problem for the whole of the Forgotten Realms. But Deadfall instead goes to level 20, and I think it's mainly because they want it to feel truly epic.

By these metrics, different WoW expansions would, I think, qualify at different tier levels. Legion and Shadowlands are unquestionably tier 4 expansions, while Wrath of the Lich King, as epic and beloved as that is, would by this metric be considered a tier 3 plot (though given how important Azeroth is to the overall Warcraft cosmos, you could argue that any global threat is inherently a cosmic threat).

But we know that the Icecrown Citadel dungeon is presented as a tier 4 adventure (it's also sold separately, which is a bit annoying, though perhaps it just wouldn't have fit in the book. ICC in WoW is a raid, which is both built for a larger group of players and is also just larger than a standard dungeon, with more bosses. I'm not going to get into all the complexities of dungeons versus raids here, but it's a fairly distinct thing even if they operate on similar principles).

Ok, sorry, getting to the actual point of this post:

GameMasters, a D&D channel that often sneaks a little preview of upcoming D&D books, has... snuck us a little preview of the new D&D book. Evidently constrained by some sort of NDA (he apparently wasn't supposed to tell us that Arthas got a stat block in the book, but I mean, the dude's on the cover and is WoW's most popular and iconic villain, so I'd only have been shocked if he didn't have a stat block), he was nevertheless able to show off some of the dungeon maps and their level ranges.

Deadmines: 1-4

Deadmines, the vast mine complex that serves as the headquarters for the Defias Brotherhood, a group of bandits founded by (rightfully) disgruntled Stonemasons after they were stiffed on the reconstruction of Stormwind, is the first dungeon that Alliance players are likely to run (well, Horde too given that you can access it via the Dungeon Finder these days, but it's more part of the questing path for human characters). The Defias have an interesting story with some real nuance (I mean, again, their grievances are very much real) they are, ultimately, a group of bandits, colored in by a sort of political edge, and thus they make perfect sense as a tier 1 challenge.

In the Cataclysm expansion, Deadmines was updated with some new characters. After players killed Edwin VanCleef, the leader of the Defias (and former head of the Stonemason's Guild) in the original version of the dungeon, his orphaned daughter Vanessa hatched a plot to revive the Defias and take over as its new leader. The general vibes of the dungeon were similar, though it was updated with more modern design philosophies. (We also fight Vanessa, though it's revealed later in the Legion expansion that she survives our encounter, and even winds up reluctantly teaming up with Rogue players as part of their class storyline).

Shadowfang Keep: 1-4

This also makes a fair amount of sense: Shadowfang Keep is found in Silverpine Forest, the second zone Undead characters are likely to quest through much as Deadmines is in Westfall, the secondary human zone. The real question, though, is which version is presented here. In Vanilla, SFK was "the Worgen dungeon," where the Archmage Arugal retreated after going mad, the source of his madness being his disastrous summoning of the Worgen to combat the undead Scourge. Worgen - WoW's version of werewolves - had initially been created through the efforts of Night Elf Druids trying to create a Druidic shapeshift form based on Goldrinn, the wolf god, but his ferocity proved overwhelming. Arugal had stumbled upon fragmented records telling of powerful wolf-creatures who were immune to diseases like the Plague of Undeath, and figured these would be ideal defenders of his home nation of Gilneas in fending off the undead threat. But the Worgen overran Gilneas, turning most of the population.

However, Shadowfang Keep became a vastly different dungeon in subject matter in the Cataclysm revamp of the original two WoW continents. In the plot there, the Forsaken invaded Gilneas in an effort to expand their territory. While the Gilneans had found alchemical means to restore the human minds to those who had been turned into Worgen, there were some of the high-ranking nobility who refused to bow down to a society that was now trying to incorporate these "mongrels" into it. Turning traitor and welcoming in the Forsaken, the three treasonous lords were killed, but then raised by the Forsaken as undead in their own right. However, the three were equally unhappy about being forced to serve the Forsaken, and betrayed Sylvanas (the Banshee Queen of the Forsaken) and even straight-up murdered her (she got better - turns out having the means to raise people into undeath can be useful if you're targeted for assassination) before fleeing to Arugal's old stronghold.

There's certainly more plot to the newer (like, 2010, but still newer than 2004) Shadowfang Keep, with tons of motivation for both Alliance and Horde players to want to take Lord Godfrey and his co-conspirators down. But I do sort of regret that the one real "Worgen" dungeon ceased to be that with this change.

Either way, it's a story of local threats, and I think makes sense as a tier 1 dungeon.

Blackfathom Deeps: Levels 5-10

Blackfathom Deeps is in the zone of Ashenvale, where the ancient forests of the Night Elves begin to butt up against the expanding territories of the Horde, who seek its lumber to fuel the construction of the new Orcish nation of Durotar. This dungeon, though, has nothing to do with that conflict.

Instead, this is an ancient Night Elf temple that at some point became a hotbed of worship of the Eldritch Old Gods (WoW's Great Old Ones/source for its Aberrations - continent-sized, mostly-underground flesh-monsters trying to corrupt the planet).

I'll be honest, this is one of the more nondescript dungeons from the old Vanilla days. It got a revamp at some point, but unlike Shadowfang Keep and Deadmines, it didn't then have a max-level Heroic version to play through at the time. I believe they may have shifted some of the focus between the factions involved here, but I don't really remember how it changed.

Elements at play here are the Naga (ancient Night Elves who were transformed into serpentine sea-monsters that honestly look a lot like Merrow, but think Merrow with the culture and broad power of Menzoberranzan Drow, who are associated with but not strictly loyal to the Old Gods) and Twilight's Hammer (a vast cult seeking apocalyptic destruction, and the closest thing the Old Gods have to a mortal cult dedicated to them). The final boss here is a massive Hydra who is an ancient "pet" of the Old Gods.

Scarlet Monastery: 5-10 and 11-16

Scarlet Monastery was one of the most popular dungeons in Vanilla, or rather, four of the most popular dungeons, as it pioneered the notion of a "winged" dungeon, with bite-sized pieces you could complete quickly (winged dungeons sort of stopped being a thing by Cataclysm, actually, but in BC and Wrath, they were the rule rather than the exception, though each wing in those were actually quite filled-out dungeons). In Mists of Pandaria, extensive revamps of these dungeons consolidated them into two: Scarlet Monastery and Scarlet Halls, effectively combining the old Graveyard and Cathedral into the former and the old Library and Armory into the latter.

While the dungeons are in the Undead starting zone of Tirisfal Glades, players would have to adventure a little bit beyond to hit the level they'd want to be before running these.

Scarlet Monastery is one of the main bastions of the Scarlet Crusade, a group of zealous religious fundamentalists who went a bit crazy in the face of the Undead Scourge. Primarily dangerous for the Forsaken, as they make no distinction between the dominated wills of the Scourge and the free-willed, sapient undead of the Forsaken, they're also just generally evil religious zealots who became deluded into thinking that all of Azeroth was infected with the Plague, and so would slaughter everyone if unchecked. (Later, in the Stratholme dungeon, we find that its leader is actually a corpse possessed by a Dreadlord, the most insidious and manipulative of demons, which explains all the evil, torture, and burning people at the stake).

Given that the natural progression of the story of the dungeon has us eventually confront High Inquisitor Whitemane in the Cathedral, I suspect that it's this half that is saved for tier 3, while the Halls half is probably our tier 2 half.

(In its 2012 revamp, most of the existing bosses from the original four wings were replaced with similar characters, but with different names, the deaths of the olds bosses evidently being canonical. The exception were Whitemane and the undead Thalnos the Soulrender, but while Whitemane's champion, Renault Mograine, in the Vanilla version of Cathedral was a fairly important lore character, overall the dungeon feels basically the same).

I have a great deal of nostalgia for this dungeon, as it's where I learned to tank on my Paladin way back in the day, and the Scarlet Crusade is a villainous faction that's a lot of fun to hate.

Dire Maul: 11-16

Dire Maul is an ancient, ruined Night Elf city. (It was this dungeon that the video gets to go into a lot of detail about.) In ancient times, it was a place of arcane scholarship among the Highborne Night Elves (the ancestors of the High Elves/Blood Elves/Void Elves) and home to Prince Tortheldrin and his Shed'ralar scholars. After the loss of the Well of Eternity (the enormous font of arcane power that was destroyed 10,000 years ago at the conclusion of the War of the Ancients,) the arcane-addicted Highborne began to struggle with deadly withdrawal, and so Tortheldrin summoned a demon called Immothar to have his people feed off of its energies. This corrupted them over time, and they began sacrificing non-Shen'dralar citizens to the demon to maintain it as a source of arcane nourishment.

The dungeon is sort of divided into three areas, with one involving the ghosts of the dead citizens and the Shen'dralar (who are, interestingly enough, actually a faction you can gain reputation with, even if Tortheldrin is clearly a villain and can be fought as a boss) but as the city has fallen into ruins, it has also become host to a clan of ogres as well as some Satyrs seeking to corrupt the local wildlife.

Quick important sidenote: Satyrs in WoW are very different than those from both D&D and Greek Myth. Far from whimsical fey beings, Satyrs are actually former Night Elves who became demons, and are closely tied with an eldritch corruption to the Emerald Dream (an alternate plane of a pristine, pre-civilization Azeroth that is core to the practice of Druidsm and the function of the natural world - very vaguely akin to its Feywild) called The Nightmare. Satyrs are thus tied to both the demonic Burning Legion and the eldritch madness of the Old Gods (two forces that are usually quite vehemently opposed to one another), and are seriously bad news.

I'm actually a bit surprised that this is a tier 3 dungeon, as it feels like it could fit pretty safely in tier 2, but I guess the presence of ancient arcane practices and the binding of a powerful demon make it sufficiently big for a tier 3 adventure.

Azjol-Nerub: Levels 17-20

When this dungeon came out in Wrath of the Lich King, it was considered almost scandalous, because it featured the Scarab King Anub'arak as a mere dungeon boss, and the dungeon itself was fairly quick and small. (Anub'arak later reappeared, resurrected, as the final boss of Trial of the Crusader, itself a sort of weird and underwhelming raid that probably could have been happily skipped).

Anyway, there's a lot of history here:

The Nerubians are one of the arthropodal peoples descended from the Aqir, the bug-people created by the Old Gods to populate their Black Empire some profound eons ago. After the Black Empire was dismantled by the Titans, the Nerubians began to develop their own distinct and necessarily culture (though they are spider-people, so it's not what we'd consider to most lovely society to live in. Yes, I realize that their king is a Scarab-Lord, which is very different from a spider. But just roll with it. Nerubians are spider-folk that also have giant scarab things that are somehow the same species).

Anyway, Azjol-Nerub was the Nerubian kingdom beneath the continent of Northrend, which meant that when the Undead Scourge got its start there on the frigid northern continent, the Nerubians came under attack, and ultimately the kingdom fell and got absorbed into the Scourge, its king, Anub'arak, becoming one of the Lich King's fiercest lieutenants.

Notably, this is the only dungeon in the book set outside of the Vanilla WoW continents, but it's a pretty distinctive look and feel. The Nerubians live in what is essentially WoW's Underdark equivalent (in The War Within, the expansion that ran from 2024 to 2026, we spent a lot of time in another Nerubian kingdom, Ahj'Kahet, and got to know their culture and even ally with a resistance movement there).

It's a little funny to me that the level range is the same here as it is for Icecrown Citadel, given that Anub'arak is unquesitonably subordinate to the Lich King, but perhaps they are making it up to the people who claimed the Scarab King didn't get his due back in 2008.

Onyxia's Lair: 17-20

My only real question here is how you'd have enough content here to span four levels. Onyxia is a pretty epic character - the daughter of Deathwing, the mad Black Dragon Aspect, Onyxia lurked in disguise within the court of Stormwind under the guise of a human named Lady Katrana Prestor (Deathwing had taken over the human kingdom of Alterac under the identity of Lord Daval Prestor, and betrayed the Alliance during the Second War). Leading Stormwind's House of Nobles, she arranged for the Stonemason's Guild to go unpaid, effectively spurring the creation of the Defias Brotherhood (see the Deadmines, way up above) and also orchestrated the kidnapping of King Varian Wrynn in an effort to undermine Stormwind and sow chaos.

Once her ruse in Stormwind was discovered, she fled across the Great Sea to Kalimdor, and the remote wilderness of Dustwallow Marsh, where she had her vast volcanic lair.

Onyxia's Lair was popular back in Vanilla, as it was a very simple one-boss instance with just a few "trash" enemies to fight through before getting to the big boss fight. While Onyxia's brother Nefarian served as the final boss of Blackwing Lair, a more extensive and full raid instance, both black dragons made for pretty cool and epic fights. (Both were somehow resurrected in Cataclsym, featuring in the final fight of the Blackwing Descent raid.) (Also, in 2009, for WoW's 5th anniversary, a level 80 version of the raid was opened up for players during Wrath of the Lich King, and I believe the current version of it is that version, though between the Shadowlands level-squish and level scaling, I don't know if you could tell the difference, really).

Anyway, as cool as that was, in WoW, Onyxia's Lair is really just a single boss fight in a big volcanic cave. The build-up to that fight, of course, was pretty cool, with an extensive quest chain to reveal Lady Prestor's duplicity, but I'm very curious to see how the book actually approaches this to give us something between being level 17 when we start it and then fighting Onyxia presumably at level 20.

Icecrown Citadel (not appearing in the book itself, but as a separate and I believe digital-only product): Levels 17-20

The final (well, there's a weird asterisk there because of the single-boss Ruby Sanctum raid, but we don't need to count that, as it was more of a prologue for Cataclysm) raid of Wrath of the Lich King, this is a massive fortress built around the Frozen Throne, the magical shard of ice containing the cursed armor of the Lich King that unleashed the Undead Scourge upon Azeroth.

Just in case you didn't know, the history of the Lich King is complex: Originally, the Orc Shaman Ner'zhul, attempting to flee the secret demonic masters of the Old Horde after their loss in the Second War, tore the Orcish homeworld of Draenor apart, and was immediately captured by the demon Kil'jaeden. Kil'jaeden bound his soul to a suit of armor (the origin of which got expanded upon/retconned in Shadowlands, but it's just so much to cover) and sealed him in an ice-like crystal to hurl down to Azeroth.

As a disembodied spirit, Ner'zhul, as the Lich King, reached out and empowered necromancers to begin raising the dead and bringing about a plague of undeath that could spread his influence and bind their wills to the Lich King. The most prominent of these necromancers, Kel'thuzad, came to the human kingdom of Lordaeron and began spreading the plague, before he was defeated by the Crown Prince and novice Paladin, Arthas Menethil. Arthas, a hero initially, began to lose perspective and his humanity in his zealous efforts to stop the Scourge, including slaughtering an entire city to contain the infection. Eventually, in an effort to defeat the demon he believed to be the head of the Scourge, Arthas took the soul-entrapping cursed sword Frostmourne (though he had done a lot of bad things even before his soul was taken).

Frostmourne turned Arthas into a Death Knight, and when he returned, seemingly triumphant, to Lordaeron, he shocked everyone by murdering his father, King Terenas, and then unleashing his undead minions upon the capital. Via the disemboided spirit of Kel'thuzad, Arthas learned that it was the Lich King who had created Frostmourne, and that the Scourge needed him to help break them free of the control of the demons. Arthas thus became the Scourge's greatest champions, eventually defending the Frozen Throne from forces (led by Illidan Stormrage, but we can't get into why that was who he was up against) that sought to destroy it. In victory, Arthas ascended the Frozen Throne, smashing the ice and freeing the armor. Placing the Helm of Domination upon his head, he merged with the Lich King, and eventually overcame Ner'zhul's will to truly become the master of the Scourge.

Icecrown Citadel, thus, is a massive complex with some of the Scourge's most powerful monstrous servants, between the Frankensteinan creations known as Abominations created by Professor Putricide, to the vampire-like San'layn led by Blood Queen Lana'thel (the San'layn created through the corruption of the blood elves who had fought for Illidan) and the undead dragons led by Sindragosa (basically a Dracolich).

Like Scarlet Monastery, I have immense nostalgia for this raid, as it was the time when I was most consistently raiding with my guild (which is now more or less defunct,) and Arthas is both mine and I'd guess a huge portion of WoW players' favorite villain.

I wish that we simply got this in the book, but I also sort of get it. Let's talk about Dungeons versus Raids.

In WoW, most of the world is shared by those on your server - if you're playing on the same "realm" as another player, if they show up at a location, you can find them there (there are exceptions I won't get into here). But "instances" are separate areas that have a fresh version of them for each group that enters. That way, you don't have to worry about some other group of players having killed the boss you want to fight and having to wait for them to respawn.

The most common form of instance is a dungeon, which is built for five players, and typically has 3-5 boss fights, with less powerful enemies ("trash") between them, and typically can be cleared in a single sitting in roughly half an hour (notably, back in Vanilla, there were far larger dungeons, but very early on they decided to make dungeons more digestible bits of content). Dungeons have a hard limit of 5 players, with one player in the tank role, one in the healer role, and three "DPS" or "damage" players who are there to just make sure the enemies go down efficiently.

Raids, on the other hand, are for larger groups. In vanilla, raids would be for groups of 20 or 40 players (the more epic and plot-centric ones being for the huge groups,) but in the first expansion, much as they standardized the shorter dungeons, they also shrunk raids to have some be for 10 players and some for 25. In the second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, they instead made multiple versions of each raid, with a 10-player version and a 25-player version. Eventually, they would create "flex" raiding, where the instance itself would scale for groups of 10-25 players, the exception being the hardest difficulty mode, Mythic, which was designed solely for 20-player groups.

Unlike dungeons, raids are not designed to be completed in a single sitting (at least not until you get good enough at the fights and have good enough gear to consistently beat early bosses in a single attempt). They can have far more bosses (I believe the largest is Naxxramas, which has 15. Icecrown Citadel has 12).

Working your way through a raid is the sort of thing that players will take several weeks to do - the race to Mythic World Firsts - beating the final boss of the latest raid on Mythic difficulty - is something WoW fans will follow like a season of sports, with famous guilds racing to get that boss down as quickly as possible, which usually doesn't happen until after the raid has been out for a week or two (or sometimes longer, depending on how hard it is).

Thus:

It sort of makes sense to me that Icecrown Citadel wouldn't fit in this book: just the map alone is far larger than the dungeons portrayed in the book (and Onyxia's Lair, while a raid, is a very simple and small raid).

I do have a few questions, though:

First off, there's far more to WoW than its dungeons - you do a lot of stuff out in the world, and dungeons often serve as the sort of climactic conclusion of an ongoing story that you've done mostly out on your own in the open world.

The maps of the dungeons look pretty faithful to their WoW equivalents, and so I really have to wonder if something like Onyxia's Lair will involve us slowly pushing through it before exiting to do other things.

The other possibility that just occurred to me, and makes me feel very silly for not thinking of it sooner, is that these level ranges might not be a guarantee of the levels that these dungeons will cover, but might instead simply be level ranges that are appropriate times for a party to visit said dungeons. Like, you might be capable of facing Onyxia by the time you hit level 17, but it'll remain a challenge through level 20.

Honestly, that might make far more sense, though I do think that puts a pretty serious onus on the tier 1 dungeons, given that the difference between a level 1 character and a level 3 character is a much bigger gulf than, say, a level 12 versus level 14 character.

One last note! (I know this post is getting insanely long):

Evidently, the book will suggest paths that a party can take if they want to focus on particular stories and antagonists, not just for these dungeons but also for the various zones of World of Warcraft. Peppering in these dungeons where appropriate could be a way to have various heightened periods in a campaign about certain things.

It seems that dungeons are designated as being associated with such recurring villains, like The Burning Legion (I think Dire Maul is considered a Burning Legion dungeon).

As I was telling my players tonight, I know Azeroth far more extensively than I do the Forgotten Realms, and I think that's what would excite me about running something there - that I would easily be able to pull in details I know about the world while also curating the story to focus on particular threads.

Ironically, while Warcraft tends toward high-stakes, epic tales, it would probably be relatively far easier for me to run a truly character-driven sandbox game focusing on players' individual stories because I have such a hard-wired sense of the moving parts of WoW's world and plot.

Faction Division and World of Warcraft D&D

 I've been following the WotC-produced "Dungeon Masters" series, which does short (like, less than ten episodes a pop) campaigns with a consistent group of players (including a couple of Baldur's Gate 3 cast members and also someone who is a friend of a friend), basically acting as promotion for the latest D&D book, with a series based in Ravenloft, then one themed around the arcane magic of Arcana Unleashed, and coming up, an Azeroth-based World of Warcraft adventure.

Now, WoW is a game that was built at least initially around a factional divide: the Alliance versus the Horde. While the world of Azeroth is threatened by villains that both Horde and Alliance are equally investing in stopping, the bad blood between these two groups created a perpetual engine of conflict, driving some of the drama and even taking center-stage with the Battle for Azeroth expansion (though that expansion was sort of half-invested in this divide and half in the machinations of the Old God N'zoth).

Starting with 2022's Dragonflight, the barriers between the factions have been loosened and made more permeable, with the resolution of 2018's Battle for Azeroth seeming to establish an enduring peace between the two sides (such that in the current expansion, Midnight, the central capital city is Silvermoon, which is the historical capital of the Blood Elves, a member race/nation of the Horde. The fact that there are still Alliance-aligned High Elves and Void Elves who are essentially the same people as the Blood Elves except for different politics and perhaps a bit of an infusion of different kinds of magic into their physiologies both stirs tension but also gives the Alliance a slightly more reasonable foothold to justify their presence here - something that the Blood Elf NPCs of Silvermoon have very conflicted feelings about).

Generally speaking, I'm a strong advocate of letting players play what they want to play. But I do think it's an interesting and worthwhile session zero discussion to have if you're going to play a Warcraft D&D campaign as to whether you want to make a party that is firmly affiliated with just one faction.

While there are some exceptions - the Pandaren, Dracthyr, Earthen, and Haranir - generally the race (or species, to use D&D's newly preferred term) determines your affiliation. When WoW first came out, the Alliance was Humans, Dwarves, Gnomes, and Night Elves, while the Horde was Orcs, Trolls, Tauren, and Undead (presented in the book as Forsaken, which is the term they use to distinguish themselves from mindless servants of the Lich King in the Scourge).

The first two games only had the Alliance and Horde as factions (actually, in the first game it was more accurately just Humans versus Orcs. While the Orcs had formed their Horde, the kingdom of Stormwind stood alone against them, with the Alliance not actually forming until the Second War, aka the second game). Thus, all conflict in those first two games was primarily through the clashing of these two factions (though I think there were opportunities to have Alliance vs. Alliance and Horde vs. Horde thanks to the traitorous human kingdom Alterac, secretly taken over by the black dragon Deathwing, and I believe the divide between the demon-worshipping forces loyal to Gul'dan in the Horde versus the more independence-minded faction under Warchief Orgrim Doomhammer).

While most of the world has always been available to both sides, there have always been territories where one side is welcome and the other is not, especially the major cities, where powerful elite NPCs are there to protect it, and player characters get flagged as valid targets for PvP even if you're on a non-PvP server (or, in more recent years, simply not in "war mode.")

Again, even though both factions are generally heroic (though I do feel that the Horde seems to slip into villainy a little easier) through much of the game's history, there has been a simmering hostility when there isn't outright warfare breaking out between them.

In a lot of ways, though, I think that the exciting possibility of a WoW D&D campaign would be to be able to do the things you can't usually do in WoW. That could as simple as having an Orc Druid (which is honestly probably the best way to realize the more spellcasting-focused Shaman specializations) but it could also mean having the party need to advocate for allowing their Forsaken party member to be allowed to enter Stormwind without being immediately cut down.

The faction conflict could be an interesting source of drama and tension within a party - rather than just assuming a total incompatibility, perhaps lean into the idea that we do, in fact, need to band together to face graver threats.

To be clear, NPCs have often and frequently reached across the factional divide. In Cataclysm, we were introduced to a pair of young paladins, Tarenar Sunstrike and Gidwin Goldbraids, a Blood Elf and Dwarf, who traveled the Plaguelands hoping to join the Argent Crusade (a faction-neutral force dedicated to protecting the world from the Scourge). Or we have Tehd and Marius, a Forsaken Warlock and Night Elf Demon Hunter who go around looking for powerful demons to slay.

The freedom, I think, of running a WoW-based D&D game is that you can really mix things up. Sentinel Hill is the central "town" of the rural realm of Westfall, basically the Kansas of the kingdom of Stormwind, and is basically the second zone that human players are expected to go in the natural quest flow from the human starting area - back in the day, you'd head there around level 10 (remember that WoW originally had a max level of 60, so 10 was really just getting started - I'd say it's basically the equivalent of level 3 in D&D. You started to get talent points/pick your specialization at 10, much as in D&D you get your subclass at level 3). 

But there's nothing saying you can't have an adventure set in Westfall that is far higher-stakes than anything that we've seen in the zone before (ok, to be fair, during the Legion pre-launch event in 2016, there was a full-scale demon invasion, a tier 4 challenge if ever I heard of one).

In other words, if your party is a mixed-faction group, that doesn't mean that firmly Alliance or Horde areas are necessarily going to be safe for everyone, and even if you've got some in-narrative explanation for why that Worgen is allowed to walk around Thunder Bluff without issue, it doesn't mean that hostile factions in your campaign's story aren't going to make these "safe" territories a bit dangerous.

While I don't know that it tells it with profound nuance (it does have its moments,) the overall "message" or "theme" of WoW is that these divides leave lasting scars, but at the end of the day, we're all just people, and when we can recognize that, we can work together toward a common goal (is that goal usually fighting some different "other?" For sure. It is Warcraft, after all).

But also, conflict is where we get drama, and while you want a party that can ultimately find a way to work together, I think having inherent resentments and grievances in a mixed-faction party could make for some really interesting roleplay.

As We Periodically Do: Asking What We Want for 5.5 Books

 Arcana Unleashed is, I think, maybe the most successful supplement to come out for D&D since the debut of 5.5 edition, other than the core books.

For the main book, we have a big influx of spells, feats, subclasses, and I think we have a pretty good hit to miss ratio.

I think it's likely that the impetus for this book was first to reprint the four Wizard subclasses that had been in the 2014 PHB but not the 2024 one, given the standardization of 4 subclasses per class in that book.

Even if it wound up reducing the number of updates for Clerics and Wizards, I actually applaud the "4 for everyone" approach that we got in the PHB. The funny thing, though, is that the books we've gotten since haven't taken the same even-handed approach.

5.5 is still relatively new, though we're now two years out, so it's not brand-new. In that time, we've gotten a revisit to Eberron (a book whose purpose I think was to get the Artificer updated to catch it up with the other 5.0 classes,) an adventure anthology in Dragon Delves, the Forgotten Realms books last year, Horrors Within, and the these two with Arcana Unleashed, with Deadfall giving us our first full campaign book of 5.5 (which, interestingly, matches the last 5.0 campaign book's level range, at least roughly).

Now, I have all of the adventure books, because I'm a bit of a collector, but I don't really use them - to me, a big part of the fun of DMing is building by own campaign. Thus, I'm more likely to borrow ideas from them, or monsters. But I recognize this isn't necessarily the typical thing: plenty of groups and players run these adventures, even exclusively.

In 5E's early days, we'd get a lengthy adventure book at least once a year. But they seem to have leaned away from that model. I don't know if it's just that most players don't make it through all those adventures (the only one I finished was part of Adventurer's League, with a lot of players who were not there for the RP, and my friend who was DMing was keeping things moving quite fast).

What I find interesting is that the early days of 5E - and actually, not even that early - some of the big supplements we got were sort of universal rules expansions.

Volo's Guide to Monsters was something of an expansion to the monster manual, and while it had pretty extensive lore chapters (a fair degree of which seemed to be retconned away) it was also the biggest influx of monsters for DMs to use, as well as new playable races.

Then, we got Xanathar's Guide to Everything, which provided at least two subclasses for every class other than the Wizard, along with the biggest addition of spells and, for DMs, a far easier encounter-building system than what we had gotten in the DMG (it was a big improvement, and one I used for a long time, though I think the 2024 DMG one is what I currently find most effective).

Later, we got Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, which provided another good influx of monsters to use, along with some more playable races (a little less broad in scope).

And then, finally, Tasha's Cauldron of Everything gave us more subclasses and, I think pretty crucially, new variant rules that divorced ability score bonuses from races - something I, frankly, think they erred in then stapling to backgrounds in the 2024 PHB and would not mind seeing a similar corrective.

Tasha's did do a fair amount of consolidation: giving us setting-agnostic versions of the Artificer as well as several subclasses. In other words, WotC has always done a fair bit of reprinting (even Xanathars repeated some options that had shown up in Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide).

Toward the end of 5.0, WotC released a "Rules Expansion Box Set," which included Xanathar's, Tasha's, and the new Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse. This latter book effectively cut out much of the length lore chapters from Volo's and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, and included nearly all of the monsters in the books, plus most of the playable races that had shown up in either (along with some that had shown up in setting books,) with a few revisions.

This box set, if you didn't already have those books, was the obvious "next thing to buy" if you were getting into 5E and had only gotten the Core Books. Truly, with those six in your collection, I'd say you were basically covered when it came to having what you needed for a decade of games.

This might appeal to me more strongly than other players/DMs, but I really prefer rules expansion books over just about everything else. As much as I love, say, the Ravenloft setting (and wish the Planescape set had been better,) and I truly think Van Richen's Guide to Ravenloft is my favorite 5E supplement they came out with, the books that provide the most utility are, in my opinion, these ones that sort of get out of the way of the people trying to come up with original stories (aka, DMs and players) and just gives them more stuff to work with.

I thus rank a broad expansion of player options and/or monsters as the best thing that WotC can release. Next, I'd probably put campaign setting books, maybe at an equal footing with thematic monster books (the latter being stuff like Fizban's or Bigby's).

Arcana Unleashed (the main book, of course) is thus sort of in that first category. There is some extensive stuff about the various magic-school-affiliated factions, that's all well and good and probably something I'll never touch in any of my campaigns. But the crux of it is player options, and that, to me, feels like fuel for player creativity.

The slightly narrower focus on the Arcane theme kind of pushes it toward that second category.

What I wonder, though, is if WotC has shifted their philosophy against "of Everything"-style books. Truly, Xanathar's and Tasha's have no singular thematic throughline, other than cheeky little commentary written in the voices of their title characters.

But what they ultimately gave us was just more stuff to use, and they wound up being, I would think, the most popular supplements in 5.0.

Given the UAs we've gotten in recent months, I suspect that we're going to have themed supplements for the forseeeable future: the announced Dark Sun book, some kind of "villain" book, now probably some Underdark book. Oddly, the revisits to older subclasses from Xanathar's seems to have been preparation for the Warcraft book (a game/franchise that can play different tones of fantasy about as well as D&D can).

But I was thinking: between Heroes of Faerun, Horrors Within, and Arcana Unleashed, we have still not gotten a new Druid subclass in 5.5 since the PHB.

There was something kind of nice about how the of Everything books really touched on each class and gave them cool stuff.