Shadowlands Releases October 27th! Also, Afterlives: Bastion, Also, Some TFH on the Implications of Afterlives: Bastion

 Ho. Ly. Shit.

First off, let's get this out of the way: the expansion drops in exactly two months. That means we're likely to get the pre-patch within the next couple weeks or so. Very exciting, yes yes. But let's talk about this short, which I assume you just watched.

Holy Crap, guys.

Never did I expect myself to be on Arthas' side when it comes to his relationship with Uther. But we got something really, really big.

So, here's the thing about Bastion. The Kyrian are the psychopomps of the Shadowlands. A psychopomp is a spirit or deity whose role it is to take the spirits (in Greek: psyche) to the afterlife. Hermes and Charon could be considered these in Classical Myth, the Valkyries in Norse myth, and you could argue kinda sorta St. Peter in his conception as the gatekeeper of Heaven and Hell in Christian belief.

Mortal souls arrive in Bastion if they lived a selfless life of duty. Beginning as aspirants, they gradually purge their memories and old identities to take on a new life as a Kyrian - eventually ascending with angelic wings to perform their role.

Devos is one of the highest-ranking and oldest Kyrian, and when Uther the Lightbringer shows up in Bastion, she takes a special interest in him.

Uther, meanwhile, is confused as to why he's there. Surely he was meant to go to the Light, not this admittedly pretty realm. And he's stewing in rage and sorrow over what Arthas has done. For all his beatific serenity, Uther does feel anger at injustice, and Arthas' actions were the greatest crime and betrayal he'd ever witnessed.

So Uther resists the purging process, and furthermore, he feels that the Kyrian are mistaken if they think that evil is truly sealed away in the Maw. Despite it not being her job to help new aspirants (it's funny to think that Uther is just another poor schmuck in Bastion) Devos takes a special interest in Uther. She begins to question whether he was really sent to the correct afterlife - which is a big no-no in perfect heaven world.

When she finally coaxes Uther's memory from him, she discovers that the blade that he was killed with (Frostmourne) was, in fact, inscribed with runes from the Maw. That evil has escaped it, and is running rampant on Azeroth. Furthermore, she finds that even Uther's soul is wounded by the blade - it looks as if it was torn in two, with part of it trapped in the sword and part of it ascending (which explains how we were able to interact with him in Wrath - it also might explain why this version of Uther lacks that beatific, all-forgiving quality. Maybe it was lost to Frostmourne.)

Telling the Archon (the leader of the Kyrian) that this whole system is broken and flawed, Devos is spurned, and so instead she decides that she needs to make Uther an ally, giving him wings ahead of time and then traveling to Icecrown Citadel... at the moment we strike Arthas down.

As Arthas lies dying on the top of the Citadel, it is Devos and Uther who take his soul to the Shadowlands.

And they bypass the Arbiter, flying directly over the Maw, where Uther chucks Arthas' soul in there - no trial, no evaluation. Just damnation for all eternity.

Is it Justice?

Because here's the thing about Arthas. He's one of the greatest monsters ever to exist on Azeroth. But to what extent was he actually to blame? How much agency did he have?

Can he be held to account for things he did after Frostmourne ripped his soul away? After all, it's his soul that is being punished, not the body that committed those acts. Arthas' soul was present when he purged Stratholme, when he fought his way to Northrend and betrayed a group of mercenaries he'd hired - blaming them for burning his ships, which he had done to prevent them from being recalled to Lordaeron.

But he did not know what Frostmourne would mean for him when he took it up. Arthas was obsessed with vengeance and retribution, but surely such sins are the kind of thing Revendreth could iron out of a soul. The truly monstrous, apocalyptic vision he had did not come until Frostmourne had taken his soul.

So did he really deserve the Maw?

I think that very few people we've met in the Warcraft story actually deserve that fate. Gul'dan is the only one I'm certain of (I've always wondered if the reason that his village's chieftain hated him wasn't because he was weak, but because he could detect the evil lurking beneath the surface). Maybe Cho'gall as well.

But this makes Uther's actions - condemning Arthas without respecting the (admittedly flawed) authority who actually makes those decisions - a seriously problematic act.

And hey... isn't it shortly after that that Sylvanas first made contact with the Jailer?

We might have stumbled onto something here. Did Uther tossing Arthas into the Maw break death?

We know of two individuals who died relatively recently and are going to be showing up in Shadowlands. Lady Vashjj and Kael'thas Sunstrider are found in Maldraxxus and Revendreth, respectively. Both died pretty close to one another - Vashjj in Serpentshirne Cavern during BC, and Kael'thas in Magister's Terrace, also during BC, which just so happens to have been the expansion before Wrath of the Lich King.

Could Uther's act, defying the system of the Shadowlands, have been what broke the Arbiter?

That being said, it's pretty obvious the system was already broken. Kil'jaeden had clearly entered and left the Maw if he was able to create Frostmourne and the Helm of Domination. But damn if this doesn't really get the lore wheels spinning!

Maldraxxus Impressions

 With the fix to the Beta, I was able to finish the primary quest line in Maldraxxus.

Much like Bastion, you arrive to find that the ordinary way things are supposed to go has broken down. The bad guys in this zone are obvious from the beginning.

The order of the zones (at least for your first go) are very clearly designed to alternate between light and dark. While Bastion is a (mostly) pristine garden of a zone - with buildings and roads reminiscent of the Halls of Valor and Mac'aree - Maldraxxus is one of the grossest places we've ever been. The very earth itself seems to be made of rotten flesh (disgustingly, Skinners can actually harvest from nodes on the ground here... don't think about that too much.)

Yet the realm's purpose suggests that all this grossness actually serves a purpose. When invaders come to the Shadowlands - something that does seem to have happened from time to time, such as denizens of the Void - it is the forces of Maldraxxus that fight them off. All the plagues, constructs, and liches are actually there to serve as the Shadowlands' army.

Naturally, with the Jailer securing agents within the various realms we go to, things have gone sideways, and a civil war has erupted within the realm.

You fight for the House of the Chosen - one of five Houses that make up Maldraxxus' military services (the others, though two have been destroyed in the war, are the House of Plagues, the House of Eyes, the House of Rituals, and the House of Constructs.)

Meanwhile, the throughline of the zone's quests has you working to empower a runeblade left for you to find by the Primus - the original (but vanished) ruler of the realm.

I'll say that the zone actually feels markedly different from Bastion - where Bastion has rather discrete areas in which there is danger, and a lot where the things you fight are summoned in various cleansing rituals, Maldraxxus is dense with foes. You're going to be carving your way through literally armies of the undead here.

I don't know that the story is quite as thought-provoking as the one in Bastion - I can totally understand the standpoint of people who join the Forsworn - but if you want to fight Scourge-like foes, this is the place to be.

Notably, toward the end of the quests here, you return to the Maw (which unfortunately had a rather bugged quests that I had to kind of get lucky to finish) before a last chapter in Maldraxxus. While there aren't quite as many breaks from leveling zones in the questing in Shadowlands (at least so far,) as there were in Legion and BFA, it's cool to really make the Maw simultaneously feel like a real part of the expansion while also feeling decidedly more deadly (while you might find it annoying, and check in with me after a few months of this, the fact that you can't mount in the Maw actually makes the zone feel much more menacing and disorienting.)

Undead Patron and College of Spirits: For Tasha's, or For a Ravenloft Campaign Setting?

 I got very, very excited when, a few weeks ago, and Unearthed Arcana post went out detailing two subclasses that really tickled my gothic sensibilities. The College of Spirits gives us a Bard that can essentially be like a 19th Century spiritualist medium. Meanwhile, the Undead Patron admittedly steps on the toes of the Undying patron, though it really doubles down on the notion of some ancient lich, death knight, or vampire as a spooky, gothic patron.

Notice a theme?

I'd really love to see these subclasses show up in the upcoming Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, but I'll confess that there's a hitch: these were just released, and it's only a couple months before Tasha's is out.

It would still be great to see it in there, especially if I ever get back to playing Adventurer's League after the pandemic is over.

But I have my doubts.

However - all that being said, there's a potential silver lining should the subclasses not make it into Tasha's.

Given the deeply gothic nature of both subclasses, I suspect this could mean a Ravenloft Campaign Setting book.

So far, in 5th Edition, there have been five Campaign Setting books - Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, Eberron: Rising from the Last War, Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, and Mythic Odysseys of Theros. Every one of these has brought new subclasses (Eberron gave us only subclasses to its brand new class, but that still counts!)

In fact, the only books apart from these to do so were the Player's Handbook and Xanathar's Guide to Everything.

Tasha's Cauldron of Everything is clearly going to be a sort of sequel to Xanathar's (perhaps establishing an "Everything" convention, though I don't know how many more we're likely to get in 5th Edition.)

But while SCAG had several subclasses (that it seems very few people play,) generally, the convention has seemed to be two or three subclasses per book.

Add that to the fact that those two subclasses are both dripping with Gothic flavor, and you're already on the right track.

Next, consider that Ravneloft is one of the most popular D&D settings - Curse of Strahd (something we just had a session of tonight) is probably the most popular published adventure for 5th Edition. I think that WotC can be confident that a setting book for Ravenloft would be a big hit.

So this all adds up to make me feel relatively confident that a Ravenloft book could be the next big campaign setting we get, probably some time in the middle of 2021.

I'd love to get more direction on the lands beyond Barovia, as well as some details about the Dark Powers (maybe not enough details to make them lose their mystique, but enough to weave a broader mythos around the setting.)

Another thing setting books come with are monsters, and boy howdy am I always happy to have more spooky monsters.

With Artificers Coming to a Setting-Agnostic Book: Fitting Them Into Other Settings

 Artificers are the only class to be added to 5th Edition after the initial release of its Player's Handbook. While we've gotten many subclasses, and the unholy mess that was the Mystic in Unearthed Arcana, the Artificer brings its own unique class features to the game.

Included in the sourcebook for the Eberron campaign setting, Artificers are a perfect encapsulation of the setting's general vibe: where magic has allowed the world to attain a semi-modern (well, roughly mid-20th-century) level of technology, but via magic, instead of the physics and engineering we understand in our world.

Personally, I love it, which is why Eberron is probably my favorite official D&D setting outside of extra-planar stuff.

But while some of us are eager to fill our D&D games with anachronism and blend fantasy with light science fiction, some prefer that things be kept strictly in a medieval style. How, then, to reckon with Artificers?

They're coming: slated to be reprinted in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, complete with a fourth subclass (the Armorer,) I think if we haven't already, we should embrace the Artificer as a full-fledged and equal member of the 5th Edition class list.

But if you aren't quite so into the steampunk-y nature of the class, worried what its effect will be on your setting, what are you to do?

The thing is, I think that inventors and tinkerers have always been a big thing in the fantasy genre. Saruman was using black powder in Lord of the Rings, for example.

So I think the easiest way to limit the impact of artificers on your setting is to consider the individual artificer to be a rare exception - someone who is forward thinking and unique in their use of this magical technology.

But to take it a step further: I think that Artificers aren't as inherently steampunk as they first appear.

The fundamental idea is that the Artificer is using tools they have prepared to cast their spells. Your Faerie Fire, for instance, is not some ethereal, conjured energy, but is projected from some physical object you have on your person.

As such, I think you could go very, very far from the typical Artificer vibe on this.

Consider, for example, that you've got some sort of Norse myth-inspired setting. Perhaps rather than shiny brass grenades the artificer has prepared, instead, your artificer might have spent their long rest taking some stones and carving runes into them. In your culture, you're referred to as a "Runecarver," and use the magic of runes and stone to cast your spells.

The Steel Defender that battle-smiths get is very easily translated into a less technological device by simply referring to it as a kind of golem. Maybe your artificer was trained by ancient sages about the secret ways the gods first created life, and as a member of that mystical order, you have bound elemental spirits into a frame of metal (or you could just have it be stone or clay - something I think any DM would happily allow.)

An artillerist might treat their cannons as something less physical - not a mechanical, literal cannon that walks around on legs, but a floating arrangement of ethereal shards of pure magic, which can conjure forth blasts of energy that attack from afar. You might look more like a wizard than some oil-covered grease-monkey.

The new Armorer subclass obviously evokes Iron Man, and as such feels pretty futuristic. But the notion of magical armor is pretty universal in fantasy, and the armor you've built could easily look like a classic knight's plate, but perhaps it is etched with magic runes that allow it to change shape.

I think it's also worth noting that technology in general is omnipresent through human history - arguably, the thing that really distinguishes us from other animals is our use of technology. If Archimedes could build things like water screws and (possibly apocryphally) a concave mirror to focus sunlight and burn enemy ships, it seems that some kind of tinkerer should fit in any setting.

Still, I do think that the Artificer can look very different in different contexts, and deserves a place in even the most pre-technological settings (I'm actually really into that "Runecarver" idea.)

Class Feature Revisions in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything

 One of the features announced with the upcoming new rules book for D&D 5E goes beyond subclasses, and alters the classes themselves.

We got an Unearthed Arcana article a while back that set forth some of these ideas.

One of the biggest new features is Spell Versatility, which applies to pretty much every class (classes that prepare spells get "cantrip versatility," which effectively makes this umbrella go over every magic class). Basically, when you finish a long rest, you can swap out a spell you know for another from your class spell list.

This is a pretty great way to let players experiment a bit with their builds and not feel like they've made some huge mistake for picking a cantrip or spell that looked like it would be useful, but isn't, actually (True Strike says hello!)

The Ranger has also gotten some profound re-works to their level 1 features - Favored Terrain and Favored Enemy can be swapped out for Deft Explorer and Favored Foe.

The former is a more broadly applicable set of bonuses to your environmental exploration capabilities, letting you clear exhaustion more easily, giving you a climbing and swimming speed, and a few other bonuses.

Favored Foe essentially lets you use Hunter's Mark like a class feature, and removes the need to maintain concentration on it (you get a limited number of uses, but it's still probably better than the number of spell slots you have, at least early on.) I'll definitely say that for the character I might multiclass as a Ranger/Barbarian, this change would be insanely welcome (as Raging breaks concentration on spells.)

Likewise, the Beast Master subclass has gotten a new replacement ability that lets you call forth a "Beast of the Air" or a "Beast of the Earth," which, along with scaling with your level, also lets you resurrect it easily, which I think should make the subclass a bit more appealing. Most importantly, you can have these attack with your bonus action, making the subclass feel a little more like, you know, people assumed it would.

Caster classes get expanded spell lists, and classes with fighting styles get new styles and get the ability to swap styles when they gain a level.

One new Warlock invocation that I think is important to note is Eldritch Armor - which is that you can use an action to touch a suit of armor and immediately don it, and you are considered proficient with it while wearing it. While I'm sure the idea here is to let a strength-based blade-lock (it's a Pact of the Blade exclusive) wear heavy armor, I also think there's some hilarious potential for larceny with this invocation - you could walk into a store filled with fancy magical armor and just "whoops" touch a set of +2 Adamantine Plate Armor, cast invisibility on yourself, and run the hell away. Still, this is an effective way to give Warlocks proficiency in heavy armor without requiring most to take two whole feats just to get there (Hexblades would need one.) Plus, it would mean that a Warlock of this variety would be an ideal defender if your DM is a stickler about not letting you rest in heavy armor - once the alarm bells go off, the warlock just slips the armor on for their first turn, bonus actions their weapon in hand, and they're good to go.

The big question I have about these features is how it will play at a DM's table. As a DM myself, I'm likely to just say that anything found in Tasha's is fair game, and if you want to use these features in addition to or in place of stuff from the PHB, I'll allow it.

But I do think that it will require some re-learning of class features for players and DMs. Still, after 6 years, it'll be nice to see some broken features and classes finally work well.

First Impressions of Maldraxxus

I was given to understand ahead of time, and it proves true, that questing through the leveling zones in Shadowlands is going to feel a little different. While you get a significant story and a lengthy quest chain, the game now indicates "main quests" as opposed to side quests. I charged through the Bastion story quests, and they were enough to get me about a quarter of the way up from 50-60 (well, I came in at 51, given that the intro quests in the Maw are just about enough to get you there.) There's still a huge chunk of Bastion (maybe half the zone) that I haven't seen, despite making it through the zone's primary story. My hope is that when you choose a covenant, the rest of that zone will be necessary for your covenant campaign - meaning it won't be just side quests that you can skip on every character. But we shall see!

After discovering the assault on the Temple of Courage (the setting of the Necrotic Wake dungeon) you follow the next clue to Maldraxxus.

Where Bastion is beautiful, sunny, and idyllic (if a little unsettlingly cult-y... I'm really eager to see more of the story there, because I honestly don't blame the Forsworn for not wanting to abandon their identities and memories. I mean, I feel like one of the main appeals of an afterlife is seeing loved ones we've lost once again, right?) Maldraxxus is... nasty.

The very earth you tread upon seems to be made of rotting flesh. Everything in Maldraxxus is bones, skin, flesh, and I guess maybe some steel - though I think their armor and weapons might just be bone.

We're told that this is the realm from which the Scourge pulled its power and minions, and it has some familiar aesthetics - floating necropoli, stitched-together abominations, and nasty skeletal warriors are everywhere.

But this being the Shadowlands, just because they're creepy doesn't mean they're evil.

You arrive in Maldraxxus right before the Theater of Pain, a vast arena in which combatants prove themselves against one another. As you go into the grand melee and prove yourself the most powerful fighter, once you are proclaimed the victor, you deliver the news about the incursion into Bastion, and the "Margrave" of the House of the Chosen backs you up while the other Margraves basically declare war.

Maldraxxus is where the army of the Shadowlands resides - and we hear about them fending off forces of the Void and (if I recall correctly) the Legion, and other extraplanar threats that even after over 25 years of Warcraft as a franchise, we're not really familiar with.

Of course, when things were working correctly, the Maldraxxi were just the rough-and-ready defenders of the plane. But in the midst of the anima drought, some have chosen to raid and pillage anima from elsewhere (probably also in some kind of arrangement with the Jailer.)

Unlike Uther, whose role in Bastion is still very much in development after its main quest line, the first familiar face in Maldraxxus is one you meet early - it's Thrall's mother, Draka, who has become one of the two Barons of the House of the Chosen (perhaps not surprisingly, the Shadowlands' military realm is pretty regimented.) Draka accompanies you on many of your quests here, as you discover a relic that the Primus - the original and seemingly long-gone leader of Maldraxxus - left, apparently for you.

I haven't gotten much farther than this because of some bugs (it's Beta, after all) but it's a profound tonal and aesthetic shift from the stuff you do in Bastion.

I will say that there's a lot in the quests of both zones that's sort of introducing you to the culture of the realm - both places treat you like a new recruit, as if you were assigned to that realm by the Arbiter. Maldraxxus is, by its nature, a more combat-oriented culture, but they're still looking to train and arm you much as in Bastion they were trying to have you purge all your psychological issues.

Much to my delight, the high-concept settings of these zones are introducing some really interesting philosophical questions. In Bastion, there's a sort of question of whether people who were selfless and self-sacrificing in life should really be fated to once again sacrifice and act selflessly in the afterlife. In Maldraxxus (and to an extent Bastion as well,) I find myself wondering what it means when someone dies in the Shadowlands. There are memorials to heroes of Maldraxxus who fell battling the Shadowlands great foes - but what does that mean? Are they just gone-gone, with nothing left of them except in others' memories? Or does death here send them to some kind of soul-recycling system (maybe Ardenweald?) where they get reincarnated? Or, perhaps a dead person who dies in Bastion gradually re-coalesces there? It's some real serious stuff to contemplate, which I love.

Anyway, I hope that whatever Beta build comes next fixes the issues so I can move on (I got a new weapon and I don't really want to just keep plugging away without a Runeforge on it) because I'm super-eager to check out Ardenweald and Revendreth.

Customizing Racial Features: Potentially One of the Best Changes Coming in Tasha's

 (Incidentally, I like to refer to the "So and so's" books simply by their "authors," which makes me feel like I'm some academic in a D&D world talking about some very obvious and important text where all you'd need to know is the author's name to identify it, e.g. "Volo's.")

In Tasha's we're going to be getting new rules for customizing Racial traits. I'm fairly sure that this is going to leave things like a Dragonborn's breath weapon in place, given that this is a defining physiological feature of their species. But the obvious thing to change is how ability scores are affected by racial choice.

I think the initial motivation for this change is one born of a greater awareness of how subtly our culture reinforces racist notions. While originally created to be disposable bad guys by Tolkien (as a Catholic, he struggled with the idea of a people who were inherently evil, which is why he made his Orcs corrupted Elves... which kind of sort of solved that issue, but also sort of opened some new cans of worms) over time, across the fantasy genre, Orcs have become a much more complex and broad group of people. And while they often do play an antagonistic role in fantasy stories, more and more storytellers are looking to explore them as having the nuances and complexities of a real group of people.

In Volo's Guide to Monsters, there were a few "monstrous races" in addition to options like Aasimar and Kenku, which included Orcs. Half-Orcs had existed in the PHB, but full Orcs were oddly mechanically different from them, built more on the conventions of how Orcs work in the Monster Manual.

And unlike other playable races, Orcs had a -2 to Intelligence.

Now...

The notion that any particular ethnic group is inherently less intelligent has been used throughout the ages as an excuse to put such people on a lower rung of society. (And the socioeconomic hardship from being on that lower rung tends to make things like getting a good education a lot harder, reinforcing the stereotype.) Races in fantasy are certainly more distinct from one another than ethnicities in the real world, but the idea of a group of humanoid people who are all dumb, violent brutes certainly rings a few unsettling bells given the way that real-world ethnic stereotypes portray certain groups of people.

Having the game mechanics double-down and actually reinforce that notion is even more problematic.

So it was quite welcome when the Orcs in the Eberron book were not penalized in terms of Intelligence, and their story portrays them in a far more nuanced and humane light.

Still, even "positive" racial stereotypes - like saying a particular ethnicity is smarter than most - plays into this same issue. The fact that Gnomes are just plane smarter than anyone else in the PHB carries with it some problematic associations as well.

But believe it or not, I'm not actually making this as my main argument against the way races currently work. While I think reexamining our culture's treatment of race is important - acknowledging both its artificiality as well as the damage it has done to our society despite this fact - I actually think this makes the most sense from a gameplay perspective.

In D&D, you generally want whatever your main ability score modifier is to start at +3. Sure, you can get along with a +2, but to actually max it out before you're in the high levels, you'll want to start at at least +3. And to do that, unless you're rolling your stats and get relatively lucky, you're going to need to pick a race that can boost that ability score by at least a bit. Taking the standard array or using Point Buy means you can, at max, have a score of 15 for that best stat. To get it to +3, you need at least one more.

As such, picking a race that doesn't boost that stat essentially signs you up to somewhat handicap your character.

Now, I know that a lot of players feel like this isn't such a big deal - you can play an underpowered character and still have fun. And I don't disagree with that.

But I also know that a lot of players would prefer to be able to choose a race that speaks to them while still making a "good" decision in terms of gameplay mechanics.

My hope is that we could see a rather simple system: you get 3 points to assign to any ability scores instead of the usual racial bonuses. You can put two of them into one score and 1 into another, or put 1 into each of three scores. That would be in line with the vast majority of existing racial ability score bonuses.

The massive benefit here is that there wouldn't be any "bad" choices for race - and you could instead build your character the way you see fit. I love the idea of an Orc who's a thoughtful, somewhat scrawny wizard, or a charming, deft Dwarven rogue. If I ever follow through on replacing my Eldritch Knight Dragonborn with a Wizard, I could use such rules to reroll the same individual (DM permitting, of course.)

Having really gotten my start in race/class styles of RPGs with WoW, I can tell you that it's really great to be able to pick combinations based on your own character concepts.