Stealing Eldraine Concepts for my Homebrew D&D Setting

Throne of Eldraine, the latest Magic: the Gathering set, is in some ways ironic. By drawing upon Arthurian legend and fairy tales, it is essentially pulling from the very foundational stories that the fantasy genre is build upon. What makes that ironic is that the genre has evolved so much over time, and particularly with the massive creativity they have at Wizards of the Coast, coming up with worlds like Ravnica or Zendikar, that this "back to basics" look at fantasy feels oddly novel.

I mean, there's literally a piece of equipment called "shining armor" that synergizes with Knight creatures.

Anyway, my D&D homebrew world tends to buck fantasy conventions where I can. The initial concepts I had for the setting were ideas about the pros and cons of imperialism and nationalism, ancient futuristic technology, and cosmic horror, none of which really play into the "knights serving righteous kings" style of fantasy.

That being said, there is a region in my world that is, basically, your classic fantasy setting. The human kingdom of Wolfengard is the heart of the continent-spanning Lupinian Empire (yes, there's a bit of a wolf theme with them.) There is one major way in which this rather conventionally western-European medieval kingdom is distinct from other settings, which is the fully legal practice of necromancy. Blame it on my love of Black in Magic. (One could also list the existence of trains and other industrial-era technology as being a rather big change from classic fantasy, but these innovations are meant to have been happening very rapidly over the last twenty years.)

Magic loves doing its five-color cycles, and I'll confess I'm a sucker for them. In Eldraine, there are five castles that each have an order of knights affiliated with them. My understanding is that, despite each representing a different color, they are not in conflict with one another, and are instead faced with challenges from the fey creatures in the wilds of Eldraine.

Wolfengard is a land of knights and courts. It has a king and dukes and all that stuff. So I decided to pull a few ideas from Eldraine.

For example, Castle Vantress, the blue castle, seems to be an order of knights who are also kind of wizards, and their castle is patrolled by constructs, some of whom look like giant locks with a big keyhole. That imagery is super cool to me, and so I created a region in Wolfengard ruled over by a city called Lochlain (which I realize sounds a ton like the Black castle, Locthwain) with, you guessed it, a knightly order of wizards who rule it.

Wolfengard borders a region primarily populated by Wood Elves to the west called Alenach, where there's a ton of Fey. Thus, I created another region in that area called The Brooklands, which is basically a land of quaint, beautiful little villages that the child protagonists of a fairy tale would live in. These are woods filled with fairies and lots of greens and purples, with glowing lights at night. While its major city isn't quite as directly taken from Eldraine, I did want it to feel like a magical place that one could imagine common people would be excited to go to. Faeroyal is basically a big castle in the middle of the forest and the only city in the empire where Half Elves are the majority population. (Given that in my setting there's plenty of racial mixing, I'd say half elves are those with over 25% human and over 25% elvish ancestry. The emperor is considered human despite having an elvish grandparent, and his children are a quarter djinni.)

Anyway, Magic has always been a huge influence on my fantasy tastes, and even though Eldraine is filled with direct references to classic stories (not unlike Innistrad, actually, though a lot lighter in tone) I do feel like it's given me some fun ideas.

I'm now imagining that a new campaign in this setting could actually do the "start small and work your way out" style they recommend in the DMG, perhaps starting the Brooklands.

Forsaken... By Sylvanas

You can probably trace my affection for the spooky, macabre, and dark to the fact that when I first started playing Magic: The Gathering, picking up a 60-card Revised Edition box (after having gotten a single Fallen Empires booster that didn't do much for me on its own,) I found a Royal Assassin in that box. This little 1/1 creature that cost 3 mana had a terribly nasty ability: tap to destroy target tapped creature. Those two little skulls and one generic mana in the cost set me on the path to become a pretty happy black player in that card game.

But this post isn't about Magic. It's about WoW.

If you were to break down the various factions in World of Warcraft, the Forsaken would be a shoe-in for the best representation of Black as it works in Magic. Undead? Check. Ruthlessly resourceful? Check. Self-interested? Check.

So naturally, given that I associate so strongly with that branch of fantasy (my own homebrew D&D setting has the central kingdom of its massive empire be a place where necromancy is legal and employed regularly,) it makes sense that I'd be a big fan of the Forsaken.

The thing is, the way Magic works, Black is not necessarily evil. It's very rare that it's good, per se, but it's not inherently cruel - and often its value of self-interest finds itself standing up against authoritarian systems. Sure, that backfires any time someone decides it's in their self interest to be an autocrat, but there's plenty of opportunity to have vampires, necromancers, and even demons who are... kinda sorta... the good guys.

And the Forsaken also give that opportunity.

When WoW began, the Scourge was a major power in the world. You felt their presence ubiquitously throughout the three northern zones of the Eastern Kingdoms, and when Quel'thalas was added, their presence in the Ghostlands was also central. Hell, they even played a role in the plot of the Barrens, using the Quilboar to undermine the young New Horde.

The Forsaken thus had something to compare themselves to. Sure, they were undead, and ruthless and deadly, but they had free will and they had allies. Yes, even in the opening voiceover when starting an Undead character (something you can experience again now with Classic) it's explicit that joining the Horde is an alliance of convenience, but in practice, Undead characters were just one of the races the Horde had available.

As I've said many times, the Forsaken have always felt more like their own mini-faction, branched off from the Horde more than, say, the Night Elves were from the Alliance. And that was even reflected in how you'd start with only neutral (though not 0/1000) with the other cities. But while the Horde has generally valued 100% loyalty to the Warchief, Sylvanas has run the Forsaken to first have 100% loyalty to her, and then to defer to the Warchief when she did.

When she became Warchief, there was no longer any conflict there, but the rest of the Horde, once again as they had under Garrosh, began to question their loyalty to the Warchief.

What makes the "Reckoning" cinematic interesting to me is that Saurfang managed to get Sylvanas to admit in front of a massive crowd - including her own loyal Forsaken - that whatever loyalty she demanded of others, she has not held it for them.

Even going back to Confucius, there's a general principle in leadership that leaders must be loyal to those from whom they expect loyalty. Sure, you might be in charge and expect them to obey you, but the only reason you ever earned that position is that people trust you to look out for their best interests.

Sylvanas made it very clear that the entire Horde, including the Forsaken, are just tools to be used by her, and discarded if they no longer help her achieve her goals. And that actually flies in the face of what she's been insisting for years. In the quests in Silverpine, Sylvanas explains that her rather horrific use of the Val'kyr to raise fallen humans her armies slay is a desperate attempt to keep her people from dying out. But now, it seems quite apparent that her reason for that was not to keep the other Forsaken safe from an endlessly diminishing population that would eventually be unable to hold back the living humans wishing to reclaim their territory, but instead to simply provide her more cannon fodder.

I think the Forsaken have been so lockstep in loyalty to her because they believed that even if she would betray and use the Horde, she was still fighting for them.

And that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. Her destruction of the Undercity, I think, was the breaking point, though clearly many needed to hear her say it out loud.

To be clear, this is not a universal thing. Some Forsaken remain loyal to her, and are pragmatically playing at reform so as to survive in a post-Sylvanas Horde. She has not been killed - indeed, she more or less just left of her own volition. While that might not be a good look, it means that the loyalists have reason to keep the faith, expecting that when her plans come to fruition, they'll be positioned to help and be rewarded.

But I don't think we can simply say that the Forsaken have all just become secret traitors in the Horde's midst. If I were one of them (and my Horde main is,) I'd be furious with Sylvanas. The Forsaken know betrayal - their own crown prince was the one who massacred them and damned them to this undead existence.

While I don't know if it will continue to be central to the plot of BFA (I suspect not, as we'll be focusing on N'zoth in 8.3,) Sylvanas has not been taken off the board - she's just in a very different position now.

And while I'm sure there will be ongoing plot for Sylvanas loyalists - I'm curious to see if people will be forced to just sit with the decision they made earlier in this expansion for the years to come or if there will be new chances to "respec" your loyalty - what I really want to see is what happens to the Forsaken now that their Queen has abandoned, or, you know, forsaken them.

Frankly, I'd love to get a Forsaken NPC - either someone like Lillian Voss or maybe a new character - who dedicates themselves to hunting her down and killing her. I want to see the rage that the Forsaken had for Arthas turn on Sylvanas.

I want to see Sylvanas reap what she's sown. She's taught an entire society to dedicate themselves to the destruction of their enemies. And now she's made herself that society's enemy.

MTG: Arena: Hoping for a Mac Version

So, Magic the Gathering: Arena looks a lot like, basically, Magic done in the style of Hearthstone. Rules-wise, it's got all the complexity of Magic, but the manner in which one plays and earns cards is like Hearthstone.

I played Magic Online in college, which was the older translation of the game to the digital realm. While I imagine I've still got my account floating around out there, it required me to boot up Windows using Parallels, and while I could do that now, I'd really prefer that Wizards of the Coast just make a Mac client for the game.

While I enjoy Hearthstone, it has always been a kind of consolation prize kind of game compared to Magic. Magic was, in many ways, my first real fantasy influence (ok, maybe Myst and Disney cartoons really hold that spot,) and the core concepts of the game have remained dear to me.

Arena seems great, and so I'm hoping that we'll see a Mac client soon.

I've watched streams of the Beta and now the live version, and here's how I understand it working:

Like Hearthstone, communication is limited between opponents. Similarly, card trading itself is set aside in favor of earning the ability to get specific cards you want as you earn more packs. And you can apparently earn packs simply by playing, which removes one of the key reasons I've been hesitant to get back into the game.

I can imagine if a set I'm particularly excited about comes out I can dump some cash at the start, but I like the idea of gradually working toward the cards I want to get to fill out a deck. I also think I'd be more eager to try stuff like limited if there isn't a cash buy-in.

There were rumors a year ago that there would be a Mac client by the time the live version came out, but that's clearly not the case. I had hoped for years that they'd come out with a Mac version of MTG:Online, which never happened (as far as I know) so I'm a little hesitant to get my hopes up. But we'll see.

I could use a PC emulator or boot camp, but it's quite a hassle, and I don't know that I want to get Windows just for this one game.

Fractures for the Alliance in a Time of Peace

One of the things I love about World of Warcraft is the way that the "monstrous" races are actually just people. And clearly, Blizzard loves this as well. As Saurfang notes in the first of this patch's cinematics (the one with in-game assets,) the Horde was founded in a fundamentally corrupt way - it was an instrument created by Gul'dan for use by the Burning Legion. And the Horde has never really reckoned with that fact. They want to be something better - a force for good in the world that can make Azeroth a safer place - but the sins of the past drive them to keep failing, new atrocities echoing old ones. The burning of Teldrassil is, arguably, the worst thing the Horde has done since the destruction of Draenor. And as much as they'd like to pin the blame on that for Sylvanas individually, the truth is that everyone who marched on Darkshore was, at least in part, complicit. They may not have known quite how far things would go, but when Sylvanas ordered the tree to burn, there did not seem to be a lot of hesitation among the many shamans and other Horde soldiers fired the incendiary attacks.

When Saurfang recounts his litany of the Horde's sins, Anduin speaks of the Alliance's. But the names he comes up with, Arthas and Daelin, ring a little false.

Arthas was absolutely poised to be one of the Alliance's most important leaders, but his fall to evil was, I'd argue, more of an individual one. The Alliance as an institution did not drive him to take up Frostmourne - indeed, his father even attempted to recall him from Northrend, feeling that things were going too far and that it would be more useful for him to stay behind and fight the Scourge where they were.

Daelin, I will grant, was acting in his full capacity as an Alliance leader, but at that point, he was blinded by misunderstanding, believing that he was saving his daughter from a foe that, up until that point, he had only seen as demon-blood-crazed monsters. Daelin was wrong to fail to see the humanity in the Horde, but I don't think that's an institutional problem with the Alliance as much as it is a personality failing.

I tend to play Alliance characters for a few reasons - I found a good guild on the Alliance side, I have characters of the classes I like to play on that side, and to be honest, I just kind of like the Alliance aesthetic better - blue's my favorite color and I'm sort of bored by all the red and spikes one gets with the Horde.

You can usually feel a lot more unambiguously heroic as an Alliance character, but the other side of that coin is that the Alliance winds up not really getting terribly interesting stories.

This is the second time that the Alliance has worked with rebels within the Horde to stand against a tyrannical Warchief who had utterly destroyed a major Alliance territory. In terms of pure "my side is stronger than your side" comparisons, it doesn't look great for the Alliance, given that both times they've had to team up with part of the Horde to face down the remaining part of the Horde. What's odd about this particular instance is that, prior to the confrontation that ends the war, the Alliance was supposed to be winning - yes, they lost some ships in Nazjatar, but the narrative post-Dazar'alor was supposed to be that the Alliance was really winning on all fronts. Did that advantage really go away after Nazjatar? If so, no one told me.

But I think that the more important imbalance is in the nuance of the story. Both Mists of Pandaria and now most of Battle for Azeroth have seen internal conflicts in the Horde center-stage, while we really haven't seen the Alliance every struggle to define itself in the same way. And while if this were real life, it would probably be comforting to know that the Alliance has this kind of unity and integrity, for telling a story as one does in a game, it's frustrating to basically have us playing supporting characters to a more interesting story.

Now, I do think that there are elements being introduced to give the Alliance more nuance. Tyrande's crusade of vengeance against the Horde is currently limited to Darkshore. She basically isn't returning Anduin's calls, but she hasn't struck out against him in any way.

But her embrace of the Night Warrior suggests that we could see a far more brutal and feral Night Elf High Priestess. The real question is whether this will ever lead to any real internal conflict.

See, Anduin is an idealist - he embodies the sort of values that one wants to see in the Alliance (at least, if you were actually living in it.) And while there's been a lot of talk about his struggle to earn the respect of the other leaders, the truth is that people pretty much do follow his lead, even if he's still a young man amongst truly ancient people (I don't know what his canonical age is. If he was eleven in vanilla, he'd be 26 now, assuming time passes at the same rate... though it might not.)

Tyrande is low-key defying Anduin, but she isn't striking against him. We don't really have any reason to think that any Alliance leader wants to harm another one.

Would it be more interesting if we did?

Admittedly, one doesn't just want to see a repeat of the same sort of plots that the Horde goes through tacked onto the Alliance. And I don't want to see Anduin killed off to create this sort of crisis. Similarly, the main way in which they've had Warchiefs go bad is by drumming up conflict with the Alliance - both Garrosh and Sylvanas gained power by pushing war against the Alliance. The thing is, when they aren't fighting the Alliance, the Horde usually feel pretty much just like good guys.

I think the Alliance has taken on a lot of new members who could bring about serious conflict. Before BFA even came out, they pulled in the Lightforged Draenei and the Void Elves. Talk about a potential conflict! These are two peoples literally imbued with opposite primordial forces of the cosmos. Yet we haven't seen any real drama erupt from that. Consider also the Dark Iron dwarves, long the "bad dwarves." And then you've got the Night Elves committing themselves to this dark aspect of Elune - a being we still don't understand at all - and you've got a lot of pieces in play to create some conflict.

But when are those pieces going to move into play?

8.3, 9.0, Factions and Old Gods

For some reason, I see a lot of people speculating that there will be no 8.3 - that the end of the War Campaign is the end of Battle for Azeroth.

Now, I'll always preface any of my predictions with the statement that I'm often wrong about these things. We're now actually only about a month out from Blizzcon (plus a week or so) and are starting to get into the period where trademark hunting could tell us something.

Two major plots have been going on in BFA. The wound inflicted by Sargeras has been threatening to kill the nascent Titan Azeroth, and we have been collecting Azerite - essentially her congealed, magical blood, we think - to empower the Heart of Azeroth, which we're then, presumably, going to channel back into her to heal her.

However, at the Eternal Palace raid, we discovered that, in some manner, Magni had been manipulated into having us do this. Was the Heart of Azeroth ever going to heal the planet? And furthermore, has he even been hearing her all this time?

That'd be the really big twist, though given that he was able to hear Argus - a world that, while deeply corrupted by demons, was not suffering the same kind of void corruption Azeroth has - it seems like his ability to commune with the Titan is legitimate (the ritual that turned him into the Speaker was found at Ulduar, which suggests it's legit Titan magic, though on the other hand, Ulduar was under Yogg-Saron's control for a long time.)

But while this crisis sparked the war between the factions, in a lot of ways the Alliance/Horde war has been a kind of separate issue.

As I said earlier, the war ends not with a bang, but with an ellipsis.

In theory, the war between the factions is over. But there are many, many ambiguities:

First off: is it though? Most of the Alliance is on board with Anduin, and over time, most of the Horde got on board with Saurfang. The latter's martyr-like death in the name of peace has inspired even some former Sylvanas loyalists to embrace the idea of peace (her dismissal of her people as "nothing" probably didn't help keep them from doing so.)

But Sylvanas is not dead, and she does still have loyalists. Sylvanas' faction within the Horde has simply been pushed underground, but it's evident that she's still expecting to come out on top here, and some player characters are now on that side of things.

Meanwhile, Tyrande was notably absent from the attack on Orgrimmar. It stands to reason that she is not going to forgive the entire Horde for their genocidal attack on Teldrassil simply because their leadership has changed. As history has taught us, "just following orders" is no defense for war crimes.

What I can imagine is an official detente between the factions - an end to open hostilities. But we'll see fracturing in both factions - Tyrande's faction will wage a guerrilla campaign against the Horde and Sylvanas will manipulate things behind the scenes. (I feel like there's something to say about the fact that Blizzard has chosen two of its most prominent female characters to be the agents of continual bloodshed, but I think that's a bigger topic than this cis straight dude is ready to bite off in this post.)

Next, we also don't know who is even leading the Horde at this point. Saurfang was sort of setting himself up to be the next Warchief, bringing with him the heroic reputation of an old veteran combined with the wisdom of recognizing how wrong the Old Horde had been (essentially being what Thrall had hoped Garrosh would be.) But Saurfang has earned his honorable death, finally (incidentally, this was something that felt so inevitable that I didn't even register it as a surprise. Just "oh yeah, here's where it happens.") And that leaves a leadership vacuum.

Now, Thrall is a pretty obvious choice, given that he had the job already. Indeed, aside from the utter disaster of naming Garrosh his successor, Thrall actually did a very good job as Warchief, establishing Durotar, giving the Tauren the safety of Mulgore, and really transforming the Horde from invading... well... horde into a global superpower.

That being said, the shame of Garrosh has always been a massive weight on his conscience, and lost him a tremendous amount of credibility. While his ascension would be a pretty direct way of indicating a restoration of the promise many of the races of the Horde joined under, one wonders to what extent the general populace is willing to give him a new chance.

Of course, if things are to really change, one also wonders if the Horde needs to undergo serious reformation. At this point, the Horde has had Blackhand, Doomhammer, Thrall, Garrosh, Vol'jin, and Sylvanas as Warchiefs. You have three pretty unambiguously evil ones, two pretty clearly good ones, and one that was a pragmatist that was complicit in a bunch of evil even if he wasn't necessarily evil personally (a kind of Lawful Neutral leader of a Chaotic Evil - at the time - faction.)

Is it really such a good idea to have some individual who is given infinite authority without checks and balances? I don't want to get too much into modern politics in a video game blog, but it does seem to me that stable societies are the ones that put a check on individuals in power in the name of preserving the institution for future generations. Even the good warchiefs occasionally abused their power. Maybe the Horde needs to restructure itself and not continue operating in a way that freaking Gul'dan of all people established.

But let's talk about practicality. What is going to happen in-game?

Again, we're just over a month from Blizzcon, at which we are almost certain to get the next expansion announced. In fact, in most expansion cycles, we'd be looking at the final patch of the expansion coming out within the next couple months - before the end of 2019. But we don't know what 8.3 will entail, and some have speculated that there won't be one.

To which I say: hogwash. Blizzard has never given us a final patch without telling us first. Even 6.2, which ended Warlords after a mere two raid tiers, was still announced as the big finale to the expansion. I am very skeptical that they would pull the rug out from under us. They're not going to release an expansion without a beta, which means there's no freaking way that 9.0 is going to drop this year.

Plus, it is pretty obvious that we're building to a confrontation with N'zoth. I think some people don't want to believe that because we haven't spent enough time building up to him, and I think that's a valid critique.

N'zoth is the most interesting of the Old Gods. In part, that's because we actually heard about him before the expansion (gamestate? Vanilla wasn't an expansion, but... you get it) in which we fight him. But also, I love the sorts of villains who manipulate things behind the scenes. My favorite guild in Ravnica (a setting for Magic: The Gathering that last year also became an official D&D setting) is House Dimir, which intentionally lets itself be perceived as the weakest and smallest of the guilds - just a bunch of couriers, postal workers, librarians, and private investigators - when in fact it's a massively powerful network that has spies embedded in all the other guilds.

N'zoth always intentionally made himself out to be the weakest of the Old Gods, holding the least territory during the Black Empire and weathering assaults from the forces of C'thun and Yogg-Saron. But all along, he's been the one who has had the most ongoing plots. The very fact that he seems to have usurped the entire Emerald Nightmare from Yogg-Saron demonstrates that he's actually probably the most powerful of the three remaining Old Gods. And given his propensity for making his seeming defeats work out in his favor, I even think he wants us to come kill him.

In fact, with the war out of the way, 8.3 has a great opportunity to focus the remainder of this expansion on the cosmic stakes in a really exciting and lore-heavy way. What does N'zoth ultimately want? What might he do?

To a large extent, I think the fantasy genre is basically supernatural horror, but in which people can actually fight back against the monsters (the Ringwraiths from Lord of the Rings, for example, are totally horror story monsters.) And so I think we could get a lot out of really delving into the cosmic horror of N'zoth. We've fought two Old Gods. The first was in Ahn-Qiraj, which Blizzard later stated was a former Titan facility (my headcanon, though, retcons that, saying that Ahn-Qiraj was actually C'thun's capital city before the Titans came, which I think is supported pretty well by the art we've seen of the Black Empire) and the second was in a Titan facility that still looked very Titan-y.

If we go to Ny'alotha to fight N'zoth, I want to see a total nightmare city - I want to see Blizzard's take on R'lyeh. I want to see madness and mutation that we need to fight valiantly against.

I think we need a really good 8.3 to send off Battle for Azeroth. The expansion has been a mix, certainly, but there's still potential here for really interesting stuff. I don't think it should be written off like Warlords was.

So, What of the Alliance and Horde?

Big spoilers. If you haven't finished the War Campaign quests that went live today, read this later. The quests can easily be completed in less than an hour.

There are very big questions raised in the end by the cinematics. I've also done some research, finding out what epilogues the essentially three factions provide.

Spoilers Ahoy!

Hexblade Warlock to Level 2

I'm playing in Descent into Avernus in an Adventurer's League setting (though a friend who's in all of my home games is DM'ing) and, given that I don't know when I'll be able to play my sweet baby boy Great Old One Warlock, I've decided to play another Warlock and not worry about making him a somewhat similar build.

While the GOO 'lock went Variant human to get Moderately Armored (well, more that the story felt best with a human character and I figured I'd take advantage of the higher AC,) the new one, Old Knox, has a Hexblade patron, and thus basically gets that (as well as martial weapon proficiencies) for free.

While Hexblades are clearly built to support a melee-based Warlock (to the extent that I kind of feel like it makes other patrons' Bladelocks feel wimpy in comparison) I've decided that I'm still going to focus on an Eldritch Blast build. The Hex Warrior changes do, however, mean that I don't need to find another cantrip to deal with targets that get into melee range - if they get too close, I just pull out a bonded weapon and smash it into their skulls for the same attack bonus and nearly as much damage (right now, given the starting equipment, I've only gotten enough gold to upgrade my armor to Scale Mail and shield, and I've still just got a handaxe. If I can get enough before we leave Baldur's Gate, I'm going to try to buy a longsword, battleaxe, or warhammer - longsword's probably the most expensive, but also feels like the best fit flavor-wise.)

The one combat encounter we've run, we were seven party members fighting seven pirates, and I killed three of them with single hits to each, just using Hex and Eldritch Blast or the Handaxe.

For level 2, I've taken most obviously useful invocations: Agonizing Blast and Repelling Blast.

Agonizing Blast, I like to think, basically makes you a ranged fighter with more powerful spells than an Eldritch Knight. Indeed, the fact that you get four Eldritch Blast attacks at level 17 makes the Fighter's 4 attacks at level 20 feel kind of underwhelming. But the point is that now, you are no less capable of dealing damage with attacks than a Fighter with a bow, at least before we start talking about magic weapons and such.

Repelling Blast, however, gives you your own magic sauce to serve with your damage. This invocation scales quite profoundly. First off, any time you hit, it simply happens. That means that even some gargantuan, legendary creature cannot save against it. As long as they don't have a wall to stop them, Repelling Blast will do what you want it to do. Enemies need to be very wary of cliffs. This can also be used to rescue other players - if your wizard or sorcerer is stuck in melee with a creature, you can knock it back, creating a window for the character to escape without worrying about opportunity attacks. And given that this happens each time you hit, as Eldritch Blast levels up, you'll eventually be able to move a target a potential of 40 feet with it.

Now, let's talk spells.

I began with Hex and Armor of Agathys - both Warlock staples. Certainly at low levels, Hex is a nice thing to buff your damage - being able to deal 1d10+1d6 damage to those pirates might explain why I was killing them so efficiently (that's an average of 9 damage per attack, and Bandits have an average of 11 health, so I guess I was a little lucky on damage rolls.)

Level 2 is the last time I'm limited to 1st level spells, so my options are somewhat narrow. Hexblades get access to Shield and Wrathful Smite. The latter seems cool, but given that I'm far more of a caster, I don't really see myself using it much. Plus, it's concentration, and certainly at these levels, I imagine I'll want to save that for Hex.

Shield has been fantastic on my Eldritch Knight character, but he's also built far more to be a tank. The Warlock is a ranged caster, and while some defense is useful, I like the damage potential of Armor of Agathys (and its scaling - eventually dealing 25 damage every time someone hits you while it's still up.)

So ultimately, I went simple and picked up Charm Person. It's not concentration (unlike, say, Cause Fear,) and seems like it could be useful situationally.

Looking ahead, I think at level 3 I'm going to take Shatter to have some AoE abilities early on. The really big question will be what Pact I take.

Pact of the Blade I think is out, given that I'm not really going to be melee-focused. Eldritch Blast is better than any ranged weapon I could summon at this point (and I think that might require another invocation.)

So it's between Tome and Chain.

Of course, Tome, with Book of Ancient Secrets, allows you to learn ritual spells, including Find Familiar. So in a way, it feels foolish. On the other hand, there are some Chain-specific invocations that might be good to have.

Tome does give more Cantrips, though, which is nice. Thankfully I'll have another week after tomorrow to figure that out.

EDIT: I think I'll be going with Chain. In part, this gives me Gift of the Ever-Living Ones, which causes any healing to be maximized while I'm within I believe a hundred feet of my familiar. The other reason is that I'll be able to summon an Imp (ironically, I could make my familiar a Celestial Imp - technically, the familiar is just a spirit who takes on a form I choose, and he'll just conveniently look like a devil despite not being one.) As an Imp, he gets Devil's Sight, and so I can just have him sit on my shoulder and swap to "camera two" to benefit from that. Next, the Imp can transform into various shapes, including a rat, raven, or spider. Other than movement speeds, the stats remain the same, and at a base of about 10 hit points, that's better than a lot of familiars.