Wildemount, Theros, and What Might Come With 5th Edition

D&D 5th Edition is now about 5 and a half years old. For a number of reasons, it has been D&D's most popular edition, likely due to its relatively simple rules system and the advent of "actual play" streaming shows like Critical Role (personally, it was Acquisitions Incorporated that got me to try it, which began to promote the then-new 4th Edition before transitioning to "D&D Next" which became 5th.)

As the number of 5E books grows, there are a few questions as to what we can expect to come in the future. Theoretically, there's a 6th Edition that will eventually come out, but I suspect they're going to be hesitant to push that too soon.

Historically, most D&D editions have lasted about a decade. First Edition is a little complicated given that there was D&D and AD&D (I'm given to understand the latter was the popular, definitive version of the game.) 2nd Edition launched in 1989, 15 years after the original D&D, and 12 after AD&D (looking through the history, it's AD&D when the Player's Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Master's Guide became the core three books.)

3rd Edition came out in 2000, but was updated to 3.5 in 2003. Then, 4th Edition came out in 2008. Finally, 5E came out in 2014.

Which means that every edition has come out faster than the previous one did. If that trend were to continue, we'd need to see 6th Edition within the next 6 months or so, which I find very unlikely.

But given 5E's massive popularity, I suspect they'll be sticking with it for a while (sorry, Rangers.)

The 5E books that have come out over the past five and a half years can be broken down, I think, into four categories: Core Books, Supplement Books, Adventure Books, and Campaign Settings. Here's what we have so far, including announced but not-yet-released books (though tomorrow one of those will be out.)

Core Books:
Player's Handbook
Monster Manual
Dungeon Master's Guide

Supplement Books:
Volo's Guide to Monsters
Xanathar's Guide to Everything
Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes

Adventure Books:
Hoard of the Dragon Queen
Rise of Tiamat (these two later published in a single volume as Tyranny of Dragons)
Curse of Strahd
Princes of the Apocalypse
Out of the Abyss
Storm King's Thunder
Tomb of Annihilation
Tales From the Yawning Portal
Waterdeep: Dragon Heist
Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage
Ghosts of Saltmarsh
Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus

Campaign Settings:
Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide
Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica
Acquisitions Incorporated (sort of? It's in the Forgotten Realms but is a sort of different tonal setting.)
Eberron: Rising From the Last War
Explorer's Guide to Wildemount
Mythic Odysseys of Theros

So, clearly, Adventure books have been their focus for much of the edition's lifespan so far. However, I find it very interesting that campaign settings are coming out much more frequently now. Of those five books, only one was published before 2018.

Personally, while I enjoyed playing Descent into Avernus, I'm always going to prefer a campaign tailored for the players and their characters, which makes the Supplement books the most exciting products for me. I also love the campaign setting books - while I am now running a Ravnica campaign (that is off to a shaky start thanks to a pandemic and we can stop talking about that now) I'm much more likely to pillage these books for things in my home setting - I've already started integrating elements of the Mournlands into my own setting's post-apocalyptic wasteland region.

I am curious to see what they do with campaign setting releases.

Perhaps to the chagrin of some older veterans, 5th Edition has only released setting books for two pre-established settings - the Sword Coast of Faerun in the Forgotten Realms, and a book for Eberron, which was introduced in 3rd Edition.

Two of its setting books are imported from Magic: The Gathering. Now, the remaining one - Wildemount, which is part of the larger Exandria setting, feels like a great addition to the canon of D&D. Critical Role has been such a popular and popularizing element of the D&D global community that I think it makes sense as both a place people might be interested in playing in and part of the legend of D&D.

Now, as a nerd who really likes weird things, I'd love to see updated content for Planescape and Spelljammer. And I'm hoping that, as we see more campaign setting books being pushed, we'll see some of those oddballs. Remember, after SCAG, we went for a long time without any other campaign setting books. But between Eberron, Wildemount, and Theors, we're getting three within the space of a single year.

I'm also hoping for another broad character-option book with as many new subclasses (or at least a comparable number) as Xanathar's Guide to Everything. The campaign setting books have given us new class options (or in the case of Eberron, an entirely new class) but typically only two or three. (SCAG actually provided a fair number, but many were sort of unpopular, and the ones that were popular largely got reprinted in Xanathar's.)

I think we can expect new adventure books to come out at a regular rate. These are, after all, the most "consumable" of the 5E products. But homebrewer that I am, I'm really eager for more content I can remix for my own purposes.

Tabletop Gaming in an Age of Plague

Hey, so, there's this virus going around.

I don't think I have anything particularly new to say here. I'm really just bummed that I'm missing out on my usual Wednesday table at my local game store to play Adventurer's League. We finished Descent into Avernus a couple weeks ago, so it's not as bad if I get bumped from the table next week because of store policies.

I'm missing the game because I have a cold. It really seems just to be a standard winter cold - bit of sore throat and congestion, but none of the fever or shortness of breath that seems to come with Covid-19. Still, to be better safe than sorry, I'm trying to avoid leaving the apartment as best as I can and washing my hands periodically and not just after using the bathroom or before eating.

It's funny, thinking about how WoW, an MMORPG, was probably the video game that drew me into the idea of playing tabletop RPGs. I still love WoW, but I've definitely been far more attracted to the way D&D works.

I'm a storyteller, or at least I like to think I am, and D&D is a great medium to tell a story, especially given that you are tested by having to deal with the decisions of your players. The game is so customizable because it leverages the most powerful rendering engine known to exist - the human mind. Yes, I'm aware how cheesy that statement is, but it's actually quite true.

I mean, if I wanted to play a steampunk robot who would spend their time between adventures building an airship, in WoW I'd have to pick a race - maybe Mechagnome - and simply imagine that as his backstory without really getting to engage with it in-game.

But in D&D, I can just talk with a DM and figure out how they want to handle that mechanically and then roll up my Warforged Artificer that I really, really, really want to play.

Of course, getting together with others to play is harder than logging into a game where there are thousands of people per server. There's also a fair number of things one can do as a solo player (I've been going whole hog on Horrific Visions, unlocking Faceless Masks and such.) Indeed, I think one of the big ideas behind computer/video game RPGs is that you essentially have a pre-programmed, computerized DM (or GM if we want to use the general term.)

It's a lot easier to hop in and play WoW for a couple hours if you want to. But I find D&D far more rewarding given the human element of it.

With the plague going around, we really don't know how serious it's going to get. People have died, and I don't want to minimize that. It's likely that a massive number of people will get sick with this, and while only a small minority are likely to die from it (biggest of knocks on wood) it will, at the very least, be a big disruption to social gatherings, not to mention businesses (I won't be super shocked if we have another market crash like in 2008,) and thus people will have less money, which is going to make it harder for them to make time for stuff like D&D.

My friends are very much in the gig economy churn, and with events getting cancelled, it's going to hit them pretty hard.

But on top of the economic hardships, there's also just the fact that we don't want to spread the sickness.

Again, I do not think I'm infected with Covid 19, but given how broadly it's spreading, it makes social gatherings like a D&D night feel potentially irresponsible. Sure, we might be a bunch of healthy folks in our 20s and 30s, but there's always a chance that someone might have a weak immune system or they might simply interact with older or infirm people who are more vulnerable.

Really, this is all just a rant about how I'm bummed that I don't get to go roll some dice and imagine I'm some badass fantasy hero. I'm hoping this crisis ends soon, primarily so that fewer people get sick, but I also think it'd be nice for people to just feel free to go out and socialize without fear or guilt.

Handling Planar Travel in the Magic Multiverse

With Mythic Odysseys of Theros, we're getting the second official guide for a Magic: The Gathering plane.

In D&D, all (or rather, most) campaign settings exist within the Prime Material Plane. The worlds of the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Exandria, etc. all share that plane. In fact, the Spelljammer campaign setting is actually a means to link these various settings together and travel from one to another. Meanwhile, Planescape, another setting, is another sort of meta-setting, expanding beyond the Prime Material to include all 16 - or rather, 17, given the Outlands as the True Neutral plane - Outer Planes, as well as the various Inner Planes and the Prime Material.

While there are some settings that have their own cosmologies, this is typically explained away by having them inhabit some odd part of the overall D&D multiverse. Eberron, for instance, appears to have its own various planes, but to weld that into the overall D&D cosmology, I believe it is canonically a kind of bubble inside the Ethereal Plane - in the Deep Ethereal.

My own homebrew setting, Sarkon (and the greater Celestial Expanse that it exists within) is one I decided is itself in a bubble in the Far Realm, making it very difficult to reach from the canon settings, but not strictly impossible. (I've considered retconning this fact to take advantage of the chance to cross over into other settings, but I also like that, for instance, my Lawful Evil plane was long ago conquered by the undead led by the Angel of Death, who I think make much more sense as LE than CE, and it also means that Hell has literally frozen over and also we have some fun with Devils in exile.)

The thing is, the planes of Magic were not invented to be D&D settings, and for over a quarter of a century, the creative team on Magic has built their own cosmology.

You could, of course, simply smash Ravnica and Theros onto the Prime Material Plane and treat them like any other D&D setting, but I think the lore of Magic is rich enough that they deserve to be portrayed as part of their own multiverse.

The Acquisitions Incorporated games are at least partially canonical (Omin Dran, Jerry Holkins' character, is canonically one of the masked lords of Waterdeep) and when they've traveled to Ravnica, they've done so by traveling across the Far Realm.

The Far Realm is fairly convenient - many fantasy properties include some sort of "ultimate outer plane" where Lovecrafitan cosmic horror can be found. Given that it's the ultimate "outside," it also sort of works as a bridge between canons. The eldritch nature of the Far Realm means it could be truly infinite in size (or if infinity isn't enough, it could be basically infinity to the infinite power.)

But to scale back down again, what about the Magic multiverse?

Specifically, how do spells like Etherealness, Plane Shift, and Astral Projection work in the Magic multiverse?

I think it depends a bit on how canonical you want to get.

First off, the Magic multiverse currently does not have any canon name like "The Great Wheel" or anything like that. However, in the early days of the game, it was called Dominia, and the primary setting of Magic for its first ten years (with a couple excursions to other settings) was Dominaria - a plane whose name meant "Song of Dominia." Dominaria was at the nexus of the multiverse, though in practice that just meant it was the important setting.

In a lot of ways, what distinguishes Dominaria from the other settings is A: it's got the most fleshed-out history, geography, and map and B: it's the most generic of the settings, existing as a kind of catch-all fantasy world, because for many years, it was all the game had (well, except for "Rabiah," which I think was basically a retcon to justify the Arabian Nights set, which was Magic's first "expansion set".)

In the lore of MTG, the various planes are all distinct worlds, but they're less interconnected than those in typical D&D. Gods that are worshipped in one world are unheard of in others. Indeed, the existence of other planes is unknown to the vast majority of people in MTG worlds.

Travel between those planes is also extremely rare, and typically can only be done by a Planeswalker.

Now, planeswalkers have existed in two major forms during Magic's canon.

In both cases, a planeswalker has what is called a planeswalker spark - a latent potential to become a planeswalker. Usually, one is simply born with this by chance, though there are cases of people gaining a spark through some artificial means - including the most famous planeswalker of Magic's early days, Urza.

Prior to an event called The Mending, Planeswalkers were essentially gods who had been born as mortals. Planeswalkers could create entire planes, and were immortal and incredibly powerful.

It was also before the Mending that other creatures could more easily travel between planes. The evil biomechanical Phyrexians had planar gates that allowed them to jump between worlds. But also, a planeswalker could summon individuals from one plane to another to fight for them (though some canonical sources suggested that summoning a creature was really more like making a copy of them.)

However, after The Mending, the old planar gates stopped working, and Planeswalkers degraded from living gods to something more like superheroes - powerful, sure, but still mortals.

In this state, it seems as if Planeswalking is the only way to go between the Planes, and that puts some limits on your player characters in a D&D campaign. Unless you flavor your planar travel spells as allowing the character to become a Planeswalker, it's not clear that you could be consistent with the lore and allow your players to travel between the planes.

Now, there is already one canonical exception that allows some things to travel between planes without being Planeswalkers. In last year's War of the Spark event, the evil Elder Dragon Nicol Bolas used a Planar Gate created on the Steampunk-India world of Kaladesh to bring his army of metal-plated mummy-warriors from Amonkhet (a world he had basically Bene-Gesserit-ed for centuries to view him as their God-Emperor before wiping out most of its population and raising them as undead) to invade Ravnica.

If it's just that the old planar bridges don't work and new ones can be built in a different way, then perhaps the planar travel restrictions can be lessened.

I'm investigating that possibility for the future of my Ravnica campaign (no one is over level 2 at this point, so I've got time.) However, I did come up with a quasi-consistent-with-canon possibility:

I have created a Feat called Planeswalker Spark. I won't go through all the details, but here's the gist of it:

When you take the feat, you get to raise one ability score of your choice by 1. Then, at a time determined by the DM (when the player is subjected to a moment of profound stress,) a couple things happen: the Planeswalker spark ignites, healing them to full. Immediately, the players then involuntarily casts Plane Shift to a plane determined by rolling on a random table.

Counting this involuntary one, the player can now cast Plane Shift once per long rest on themselves, with no required material components. Returning to their home plane (Ravnica) is easy, but traveling to planes they haven't been to before has a chance to fail and send them to a random one instead.

Where we start to break canon is that they can spend the time it would take to learn a new tool or language proficiency to become "proficient" with Planeswalking, allowing them to draw upon the mana of the land to summon allies with them as they go (or send an unwilling target elsewhere.)

We're, of course, pretty far from players learning all those other planar travel spells, but I'm hoping to have a robust system in place - not to mention some go-to locations and scenarios for all those other planes.

Spell-Storing Items Are Insane

The Artificer is a half-caster, like the Paladin and the Ranger. You'll never get more than 5th level spells with it, and you'll have to rely on other class features (like the very nice Artificer Infusions) to keep up with pure casters.

Looking through those features, though, one of them stands out as really, really good: Spell Storing Item.

Once you hit level 11, when you finish a long rest, you can touch an item and store a spell of 1st or 2nd level in it - it can be any artificer spell of those levels; you don't need to have it prepared. The spell needs to have a cast time of 1 action, though, so no Shield.

Anyway, anyone can use this item to reproduce the spell, using your spellcasting stats (your spell attack bonus and your save dc, and if it's cure wounds, it uses your Int modifier to determine the bonus to the heal.)

What's crazy about this is that you get to use it a number of times equal to twice your Intelligence modifier - and all you need to do to recharge it is rest.

What this does, effectively, is give you 10 extra 1st or 2nd level spell slots. Admittedly, you have to pick the one spell you'll be using for all 10 of those slots, but that's still 10 more spells to cast than you would otherwise have - and you can even hand it off to others (for instance, you can give a Cure Wounds canister to your monk, who can then zip around healing folks if they go down.)

If you're an artillerist, you get Shatter as one of your Artificer spells, which is 2nd level (it's a 10-ft radius sphere within 60ft that does 3d8 thunder damage, with a Con save to reduce that by half.) While at level 11 3d8 might not be a ton of damage (your Firebolt by that point will be hitting for 3d10+1d8 if you use your Arcane Firearm) but given that it's an area-effect spell, the damage gets multiplied by how many targets you can hit - and if you have a swarm of enemies, that can get really high.

Invisibility is another option - with ten charges, you (or an ally) can drop out of invisibility without too much fear.

The really excellent thing about this is that you can also spread concentration around. Let's say you want to be concentrating on some other spell, but also want to maintain, say, Enlarge/Reduce on your Monk or Fighter. Just let someone who doesn't need to concentrate on one of their own effects do it for you.

Going back to invisibility, you can simply have each player concentrate on their own invisibility spell so the whole group is much better at sneaking.

Like basically all Artificer features, this is also one that I really think you can get creative with in terms of flavor. I like the idea of making metal canisters for various spells, or rigging up some kind of wrist-mounted squirt-nozzle to shoot grease at an area. Maybe your alchemist makes Enhance Ability into a bottle from which you drink to cast it on yourself.

As a half-caster, you miss out on 6th-9th-level spells, but while those are unquestionably more powerful individually than a couple of 2nd (or 1st) level spells, the fact is that the actual, raw spellcasting ability of the Artificer is increased by 67% from this feature (and at the level you get it, it's doubled!)

The Artificer is really a great Swiss Army Knife class. If you are able to figure out things you might need ahead of time, this feature could be incredibly powerful.

The First Session of Jace's Irregulars

We had the first session of a campaign I have been planning for months, and it went well!

The party arrived at the Chamber of the Guildpact, the office in the center of Precinct One in the Tenth District, where they've been assigned by their guilds to work for the organization that keeps it all balanced. The Guilds each have their own opinion of the organization, but even the more chaotic ones want to have some representation within it to ensure that the bossy guilds don't just use it as a bludgeon to infringe on their freedoms.

I have a large number of players officially in the group, but with a rotating cast as players' availability changes.

Tonight, we had:

Bob, a Vampire (homebrew/modification of the Ixalan vampire) Sorcerer with the Izzet League
Niko, a Vampire Rogue with the Cult of Rakdos
Hados, a Loxodon Barbarian from the Selesnya Conclave
Dahn, an Elf Druid from the Golgari Swarm
Sestri, a Vedalken Sorcerer with the Izzet League
and Ararara, a Vampire Fighter with the Simic Combine

(Note that just in case other players stumble across this, I'm not going to note if any of these characters are actually in House Dimir until they get officially unmasked in-game.)

The party is sent to an Izzet power station in Wayport (Precinct Six), where electrical power is harvested from (quite happy, friendly) Galvanice Weirds. A sewer line burst next to the station's basement, and it's caused a great deal of damage to the station, shutting it down. But when the Izzet contacted the Golgari to fix it and clean it up, the Golgari denied having any sewer lines running through there, and thus have refused to do anything.

In goes the party, who discover that the fungal growth in the sewage has animated the dead bodies found in there, and they're forced to fight a group of zombies and violet fungi.

This fight wound up being way tougher than I expected, first because two of the fungi rolled to do 4 attacks on their first turns, and second because the last zombie kept rolling insanely high on its Undead Fortitude saves. I believe three people went unconscious in this fight, but I gave everyone healing potions to start with, so it wasn't terrible.

Taking a short rest after this fight, the party considered just claiming it was the Golgari to blame, but then decided to investigate a broken wall in the side of the basement, which led to a defunct Izzet access tunnel and then to a busted sewage tank in which the missing Galvanice Weird (Frosty) was sitting in a panic. Two characters managed to do very well calming the Weird down, and led him back to the station.

Exploring a hatch in the top of the tank, the party came upon a ruined old Izzet station and found a former Golgari Swarm member who was camped out in a tent, trying to start a Rot Farm near the surface after her family was targeted by a rival in the Swarm and her old properties were seized in a hostile takeover (which, for the Golgari, often means sending assassins.)

In the middle of their conversation, a pair of Kraul Warriors came in through a big gap in the wall and attacked, trying to kill the Devkarin woman. The party managed to defeat them, just barely saving the woman's life (she had 1 hp at the end of the fight.) Upon searching the Kraul, they found one had a sort of ritual scarification (tattoos don't take very well to chitinous exoskeletons) in the shape of a circle with a big line going down the center.

With the mystery solved, and the Devkarin woman offering to help clean things up after her failed Rot Farm caused all this damage, the party completed their mission and our first session came to an end!

Mythic Odysseys of Theros - Official Announcement of D&D's Second MTG-Crossover Campaign Setting Book

While it was leaked a couple days ago, we now have the official announcement that Mythic Odysseys of Theros is real and will release on June 2nd (just in time for my June 8th birthday!)

Theros is one of the planes in the multiverse of Magic: the Gathering. Inspired by Greek mythology, Theros is a land deeply tied to the Gods, where mortals are blessed or cursed by Gods in their quests for glory and fame.

The Gods of Theros inhabit a realm beyond the world known as Nyx, which manifests in the constellations seen at night. Additionally, Theros has a vast Underworld, where mortals go after they die, and from which various terrible monsters emerge.

According to the announcement, MOoT will bring a few new features to the game:

Supernatural Gifts will help distinguish players from ordinary people, with similar mechanics to races. I suspect this might be, essentially, the Theros equivalent of Eberron's Dragonmarks, which are essentially several variant versions of existing races or subraces.

There will also be new races: the listed ones on the announcement are Satyrs and Leonin (the latter being lion-people who are found in many Magic worlds.) Given their Greek mythology origins, I highly suspect that we'll also see Minotaurs and Centaurs reprinted in MOoT, as both races are found with some abundance in Theros.

New subclasses include the Bard's College of Eloquence and the Paladin's Oath of Heroism, both of which we've seen tested as part of Unearthed Arcana. The former seems fitting for the Theros equivalent of the Athenian Agora (which I was lucky enough to visit back in 2018) while the latter is built around the Classical ideals of heroism.

There are also new mythic monsters, which the announcement claims are beyond legendary. I don't know if that implies some new mechanical distinction or if they're just drumming up excitement for them. We'll see!

Finally, there are god-weapons, which are the iconic arms of the gods of Theros, and will presumably be some very exciting artifact-level magic items. I'm curious to see how these compare to the Vestiges from Exandria, which becomes an official D&D setting once the Explorer's Guide to Wildemount comes out later this month.

I'm literally beginning a Ravnica campaign tonight (even if we had a little preview-session as a last minute thing a week ago for some players) and while I'm sure I'll have plenty of material for that on Ravnica itself, I've definitely intended to expand into the greater Magic multiverse (which I still call Dominia, damn it!) and even came up with a special Feat that allows players to become Planeswalkers, so it'll be good to have a bunch of material for any adventures that take them to Theros - even, possibly, having players create Theros-natives who join the party if people want to make "alts" or their characters die or retire.

Folks, Baldur's Gate III Looks Really Good

I am no veteran of the Baldur's Gate games. I got "Enhanced Edition" when it became available and could never get past the tutorial phase of the game. I'm sure that it's a great game when you get used to its systems, and it's one of those games I'm constantly imagining I'll return to and try out "for real," but I haven't been able to get myself to do so. When the game first came out, I don't think I even registered it - it was around the time that I had finally gotten a video game console, and I was probably more excited about games like Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, and Perfect Dark.

But a couple things: one is, I've now become far more well-versed in D&D - both its (5th Edition) mechanics and the lore of the Forgotten Realms.

I've literally just finished playing Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus (which, to be fair, is only in Baldur's Gate until you hit level 5 - then you go to the titular first layer of the Nine Hells) so I have a much better sense of the eponymous city (it's not great!)

So my interest for this new game is piqued in a way that it certainly wasn't when the original came out over 20 years ago.

But what has really been encouraging me is seeing the way the developers are talking about it.

Naturally, behind-the-scenes stuff is part of marketing, especially on a project that is awaited but not coming out for a while. They want us to feel that there are passionate and talented people working on the project.

But I also think that you don't often get to see that "how the sausage is made" stuff unless they're feeling good about what they've made. What they've shown off is a game that looks like a labor of love, as well as one in which they're proud of what they're producing.

Anyway, I'm feeling pretty excited about this game. We might have something really great here, which is nice given that I don't feel like there have been many "really great" games coming out lately.