War nomenclature in the Warcraft series has always been a little funny. Obviously, the truth is that the First through Third Wars were just the first three games. But while the first two were the first two wars between the Alliance (or what would become the Alliance) and the Horde, the third was really against the Scourge and the Burning Legion.
And given that there was a whole huge war that spanned from the middle of Wrath questing through the end of Mists of Pandaria - a longer war than the current one - it's a bit funny that they've decided to call the conflict at the center of Battle for Azeroth the Fourth War.
So: today 8.2.5 came, and we got the conclusion to the War Campaign. What does it mean? Well, let's go into spoiler territory.
Tuesday, September 24, 2019
Link's Awakening
I never had any Gameboy. The Switch is really the first mobile gaming platform I've ever had (not counting an iPhone, which to be fair is actually a pretty substantial part of that field.)
The first Zelda game I ever got was Ocarina of Time - I would later get Link to the Past in college, despite having had an SNES since I was 10. While now, 21 years later, being first introduced to a game series at 12 feels pretty lifelong, I nevertheless felt like a bit of a newcomer.
Zelda is, I'd argue, Nintendo's most prestigious franchise. While Mario is obviously the headliner, he's also far more saturated - you can expect multiple Mario games per console generation. With Zelda, you tend to get one or two. The Wii U (which I think already stands as Nintendo's "forgotten console") technically had Breath of the Wild (that's the platform I have it on,) but much as Twilight Princess was a launch title for the Wii despite also being available on the Gamecube, Breath of the Wild feels more tied to the success of the Switch.
Zelda games are events. And as someone for whom Ocarina of Time is pretty hardwired into me as one of the most important games I've ever played, it's been kind of sad for me to say that I actually haven't really loved a Zelda game since Twilight Princess. Skyward Sword was too repetitive and disconnected - even if it had some really cool ideas - and Breath of the Wild is one of those games that has me feeling like I've gone insane given how passionately people love it when, to me, it abandons a ton of the things that I feel makes Zelda games Zelda games.
So it's kind of interesting to play Link's Awakening.
Released on the Gameboy, this was the fourth Zelda game, between A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time. In a lot of ways, the game was an attempt to shrink down the style established in Link to the Past to a game that can work on the Gameboy. It's actually kind of funny to me to think now that, given how different the original Zelda was and especially how different Adventure of Link was, that LttP and Link's Awakening are actually the only 2D Zelda games of what I think of as the "classic Zelda" style (actually, that's not necessarily true, given the other Gameboy games that came out later, like Oracle of Ages/Seasons and such, which I have not played but could also be of that style.)
The remake of Link's Awakening is sort of fascinating, then, in that (I'm given to understand) it really, quite purely, just recreates the 1993 game as it existed, but with modern graphics, sounds, and a few control elements to make it easier to play (taking advantage of the larger number of buttons to give the sword and shield dedicated inputs, for example.)
In the classic Zelda vein, you're presented with a world that you get to explore more fully as you gain new items. The sword lets you cut through bushes, there's a feather that lets you jump over holes, and, and you get bracers that let you lift rocks out of the way.
The map is very grid-like, in that old style, but given how very easy it is for the Switch to load the entire map, they do away with the one-square-at-a-time transition between locations except when it makes sense to do so - like if there's a chamber with doors.
Now, I'd been given to understand that Link's Awakening had a very weird, even Lynchian, tone to it, but so far I've only seen a couple of hints at that. I'm two dungeons into the game, having just opened up a third (but I need to find a way to get to its entrance.)
In terms of challenge, it's definitely not too bad - and I wonder if the smoother controls on the Switch have made it easier than it would be on the original two-button Gameboy.
But in terms of the recreation, the art style of the remake is utterly charming. The world is rendered in plastic-toy-like simplicity - a modern take on repetitive sprites of the early 2D era. But also portraying it almost like a play-set with your camera looking down toward it, the foreground and background blur slightly. The soundtrack has some classic Zelda music, but it's also arranged simplistically, giving it a light tone in keeping with the art style.
As someone who is a bit nostalgic for older Zelda games and on top of that never played the original version of Link's Awakening, this is actually pretty ideal for me.
Naturally, I'll be looking forward to Breath of the Wild 2 with interest (unless they change the name, this would, I think, be the first Zelda game to be a part two of something that's technically already a part X.) It's not that I disliked BotW, but I think I just missed some of the elements that it cut out - and felt like for all the freedom that the game gave you, it also made things feel a little more like a generic open-world game than Zelda is supposed to be.
The first Zelda game I ever got was Ocarina of Time - I would later get Link to the Past in college, despite having had an SNES since I was 10. While now, 21 years later, being first introduced to a game series at 12 feels pretty lifelong, I nevertheless felt like a bit of a newcomer.
Zelda is, I'd argue, Nintendo's most prestigious franchise. While Mario is obviously the headliner, he's also far more saturated - you can expect multiple Mario games per console generation. With Zelda, you tend to get one or two. The Wii U (which I think already stands as Nintendo's "forgotten console") technically had Breath of the Wild (that's the platform I have it on,) but much as Twilight Princess was a launch title for the Wii despite also being available on the Gamecube, Breath of the Wild feels more tied to the success of the Switch.
Zelda games are events. And as someone for whom Ocarina of Time is pretty hardwired into me as one of the most important games I've ever played, it's been kind of sad for me to say that I actually haven't really loved a Zelda game since Twilight Princess. Skyward Sword was too repetitive and disconnected - even if it had some really cool ideas - and Breath of the Wild is one of those games that has me feeling like I've gone insane given how passionately people love it when, to me, it abandons a ton of the things that I feel makes Zelda games Zelda games.
So it's kind of interesting to play Link's Awakening.
Released on the Gameboy, this was the fourth Zelda game, between A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time. In a lot of ways, the game was an attempt to shrink down the style established in Link to the Past to a game that can work on the Gameboy. It's actually kind of funny to me to think now that, given how different the original Zelda was and especially how different Adventure of Link was, that LttP and Link's Awakening are actually the only 2D Zelda games of what I think of as the "classic Zelda" style (actually, that's not necessarily true, given the other Gameboy games that came out later, like Oracle of Ages/Seasons and such, which I have not played but could also be of that style.)
The remake of Link's Awakening is sort of fascinating, then, in that (I'm given to understand) it really, quite purely, just recreates the 1993 game as it existed, but with modern graphics, sounds, and a few control elements to make it easier to play (taking advantage of the larger number of buttons to give the sword and shield dedicated inputs, for example.)
In the classic Zelda vein, you're presented with a world that you get to explore more fully as you gain new items. The sword lets you cut through bushes, there's a feather that lets you jump over holes, and, and you get bracers that let you lift rocks out of the way.
The map is very grid-like, in that old style, but given how very easy it is for the Switch to load the entire map, they do away with the one-square-at-a-time transition between locations except when it makes sense to do so - like if there's a chamber with doors.
Now, I'd been given to understand that Link's Awakening had a very weird, even Lynchian, tone to it, but so far I've only seen a couple of hints at that. I'm two dungeons into the game, having just opened up a third (but I need to find a way to get to its entrance.)
In terms of challenge, it's definitely not too bad - and I wonder if the smoother controls on the Switch have made it easier than it would be on the original two-button Gameboy.
But in terms of the recreation, the art style of the remake is utterly charming. The world is rendered in plastic-toy-like simplicity - a modern take on repetitive sprites of the early 2D era. But also portraying it almost like a play-set with your camera looking down toward it, the foreground and background blur slightly. The soundtrack has some classic Zelda music, but it's also arranged simplistically, giving it a light tone in keeping with the art style.
As someone who is a bit nostalgic for older Zelda games and on top of that never played the original version of Link's Awakening, this is actually pretty ideal for me.
Naturally, I'll be looking forward to Breath of the Wild 2 with interest (unless they change the name, this would, I think, be the first Zelda game to be a part two of something that's technically already a part X.) It's not that I disliked BotW, but I think I just missed some of the elements that it cut out - and felt like for all the freedom that the game gave you, it also made things feel a little more like a generic open-world game than Zelda is supposed to be.
Monday, September 23, 2019
Homebrewing Kick: Lesser Death Knights and Ancient Mechs
My homebrew setting has a couple elements that maybe don't set it apart in terms of their presence, but in their prominence.
It is a setting with a fallen, technologically advanced civilization. It's also one in which there is basically a massive undead army that is currently leaderless and confined to a place in the center of its largest empire with a low population. It also has a great deal of aberrations, with a strong cosmic horror element (that might just have something to do with the fall of that ancient civilization.)
I've brewed up a couple of stats for the final dungeon of the adventure my players are currently on, but I've also been working on a few other elements.
First off, with the undead hordes and elite skeletons, I also wanted to brew up a Death Knight I can throw at a tier two party. Conceptually, what I came up with were "Scourge Knights," named obviously in reference to Warcraft's undead Scourge. Given how the Death Knight is based on the idea of a paladin of great renown breaking their oath, I wanted to make a distinction for these lesser versions. Thus, my lore is that when a Death Knight slays a paladin, they can sometimes capture the soul of that paladin (involving a magical item called a Soul Lantern.) The Death Knight then tortures the soul until they agree to serve the Death Knight, at which point the soul is released to manifest as a corrupted, undead lieutenant.
Splitting some of the Death Knight's abilities and coming up with some new ones, the first of the two varieties here is Scourge Knight Captains - which can lead contingents of undead and retain the Death Knight's more defensive capabilities. The other is Scourge Knight Executioners, who wield greataxes and have a feature that makes it far easier for them to get to their foes.
The Captain and Executioner are CR 10 and 9, respectively, allowing you to throw them at a party far earlier than the CR 17 Death Knight.
The really big project, however, has been my Ancient Mechs. These are basically robots that patrol the post-apocalyptic wastelands that were never rebuilt following the fall of that ancient civilization. These mechs fight mutants and aberrations, but sometimes mistake the "Scrappers" who try to salvage the lost technology for their targets.
There are several varieties of mech, ranging from the small Scavenger Mechs that are designed to sort through piles of rubble and find useful material (and are the ones I imagine as being cute and probably puppeteered by the Jim Henson company) to the Huge Assault Mechs, which have powerful cannons, a shielding force field that reduces incoming damage, and even a miniature nuclear strike capability.
What unites the design of these creatures is their use of Power Cells. Essentially, each of their main actions requires power from their batteries. And they will continue to operate until they run out of juice. However, given that these power cells involve some magic, they will regenerate on their own over time. Because power cells are interchangeable, other creatures can swap out a power cell if the mech is out of energy, and so NPCs (or even potentially players) who find a way to reprogram these mechs to work for them can keep their mechs working if they have a supply of fresh power cells. Naturally, the bigger ones come with more cells, but they also have abilities that drain more power from them.
Inspired by these mechs, I also started detailing the town of Gonquista - the only major settlement in the post-apocalyptic wasteland part of my setting - giving it a number of factions and important figures heavily (heavily) inspired by Mad Max.
It is a setting with a fallen, technologically advanced civilization. It's also one in which there is basically a massive undead army that is currently leaderless and confined to a place in the center of its largest empire with a low population. It also has a great deal of aberrations, with a strong cosmic horror element (that might just have something to do with the fall of that ancient civilization.)
I've brewed up a couple of stats for the final dungeon of the adventure my players are currently on, but I've also been working on a few other elements.
First off, with the undead hordes and elite skeletons, I also wanted to brew up a Death Knight I can throw at a tier two party. Conceptually, what I came up with were "Scourge Knights," named obviously in reference to Warcraft's undead Scourge. Given how the Death Knight is based on the idea of a paladin of great renown breaking their oath, I wanted to make a distinction for these lesser versions. Thus, my lore is that when a Death Knight slays a paladin, they can sometimes capture the soul of that paladin (involving a magical item called a Soul Lantern.) The Death Knight then tortures the soul until they agree to serve the Death Knight, at which point the soul is released to manifest as a corrupted, undead lieutenant.
Splitting some of the Death Knight's abilities and coming up with some new ones, the first of the two varieties here is Scourge Knight Captains - which can lead contingents of undead and retain the Death Knight's more defensive capabilities. The other is Scourge Knight Executioners, who wield greataxes and have a feature that makes it far easier for them to get to their foes.
The Captain and Executioner are CR 10 and 9, respectively, allowing you to throw them at a party far earlier than the CR 17 Death Knight.
The really big project, however, has been my Ancient Mechs. These are basically robots that patrol the post-apocalyptic wastelands that were never rebuilt following the fall of that ancient civilization. These mechs fight mutants and aberrations, but sometimes mistake the "Scrappers" who try to salvage the lost technology for their targets.
There are several varieties of mech, ranging from the small Scavenger Mechs that are designed to sort through piles of rubble and find useful material (and are the ones I imagine as being cute and probably puppeteered by the Jim Henson company) to the Huge Assault Mechs, which have powerful cannons, a shielding force field that reduces incoming damage, and even a miniature nuclear strike capability.
What unites the design of these creatures is their use of Power Cells. Essentially, each of their main actions requires power from their batteries. And they will continue to operate until they run out of juice. However, given that these power cells involve some magic, they will regenerate on their own over time. Because power cells are interchangeable, other creatures can swap out a power cell if the mech is out of energy, and so NPCs (or even potentially players) who find a way to reprogram these mechs to work for them can keep their mechs working if they have a supply of fresh power cells. Naturally, the bigger ones come with more cells, but they also have abilities that drain more power from them.
Inspired by these mechs, I also started detailing the town of Gonquista - the only major settlement in the post-apocalyptic wasteland part of my setting - giving it a number of factions and important figures heavily (heavily) inspired by Mad Max.
Thursday, September 19, 2019
Homebrewing Tougher Undead Hordes
There's nothing quite like an army of skeletons and zombies to let the party know that you're the bad guy. But if you're a DM like me, you might find yourself feeling like there are certain gaps in terms of stat blocks for undead you can throw at your party.
Basically: there's a knife's edge balance when it comes to big swarms of undead, or really any mass combat situation. There are rules for how to run this - essentially averaging out damage over how likely a large number of foes are going to hit your party members.
But there are only a couple of true zombies in the Monster Manual. You can certainly run an encounter with a mass of them, but I find that, while fights against really big gangs of bad guys can be a lot of fun (I ran a one-shot that involved I believe 14 enemies against three party members with two allied NPCs) it can also get tedious and slow.
Taking zombies and skeletons as the absolute classic undead armies, I've homebrewed up a couple of stat blocks.
I started with the harder one, which is zombies. Taking inspiration from the Bar Brawl from Creature Codex (by the Kobold Press - an excellent 2nd party supplement, along with their earlier Tome of Beasts,) rather than just having you send, say, 20 zombies at your party, I've made a swarm.
Conceptually, I started by simply multiplying the zombie stat block 9 times, essentially treating a 3-by-3 square as one Huge-sized swarm. As it turns out, 9 zombies is not really that impressive. And given that the 5-ft square is implied to be a space occupied by a hero who really wants full freedom of movement, it's also not quite as dense as I wanted for this swarm.
So I bumped that up to 20.
Next, I bumped the hit die up - swarm hit dice are calculated based on the size of the swarm, not the individual, so even though it's made up of medium undead, the swarm itself is Huge, meaning it gets a d12 hit die. That wound up being helpful, as it put the health in a better range for what I wanted - an average of 190.
The AC is still very low - like a standard zombie, it's 8. But if your hero can hit a single zombie, it seems fair that they should have an easy time hitting a swarm of them.
Naturally, the swarm has the standard swarm abilities - it can't regain HP, it can't get temporary HP, and (and here's the nasty part) it can occupy other creature's spaces. Oh, and it can squeeze through any space a medium sized creature could, for obvious reasons.
In terms of damage, I gave it multiattack, hitting three times (it's a lot of zombies after all.) I also boosted the damage, treating each attack as if three zombies were hitting you at once (literally just multiplying the zombie's slam attack three times.) That means that on a given turn, 9 of the 20 zombies, effectively, are striking out, which seems fair. Those big hits allow this slow, easy-to-hit mass to feel scary.
Given that the whole point of a Cleric's destroy undead is to clear out hordes of zombies and the like, I wanted to throw clerics a bone, so to speak, and so the horde has a feature that causes them to take significant damage if they fail a Turn Undead save against a Cleric who's level 5 or higher.
So it was mostly done, but I wanted to give it something scary - a little extra juice.
So I created an ability called Overwhelming Lurch. This is when the zombies get all 28 Days Later and speed forward, trampling over party members. The creatures hit with this need to do a strength saving throw or get knocked prone and grappled - it's supposed to be that nightmare moment where someone gets engulfed by the mob of undead. It's not a terribly difficult DC, but low Strength characters are going to be in a really tough spot. Meanwhile, your beefy paladin or barbarian or fighter can laugh as they revel in this new target-rich environment.
The Massive Zombie Horde is CR 6 - enough to be pretty scary on their own to early tier 2 parties. But here's the thing: there ain't anything saying you can't use more than one of them! To peel back the curtain a little, I've got a town that is totally filled with corpses my party is going to come across in their current adventure, and my hope is to push them to certain locations within the town, so they're probably going to encounter more of these than they're supposed to fight. The hordes are slow, though, and for all I know the party will just kick an absurd amount of ass, so I think it'll be fine. But my initial plan was for a hundred zombies. So I might throw five of these hordes at them (might have them fight one or two to start with and then reveal the rest.)
Moving on to the skeletons:
I was a little less radical in my design here. Essentially, I just beefed them up. I treated the basic skeleton stat block as if they were sort of generic characters - like limited fighters. So I gave them an extra attack at level 5 and ability score improvements at levels 4 and 8.
First was the Elite Skeletal Archer, which I essentially bumped up to level 10 (getting two ASIs and an extra attack) and then slapped some scale mail on them to boost their AC to 16. Easy peasy, and the archer becomes a CR 2 monster, or in other words, a much better tier 2 or 3 minion monster. While normal skeletons are being sent out on patrol around the Lich's territory, these guys are probably patrolling the ramparts of their dread citadel.
But you can't just have archers. You need some guardsmen! And for that, I bumped things up further.
The Elite Skeletal Guard is bumped to level 17 and outfitted with plate armor as well as halberds - because halberds seem like a great kind of weapon for guardsmen. I also basically swapped the standard skeleton's strength and dexterity before applying the ASIs to boost their Strength, Constitution, and Wisdom. I also granted them proficiency with perception, because they are supposed to be guards, aren't they?
These guys wind up being CR 5 - meaning they can form the backbone of a combat encounter with some of the archers mixed in with them.
Finally, what readers of this blog should not find very surprising, a lot of my "army of the dead" concept is inspired by the Scourge in World of Warcraft - sure, they use mindless zombies, but they're mostly a pretty well-regimented army of skeletons, some of whom retain some magical ability.
So I've created the Elite Skeletal Mage. These are not meant to be boss-level casters, and so I tried to keep their abilities relatively limited. Essentially, they're there to magically harass the party while the archers and guards bring the pain. The idea is to sprinkle one or two of these guys into a larger encounter with other skeletal minions.
I basically gave them a character level of 6, but 4 levels of wizard, and boosted their Intelligence to 14 so that they can actually cast some stuff. They actually wound up being a lot like a Cult Fanatic, except they're wizards instead of clerics. They have Ray of Frost as a cantrip (bit of a Warcraft reference there) and then use Magic Missile, Mage Armor, Shield, Hold Person, and Ray of Enfeeblement. Again, they're less about pumping out the damage than harassing the party that is being pelted with arrows or sliced with halberds.
So I've managed to put together a nice little army of the dead. None of these guys are terribly complex on their own - they're all built to be minions or mid-way encounters. And if your characters have wisely chosen to go with bludgeoning weapons (I get the aesthetics of it - my Paladin's going to be going with a greatsword, but why would you ever not just take a maul? Frankly, in the vast majority of cases I like my Paladins to swing mauls,) they'll carve through these guys at double speed.
But we do want some kind of a boss, right? And that's where my next homebrew monster comes in: I want to create a Death Knight that the players can fight in tier 2. I'm aiming for about CR 8 or 9. Basically, I want the boss guy to lead all these nasty skeletons. But the Death Knight, a CR 17 monster, is a bit much for a party of, say, level 9 characters.
Beyond that, I'm going to be working on some vampire variants as well. Indeed, I'm now thinking about all the statblocks I want to generate. I actually need to make a bunch of ancient robots for my setting, so we'll have to take a look at some earlier ones I designed and come up with variants.
This is fun.
Basically: there's a knife's edge balance when it comes to big swarms of undead, or really any mass combat situation. There are rules for how to run this - essentially averaging out damage over how likely a large number of foes are going to hit your party members.
But there are only a couple of true zombies in the Monster Manual. You can certainly run an encounter with a mass of them, but I find that, while fights against really big gangs of bad guys can be a lot of fun (I ran a one-shot that involved I believe 14 enemies against three party members with two allied NPCs) it can also get tedious and slow.
Taking zombies and skeletons as the absolute classic undead armies, I've homebrewed up a couple of stat blocks.
I started with the harder one, which is zombies. Taking inspiration from the Bar Brawl from Creature Codex (by the Kobold Press - an excellent 2nd party supplement, along with their earlier Tome of Beasts,) rather than just having you send, say, 20 zombies at your party, I've made a swarm.
Conceptually, I started by simply multiplying the zombie stat block 9 times, essentially treating a 3-by-3 square as one Huge-sized swarm. As it turns out, 9 zombies is not really that impressive. And given that the 5-ft square is implied to be a space occupied by a hero who really wants full freedom of movement, it's also not quite as dense as I wanted for this swarm.
So I bumped that up to 20.
Next, I bumped the hit die up - swarm hit dice are calculated based on the size of the swarm, not the individual, so even though it's made up of medium undead, the swarm itself is Huge, meaning it gets a d12 hit die. That wound up being helpful, as it put the health in a better range for what I wanted - an average of 190.
The AC is still very low - like a standard zombie, it's 8. But if your hero can hit a single zombie, it seems fair that they should have an easy time hitting a swarm of them.
Naturally, the swarm has the standard swarm abilities - it can't regain HP, it can't get temporary HP, and (and here's the nasty part) it can occupy other creature's spaces. Oh, and it can squeeze through any space a medium sized creature could, for obvious reasons.
In terms of damage, I gave it multiattack, hitting three times (it's a lot of zombies after all.) I also boosted the damage, treating each attack as if three zombies were hitting you at once (literally just multiplying the zombie's slam attack three times.) That means that on a given turn, 9 of the 20 zombies, effectively, are striking out, which seems fair. Those big hits allow this slow, easy-to-hit mass to feel scary.
Given that the whole point of a Cleric's destroy undead is to clear out hordes of zombies and the like, I wanted to throw clerics a bone, so to speak, and so the horde has a feature that causes them to take significant damage if they fail a Turn Undead save against a Cleric who's level 5 or higher.
So it was mostly done, but I wanted to give it something scary - a little extra juice.
So I created an ability called Overwhelming Lurch. This is when the zombies get all 28 Days Later and speed forward, trampling over party members. The creatures hit with this need to do a strength saving throw or get knocked prone and grappled - it's supposed to be that nightmare moment where someone gets engulfed by the mob of undead. It's not a terribly difficult DC, but low Strength characters are going to be in a really tough spot. Meanwhile, your beefy paladin or barbarian or fighter can laugh as they revel in this new target-rich environment.
The Massive Zombie Horde is CR 6 - enough to be pretty scary on their own to early tier 2 parties. But here's the thing: there ain't anything saying you can't use more than one of them! To peel back the curtain a little, I've got a town that is totally filled with corpses my party is going to come across in their current adventure, and my hope is to push them to certain locations within the town, so they're probably going to encounter more of these than they're supposed to fight. The hordes are slow, though, and for all I know the party will just kick an absurd amount of ass, so I think it'll be fine. But my initial plan was for a hundred zombies. So I might throw five of these hordes at them (might have them fight one or two to start with and then reveal the rest.)
Moving on to the skeletons:
I was a little less radical in my design here. Essentially, I just beefed them up. I treated the basic skeleton stat block as if they were sort of generic characters - like limited fighters. So I gave them an extra attack at level 5 and ability score improvements at levels 4 and 8.
First was the Elite Skeletal Archer, which I essentially bumped up to level 10 (getting two ASIs and an extra attack) and then slapped some scale mail on them to boost their AC to 16. Easy peasy, and the archer becomes a CR 2 monster, or in other words, a much better tier 2 or 3 minion monster. While normal skeletons are being sent out on patrol around the Lich's territory, these guys are probably patrolling the ramparts of their dread citadel.
But you can't just have archers. You need some guardsmen! And for that, I bumped things up further.
The Elite Skeletal Guard is bumped to level 17 and outfitted with plate armor as well as halberds - because halberds seem like a great kind of weapon for guardsmen. I also basically swapped the standard skeleton's strength and dexterity before applying the ASIs to boost their Strength, Constitution, and Wisdom. I also granted them proficiency with perception, because they are supposed to be guards, aren't they?
These guys wind up being CR 5 - meaning they can form the backbone of a combat encounter with some of the archers mixed in with them.
Finally, what readers of this blog should not find very surprising, a lot of my "army of the dead" concept is inspired by the Scourge in World of Warcraft - sure, they use mindless zombies, but they're mostly a pretty well-regimented army of skeletons, some of whom retain some magical ability.
So I've created the Elite Skeletal Mage. These are not meant to be boss-level casters, and so I tried to keep their abilities relatively limited. Essentially, they're there to magically harass the party while the archers and guards bring the pain. The idea is to sprinkle one or two of these guys into a larger encounter with other skeletal minions.
I basically gave them a character level of 6, but 4 levels of wizard, and boosted their Intelligence to 14 so that they can actually cast some stuff. They actually wound up being a lot like a Cult Fanatic, except they're wizards instead of clerics. They have Ray of Frost as a cantrip (bit of a Warcraft reference there) and then use Magic Missile, Mage Armor, Shield, Hold Person, and Ray of Enfeeblement. Again, they're less about pumping out the damage than harassing the party that is being pelted with arrows or sliced with halberds.
So I've managed to put together a nice little army of the dead. None of these guys are terribly complex on their own - they're all built to be minions or mid-way encounters. And if your characters have wisely chosen to go with bludgeoning weapons (I get the aesthetics of it - my Paladin's going to be going with a greatsword, but why would you ever not just take a maul? Frankly, in the vast majority of cases I like my Paladins to swing mauls,) they'll carve through these guys at double speed.
But we do want some kind of a boss, right? And that's where my next homebrew monster comes in: I want to create a Death Knight that the players can fight in tier 2. I'm aiming for about CR 8 or 9. Basically, I want the boss guy to lead all these nasty skeletons. But the Death Knight, a CR 17 monster, is a bit much for a party of, say, level 9 characters.
Beyond that, I'm going to be working on some vampire variants as well. Indeed, I'm now thinking about all the statblocks I want to generate. I actually need to make a bunch of ancient robots for my setting, so we'll have to take a look at some earlier ones I designed and come up with variants.
This is fun.
Wednesday, September 18, 2019
New Unearthed Arcana Subclasses: College of Eloquence and Oath of Heroism
They're coming out with a lot of these lately, aren't they?
In the latest Unearthed Arcana, we get new subclasses for Bards and Paladins. After new ones for Barbarians, Monks, Sorcerers, and Warlocks, it seems like the folks at Wizards are really getting on the subclass train.
Should we read much into this?
Three books in 5E have expanded subclass options: Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, Xanathar's Guide to Everything, and Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica. While the first and last of those were a bit limited - giving just one new subclass to not all the classes (only two in Ravnica,) one could argue Xanathar's main feature was the addition of 2-4 subclasses for every existing class.
Now, Unearthed Arcana is, to be fair, just a testing ground for new ideas. But in the past, it has hinted toward future releases - the Order Domain and Circle of Spores were both first tested there (we also had School of Invention and the Brute Fighter archetype, the former of which became an Izzet-league magic item and the latter... just sort of wasn't that interesting and got dropped.)
I'm going to go totally wild with speculation here: I think we might be looking at ideas for a new major sourcebook. It could be another broad-scope book like Xanathar's, or it could be a campaign setting book. If it's the latter, these latest subclasses made me think of Planescape, given that Oath of Heroism feels very appropriate to Ysgard, and College of Eloquence feels very appropriate to Mechanus. That said, I'm not sure that the Cosmic Horror-themed Warlock and Sorcerer subclasses from last time quite fit into that concept. We could simply be looking at another general sourcebook.
But let's get into those, shall we?
College of Eloquence gives you many options to calm people down and gain advantage on charisma checks. One of the coolest elements is that, at high levels, when people use their Bardic Inspiration you've given them, they actually get to keep it if the check failed despite the bonus die. And if it does succeed, you can "chain" it to another creature at no extra cost.
College of Heroism has a lot of things that seem, frankly, kind of overpowered. There's a lot here where you gain benefits from critting or you have an easier time critting (which is always fun on a paladin, given divine smite,) and at higher levels you get to use a reaction to boost your AC when you get hit (with no limit on how many times you can use it) and your level 20 "super mode" lets you, among other things, just choose to succeed on an attack roll every turn, or choose to succeed on a saving throw.
Anyway, it's all fun stuff. And it's nice to see these coming out at a decent clip.
In the latest Unearthed Arcana, we get new subclasses for Bards and Paladins. After new ones for Barbarians, Monks, Sorcerers, and Warlocks, it seems like the folks at Wizards are really getting on the subclass train.
Should we read much into this?
Three books in 5E have expanded subclass options: Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, Xanathar's Guide to Everything, and Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica. While the first and last of those were a bit limited - giving just one new subclass to not all the classes (only two in Ravnica,) one could argue Xanathar's main feature was the addition of 2-4 subclasses for every existing class.
Now, Unearthed Arcana is, to be fair, just a testing ground for new ideas. But in the past, it has hinted toward future releases - the Order Domain and Circle of Spores were both first tested there (we also had School of Invention and the Brute Fighter archetype, the former of which became an Izzet-league magic item and the latter... just sort of wasn't that interesting and got dropped.)
I'm going to go totally wild with speculation here: I think we might be looking at ideas for a new major sourcebook. It could be another broad-scope book like Xanathar's, or it could be a campaign setting book. If it's the latter, these latest subclasses made me think of Planescape, given that Oath of Heroism feels very appropriate to Ysgard, and College of Eloquence feels very appropriate to Mechanus. That said, I'm not sure that the Cosmic Horror-themed Warlock and Sorcerer subclasses from last time quite fit into that concept. We could simply be looking at another general sourcebook.
But let's get into those, shall we?
College of Eloquence gives you many options to calm people down and gain advantage on charisma checks. One of the coolest elements is that, at high levels, when people use their Bardic Inspiration you've given them, they actually get to keep it if the check failed despite the bonus die. And if it does succeed, you can "chain" it to another creature at no extra cost.
College of Heroism has a lot of things that seem, frankly, kind of overpowered. There's a lot here where you gain benefits from critting or you have an easier time critting (which is always fun on a paladin, given divine smite,) and at higher levels you get to use a reaction to boost your AC when you get hit (with no limit on how many times you can use it) and your level 20 "super mode" lets you, among other things, just choose to succeed on an attack roll every turn, or choose to succeed on a saving throw.
Anyway, it's all fun stuff. And it's nice to see these coming out at a decent clip.
Tuesday, September 17, 2019
My New Hobby: Creating Playlists for D&D
Given that I designed the adventure my players are on over two years ago - it's just taken them that long to get through the stuff I had prepared ahead of time (and we haven't been playing as frequently as we used to this year) - I've had little planning to do as a DM. Sure, I do have to make adjustments, and I've integrated stat blocks and other things that have come out in the meantime (having more vampire stat blocks from Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica and Tome of Beasts/Creature Codex is very useful right now.)
But thanks to my friend/roommate's subscription to Spotify, I've been using the service to put together playlists for my D&D campaign.
I have a fairly large number of playlists (each listed as Duck of Power's D&D, and then the name of the specific list, if you can find them) for different situations.
I've almost exclusively stuck to video game music, as I find that music designed for games (outside of cutscenes) tends to be designed without a massive build or drop off in intensity (there are some exceptions even among the ones I've used.) A lot of old-school game music isn't quite up to what we're looking for, in terms of instrumental quality (not to badmouth Chiptunes if you're into that kind of thing) but thankfully a lot of people have done covers that sound fantastic.
I have the following lists. Each is over an hour long, some of them reaching more than two hours, which helps them from getting repetitive over a night of gaming.
General Exploration:
This one is the sort of catch-all - any time the players are traversing the world, or going through standard fantasy environments. There are a lot of overworld themes here, particularly from Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, and World of Warcraft.
Heroic Combat:
This is the standard combat mix. Once we roll initiative, this goes on unless we're using a more specific combat mix. The music gets more intense, but the tone is generally meant to be exciting - showcasing our brave heroes fighting their foes.
Dark Exploration:
This one's meant to be all about the creepiness. This one is going to get a lot of use in the current adventure (more or less replacing General Exploration.) Again, lots of WoW stuff here, with a bit of Diablo III and Darkest Dungeon. The intention for this mix is not to just be any dangerous place, but specifically those that give you the creeps. Given that the party is currently in a large barony ruled by a racist vampire wizard, there's a lot of gothic (and cosmic) horror elements for them to explore.
Dark Combat:
The notion behind this mix is that Heroic Combat is all about facing foes that you're evenly matched for - that your heroes will feel confident that they can prevail against said foes. Dark Combat is meant to instill a sense of panic and terror - the monster is here, and you're in a fight for your life. Naturally, there's a lot of Bloodborne boss music, though I'm pretty happy with "Assault on New Avalon" from WoW (it's the music that plays toward the end of the Death Knight starting experience, once you're basically overwhelming the Scarlet Crusade with swarms of undead.)
Otherworldly Locales:
To a large extent, this is meant to be for planar travel. It's a little less focused, but I've allowed for a little more sci-fi music here, like stuff from Mass Effect 2. There's a fair amount from the Burning Crusade WoW expansion here as well, which is the most science-fantasy expansion they've had (except maybe Legion, but its space-demon stuff was mostly in later patches, which, annoyingly, don't come on the soundtracks to the expansions.)
Ancient Locales:
This is mostly for ancient ruins - the kind of places you might find buried in sand or hidden underground. There's a slightly ominous, slightly otherworldly feel to this, but the notion is that these places are very ancient. Assassin's Creed Odyssey, with its pseudo-Egyptian music, worked great for this. Likewise, a lot of the Temple music from Ocarina of Time (plus two covers of the Stone Tower Temple theme from Majora's Mask.) Finally, the soundtrack to Riven has a great number of tracks for this. Also, basically any Draenei-themed music from WoW.
General Urban:
This is the mix for city music. It's generally a bit upbeat, and provides an alternative when going through cities and major towns from the General Exploration mix. I'll confess that I think this one needs a bit of work.
Western Exploration:
There's a region of my homebrew setting that feels very Wild West, and so I took a lot of music from Red Dead Redemption and Bastion, which works pretty well here.
Western Combat:
Similar sources, these are tracks that are geared a bit more toward fighting.
Works in Progress:
Not a list, but I would like, at some point, to create mixes for traveling by sea or on airships. I have playlists, but they're not long enough for me to really want to use them. There's some Assassin's Creed Black Flag on them, but it's hard to find stuff with just the right tone I'm looking for. A naval combat mix would also be great (I really want to try out the naval combat rules in Ghosts of Saltmarsh.)
But thanks to my friend/roommate's subscription to Spotify, I've been using the service to put together playlists for my D&D campaign.
I have a fairly large number of playlists (each listed as Duck of Power's D&D, and then the name of the specific list, if you can find them) for different situations.
I've almost exclusively stuck to video game music, as I find that music designed for games (outside of cutscenes) tends to be designed without a massive build or drop off in intensity (there are some exceptions even among the ones I've used.) A lot of old-school game music isn't quite up to what we're looking for, in terms of instrumental quality (not to badmouth Chiptunes if you're into that kind of thing) but thankfully a lot of people have done covers that sound fantastic.
I have the following lists. Each is over an hour long, some of them reaching more than two hours, which helps them from getting repetitive over a night of gaming.
General Exploration:
This one is the sort of catch-all - any time the players are traversing the world, or going through standard fantasy environments. There are a lot of overworld themes here, particularly from Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, and World of Warcraft.
Heroic Combat:
This is the standard combat mix. Once we roll initiative, this goes on unless we're using a more specific combat mix. The music gets more intense, but the tone is generally meant to be exciting - showcasing our brave heroes fighting their foes.
Dark Exploration:
This one's meant to be all about the creepiness. This one is going to get a lot of use in the current adventure (more or less replacing General Exploration.) Again, lots of WoW stuff here, with a bit of Diablo III and Darkest Dungeon. The intention for this mix is not to just be any dangerous place, but specifically those that give you the creeps. Given that the party is currently in a large barony ruled by a racist vampire wizard, there's a lot of gothic (and cosmic) horror elements for them to explore.
Dark Combat:
The notion behind this mix is that Heroic Combat is all about facing foes that you're evenly matched for - that your heroes will feel confident that they can prevail against said foes. Dark Combat is meant to instill a sense of panic and terror - the monster is here, and you're in a fight for your life. Naturally, there's a lot of Bloodborne boss music, though I'm pretty happy with "Assault on New Avalon" from WoW (it's the music that plays toward the end of the Death Knight starting experience, once you're basically overwhelming the Scarlet Crusade with swarms of undead.)
Otherworldly Locales:
To a large extent, this is meant to be for planar travel. It's a little less focused, but I've allowed for a little more sci-fi music here, like stuff from Mass Effect 2. There's a fair amount from the Burning Crusade WoW expansion here as well, which is the most science-fantasy expansion they've had (except maybe Legion, but its space-demon stuff was mostly in later patches, which, annoyingly, don't come on the soundtracks to the expansions.)
Ancient Locales:
This is mostly for ancient ruins - the kind of places you might find buried in sand or hidden underground. There's a slightly ominous, slightly otherworldly feel to this, but the notion is that these places are very ancient. Assassin's Creed Odyssey, with its pseudo-Egyptian music, worked great for this. Likewise, a lot of the Temple music from Ocarina of Time (plus two covers of the Stone Tower Temple theme from Majora's Mask.) Finally, the soundtrack to Riven has a great number of tracks for this. Also, basically any Draenei-themed music from WoW.
General Urban:
This is the mix for city music. It's generally a bit upbeat, and provides an alternative when going through cities and major towns from the General Exploration mix. I'll confess that I think this one needs a bit of work.
Western Exploration:
There's a region of my homebrew setting that feels very Wild West, and so I took a lot of music from Red Dead Redemption and Bastion, which works pretty well here.
Western Combat:
Similar sources, these are tracks that are geared a bit more toward fighting.
Works in Progress:
Not a list, but I would like, at some point, to create mixes for traveling by sea or on airships. I have playlists, but they're not long enough for me to really want to use them. There's some Assassin's Creed Black Flag on them, but it's hard to find stuff with just the right tone I'm looking for. A naval combat mix would also be great (I really want to try out the naval combat rules in Ghosts of Saltmarsh.)
Alternate Character Backgrounds in Ravnica
Guild identity is at the core of Ravnica as a D&D setting. What began as a mechanical concept in Magic (namely: we want a multicolor set where people only play two colors in their deck, so let's build identities around those ten color pairs) became one of the key defining traits of the setting (the other key trait, I'd say, is the fact that the entire world is a single vast city, meaning that explorers are literally just finding new neighborhoods and districts that people "downtown" have never heard of.)
In Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, this is reflected through various character backgrounds, with one for each guild.
And to an extent, I think this is useful, given how distinct Ravnica is from other D&D settings. For example, if you have a player who wants to come up with a Wizard character who lives in a remote tower in some uninhabited forest, you might force them to re-think that character by limiting them to these character backgrounds. That Wizard ain't going to have the sort of isolation they're looking for unless they can create a demiplane to steal away to, because Ravnicans have about as much privacy and personal space as people who live in Tokyo (having not been to Tokyo since I was six, I'm going to own up that I just picked it as a famously dense city.)
But while the backgrounds to a great job of officially linking a character to a guild, I'd also say that there's room to wiggle.
Generally, the book recommends using other backgrounds if players, for some very strange reason, want to play Guild-less characters in a Ravnica campaign. Granted, half the world's population is "Gateless," but surely given how the guilds are one of the big things of the setting, you'd want to pick one for your character, right?
But I think you could make allowances for characters who are members of their guilds, but didn't quite come up in the same way.
The simplest way of implementing this is simply to allow players to use these other backgrounds but still benefit from being members of the guild factions. You might also grant them access to the guild expanded spell list and perhaps throw in a guild insignia in their starting equipment.
The main thing that inspired this thought was House Dimir.
The Dimir Operative background is built around the notion that you've infiltrated another guild. Indeed, you can even play it that way with your fellow players, perhaps allowing the DM to reveal it in a cool way.
But the Dimir do have a small public face - the librarians, book sellers, and private investigators (and, in my version of Ravnica, journalists.) So it seems a little disappointing that there's no option for player characters to be that kind of Dimir member.
Of course, Dimir faction rewards are also less tangible and more plot-focused than other guilds, presumably given the assumption that you'll also be earning renown with the faction that you've infiltrated. So DMs might want to come up with good rewards for Dimir members who are openly wearing the blue-and-black.
I do think one should be cautious, though. If you have a player who is not terribly familiar with the setting, you might, for example, find a player who wants to play a Fiendish Warlock from the Cult of Rakdos. But let's say they pick up the Sage background and play it as a scholar of forbidden, demonic rituals whose patron is hidden from the world. That's not exactly on-brand for the Rakdos, who would never hide the demonic nature of their guild. You'd run the risk of losing Rakdos' showbiz and entertainment element. Now, if you were to re-work it so that the Sage background is instead someone who works for the Cult as essentially a "dirt miner," looking through old records to find embarrassing secrets of the rich and powerful as material for the next big satirical revue, it could work fantastically.
Backgrounds are, of course, something that the game explicitly encourages you to customize - even in Adventurer's League you can swap out some of the elements to get what you want. So while it's a great "third choice" at character creation after race and class to align yourself with a guild, it's also pretty obvious that any of the guilds will want members with diverse experience and expertise. Boros Legionnaires use intimidation to get criminals to surrender, but surely some of them will instead try to calmly persuade a bad guy that maybe it'd be safer for everyone to just relax and work things out.
Given the sheer number of D&D games I'm lined up to play in the near future, I think my eventual Ravnica game is probably not going to happen for a while, but I'm eager to figure out exactly what shape it will take.
In Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, this is reflected through various character backgrounds, with one for each guild.
And to an extent, I think this is useful, given how distinct Ravnica is from other D&D settings. For example, if you have a player who wants to come up with a Wizard character who lives in a remote tower in some uninhabited forest, you might force them to re-think that character by limiting them to these character backgrounds. That Wizard ain't going to have the sort of isolation they're looking for unless they can create a demiplane to steal away to, because Ravnicans have about as much privacy and personal space as people who live in Tokyo (having not been to Tokyo since I was six, I'm going to own up that I just picked it as a famously dense city.)
But while the backgrounds to a great job of officially linking a character to a guild, I'd also say that there's room to wiggle.
Generally, the book recommends using other backgrounds if players, for some very strange reason, want to play Guild-less characters in a Ravnica campaign. Granted, half the world's population is "Gateless," but surely given how the guilds are one of the big things of the setting, you'd want to pick one for your character, right?
But I think you could make allowances for characters who are members of their guilds, but didn't quite come up in the same way.
The simplest way of implementing this is simply to allow players to use these other backgrounds but still benefit from being members of the guild factions. You might also grant them access to the guild expanded spell list and perhaps throw in a guild insignia in their starting equipment.
The main thing that inspired this thought was House Dimir.
The Dimir Operative background is built around the notion that you've infiltrated another guild. Indeed, you can even play it that way with your fellow players, perhaps allowing the DM to reveal it in a cool way.
But the Dimir do have a small public face - the librarians, book sellers, and private investigators (and, in my version of Ravnica, journalists.) So it seems a little disappointing that there's no option for player characters to be that kind of Dimir member.
Of course, Dimir faction rewards are also less tangible and more plot-focused than other guilds, presumably given the assumption that you'll also be earning renown with the faction that you've infiltrated. So DMs might want to come up with good rewards for Dimir members who are openly wearing the blue-and-black.
I do think one should be cautious, though. If you have a player who is not terribly familiar with the setting, you might, for example, find a player who wants to play a Fiendish Warlock from the Cult of Rakdos. But let's say they pick up the Sage background and play it as a scholar of forbidden, demonic rituals whose patron is hidden from the world. That's not exactly on-brand for the Rakdos, who would never hide the demonic nature of their guild. You'd run the risk of losing Rakdos' showbiz and entertainment element. Now, if you were to re-work it so that the Sage background is instead someone who works for the Cult as essentially a "dirt miner," looking through old records to find embarrassing secrets of the rich and powerful as material for the next big satirical revue, it could work fantastically.
Backgrounds are, of course, something that the game explicitly encourages you to customize - even in Adventurer's League you can swap out some of the elements to get what you want. So while it's a great "third choice" at character creation after race and class to align yourself with a guild, it's also pretty obvious that any of the guilds will want members with diverse experience and expertise. Boros Legionnaires use intimidation to get criminals to surrender, but surely some of them will instead try to calmly persuade a bad guy that maybe it'd be safer for everyone to just relax and work things out.
Given the sheer number of D&D games I'm lined up to play in the near future, I think my eventual Ravnica game is probably not going to happen for a while, but I'm eager to figure out exactly what shape it will take.
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