Threads of Fate Mode in Shadowlands

 Blizzard has a new system for players who have completed the 50-60 Shadowlands campaign. To be clear, you just need to finish the final story quests in Revendreth (not counting the Venthyr covenant) to qualify for this, and I'd assume you also have to be level 60 (while one would think that completing said quest should get you to 60, when I did it, that was not the case. Here's hoping that's fixed come October 27th.)

You'll still need to complete the Maw intro quests, which is enough to get you to just shy of 51 (I'd say it's 45 minutes of questing, roughly) but the moment you arrive in Oribos, you get frozen in time and the Fate-Scribe comes and offers you two options: to simply repeat the story quests and do the zones in a predetermined order, or to go with the "Threads of Fate" mode, which scales all the zones and lets you do them in any order, as well as having you choose your covenant immediately.

Like the level 60 quest, you do get some target dummies and the ability to test out the covenant abilities before you make your choice, but once you do, it's locked in, requiring a bit more effort to return to a covenant you abandon.

With the covenant chosen, you also effectively have the story campaign completed as well - you don't actually get to do the main story quests for the four zones, or the various trips to the Maw.

Instead, when you arrive in your chosen covenant's zone, you'll get quests telling you to complete objectives around each zone to earn the favor of the various factions/covenants in those zones. These quests, along with new bonus objectives, as well as all the side quests in those zones, are what you'll be doing to actually level up.

The big "blanket" quests for the zones say you should get credit for doing side quests, killing dungeons bosses, killing rares, and completing bonus objectives, but my brief experience with it showed that not everything was awarding credit (though as a new system, that could just be a bug.)

While I do like being able to choose the order in which I do zones, I'll be honest and say that I'm probably going to stick with the main leveling path for at least the first few characters I bring through Shadowlands. Getting to test out your covenant ability over the course of a whole zone's story is a pretty good way to get a feel for it and whether you want to use that (while I don't know what is simming for most powerful, I've found that I'm pretty happy with the Venthyr Death Knight ability, and I also find it fits thematically for my ancient draenei. I actually found I liked the Night Fae Demon Hunter ability better, even though my plan is still probably to have him go Necrolords. My Paladin (who's actually my main and will probably go through first) is leveling the story-mode way, and I actually really like the Kyrian ability, which is also a pretty Paladin-appropriate covenant, so cool!)

Thoughts on Creating a Horror Campaign

 Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, is said to be a horror campaign, focused on "modern horror" as opposed to the gothic horror of Curse of Strahd.

While I think there's a lot of ambiguity to the notion of what, exactly, "modern horror" entails (though I'm going to guess Cosmic Horror is a major element of it) I was thinking about ways in which to make a campaign feel really menacing and dangerous - to get players to feel like they've got to really fight to survive.

Naturally, a lot of this can be established tonally. While your average fight against goblins or orcs out on the roads can be felt in the sort of bloodless combat one sees in much of the Lord of the Rings movies (not always, of course - you often see Orcs getting totally chopped up and spewing blood everywhere in those movies) if you want to drive home the notion of horror, a great way to do that is simply by establishing the creepy tone - being very descriptive about the horrific elements of the monsters you're fighting. For instance, if your party is taking a rest and they pass the perception check to see the monster before it can attack, you can make the monster's strike scarier by only slowly revealing the danger it poses - a rustling branch, a dark shape in the shadows, and then the glint of eyes - all giving the player time to warn the party and actually face the monster in a safer way, but building the sense of horror with this anticipation.

Stephen King (kind of an expert on the subject) describes a difference between horror and terror. By King's definitions (though frankly, just from my own connotations, I prefer to flip the two,) horror is the sensation of panic that fear causes when something massively disruptive and obviously dangerous occurs, but terror is the creeping dread and ambiguity over whether there is a threat or not - being stuck in that moment before choosing fight or flight.

(Again, I really think I'd flip those definitions, as I think of terror as more the "I'm already running for my life" kind of emotion, and of course associate it a lot with terrorism - and yes, I'm aware of the coincidence of mentioning that on this date - whereas horror, more connected with the genre, feels more associated with that pit in the gut, suspenseful feeling.)

(The point, though, that I think King gets spot on, is that these are two related, but distinct emotions, and what he calls terror and I call horror has a lot more potential for nuance and complexity.)

But D&D being a game in addition to a storytelling medium also allows for you to make things scary via difficulty.

Now, you could just dial up the difficulty to be unfair and brutal, but I think that's A: uninteresting and B: could wind up just making it impossible to have fun with if you're a player. It's true that a game like Call of Cthulhu is sort of built around the idea that player characters are going to die, and you can have fun with that, but I think a game like D&D - especially given that the full potential of your character doesn't unlock until after you've vanquished many a foe - means that just making it brutally difficult kind of ruins the game.

However, there is wiggle room in what kind of difficulty your players can face.

So I'd suggest having a fairly open world, with breadcrumbs to lead the players to certain places, but uncharted locations on the way that have a range of threats and monsters. You need to get the players to buy into the notion that there are some fights they should just run away from (though my Curse of Strahd party - one in which I'm a player, not DM - managed to just stick around and kill the Shambling Mound in the basement of the Death House at level 2 thanks to a few lucky rolls.) So I'd suggest that you have the area your players are exploring have encounters that are balanced for a wide level range - meaning they might find a monster that's a reasonable challenge for a bunch of level 7 player characters when they're only level 3.

I think another way to ratchet up tension is to disrupt rests. Resting in D&D is the way players recover their resources, and when you mess with that, you mess with the math that they do in the encounters they face - you might blow all your spell slots on a monster if you think that the next thing you'll be doing is hitting the hay, but if the DM then makes it impossible for you to do so, you're going to be scrambling to survive with just your basic things like Cantrips. Health management, then, becomes a real challenge.

I think another thing to play with, and this can tie into that disrupting rest, is to take places that are established as safe early on and in some way deprive the party of them. Maybe they find a friendly inn with some sympathetic staff early on, and they think of this as a home base to return to. Maybe, then, they come back to find the inn has burned to the ground. Or worse yet, they come back and it looks normal, but then they find out that the staff were monsters all along, and this time, they're taking the opportunity to strike.

Messing with perception is also a really great way to make things scary. Letting individual player characters see or hear things the others don't can both provide fun RP opportunities for the players, but also start messing with their sense of the scenario's reality - they'll probably assume that the one getting the visions is having hallucinations or illusions inflicted upon them, but maybe you flip that by proving that the "vision" was actually the objective reality while the rest of the party was deceived.

The final thing I'll suggest to truly mess with the party: invite a player to conspire with you.

Now, you have to use a light touch here, and you should only pick a player who is really going to follow your lead and not game things to be especially mean. But there's an implicit trust within D&D groups that the party will cooperate, even if the characters themselves are shady (this might not be with every group, but it tends to be in mine, which is part of the reason why, to both mine and the player's shock, my Ravnica group always trusts the Rakdos Bard despite the very clearly established fact that the guy's a chaotic evil serial killer.) But if you can break even that trust, it can induce a real sense of paranoia (still, use this sparingly.)

I'm really excited to get my copy of Rime of the Frostmaiden, and I'm really eager to see how this measures up to Curse of Strahd in terms of creepy scenarios and adventures. 

Afterlives: Ardenweald

 The latest Ardenweald short is out, and... well, watch it and we'll talk:

I realize I was a little dismissive of the Maldraxxus short, downplaying the reveal that Draka had been fighting the Burning Legion (in fact, almost certainly infiltrating the same Legion base Illidan later would attack after whatever world it was on was turned into a fel-blasted hellscape,) though I still think that short was more or less just telling us the basic gist of what is going on in that zone.

Ardenweald, though not quite as explosively revelatory as Bastion, still gives you a massive gut-punch.

We've known about this anima drought and the fact that every soul is being sent to the Maw, a realm of torment and not much else, which feels like pretty big stakes. But even though playing through places like Torghast you see trapped souls ultimately expire - a kind of existential extinction that, frankly, is the most terrifying thing I could possibly think of - it's abstract enough that it might not hit hard just how horrible things are.

And so, Ardenweald arrives to take a familiar character and tell us that no, he's not coming back. There's no afterlife left for him.

Ursoc is gone.

As the short begins, we see Ursoc fighting in the Emerald Nightmare - fighting us, as this was after his mind was tainted by the Nightmare. But with his death, with Malfurion standing there as a friend, Ursoc's mind is restored to sanity, and he takes comfort in the fact that he's going to be spending the "long winter" in a sort of hibernation within the "Great Forest Beyond," which is, of course, Ardenweald.

Ursoc's soul comes to rest in one of the giant seeds that house the souls of fallen nature spirit in this realm, and an unnamed (though I think he winds up being a major NPC in the zone) faun (useful that there's another term for satyr given how satyrs in WoW are demons, rather than fey) passionately swears to the Winter Queen that he will nurture and protect Ursoc until the bear-spirit can return to the land of the living.

And this seems pretty standard - the forest is lush and healthy, and the anima-fruits that he feeds to the spirits are plentiful.

This is actually a pretty important revelation. There's been some speculation on when, exactly, the anima drought started, with some assuming that it began with Sylvanas' deal with the Jailer, or perhaps with Uther's unjust condemnation of Arthas. While I think both are very likely part of the cause of it, we can see that at least as of the earliest raid of Legion, the afterlife was still mostly functional.

Time passes, and the forest grows brown and dried out - drained of anima. The anima-fruits are few and far between, and our faun character has to roam farther to keep his charge fed.

When he returns to his grove, he finds a group of other Night Fae attacking it, destroying the spirits within. In a rage that uses the same color scheme as Ursoc's last moments consumed by the Nightmare, he fights back - this is his nightmare scenario, after all.

Having sworn himself to the Queen herself to defend this grove, he strikes with a primal fury.

But the attackers are not evil agents of the Jailer or anything. They are there on the orders of the Winter Queen herself, and when she arrives, our hero is shocked and confused. Finally, she reveals why they are doing this: the anima drought threatens the entire forest, and if they don't cull some of the groves, the entire ecosystem will collapse.

Seeing that his heart is pure, she tells the faun that she will respect his decision - whether to continue trying to save this one soul, or to sacrifice him for the sake of the forest.

Devastatingly, the faun realizes what the right thing to do is. And so, he abandons the grove, and leaves Ursoc's soul to wither and die, swearing to his queen now that he will do whatever he can to defend Ardenweald and the souls that may yet be saved.

This really hits us right in the gut. Ursoc might not have been the biggest Warcraft character, but he's such a part of the mythos - Druids' bear form (well, any of the Night Elf-derived Druids, so Night Elves, Worgen, and Tauren) base that form on Ursoc. This guy fought in the War of the Ancients.

This is a major stakes-raising story, but I also find it kind of interesting that the perspective from which it's told also frames it in larger terms. Ursoc might have been a hugely important figure in Azeroth's history, but for this one Night Fae faun, he was just an individual responsibility and charge. And Ardenweald - and the Shadowlands in general - are full of every important figure who has died in Warcraft history. And it's all in danger of being lost.

With 7 Weeks Until Shadowlands, When Does 9.0 Drop?

 I suppose in part because I got into the Beta only pretty late, it's a little shocking to think that we're under two months out from the drop of World of Warcraft: Shadowlands.

Overall, the state of the beta is mostly good, though there are a few systems that I hope will be better tutorialized - particularly soulbinds and conduits. There are a few bugs that pop up, and I do wonder a bit whether the impact of the quarantine (which has no really obvious end, though I'm hopeful we'll get a viable vaccine either this year or early next year) has slowed work on the expansion.

I'll be frank: this is an expansion that I really want to like, because the concept of it (namely, it's high concept) is really exciting. While the grounded stories of clashing armies are important to set the stage in WoW, I think the best expansions have been the ones where they swing for the fences and give us big, cosmic reveals. Is that a coincidence of good gameplay matching exciting stories? Or is it that one feels much more motivated to play when the plot is a big deal?

So while I'm slightly trepidatious about the implementation of some of these systems (and the overload of new systems to learn, between Torghast, Soulbinds, Covenant abilities, and the various covenant management things) I think the backdrop and lore reveals for this expansion promise to be very exciting. (Also, even though they aren't class sets, Castle Nathria is the first raid since Antorus that has gotten me excited to collect armor appearances - I mean, leather gets Solomon Kane-style witch hunter garb and cloth gets freaking plague doctors!)

We're not getting a massive, Legion-style class revamp, but we are getting a fair number of abilities and bonuses back that were pruned in Warlords and Legion, and a few specs are going to play quite differently. For one thing, I'm going to have to get used to once again needing to generate Holy Power on my tankadin. I'm also really excited for Two-handed Frost returning (though I'm also worried a bit about its power being a bit low - I'll have to see what Icy-Veins and such have to say about it.)

Anyway, with the expansion itself coming so soon, I have to imagine that the pre-patch will be here shortly. Historically, the pre-patch for an expansion tends to come 6-8 weeks before the expansion drops, which would put its release likely at next week.

What to expect with 9.0?

Well, the big thing is going to be all the system changes. You'll be able to do Exile's Reach and everyone will drop down to a lower level - with current 120 characters going to level 50, and I believe everyone else getting proportionately dropped down.

Leveling should be much, much faster, as you should be able to do the whole 10-50 climb in a single expansion's content.

Another thing to be excited about is the new character customization options, which are really great.

Of course, we'll also be getting the story quests that lead us to the expansion proper, including the return of the Zombie Plague. I haven't played much on the PTR since getting into the Beta, but when I was, the zombies were really not messing around. It's possible that they've been nerfed, but when I was playing, it was really difficult to avoid dying to swarms of them - but hey, it's an event, it should be scary.

If I recall correctly, corruption on gear will cease to have an effect - both positive and negative - but we'll continue to get bonuses from azerite armor and our Heart of Azeroth essences until we actually enter the Shadowlands proper. (At which point those effects are turned off and gear just becomes gear.)

There will be a couple oddities - for example, while Paladins are all getting Hammer of Wrath, the ability to use it against targets at any health level when Avenging Wrath is up is actually going to be taken away - only to be regained while leveling in Shadowlands (which... I'm not crazy about, but at least it won't be gone for long.)

In most cases, though, abilities will be regained rather than removed (or delayed,) so it'll be a good time to figure out your actionbars and keybinds - though make sure to leave room for your two new covenant abilities!

Facets of the Shadowlands Level-Cap Content

 Having hit 60 on my Death Knight and finally figuring out a fix for a weird bug that made the game not unplayable but really unpleasant, I've been continuing to explore the content that unlocks at the level cap.

Naturally, there's the usual options of dungeons, pvp, world quests, etc. But there are also two important quest chains that you'll start.

The obvious one is that when you hit 60, you're going to be picking a covenant (while I believe the plan is still to let alts pick them after they get to Oribos, which will probably be at around level 51, as the intro quests in the Maw are enough to get you through a level in my experience, currently on the beta new alts are just going through the same Bastion-Maldraxxus-Ardenweald-Revendreth path that has you choosing only at level 60.)

Picking a covenant will give you that covenant's class and general ability, and you'll get access to the covenant sanctum. From here, things kind of blow up. I'm not sure if we're missing some tutorial quests, but you're going to get pretty frontloaded with soulbinds, adventures, and various daily quests as well as the covenant campaign.

The campaign will, among other things, award you the awesome armor that is linked to the covenant over the course of the quests, though at least right now, the armor is a little underwhelming power-wise - while it's all epics, you can often get better stuff as blue gear from world quests. Still, these sets are probably going to be mostly desired for transmog.

So far the covenant campaign seems like a rather extensive quest line (my DK's with the Venthyr) that further tutorializes elements of the zone and bonuses you get (Venthyr can unlock a number of blood-mirrors that allow you to teleport around Revendreth.)

The other major questline is the one that sends you into Torghast, which both introduces the new infinite, procedurally generated solo-to-5 dungeon, but also gives you stuff to do in the Maw.

I've only scratched the surface on these, but both seem important to the overall plot of the expansion.

Enemy Infiltration - Preface: An In-Game Book With Universe-Shaking Implications

 Buckle up, buckos, and get ready for maybe the biggest lore bombshell... in at least a long, long time.

The Dreadlords (aka Nathrezim - I'm going to use both interchangeably) have always felt like very important people amongst demonkind. Despite the fact that the Man'ari Eredar were elevated above the Nathrezim in terms of leadership of the Burning Legion, the Dreadlords have always had some major role to play.

It was, after all, the Nathrezim whose daliances with the void first drove Sargeras to despair - chasing the demons, he came to Telogrus, where the Nathrezim had made alliances with the Old Gods of that world to channel their shadow magic.

In our own experience of the story, the Nathrezim were first introduced in Warcraft III, with Mal'ganis leading the Scourge forces in Lordaeron and later Northrend. We wouldn't actually learn of the Lich King until later in that story, but we also met Tichondrius, Varimathras, Detheroc, Balnazzar, and Mephistroph. Tichondrius was one of the main commanders leading the combined Legion/Scourge forces in the attack on Felwood, but the others were largely tasked with trying to wrestle control of the Scourge back under the Legion's control following the Lich King's rebellion.

We even met Lothraxion in Legion, a Dread Lord who had been changed by the Holy Light and served the Army of the Light. It seems that the Dread Lords are very adaptable, aren't they?

People have observed some similarities between the Dreadlords and the inhabitants of Revendreth. Revendreth, the purgatorial realm of the Shadowlands whose purpose is the rehabilitation of souls through a grueling kind of "break them down before we can build them back up" approach, is inhabited by the Venthyr, vampire-like tall Nosferatu-looking people who were once sent there for their own crimes and then ascended into the realm's caretakers (this is standard practice for most Shadowlands realms, though in Revendreth, you might also get sent back to the Arbiter for reassignment, or if you never make any progress, you get dumped in the Maw.) The Dreadlords, while they seem to be demons and might even have a homeworld of Nathreza, nevertheless bear some striking similarities to the Venthyr, and particularly their Eternal, who rules Revendreth, Sire Denathrius (even his name shares the "nath" syllable.)

There is a book someone found in the Shadowlands beta that suggests something rather massive. not only might that connection be confirmed, but it might also suggest that the machinations of Sire Denathrius and the Jailer have been going on for a profoundly long time.

IGN Previews Some Monsters out of Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, Plus Thoughts on What "Modern Horror" Means

 IGN has a preview of the upcoming adventure book (which I'll be honest, kind of slipped my mind with the announcement of Tasha's Cauldron of Everything,) including early chapters on Ten Towns, the remote settlements in the Dale, as well as two creatures found in the book's bestiary.

One is a returning favorite: the Chwinga from Tomb of Annihilation (which my party just encountered, actually!) returns, though in an obviously very different environment. These nature spirits are benevolent and helpful, and in ToA serve as a kind of relief from the relentless death and danger of that adventure. I suspect, given the dark nature of this adventure, they'll serve a similar role.

The next, and brand new, monster is the Coldlight Walker. If you remember the poster to John Carpenter's The Thing (a major reference point for this adventure,) this is basically a monster built to look like that image. As a CR 5 Undead, its main hook is that when it kills things, they remain frozen for 9 days, meaning you can't thaw, animate them, harm them with fire, or raise them from the dead. While a generous DM could, I imagine, treat this like an automatic gentle repose, I think the intention here is to make it so that you won't be able to use Revivify to bring a person back. Raise Dead has a 10-day window, which means that you'll need to be ready to cast that on the day they thaw out or you're out of luck (I don't recall the level range of the adventure, but I'd guess you don't get high enough for 7th level spells, at least until the very end.)

Rime of the Frostmaiden is supposed to evoke "modern horror," in contrast with the gothic horror found in Curse of Strahd. It strikes me that some of the great horror movies of the 1980s had winter, snow, and cold as major themes in them. The Thing, of course, had a group of scientists trapped in an antarctic research facility with an infectious, mimicking alien... mass (100% aberration creature type) and The Shining had the Torrance family trapped in its big hotel over the winter.

Despite my tendency to use horror elements in my writing and D&D adventure creation, I can't really describe myself as a horror aficionado (I get really squeamish with gore and body horror) so I don't know exactly how I'd classify "modern horror" with any great specificity.

Gothic Horror is obviously a growth out of the Romantic movement of the 19th Century, which saw the meticulous enlightenment writing of the 18th Century as too stuffy and stodgy, and embraced a more mystical, supernatural, and emotion-driven narrative (for a fantastic contrast between that 18th Century enlightenment story versus 19th century Romanticism, I cannot highly enough recommend Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel, the two of which represent those two worldviews - though Strange is the latter and Norrel is the former, all in the context of an alternate history involving magic.) But gothic horror tends to call back to ancient history (or at least medieval) and dark forces that exist within the human psyche that resist control by rational thought - werewovles and vampires are both infectious as well as representing a kind of unrestrained id.

To define "Modern Horror," I think we need to think about the subgenres that followed in the 20th and 21st century.

Probably the biggest of these subgenres to be born of the 20th century is cosmic horror. As our understanding of the physical universe expanded, showing how weird things really were (thanks in large part to Einstein) and how tiny we were in relation to the cosmos, writers like H. P. Lovecraft merged the psychological horror of gothic writers like Edgar Allen Poe with trepidation over the vastness of the cosmos and some early science fiction (I think it's easy to forget how Lovecraft's monsters were often quite similar to those found in 1950s B-Sci-Fi movies, though in the latter, America's post-WWII confidence tended to render such creatures as defeat-able with the right know-how and scientific insight.) Yet, lost in those B-Sci-Fi movies was the underlying and rather Romantic notion in cosmic horror of a death of rationality - though in contrast to gothic horror, where part of the danger was succumbing to emotionality, in cosmic horror, the fear was that rationality, the enlightenment, and any kind of ordered thought was just a big lie that keeps us from the true state of reality - utter chaos and madness.

While not exactly a horror genre, the 1970s saw a rise in conspiracy thrillers, especially following the Watergate scandal, with paranoia and the inability to trust those around you was a prevalent theme to this genre.

We can't really talk about horror of the 20th century, though, without acknowledging the slasher movie. There was a bit of fascination with serial killers even starting with Fritz Lang's M in 1931, and I think you can also consider Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho in 1960 to be a kind of proto-slasher. Wes Craven's 1972 Last House on the Left took the real-life Manson Family murders and made villains that resembled a group of hippies (never mind that Manson was more of a white supremacist cult leader than a peace-loving hippie.) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974 really got the ball rolling, and then Halloween in 1978, Friday the 13th in 1980, Nightmare on Elm Street in 1986 gave us some of the titans of unstoppable teenager-killers with Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees, and Freddy Kreuger.

Though not the first adaptation of the series, 1991's Silence of the Lambs spawned a whole flood of (mostly forgettable) "psychological thrillers," which made the analysis of some serial killer's MOs into the puzzle by which heroic investigators would try to catch them without becoming one of their victims. Unlike the 80s slashers, psychological horror almost never contained any real or implied supernatural element.

As for the past 20 years, I'll confess I might not have enough movies under my belt to really define any serious trends. Starting with the Blair Witch Project in the 90s, we had a bit of a trend of "found footage" horror, such as the big-budget Cloverfield, which blended cosmic horror, kaiju movies, and this style of storytelling in a kind of oblique reference to the urban destruction that came with September 11th. Paranormal Activity was also a big deal.

We've also seen horror dominate the independent movie industry (to be fair, horror has often worked well in the indie field) and probably also related to the War on Terror, our national tolerance for torture was either critiqued or celebrated (depending on the critic) by "torture porn" horror like the Hostel and Saw movies.

It's admittedly a little hard to analyze the movements currently going on in the genre, being in the middle of it (not to mention during a time in American life that feels a lot like Stephen King's The Stand.)

Oh, how could I forget Stephen King!

Emerging in the late 70s and continuing to be one of the most adapted writers, King's take on horror can't be ignored. Much as Poe influenced Lovecraft, King was an avid Lovecraft fan, but where Lovecraft found nothing but loneliness and madness and a disdain for humanity (plus a further disdain for humanity that didn't fit within the ethnic identity that he belonged to) King brought humanism - both in empathy for his characters but also an exploration of how trauma and abuse can leave deep wounds in the soul - to cosmic horror. Having first been exposed to King by reading his Dark Tower series, I've always classified him as more of a Dark Fantasy writer than a horror writer, though the border between those genres is extremely fuzzy.

While King's stories are usually deeply rooted in an American setting, there's generally some sort of win for his characters to earn by the end, even if they don't all make it out alive. And for that reason, I actually think he's a really crucial touchstone for a "modern horror" D&D adventure, which presumably has some kind of win condition and doesn't simply end with everyone dying out in the cold.