Thursday, September 17, 2020

How to Pillage/Rework Rime of the Frostmaiden

 So, I'm not someone to generally run published adventures, even though at this point I literally have every official 5E book other than Dungeon of the Mad Mage (some day, probably.)

I imagine I'll do so at some point - it's really a question of commitment. However, I've definitely taken ideas out of published adventures, as well as campaign setting books, to build my own adventures.

Having now read through Rime of the Frostmaiden, I'm thinking about what really appeals to me about the book, and thus what I'd want to take.

Perhaps better than anything, the book really portrays a region of frigid isolation. There's an afterword by Lead Narrative Designer Chris Perkins in which he mentions that when they were first working on the adventure's design, they didn't realize how isolating a year 2020 would be (fingers crossed that we have some return to social engagement in 2021 - though there are a million things I feel anxious about regarding the future that even go beyond the horrific pandemic.)

Rime of the Frostmaiden is dark - literally. The characters never see the sun until they defeat Auril, and I think you could really play with that sort of powerful magical phenomenon as a central concept to an adventure.

Another thing I'd consider taking is the "secrets" option for character creation. There are several secrets that players can draw from a stack, and while some are rather innocuous (like, "I'm looking for my dad's missing ring, which he lost after his finger was bitten off by a knucklehead trout") to totally horrific (like, "I have a slaad tadpole growing in my chest that's going to burst out of my chest and kill me very suddenly, probably at an inopportune time.")

The random encounters, which have a mechanic that causes them to occur during Blizzards (you have an encounter d20 and a weather d20, and if the weather d20's roll plus 1 is more than the encounter roll, it takes place during a blizzard, which can dramatically change it) are actually really exciting.

The book also gives you a rather broad overview of what Icewind Dale is like, and could easily be repurposed to set entirely different adventures within the region.

My tastes, of course, tend toward the really high-fantasy and cosmic horror side of things, and the latter chapters of the book push more in that direction. We were introduced to Living Spells in the Eberron book, but while those tended toward straightforward damaging spells, this one introduces Living Demiplane, which is actually utterly terrifying - a living spell that tries to catch you and trap you in an extradimensional space.

I think the thing I'm most tempted to do is borrow some of the structure - particularly the small, isolated towns amid a frozen wasteland - and use it for events in my own setting. After first hearing about this book, I came up with a frozen island north of the main continent in my setting called Cotieras where people fear to tread. I might borrow some of the creatures and frigid terrain rules here, and perhaps some of the adventure locations, to build a relatively open-ended campaign in that region.

One of the chapters in this adventure presents a really great high-stakes event - while most D&D books tend to focus on explorable dungeon environments, the attack by the chardalyn dragon-construct on Ten-Towns is a massive race against time with the feel of a chaotic battle, and it makes travel-time between the towns feel urgent.

I believe that Rime of the Frostmaiden was designed to be broken up - allowing DMs to use different parts of it depending on what appealed to them. Frankly, I think this makes the adventure itself feel a bit unfocused - Auril herself doesn't totally feel like a big bad you're building up to a fight with - in fact, the place you're most likely to fight her, she's kind of just alone in a random room she pops out of (which, to be fair, is appropriate given how she embodies in part the isolation felt in winter). While I'm sure you could run the whole thing as written and get a really fun game out of it, I think the book is probably best used by pillaging and repurposing the things found within.

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

Rime of the Frostmaiden Part Two: Um, The Rest

 The first chapter is extensive. Over yesterday and today, I've now read through the whole adventure. Here are my thoughts:

The past three years, the adventure books have had their location in the Forgotten Realms as the sort of headliner - rather than just "Dragon Heist" and "Dungeon of the Mad Mage," these twin adventures were marketed as Waterdeep: (the title.)

Last year, Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, was sort of funny for doing the same, given that the Baldur's Gate segment and the Avernus segments were quite separate, and even though there was certainly a thematic and plot connection between the events in both, to me the real main event to that adventure was the Avernus segment of it.

Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, I think, is much more location-centric than plot-centric. Indeed, there are actually three major plots going on that are only tangentially related to one another.

I also think I'd raise some doubts as to what extent this truly is a "horror" adventure. If you're looking for something as horror-centric as Curse of Strahd, that's not really what you're going to find here. While there are some adventures that skew that way, and the final segment of the adventure does borrow heavily from H. P. Lovecraft's story At the Mountains of Madness, there's enough here that is more general fantasy adventuring that I find myself disagreeing with the way WotC has characterized the overall book. Admittedly, some of the "secrets" player characters can choose from at the beginning can lend the adventure a more paranoid and creepy feel, but the majority of the adventure locations found in the book carry a more general fantasy danger than what I'd really call horror. The line between them is subjective, of course, but when I compare this to other adventures I've read, such as Tomb of Annihilation, Ghosts of Satlmarsh, and Descent into Avernus, I don't really think that this is that much more horrific.

Still, this will be an adventure in which the bitter cold, harsh environment poses a major threat, and there's a major event that happens after you've gotten to know the location that is less horrific in terms of genre than just horrific for the massive potential loss of life.

So let's get into spoiler territory:

Tuesday, September 15, 2020

Rime of the Frostmaiden Part One: Ten-Towns

 I've picked up my copy of Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, and I'm currently reading through it.

Oh, heads up, if you are planning on playing this, you might want to stop here given spoilers. I'm keeping specific details pretty vague, but the overall arc of the campaign is something I'm discussing.

Adventurer's League Season Ten Rules

 The Season 10 rules for Adventurer's League have been released. I realize that most D&D players aren't familiar with AL, but it's basically the more structured format that allows players to drop in and out of quick modules at game stores. It's not quite the same as playing at home with a group of friends, but the buy-in is a lot lower.

The first really exciting bit of news is that Tasha's Cauldron of Everything is an available book for AL games - when making an AL character, you can only use things from the Player's Handbook and one additional book (and these tend to be limited to setting-agnostic books outside of Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, given that AL games tend to all take place in the Forgotten Realms.) By adding Tasha's, this allows players to play Artificers, as well as the many subclasses coming in that book (which include all four that came in the Magic crossover books.)

The other thing I'm excited to see is that we've got a preview of how the new racial customizations are going to work, and it's the simple system that I expected we'd be getting: when your race grants an ability score bonus, you can simply move that bonus to another ability. Half-Orcs get +2 Strength and +1 Con by default, but you can decide your Half-Orc has +2 to Charisma and +1 to Dex, if you'd like. And perhaps your Triton is going to take bonuses to Dexterity, Wisdom, and... well, probably still Constitution.

I'm currently waiting to get my confirmation email that my local store is ready to give me my copy of Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, but I'm also very excited for the November release of Tasha's Cauldron of Everything.

What Concerns Me About Shadowlands

I've been excited about the Shadowlands expansion since it was announced. I'm really happy for WoW to go very high-fantasy in its concept, and I've always found the death/undead elements of Warcraft lore to be really interesting and aesthetically cool.

And, having played in the Beta, I'm mostly pretty happy with what I see. The zones are all really cool (I'll confess I find Maldraxxus a little dull) and the overall plot feels big and high-stakes, which makes it feel like what you're doing matters.

I also really like the idea of choosing a covenant, unlocking the story that comes with it.

But with just over a month until the expansion launches, I'll confess that I am concerned with a few things.

First off, bugs: I know it's a Beta, and thus the whole reason we're playing it is so that we can find bugs. But even this far into the beta, I'm encountering a fairly large number of game-breaking bugs. Some of these involve crashing the client (or even my computer,) some involve the "really cool when it's happening in the right moment" visual effect for the "In-between" happening forever after you take a flight path some times. And lastly, some break the Soulbind/Conduit system, which is probably the thing that requires the most testing.

There is a massive amount of stuff for you to do when you hit the level cap, which I think is mostly a good thing, but I also wonder how much of a weekly grind it will be for a character to feel "up to date."

I think they reduced the amount of XP required since I leveled my Death Knight, but I think it's crucial that a player should be able to play through the main story and get to level 60, without lingering and struggling to finish.

As has been suggested by Taliesin & Evitel's YouTube channel, I fear that conduits are going to have one of the big problems that Azerite Armor had - which was that you felt compelled to farm the same pieces over and over. Admittedly, because this won't get in the way of other gear you might find, I doubt it will be quite as annoying, but it's still a potential for some empty gameplay rewards.

The other big concern is that some covenant abilities just seem better than others. My intention is to just brace myself and pick covenants that fit with my characters' vibes, and just hope that the abilities become balanced over time, but there is a concern that if my guilt-ridden, ancient Draenei Death Knight picks Venthyr as his covenant, he's going to be putting himself at a disadvantage thanks to the fact that the Night Fae have a more powerful ability.

There is a sort of sense that the expansion maybe needs a little more time to iron out these kinks. I suppose the good news is that, given the way WoW tends to work, fixes can happen over the course of the expansion, but the general way the systems work is going to be relatively locked in place.

I think I feel invested in this expansion being good just because it's the one that I was hoping would come. Blizzard is swinging big, and I'll always respect someone trying out big ideas. I just hope that it works out, and I hope that the expansion lives up to its potential.

Monday, September 14, 2020

MTG Cosmos for D&D Fans (Part Two of Two)

 The multiverse of Magic: the Gathering is rather unusual in that it technically has a name: Dominia. Granted, that's some old and probably defunct lore from the mid-90s, but I think it's good to take into account.

Given that two Magic settings are now officially also D&D settings, it might be a good idea to look into the way that these worlds bear resemblance to, but also are distinct from, classical D&D cosmology.

Both Ravnica and Theros might strike you as particularly strange and rather high-concept worlds, and that is true. The reality of building a card game primarily around mechanics, with worlds that are often made to fit with the mechanics, rather than the other way around, tends to make for some very high-concept worlds - worlds that sometimes have you wondering how one actually lives in them. Nevertheless, Magic does have ongoing plots and stories set within it, and while the cards represent the most over-the-top, crazy things one can find in these worlds, the underlying premise is that these are still worlds that people live in, with all the potential for a fantasy RPG like D&D to fit within it.

One thing to bear in mind in the worlds of Magic is that each world is its own separate plane. Admittedly, there's an argument to be made that "plane" is just a different concept in Magic than it is in D&D, but I actually think it works pretty well if you think of each world as a truly separate universe with its own distinct rules - more akin to the differences between Limbo and Arboria than those between Oerth and Toril.

In the Magic multiverse, the ability to actually travel from one plane to another is extremely rare. People who gain this ability are called Planeswalkers. About one in a million people is born with a Planeswalker spark (though if you're running a D&D campaign in these worlds, you might want to ignore these statistics to allow the party to hop between settings) and only one in a million of those ever have that spark ignite to turn them into a full-fledged planeswalker.

Typically, what ignites the spark is an event of profound emotions - often traumatic (though they need not be in every case.) A newly ignited planeswalker will, involuntarily and unexpectedly, travel to a different plane at random.

In an earlier time, planeswalkers were godlike in their power - their physical forms little more than a manifested avatar behind tremendous magical force. But after an event called The Mending, which occurred on the world of Dominaria, Planeswalkers are now more or less just people, though they tend to possess some great magical power and the unique ability to journey between planes.

There have been some exceptions to this rule, but for the most part, only planeswalkers can travel to other planes. Even gods are generally limited to their home plane, which is why different worlds will have different pantheons - at least those whose religions weren't just deifying old planeswalkers.

Beings that would be considered "outsiders" in D&D are probably native to the same planes that have ordinary mortals and beasts. And this is also why angels in one setting might be very different from those in another. Races found on multiple worlds can be quite different from one another. For instance, Vedalken, the blue-skinned, hairless intellectuals, have only internal ears and wider facial features in Ravnica, while those found on Kaladesh have earlobes and vertical lines along their foreheads.

The one constant in the multiverse, though, is the manifestation of the five colors of Magic.

Magic flows through everything in the worlds of MTG, and the magical essence known as mana comes in five varieties, known as the five colors. This is, to be fair, a major element to the rules mechanics of the card game, but it's also an underlying organizing principle for how the worlds of Magic are constructed. The five colors are White, Blue, Black, Red, and Green. The colors represent and also drive forth certain values and philosophies, as well as certain types of magical creatures.

White mana is a color of unity, altruism, order, authority, and selflessness. Found in wide-open plains and associated with sunlight, it's easy to conflate white mana with goodness, but white can often be good, it's also a color of tyrannical authoritarianism and strict hierarchies that have no real interest in freedom. Angels, who in MTG are nearly always female-presenting, are beings of pure white mana who represent justice and protection, tending toward the better aspects of white mana (usually.) Knights and soldiers, often human, are also usually associated with white mana (though humans, being so adaptable, are found associated with all the colors.)

Blue mana is a color of intellectualism, knowledge, trickery, cleverness, and illusion. Found on islands and associated with the elements of water and air, blue mana is the primary color associated with powerful wizards. Blue is of course laudable for its rationality and cleverness, though it can sometimes veer into cold callousness. While beings like Sphinxes and Djinn represent the cleverness blue is known for, it's also a color that can call upon great ancient monsters like krakens and leviathans, using its knowledge of hidden secrets to call forth forgotten beings form the depths. Merfolk and the aforementioned Vedalken are also usually associated with blue mana.

Black mana is a color of ambition, self-interest, greed, ruthlessness, death, decay, and resourcefulness. Found in fetid swamps, black is often associated with that which is buried or sunken, including anything from dead bodies to precious metals (and thus wealth.) Much as white is often assumed to be good, black often gets "type-cast" as evil, and while there's often an overlap, black is not bound only to be villainous. At the heart of black mana is a focus on the accomplishment of a goal, no matter the cost, and as such, when directed toward noble goals, black can be effective and heroic. Still, its disregard for any kind of moral framework means that its methods are often quite distasteful. Much as white mana can manifest as angels, demons are manifestations of pure black mana. Black mana is also used to raise the dead as zombies, skeletons, and vampires.

Red mana is a color of passion, impulse, violence, aggression, creativity, and destruction. Found in rocky mountains and volcanos, red mana drives emotions and rage. More than any other color, red fights for freedom, and while black might fight against structures of authority for its own self-interest, red does so on principle. Red is associated with the element of fire, but also with earth and lightning, and even, very rarely, ice. Red's recklessness can make it a danger to its foes, but also to its allies. The creatures most associated with red mana are dragons, as well as goblins and minotaurs.

Green mana is the color of life, nature, instinct, and symbiosis. Found in the living forests of Magic's worlds, green is a color one might tend to associate with goodness, though like white, this tendency is not a universal rule. Green can grow dangerous when its obsession with raw strength leads the strong to menace the weak. Green is associated with great and powerful beasts and monsters including Hydras, but also with humanoids like elves.

Generally, the colors are depicted in a pentagon-shape, with white at the top, and then blue, black, red, and green making the other corners, clockwise. As you might sense reading the descriptions of these, each color has two "allies" next to it, which have more of a philosophical overlap (for instance, Red and Green are both very action-oriented worldviews) and two "enemy" colors across from it (by contrast, Red isn't such a big fan of White's tendency to try to boss people around.)

And while it's true that there can be some conflict between enemy colors, there are also individuals who embody aspects of two seemingly opposing colors.

The guilds in Ravnica each represent a different pair of colors, meaning half of them represent "enemy" color pairs. But you might also be able to see how sometimes these opposites can complement one another. The Boros Legion takes the order and duty of white and combines it with the zeal and passion of red.

While the colors are the closest equivalent to D&D's Lawful/Chaotic and Good/Evil alignment system, they're less hard and fast in terms of how alignment with one precludes the other.

Within the Magic worlds, most people aren't really aware of these five colors - they might recognize tendencies in certain cultures and creatures, but it's a subtle thing that probably only very advanced spellcasters would truly be able to see the underlying structure.

The planes of Magic are not really organized in any real hierarchy or arrangement like the Great Wheel. While Dominaria is theoretically the "central" plane of the Magic multiverse, its position does not seem to make it manifestly more important than other worlds.

The list of Magic planes is extensive, and also constantly growing, so I'm not going to do an exhaustive list here. But the thing to keep in mind is that each world is governed by the balance of these five colors and what they represent.

In recent times, a group of planeswalkers has formed something called the Gatewatch, which is dedicated to fighting against interplanar threats. Given that this group is essentially an adventuring party, you might want to keep them separated from your own D&D group, though you can also potentially bring them in as powerful NPCs.

A List of Returning Characters in Shadowlands, So Far

 I've been playing the Shadowlands beta for a few weeks now, and I've played through the leveling experience and gotten a significant chunk into the Venthyr covenant campaign.

Given that we're heading toward the land of the dead, it's no surprise that we're going to be seeing some familiar faces. Some are very apparent from the promotional materials we've received, while others might come as a bit of a surprise.

The Shadowlands is the most alien place we've ever gone in WoW, and certainly is the most alien place we've gone for a whole expansion (I'll accept arguments on behalf of Warlords, given that it was a whole other timeline, though the weird rules about demons complicates that.)

This is, of course, spoiler territory. But it's also potentially incomplete, as I've only seen a portion of the expansion. But let's get to it!