New Details on Eberron: Rising From the Last War

(I might just start calling the book Eberron.)

Well, in just a little over two months we're going to be getting the official Eberron book for 5th Edition.

I've never played a game set in Eberron, but the setting seems really cool, and frankly I think it's more up my alley than the Forgotten Realms in terms of tone and originality.

The premise of Eberron is this:

The continent of Korvaire, one of the major continents on the world of Eberron, had been at war for a very long time, with different kingdoms clashing against one another in the Last War. And then, one day, the kingdom of Cyre just... was destroyed. An event called the Day of Mourning left the entire kingdom destroyed, with everyone dead.

The other kingdoms ceased their hostilities in the face of this devastating event, ending the war out of fear that further conflict could lead to another such event. But this has resulted in a very uneasy peace - the war's conflicts weren't really resolved, with no real winners or losers.

Beyond the kingdoms, however, there are also powerful houses - the Dragonmarked Houses - which are something like massive megacorporations that hold monopolies on certain industries. Members of these houses carry dragonmarks - a sort of mystical birthmark - which give them magical powers that help them in their given industries.

Among the Houses is House Cannith, who manufactured weapons of war and sold them to all sides. Their greatest creation are the Warforged - artificial humanoids bearing a resemblance to golems, but with humanoids intelligence and free will. The Warforged were built as living weapons to fight in the war, but with the end of the conflict, they've been forced to find new meaning for their lives.

One of the major elements of the setting is the way in which the Houses, and the general study of magic, has led to a ubiquity of magic. Ordinary people might know cantrips or ritual spells and use them in their jobs. Magic has allowed for the creation of airships and a system of trains known as the lightning rail. There are newspapers and many other "modern" conveniences that Eberron has arrived at through magic rather than pure science.

This probably manifests in the most exciting way in terms of gameplay with the Artificer class. Artificers are the first fully new class to be introduced in 5E since the player's handbook, and the Eberron book will have three subclass options for them (those of us who got the Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron will get an updated version that includes the Artificer with one subclass.) Artificers use magical inventions to provide utility and fight monsters.

Tonally, Eberron borrows a great deal from pulp novels from the middle of the 20th century. With all the intrigue and cloak-and-dagger shenanigans the Dragonmarked Houses get up to, there's plenty of opportunity for noir-ish mysteries in places like the city of Sharn, a metropolis with skyscrapers and plenty of air traffic.

There's tons of cool twists on classic D&D ideas, like wild Halflings who tame dinosaurs, or a society that uses Positive energy to live on forever as good-aligned undead. If you, like I do, tend to like to see the fantasy genre grow past the standard medievalism that so often defines it, this setting should be very appealing. (Of course, this is also coming from the guy who's super excited for Throne of Eldraine, the new Magic the Gathering set, which is based on Arthurian knights and Grimm's fairy tales, so I can enjoy the classics as well.)

But let's get to the details:

The book will have four new playable races: the Changelings, Shifters, Kalashtar, and Warforged. There will also be new sub-races for existing races that establish people as Dragonmarked - this includes "subraces" for races like Human or Half Elf that don't typically have subraces.

There will be adventure location maps, similar to the ones found in Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, such as airships and lightning rail trains.

There will be a level-1 adventure to introduce the setting.

There will, of course, be tons of information about the setting and its various locations and ongoing plots.

And there will be 38 new monsters!

Oh, and there's a new cover for the book! Apparently they just swapped an image from within the book with the old cover, but I think it's a better look. The new one depicts a warforged wizard and a halfling ranger with a dinosaur beast companion exploring a canyon while some ominous winged creature (I couldn't tell if it was a dragon or a demon) watches them from above.

Getting the Campaign Back on Track

I think the biggest challenge to being a dungeon master for D&D is just getting people to show up.

I love running the game, particularly running my own story. The players always come up with different ways to do things than I expect, and I'm now thinking of how I might shift the adventure around.

Basically, the players now know that they're going up against a vampire named Baron Orszag (yes, that's just the Hungarian name for "land," like how the Hungarian word for Hungary is "Magyarország," because my dad was born there and my grandfather had Bela Lugosi's accent) who engineered a subtle plot to have their patron, Baron Angir, killed (Angir is also a vampire, but a good guy.)

Anyway, we've been unable to play a lot this year due to various scheduling issues, but now that I've A: shifted the game to play at my own apartment, which is closer for most of the players and B: added my other apartment-mate to the game (she's married to the first apartment-mate) I've got enough people to, I hope, consistently get people together to play (my general rule is we want at least four to show up not counting me, and with two players and the DM living where we play, it should be easier to get that.)

We have a lot of other games going on - one of my players also runs a game here that I play in, and that first roommate is about to start a Curse of Strahd game as well (I'm going to play in that as well! And yes, I'm aware that it's funny we're both starting big Vampire-themed adventures at the same time, but I've had this one planned out for over a year, so there.)

Anyway, we didn't have any combat encounters this session, but we'll be starting the next one with a big fight against an angry mob (I might alter the Bar Brawl stat block to treat them as a swarm) as well as a lesser vampire (using the Blood Drinker Vampire stats from Ravnica) and a pair of gargoyles.

It should be a fun opportunity for the players to shake the rust off, and I think that with a CR 8 vampire and two CR 3 gargoyles (if I'm remembering those stats right) plus some potential threat from the crowd, it should be a decently challenging but manageable fight.

Anyway, I'm hoping we'll get another game in soon - if not next week then the week after - and get this game back into gear soon. There's a lot of fun to be had and...

If by some chance you're in this game and read this blog without having told me you do, maybe don't read the next bit...

Right? Good?

There's also three dungeons in this adventure, with some major twists and ideas I'm really proud of that I'm super excited to try out.

What WoW Info We Can Expect at Blizzcon this Year

We're now less than two months from Blizzcon.

BFA's current state is the following: we've had our second major patch, bringing with it the second "tier raid." We know that 8.2.5 is on the horizon, coming with story developments, various balance changes, and updated models for Goblins and Worgen.

Given that 8.2.5 is not live yet, it's unlikely we'll be seeing 8.3 drop within less than two months, which means that we're almost certain to get to Blizzcon before we see 8.3 go live.

We know that there will be an 8.3, because Blizzard has said that the end of the Eternal Palace raid will make it clear who the final boss of BFA is. Admittedly, a lot of the community doesn't seem to think it is that clear, but to me, if that statement was made in good faith and not just a total lie, it has to mean that N'zoth is BFA's final boss, as it was his escape that ended the Eternal Palace.

Another reason to believe strongly that there will be an 8.3 is that Blizzard did a two-tier expansion once in Warlords of Draenor, and basically everyone felt super cheated by such an insubstantial expansion.

So, we're approaching Blizzcon without the final patch of the current expansion out, despite the fact that we're expecting the next expansion to be announced.

The good news is that there's a ton of precedent for this. Mists of Pandaria was actually the first expansion to be fully complete before we heard about its successor. If you watch the announcement trailer for Cataclysm, for example, it starts with a roughly second-long preview of Icecrown Citadel, which had not yet come out. Wrath was announced before we got 2.4, and Mists was announced before we got 4.3.

Now, what this does mean is that we might not get to see as much of the new expansion as we're hoping.

Expansion announcements are always kind of strange, because we get the very first impression they want to give us of a new expansion. Sometimes, it's ludicrously polished, like how Legion's announcement (which was at Gamescom - probably because they didn't want to have to wait until Blizzcon given how long Warlords' tail was) had the Mardum half of the Demon Hunter starting experience more or less how it turned out on live. But it's also sometimes pretty rough - Mists of Pandaria, for example, basically said "yes, we've got Pandaren and Monks, and there's going to be a vaguely Chinese feel to the expansion" but we got nothing about the centrality of the Alliance and Horde conflict or the Mogu or much about Pandaria itself until a couple months later. In fact, I think the only thing they could show was stuff from the Wandering Isle.

When Cataclysm was announced, they actually spent a good deal of time talking about Icecrown Citadel and the various features of 3.3 - including the dungeon finder, which was kind of a huge deal.

I don't know if we'll be getting another huge, transformational change to the way that raids or dungeons work in 8.3, but I could imagine that at Blizzcon we're going to get a lot of info about 8.3 and just the basic gist of the new expansion.

So what details can we count on seeing?

The name and general premise: We'll know where it's set, and we'll get a general "vibe" for the expansion. Like, will this be the Shadowlands expansion with a bunch of spooky undead? Will it be a dragon-themed expansion on the Dragon Isles? That sort of thing should be covered.

New Character Options: New races and new classes are usually the major headlining elements to a new expansion, and we'll probably get a look at these kinds of details. Now, granted, when BC was announced, they knew Blood Elves would join the Horde, but they hadn't actually decided on the new Alliance race - Pandaren had actually been a possibility. I, for one, am really happy they went with Draenei, who might be my favorite playable race. Still, that was the old days, and I think they'd be unlikely to skip such a major detail.

New Level Cap: There were only two expansions that only raised the cap by 5, but given the possibility of a level squish, we might see something crazy like "new level cap: 60."

Beyond that, it's a bit early to say. I'm hoping that they'll do this more like Blizzcon '09 (holy crap that was 10 years ago) when they gave us a bunch about ICC but also a fairly robust amount of detail about Cataclysm. It'd be good to see things like dungeons, important characters, and details about whatever new systems get worked in.

Naturally, a lot of this is dependent on how far along they are in developing these things. How many zones are polished enough to show off? Naturally, it could all turn out like Blizzcon '11, where we got the basics and had a big series of posts (or maybe panels at other conventions) to talk about Mists in depth.

Still, I'm very confident we'll get the next expansion announced, and if it's not on the PTR by then (which seems very possible,) we'll also get a very big info dump on 8.3.

In a lot of ways, I think BFA has more to resolve than it can in one more patch. So I'm curious to see exactly where the focus will be. I'm leaning toward N'zoth, but that will mean that the Sylvanas story and with it the general Alliance/Horde war story is unlikely to come to a conclusion here. So unless they're going to pull a Wrath and make this a four-tier expansion, or if they're willing to resolve a ton of plot in questing content rather than raids, I think there are a lot of threads that could carry through to 9.0.

Are the Shadowlands a Reasonable Setting for a WoW Expansion?

To avoid being clickbait-y: my argument is going to be yes.

But let's get into it:

WoW, like basically every RPG that exists, from Final Fantasy to the Elder Scrolls, is heavily influenced by Dungeons & Dragons - a game you might have seen me posting a great deal about on this blog.

D&D's larger cosmology, which usually applies even if you're making your own homebrewed settings, is built on the idea of different planes. Your ordinary, mundane world is the Prime Material Plane - and in fact, all the mundane worlds where what we'd consider normal people come from (normal including elves and dwarves and the like) are in that same plane. There are a bunch of different planes as well, though, like the Inner Planes - which notably include the Elemental Planes - and the Outer Planes, which is where one tends to find gods, as well as angels, demons, and devils (in D&D, those latter two things are distinct from one another, though what you'd probably think of as demons in general in most settings are referred to as "fiends.")

But the planes the absolute closest to the prime material plane are two sort of reflections of the material world: the Feywild and the Shadowfell.

Now, obviously Warcraft has elemental planes (they even have distinctive names, where in D&D they're just "The Elemental Plane of Water," etc.) But we've also learned more about planes that feel very closely equivalent to the Feywild and the Shadowfell, namely the Emerald Dream and the Shadowlands.

Now, granted, the Feywild is much more like the land of Faerie as derived from Celtic mythology, being a place filled with magic and Fair Folk (aka Fairies) who act in ways totally foreign to normal people - meaning that they're just as likely to be murderously dangerous as they are to be genuinely helpful, and it's not going to be terribly obvious which way things will go based on appearance.

The Emerald Dream, outside of corruption by the Nightmare, is a much more obviously benevolent place, home to benevolent Wild Gods (which one could argue is actually more akin to D&D's Beastlands - an outer plane that exists between Neutral Good and Chaotic Good.)

If the Feywild is lush and filled with unpredictable magic and creatures, the Shadowfell is a bleak, grey reflection of the world that tends to be filled with undead and ruins - if you've ever played Dark Souls III, you could probably imagine most of the stuff in that game to look right at home in the Shadowfell. Actually, probably most of Bloodborne too. The popular Ravenloft gothic horror setting for D&D takes place in a group of pocket demiplanes called the Domains of Dread, which can be thought of as kind of soap bubbles within the greater Shadowfell.

In WoW, the Shadowlands serve a more specific mystical purpose - it's where the spirits of the dead go when people die. And whether it's a transitory plane before they go onto some afterlife (or are reincarnated) or if it's purely just the "underworld" hasn't been explicitly answered. Ironically, of all the planes in WoW, it's the one you've probably gone to the most frequently, given that our ghosts that pop in at the graveyard are technically traversing the Shadowlands.

Right: so would the Shadowlands work as a setting?

Basically all WoW expansions have primarily taken place in Warcraft's equivalent of the Prime Material plane. You could argue that Outland, being partially sunk into the Twisting Nether, makes it a planar adventure, and Draenor is of course in a different timeline (though potentially the same material plane.)

For many years, the Emerald Dream was considered an obvious location for an expansion - indeed, there was even work done on a large Emerald Dream area that found its way into Vanilla files - though whether this was meant to be a raid or an expansion I don't know. But Blizzard decided that the lore wouldn't make for a good expansion - not that there's not interesting stuff for the Dream, but that it just wouldn't be visually interesting.

The Emerald Dream is said to be a version of Azeroth that exists as if no civilization had ever risen. The Sundering never happened, and there's no buildings or settlements. So not a whole lot to work with for a whole expansion. Granted, we did see bits of Thunder Bluff in the Emerald Nightmare raid, so maybe that notion has been retconned. But it seems unlikely that we'll get that one.

But are the Shadowlands bound the same way?

In a rather pessimistic way, one can think of the Emerald Dream as the "before" picture of Azeroth. The Shadowlands, being the land of the dead, could almost be thought of as the "after." This is a place where civilization has arisen and all the changes the people of the world have wrought on the planet have taken place - but it's all in the past. Again, I'm reminded of Dark Souls III, where toward the end of the game (and a big chunk of the Ringed City DLC) you travel seemingly to the farthest possible future and see the many great civilizations' ruins all tumbling and crushing together, covered in ash. So you'd actually have plenty of opportunities to have interesting locations for us to visit in the Shadowlands.

But then there's the other issue: if we're literally in the Shadowlands when we travel as a ghost, shouldn't it really just look exactly like the real world?

See, in D&D, the Shadowfell isn't really where the dead go when they die - characters who die in D&D just die, and then they either get resurrected, or they go to the Outer Planes for their afterlife. The "ghost run" is really just a gameplay mechanic with some lore to explain it. In D&D, the Shadowfell is truly a different place - there's, for example, a city called Evernight in the Shadowfell that is the reflection of the prime material plane's city of Neverwinter, that, while a clear reflection of the other city, is fundamentally different, with its own inhabitants.

In WoW, you could imagine that the Shadowlands as it truly appears is not simply the ghost-version of the world. Maybe as a ghost whose time hasn't yet come, you don't see it as it really is. Or maybe, there's a "Border Shadowlands" and a "Deep Shadowlands," similar to how D&D has the Ethereal Plane (which, I should note, is where you tend to find ghosts, for the record) has a "border" aspect to it that overlays with the prime material, and a "deep" aspect that has you move sort of fifth-dimensionally into a misty world that has portals to the other inner planes. Perhaps the "Deep Shadowlands" could have its own places and even inhabitants.

Of course, alternatively, we could return to the connection with Ravenloft. The Domains of Dread are created by mysterious entities known as the "Dark Powers," who tend to find particularly evil (and usually tragically self-deluded) individuals and create demiplanes for them in which they are forced to live through their self-inflicted tragedies over and over, acting as both rulers of their domains but also prisoners within them.

This would be a way for the Shadowlands to have its cake and eat it too - being a reflection of Azeroth, but also allowing for cool new locations.

And you know why I think this would totally work? Because we've already seen one of these Warcraft Domains of Dread.

Helheim.

I don't remember if it's explicitly stated, but I strongly believe that Helheim is in the Shadowlands. But it's also not the equivalent space of anywhere on Azeroth (we know of.) And Helya, as a totally tragic figure who then did great damage to the world only to be trapped in her own realm totally fits as a Ravenloft-style Dark Lord (not to be confused with the Dark Powers.)

So one could imagine that a WoW expansion set in the Shadowlands could be a series of zones like Helheim, each with a different theme around the entities stuck there.

Thros, the land of Gorak Tul, was also not explicitly but almost certainly in the Shadowlands as well. Now, Thros did look exactly like the Crimson Forest, true, but it was also created for just a single (admittedly climactic) quest, and so I'd argue the reason it wasn't its own Helheim-like mini-zone was simply a question of developer efficiency.

I've generally assumed Ny'alotha is a place in the physical world - namely that it was simply the prison in which N'zoth was held (which would also mean that it was his capital city, like Ahn'qiraj for C'thun and possibly Ahn'Kahet for Yogg-Saron, assuming the latter really spanned all of what is now Northrend.) But given that N'zoth seems to be truly free of his bonds (and seemingly mobile - unless that was just his shadowy projection... I had previously assumed Old Gods couldn't really move given that they were burrowed into Azeroth) maybe the fact that Ilgynoth talked about going to Ny'alotha when we killed it, perhaps it's an Old God-y, void-corrupted area of the Shadowlands?

Given all these locations, and obviously with the potential for Blizzard to just make up more (I sure hadn't heard of Stormheim before Legion was announced,) I think you could very easily use the Shadowlands as a full expansion setting.

And frankly, given that I think WoW is usually best when it's going for the spooky horror stuff - between the Undead questing zones, Karazhan, practically all of Wrath, Black Rook Hold, and Drustvar - I could totally be down for an expansion in the spookiest place of all. Give me the Lich King, Helya, Bwonsamdi, and a role for Sylvanas that doesn't involve as much genocide, and I'm going to be a very happy WoW player.

Sylvanas in the Key Art for Blizzcon

Blizzard released the "key art" for Blizzcon - the splash of characters from their various franchises that they're there to talk about.

The Diablo barbarian is at the center, which either means potentially disappointing a ton of people (whether it's fair that they're disappointed or not I won't say) by simply talking Diablo Immortal, or driving people crazy in a good way by officially confirming Diablo IV.

But let's talk WoW, shall we?

The key art figure is Sylvanas.

Now, that's all the real news, to be honest. If you're here just for the facts (m'am,) we're done.

But let's look at what this could mean.

In 2017, the Blizzcon key art for World of Warcraft was Jaina - ironically in her old Dalaran Mage outfit, rather than her badass new Lord Admiral look. Still, while technically not telling us much, it did suggest rather strongly that we'd finally get to see Jaina's homeland and that she'd play a major role in the expansion's story.

To be fair, since the end of the Dazar'alor raid, in which she was the final boss, Jaina's role in BFA has somewhat lessened to more of a simple "main Alliance representative" state. I'm very eager to see how the whole Derek Proudmoore plotline goes (and hoping that Sylvanas made a miscalculation because she didn't know about Calia) but I think Jaina, with her quite compelling story in 8.0, has done most of what she was meant to do in BFA.

So what of Sylvanas?

Sylvanas is obviously a huge part of BFA. Always one of the most interesting and polarizing characters in WoW, her status as Warchief has put her destructive ways centerstage, no longer allowing her to hang out in the back as the Horde's own token evil team member. As an instigator, she's been much more prominent than her opposite number Anduin (one of the big reasons I wish we'd get more of a moral balance between the factions is that it might allow the Alliance to actually do something - and yes, I shouldn't ignore Dazar'alor, which was rather big and also rather ethically questionable - but far from obviously evil the way that, say, Teldrassil was.)

But her presence in the key art for Blizzcon 2019 suggests very strongly to me that Sylvanas' story is not going to be resolved in BFA.

I hear a lot of speculation that N'zoth is going to be saved for the next expansion at the earliest, but frankly, I don't think so. We were told that it'd be clear who the final boss of BFA was after the Eternal Palace raid, and I sure as hell didn't see Sylvanas unleashed from an ancient, millennia-old prison.

The reason I don't mind fighting N'zoth "prematurely" is that A: it's not premature. We've been waiting to fight this thing since he was first mentioned way back in Cataclysm - which came out nine years ago. And B: N'zoth is the master manipulator. While Blizzard might even sell it as if we decisively defeat him at the end of BFA, they have an infinite license for N'zoth to re-emerge in some form and simply reveal that dying at our hands wasn't even a setback - it was all part of the plan.

There's no datamining, no leaks, nothing like that to back this up except logical storytelling, but my theory (and I won't say it's my prediction exactly, as much as it's where I think the story logically needs to go) is that BFA ends with us killing N'zoth, but in so doing corrupting Azeroth (the Titan, to be specific.) And then, someone makes the hard decision - maybe it's Sylvanas, maybe not - that Azeroth needs to die. We can't risk a Void Titan emerging and destroying the universe. We did what we could to save her, but with the Old Gods finally triumphant, we need to do the unimaginable in order to prevent the worst.

But then, there's a loophole. Where do the souls of the dead go when they die? Bwonsamdi calls it the Other Side, but it's known more broadly as the Shadowlands.

And who has dedicated herself to understanding the dead and how to bring the dead back? Sylvanas Windrunner.

And what a nasty position we'd all find ourselves in. The Alliance rages against Sylvanas for her many terrible crimes against them. The Horde rages against her for her tyrannical rule. But it turns out we need her, because without her, the world soul is lost forever.

That's all totally speculative, of course. But Sylvanas' place in the key art suggests, to me, that she'll continue to be an important figure in the next expansion.

Now, to be fair, there is a pattern that could mean that Sylvanas is both this expansion's end boss and also continues to play a prominent role.

BFA doesn't have "tier sets" but it does have major raids versus minor ones, similar to how things would be broken down in other expansions. Legion had the Emerald Nightmare and Trial of Valor as "minor raids," while Nighthold, Tomb of Sargeras, and Antorus were the tier raids.

BFA could be broken down in a similar way. Uldir and Crucible of Storms are the minor raids, while Battle for Dazar'alor, the Eternal Palace, and whatever the last raid is will fill those "tier raid" roles.

And let's think about something: Dazar'alor and the Eternal Palace have two things in common regarding their final bosses. Neither died (or at least, didn't stay dead - it's unclear if Azshara was dead or unconscious before N'zoth woke her up.) And both were in the Warbringers shorts that came out prior to BFA.

There's one more character from those shorts: Syvlanas Windrunner. So might we actually see her as the final boss, and also see her survive the raid?

Now, granted, doing so would really raise some eyebrows given Blizzard's insistence that Sylvanas is not just Garrosh 2.0. Having her as the final boss of an expansion and then lead us into the next one is exactly what they did with Garrosh. But it would complete that pattern, and humans freaking love to see patterns.

Regardless of whether Sylvanas or N'zoth wind up being the final boss fight of BFA, I'm feeling quite confident that Sylvanas will be a major player in expansion eight. And to me, that suggests that the subtle death and death-magic theme of BFA will be far less subtle next expansion, much as Legion's Old God themes became far more prominent in BFA.

Lovecraftian Subclasses in the Latest Unearthed Arcana

After the last UA gave us a wild magic Barbarian subclass and a psychic-themed monk subclass, the latest gives us new subclasses for the Sorcerer and Barbarian, as well as a new cantrip.

Both involve elements common with the works of Lovecraft and cosmic horror.

Sorcerers get the Aberrant Mind sorcerous origin. The notion in this subclass is that your sorcerer got their powers after being tainted by some kind of aberration - being born in some place warped by the Far Realm, maybe having been enslaved by an Aboleth, or even having nearly undergone Cereomorphosis, only for the process (which would have seen your body essentially overtaken by a nascent Mind Flayer) to fail.

Aberrant Minds get several free spells (not counting against the "known spell" limit) that, when cast using Sorcery Points, actually count as Psionics and thus don't require any components (it took me a very long time to figure out that was the distinction.) You can also eventually find yourself transformed in various body-horror ways to give various physical benefits. Definitely one of the creepier subclasses, and if my Great Old One Warlock ever multiclasses into Sorcerer, this'd probably have to be the subclass for him.

Warlocks get the Lurker in the Deep. Now, if you've watched Critical Role's second campaign, you'll be familiar with Fjord (pronounced just "Ford,") the well-meaning but deceptive half-orc who woke up after nearly drowning in a shipwreck with a magical falchion by his side. Fjord is a Hexblade warlock, but his patron is less Shadowfell-y and more like a Great Old One - a massive underwater sea monster titan with, just, too many eyes called Uk'otoa. Well, even if I think it fits Great Old One, it's an even better match for the Lurker in the Deep, which has a patron that's some ancient underwater creature like an Aboleth, Kraken, or Leviathan - maybe even something from the Plane of Water. In addition to some obvious aquatic-based abilities, you can also have your patron come and aid you in various ways, and summon a tentacle of theirs to help in combat.

So what could this all mean?

After seeing the Order Domain, Circle of Spores, School of Invention (which sort of became a magic item,) as well as several Ravnica races that were first tested in Unearthed Arcana before the Ravnica sourcebook was announced, I now look at a lot of UA articles as potential hints for something in the future.

On one hand, the psionic nature of Aberrant Mind and the Monks' Way of the Astral Self makes me wonder if they might be gearing up for some Dark Sun-themed release, which I know to be a popular (and very different from both Forgotten Realms and Eberron) setting. On the other hand, Lurker in the Deep sure as hell ain't going to be much of a thing on the desert world of Athas (unless there's some vast ocean there I'm not aware of.)

The truth is that these could just be ideas they're tossing at the wall. Or, we might get something more akin to Xanathar's Guide to Everything, which is not really about any one particular theme but adds some "missing pieces" that feel like they fill out the options pretty well.

But given how my homebrew setting has cosmic horror monsters that even fiends consider dangerous as its most prominent supernatural threat, I'm very curious to see if we see more of that sort of thing in future 5E releases. After all, with Out of the Abyss and Descent into Avernus, we've got two major adventures featuring the headlining fiend types. Maybe a bit more in the way of the aberration is what we could use next.

How Much to Demand of a TTRPG System

So, I've been reading a bit about Pathfinder 2.0. Years ago, a friend started talking about running a Pathfinder game - this was prior to D&D 5th Edition, when the common wisdom was that Pathfinder was the better game. Not having had any TTRPG experience, I had no idea what the differences might be, and so I said I'd make a half-orc beast master in an effort to play against my usual types (which tend to be very arcane, urban-friendly, and plate-wearing if I can manage it.)

Now, I'm about four years into a very deep delve into D&D 5th Edition. I have sixteen official D&D books, plus two Kobold Press books (Tome of Beasts and Creature Codex) as well as a pre-ordered Eberron: Rising from the Last War not to mention a strong inclination to get Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus (you had me at Infernal War Machines.)

While I've been experiencing major campaign frustrations lately (we've played less than once a month this year) I'm nevertheless steeped in D&D - its mechanics, and increasingly, its lore (though given my homebrew setting, which even has its own outer planes and gods with no real crossover with the D&D canon except Great Old Ones like Tharizdun whom I reason could cross between multiverses as a being of the Far Realm, it's more for inspiration than real background.)

Those books are, honestly, a rather significant financial investment in D&D, even if I've tended to buy them on sale (feeling guilty for supporting Amazon rather than my local game stores, but a 40% discount is hard to pass up.) And that's not to mention the huge time commitment as well - it's hard enough to corral players together for my game without learning and then teaching them a whole new game system.

And yet, there are intriguing ideas I've read about in Pathfinder Second Edition that make me want to take a look at it.

The first thing that struck me is that the concept of "race" is replaced by "ancestry." Now, while this might in practice be merely a semantic change, it's something I appreciate. For one thing, the edition seems to be emphasizing that none of these peoples are inherently evil. In the Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron, they justify non-evil Goblins and Orcs by suggesting that Eberron is more distant from gods like Maglubiyet and Gruumsh, whose evil filters down to their people.

But I'm always uncomfortable with the idea that any person is truly evil based on their ancestry, given the rather obvious real-world racism such beliefs mirror. To be certain there are some cultural practices that are passed down that I'd consider evil, but it's not in the genes (it's also important to note that every culture has its evils, and usually the way we demonize others is by minimizing our own flaws while magnifying others'.)

There seems to be a lot more freedom in Pathfinder both for building characters and taking actions in combat. In the latter, it appears that feats - a "potentially every four levels or so if you want to give up an ASI" thing in D&D - are the main way that you build your character. It can mean the difference (I think - again, haven't read the book) between something like a Fighter versus something like a Paladin. It's how you multiclass. It's even how you say that your character is a half-elf or a half-orc - apparently half elves, for example, are humans with a feat that denotes their other heritage (I'm curious if you can do it the other way - be an elf with a feat denoting human heritage.)

In combat, the way it seems to work, you get three actions per turn - but no specific allowance for movement. Which seems to suggest you can attack more if you plant your feet.

My sense is that Pathfinder 2E is more complex than D&D 5E, being less beginner-friendly but also letting greater customization.

What I don't know is if those rules get complex everywhere.

See, here's the thing: one of the things I like about D&D 5E is that a lot of the stuff you do in game doesn't need to have specific mechanics. You can boil down almost everything to skill checks and saving throws and then have the DM just sort of "yes, and" the party.

I know there are rules written for stuff like downtime, with tables to roll on and the like, but to a large extent I like to just run it logically as a story.

It's only really combat where I get very strict about rules (and I'm willing to bend those when it makes for a good moment - like letting someone cast Mage Hand and pour a healing potion into the mouth of someone who's about to die.)

And I get that people have different ways they like to interface with the game. If I want strictly rules-based gaming, I tend to go for video games. There are a lot of options for rules-tinkering strategy. Indeed, while I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Magic: the Gathering, higher level play (which, playing Online, it all seemed to be) sucked some of the fun out of it, when I was more interested in coming up with fun, flavorful decks. In fact, the release of the Ravnica book for D&D was really exciting for me because I love that setting (and ok, loved that set as well in large part because it was much more balanced than the previous ones) and I was (and am) excited to play through stories set there.

Again, I'm speaking from kind of a place of ignorance - I don't really know enough about Pathfinder to know whether I'd like it more or less (or equally in different ways) than D&D 5E. But I'm also wondering a bit whether it would even make that much of a difference.