The Shadowfell and Ravenloft

 As a 5th Edition baby, I remember watching Stranger Things and, when they mentioned the "Vale of Shadow" as the equivalent to the Upside-Down, thinking "that's odd! Shouldn't that be the Shadowfell? Weird that a series that is willing to be pretty explicit in its D&D references would have some odd off-brand thing." Then, of course, I looked into the history and found out that the Shadowfell, as a thing, has only been around since 4th Edition. It was apparently a fusion of the Plane of Shadow and part of the Ethereal Plane.

I actually love the concept of the Shadowfell, especially as a sort of balance to the Feywild. The Feywild is bright and colorful and full of energy, but not necessarily good, and the Shadowfell is bleak and dark and subdued but not inherently evil. I sometimes like to say the Feywild is Manic while the Shadowfell is Depressive.

In particular, I like the concept that the Feywild and the Shadowfell are parallel worlds to the Prime Material Plane - perhaps even thinking of them as "Secondary Material Planes." This distinguishes them from the Outer Planes or even the Elemental Planes, in that they're still physical, real places, but just a little less so than the "real world." But also, I'm a huge fan of the concept of a world that is structurally similar to our familiar world, but is distinct.

The first Zelda game I ever played (though I didn't really play through the whole thing until college, well after I'd played several others) was A Link to the Past. This game, the third ever Zelda game for the Super Nintendo, has you first play through the "Light World" before journeying to the "Dark World," a reflection of the Light World that was more sinister. Where in the Light World there had been a sun-baked desert with ruins, in the Dark World is a great swamp. In the Light World, Kakariko Village is a pleasant enough place (except that they think Link is a criminal) while the Dark World equivalent is a haunted ruin filled with thieves.

The Shadowfell, to my mind, ought to work a lot like this: the familiar turned strange and sinister (though, again, not everything there is automatically evil - and in fact, you could have a whole lot of Tim Burton-esque inhabitants who seem creepy but are actually quite nice.)

Still, I don't think that WotC has been 100% consistent on what the Shadowfell is like, exactly. In the DMG, it's described as being similar to the material plane, but darker, as I've described above.

However, in 4th Edition's Shadowfell: Gloomwrought and Beyond, the primary Campaign Setting book for the Shadowfell, the implication seems to be more that it's kind of its own whole world, with locations like Gloomwrought, which is a city that has no real equivalent to places in the Material Plane but is sort of central to any visitor to the Shadowfell. (Gloomwrought as a location is actually pretty awesome - ruined towers and walls periodically collapse, but then others rise up on their own periodically.)

The Shadowfell hasn't starred in any published 5th Edition adventures - unless you count Ravenloft.

Ravenloft was first introduced in the original Castle Ravenloft adventure back in the 80s, though Strahd and his castle were not, I believe, meant to be anywhere but your standard campaign setting. It was in the 90s that Ravenloft was made its own campaign setting, and places like Barovia and other domains of dread were separated out. As it stood then, the Demiplane of Dread existed within the Ethereal Plane.

The Ethereal Plane is a good sort of catch-all for locations that don't fit nicely into the rest of D&D's cosmology. Eberron, for instance, was created at a time when WotC was less interested in keeping its world interconnected. That's why Eberron comes with its own planes for elementals and celestials and fiends and such. To squeeze it back into the shared D&D setting, though, one suggestion is that the entire Eberron setting, including its various planes, is actually a bubble within the Ethereal Plane (I think I'd just give it its own weird "Crystal Sphere" in the Prime Material, though.)

Anyway, either in 4th or 5th Edition, the Ravenloft setting has migrated to the Shadowfell. Given that the Shadowfell is meant to be the domain of spooky undead monsters and such, Ravenloft being part of it makes a ton of sense. That being said, the overall concept of Ravenloft and the Shadowfell do have some huge differences - the Shadowfell (at least how I like it) is a mirror to the Prime Material. The domains of dread, however, are extracted from the Material Plane. My understanding is that there is no place known as Barovia on any existing Prime Material Plane world, because the Mists of Ravenloft took it away, presumably kind of mystically closing up the wound on Strahd's original homeworld.

However, there's another potential interpretation that could be interesting: perhaps the Domains of Dread are actually nightmarish facsimiles of existing places. Maybe when the Dark Powers steal away a Darklord, they actually create a false echo of their realm - or take it from the Greater Shadowfell, even - and plop that Darklord and the poor souls who came with them there.

What I think would be so cool about this is that you could then have your players travel to the real Barovia, which could be a thriving kingdom that has been free of Strahd's tyranny for thousands upon thousands of years. Maybe the true Castle Ravenloft was long ago taken over by some benign ruler - or even serves as the seat of some democratically-elected republic!

Adventures there could involve the darkness of the Shadowfell, and the Barovia that we all know from Curse of Strahd and the earlier Ravenloft adventures, creeping into the true Barovia. Maybe the Mists of Ravenloft are particularly common in areas that correspond to the Domains of Dread.

I'm very curious to see if Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft addresses any of these cosmic questions about the nature of the Demiplane of Dread. I suspect they'll keep it vague, to allow DMs to make up their own minds about these things. But I think it would be a particularly interesting idea to suggest that Strahd doesn't even have the realm he thinks he has - only a dark echo of it, just as he's only a dark echo of the human being he once was.

New Unearthed Arcana: Folk of the Feywild

 Well, if Ravenloft is going to give us some Shadowfell adventuring possibilities (I wonder if they're going to do any fleshing out of the "Greater Shadowfell" like Gloomwrought and other areas from 4th Edition or if they're going to do Ravenloft and call it a day) it stands to reason we might give the Feywild some love.

While the Feywild is drawn from very real-world mythologies - particularly the Otherworld of Celtic Mythology from which the concept of Fairies most directly comes (though many cultures have similar ideas) - at least in 5th Edition, there's barely any fleshing out of the realm apart from the existence of Fey creatures in the Monster Manual and Volo's Guide to Monsters (we do also have the Eladrin in Mordenkainen's).

But I'm getting ahead of myself - this doesn't guarantee a Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft-style campaign setting book is coming for the Feywild, but... it could!

Today's new UA introduces four new* playable races that are all Feywild-themed. They are the Fairy, Owlfolk, Rabbitfolk, and *"Hobgoblin of the Feywild." We'll tackle that one last despite its alphabetical position.

Like the Gothic Lineages, some elements of these races are left entirely up to the player. Ability score increases are up to you, and you can choose either a +2 and a +1 or three different +1s. This reflects the rules going forward in 5th Edition that retroactively change existing playable races to make them more flexible. Likewise, Languages can be chosen appropriately to the character, so if your Fairy grew up in the Material Plane, perhaps they don't know Sylvan. Let's go through them:

Fairy:

Fairies are the classic Feywild inhabitants. Larger than Pixies or Sprites, Fairies are nevertheless similar to these Fey relatives. They are small in size, but true to the hyper-manic nature of the Feywild, have the standard 30 ft movement speed (like Goblins, who are linked to the Feywild in this UA - we'll get to that.)

Fairies have the Fey creature type, which, you know, duh. For the most part this shouldn't affect anything, but it does provide immunity to your Hold Persons and similar spells.

Fairies also get a flight speed equal to their walking speed, and unlike Aarakocra, this does not worry about what kind of armor you're wearing, so a heavy-armored Oath of the Ancients Fairy Paladin can zip around the battlefield no problem. You might have wings as a fairy, but this flight doesn't require them.

Fairies have some innate spellcasting, too. They can cast Druidcraft, and they can cast Faerie Fire for free once, and then spend any spell slots they have to cast it again, and get to choose between Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma as their spellcasting stat for this.

Finally, you can go through 1-inch holes without squeezing, which is some Alice in Wonderland stuff. Very cool.

Owlfolk:

Owlfolk are humanoid and can choose if they're small or medium (the latter being the choice if you wish to use heavy weapons). You have 30 ft. of movement speed and 90, rather than 60 feet of darkvision.

The headlining ability here is Magic Sight. You can cast Detect Magic as a ritual, or you can cast it normally if you spend a spell slot, so Owlfolk are going to be good for spotting any kind of magical stuff.

Nimble Flying grants you a flight speed equal to your walking speed, like Fairies, but in addition, if you fall off of something, you can make a DC 10 Dexterity saving throw to stop falling and fly in place until your next turn. So if you're a Dex-based class, you basically never have to worry about falling.

Finally, because of your soft, fluffy owl feathers, you have proficiency in Stealth.

Man, an Owlkin Rogue or Monk would be a very nice combination - great for scouting ahead.

Rabbitfolk:

Rabbitfolk are humanoids and also choose whether to be small or large when you create your character. You have the standard 30 ft. movement speed.

Rabbitfolk get to add their proficiency bonus to initiative rolls, as part of their... Hare-Trigger trait. They also get proficiency in Perception.

Lucy Footwork allows you to use your reaction to add a d4 to a failed Dexterity saving throw, potentially making it a success.

Finally, Rabbit Hop lets you add a d12 of movement if you move at least 5 feet and your speed hasn't been reduced to zero, as you hop away. Unlike normal jumping, this hop doesn't cost movement speed, so you can effectively move an extra d12 feet each turn.

Hobgoblin:

Hey, hold on a minute! Don't we already have Hobgoblins? Since Volo's Guide to Monsters (and, you know, the Monster Manual,) Hobgoblins have been a race of goblinoids who are the sort of smarter, more intelligent and human-like goblins with a martial culture. These hobgoblins, though, are very different, as beings of the Feywild. Let's take a look:

Hobgoblins are Medium Humanoids (no change there) with 60 ft. darkvision and 30 ft. of movement.

You also get Fey Ancestry, which gives advantage on saving throws against charm effects.

Fey Gift allows you to use the Help action as a bonus action a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus. Once you hit level 3, any time you take the help action:

Hospitality: you and the target get 1d6+PB temporary hit points.

Passage: you and the target get a 10-ft boost to your walking speed until the end of your next turn.

Spite: The first time you or your target hit a creature with an attack roll, that creature has disadvantage on the next attack roll it makes in the next minute.

Finally, Fortune from the Many: when you fail an attack roll, saving throw, or ability check, you can add a number equal to the number of allies you can see within 30 ft to the roll, potentially making it a success (maximum of +5). You can use this PB times per Long Rest.

Comparing this with the older Hobgoblin, Fortune from the Many is just a buffed version of Saving Face, but the other traits are wholly new.

Flavor-wise, what little we get of the Hobgoblin is a lot more whimsical than their kind of aggressive-samurai feel in the Monster Manual, including the detail that their noses change color when they experience strong emotions.

It's very early to say, but I'd keep an eye out for future releases later this year that might have more of a Feywild vibe to them.

Adventures in the Upper Planes

In the mythos of D&D, good and evil become tangible differences when one emerges from the physical world into the Outer Planes. The Outer Planes are fundamentally pretty weird, as they're a place that looks physical and material, but is truly made up of philosophical belief and position - and yet it is real. The souls of the dead eventually journey to these Outer Planes to spend their afterlife, and so they must be as real as the people who live in the Prime Material Plane, despite their odd nature.

D&D thrives on adventure, and adventure generally needs danger. As such, journeys into the Lower Planes - those seven on the Great Wheel that are fundamentally evil - are obvious locations for adventure. The Nine Hells are filled with Devils who want nothing more than to entrap your soul and torment you (or turn you into one of them to serve as an underling.) The Abyss is chock full of demons who would love nothing more than to eviscerate you and wear your skin like a t-shirt. Acheron's an endless battlefield, Gehenna is a treacherous landscape of volcanos. Hades is a bleak wasteland where trapped souls become mindless grubs. Carceri is a deep, dark prison. And Pandemonium drives you insane with incessant winds and dust.

The stakes aren't hard to imagine. It's a dangerous place, and you'll want to do what you've gone there to accomplish and get out of there as soon as you can.

But there's symmetry in the Great Wheel cosmology, and that means that there are Upper Planes as well, which are fundamentally good. Yet, they're right there, begging to be used as adventure settings. So, then, how do you create a sense of adventure?

The first concept is the notion that the adventurers aren't worthy. 

Why are you going to the Upper Planes? My guess would be that you need someone or something from there. Let's say that there's some powerful magical artifact - you need the Chalice of Dawn, from which pure sunlight can be poured endlessly, in order to destroy some vampire who has ascended to demigod status and has, let's say, covered your world in endless night. So you find out that this thing exists, but it's kept in the palace of Doros, the God of the Sun, high up on Mount Celestia. Doros has many angels (and let's say some giant robots because hey, it is a lawful plane) who are sworn to guard the Chalice and ensure it's not taken, for fear that it will be corrupted or destroyed by those will ill intent.

Now you've got a challenge in which your party is doing good by taking it to destroy the Vampire God, but where the people you're fighting are also doing good by fulfilling their sacred oaths.

How violent this conflict becomes is up to the DM and the players - one could assume that Celestials are much more willing to hear out the party's pleas, but are also capable of defending themselves if needs be. But perhaps Doros has some reason not to want them to get the Chalice that could be for a greater good, or perhaps because he doesn't think the party stands much of a chance even with the Chalice and would hate for it to be corrupted by the evil Vampire God. There's still a possibility for conflict between good sides.

There are also odd mechanics to the Outer Planes. In the Outer Planes, if enough people of a certain alignment gather and behave that way in a region of the plane, that piece of the plane will actually shift and be absorbed by the plane that adheres to that alignment. For example, there's a whole layer of Arcadia that became too Lawful Neutral and not enough Lawful Good that it got absorbed by Mechanus.

The souls of mortals who go on to the Outer Planes are selected rather precisely to match the plane to which they're being sent, but mortals who travel via the Astral Sea or the Plane Shift spell might not. While the fundamental goodness of the Upper Planes suggests that they likely get along decently, there is a distinction between them. The Upper Planes run the gamut just as the Lower Planes do between Lawful and Chaotic. While there's no real equivalent of the Blood War between the Nine Hells and the Abyss among Mount Celestia and Arborea, there is still the same difference in alignment between them.

One could imagine that a group of industrious, say, Gnomish souls camp out in Elysium, but their somewhat lawful nature threatens to draw part of that realm into Bytopia. So some entity of Elysium might employ the party to kick them out or at least change their behavior to preserve things.

(Note that this aspect of the Outer Planes does seem to have exceptions. The Githzerai are a lawful neutral culture that exists within Limbo, the chaotic neutral plane, and they don't seem to have sucked part of it to Mechanus or Arcadia, which seem to more closely resemble their attitudes.)

Of course, another adventure concept is fairly easy: the test. In Critical Role's first campaign, for example, the party had to travel to the realms of various gods in order to get the power needed to defeat the big bad. The gods were not willing to invest that power in anyone who wasn't worthy, and so some of the party members had to perform feats to show they could be trusted to use that power well.

This creates conflict without any real antagonism, and can give the players challenges despite being "among friends" as it were.

I have been ignoring, to this point, the "Factols" of the Planescape setting. While these are all based in the city of Sigil, itself an odd neutral ground for beings from all the Outer Planes, these factions have their own bases of operation on other planes, and while you might be fine with those Chaotic Good/Chaotic Neutral folks in Ysgard, you might have a more specific beef with one of the Factols that has set up there.

Of course, the last possibility I'll talk about is if your player characters are just evil. They might be going there to steal some source of power not for the greater good, but for their own greed. Or they might wish to inflict harm on beings of good because they're jerks. Here, the conflict writes itself.

But most games run with good or neutral PCs, so this is probably going to be a bit rare.

Flavoring The Undead Warlock

 Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide is an odd book - it came out in 2015, not long after the launch of 5th Edition, and is technically a campaign setting book for the Sword Coast - the region of Faerun, itself a continent on Toril, the primary world of the Forgotten Realms setting, that is the most storied and classic of D&D settings (while Greyhawk, being the creation of Gary Gygax himself, could argue for primacy as the "main" D&D setting, through at least 2nd, 3rd, and 5th Edition the Forgotten Realms has been the "standard" setting for the game.) But compared with other campaign setting books, it's weird. It came with several subclasses, some of which were reprinted in Xanathar's Guide to Everything, but others that you might not even remember existing: have you ever seen someone play a Battle Rager Barbarian? A Purple Dragon Knight Fighter? A Way of the Long Death Monk? These are all officially-published 5th Edition subclasses.

Among the oddities of SCAG, there is the Undying Warlock. The general interpretation for this subclass is that your patron is some form of undead, like a Lich. However, the book weirdly does all in its power to avoid explicitly saying your patron is undead. Instead, the Undying is a being who has avoided death in some powerful, magical way. So you could technically have any immortal being - your patron could be some sentient treant suffused with druidic magic that keeps it from ever dying.

This intentional vagueness has always been a little frustrating. It also doesn't help that the Undying Warlock's subclass features are, well, not particularly great. For example, you effectively have a permanent sanctuary spell against undead, which could be great if you're dealing with a bunch of undead, but could be useless in other situations.

The Undead Warlock Patron coming in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft will, I think, supplant the Undying in many ways, and I think that's fine. In this case, the patron is explicitly an undead being - a lich, a vampire, a ghost, a death knight - any powerful undead.

By making this explicitly a patron who is necromantically inclined, the flavor of the subclass can be more explicit. Obviously, we don't have the official rules for the subclass just yet, but we did have an Unearthed Arcana article a few months ago. The Undead Warlock can alter much of their damage to become necrotic, and when they do so, they can often deal additional damage that way (one thing I am almost certain will be nerfed is that, as written right now, an Undead Warlock who uses this boost can deal 2d10 necrotic damage with each hit of an Eldritch Blast, which means a tier 4 Warlock could do 8d10 damage with a cantrip without even critting or accounting for agonizing blast.)

Given that the mechanics are in flux, let's talk flavor.

Naturally, Liches, Vampires, and the like are popular D&D monsters. One of the common themes for these sorts of creatures is their ability to come back after being destroyed. A Lich respawns after a couple days near wherever their phylactery is hidden. A vampire turns to mist when it is killed and can potentially escape to its resting place to regenerate. A death knight comes back as long as its soul hasn't been redeemed. And ghosts remain as long as their unfinished business remains unfulfilled.

Undead are usually evil, which means any warlock who has made a pact with an undead patron has bargained with a dangerous entity. There are exceptions, though: the Undying Court in Eberron is made up of undead who are animated by positive energy - this is reflected in their resilience to radiant damage and their vulnerability to necrotic - and are all good-aligned, acting as undead caretakers of their society.

Given that the subclass is coming with Ravenloft (and thus will probably not be AL-legal unless it gets a reprint in another "Everything" book) the most obvious connection here would be to use a domain's darklord as your patron. Not all darklords are undead, but many are - if you look at classic Universal monsters, the likes of Dracula, the Mummy, and Frakenstein all count (even if by D&D mechanics, a flesh golem like Frakenstein is technically a construct. Oh, and before you go "um, actually, Frankenstein is the creator, not the monster," I'll nerd you one better by reminding you that in the book, the creature takes Victor Frankenstein's name, so the Boris Karloff character is, indeed, named Frankenstein.)

Strahd von Zarovich, or other figures like Azalin the Lich, are the rulers/prisoners of their own domains of dread. They are all powerful - imbued with a deep connection to the realm itself - and could certainly make for good warlock patrons. I see two routes for this:

One is that the darklord of the domain you find yourself in is your patron. You could play Curse of Strahd as a warlock of Strahd himself. This is going to introduce some really interesting dynamics: first off, you could play as his secret agent within the party (though this might make it hard to resolve the story.) Alternatively, you might be a rebel against Strahd, one who did gain power from him but now acts against him. Given the transactional nature of a Warlock's pact, it's possible that you made a deal for power and considered that a closed deal - but now you're essentially swept into this conflict with someone you dealt with in the past. If you go this route, you should definitely figure out with your DM if your end of the pact has already been fulfilled, or if it's an ongoing obligation that would allow the darklord to turn your powers off. While mechanically it'll be a lot easier if the deal is done and irrevocable, you can sacrifice some of your own player power for a potentially very rewarding challenge in which you need to deal with the fact that the antagonist can take your power away (perhaps creating a new side quest in which you can rip that power fully from them and make it your own.)

Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft will be breaking with some of the 2nd Edition lore - the Core, a continent-like landmass that connected the various Domains of Dread will be shattered, which means that travel between domains will at best be a metaphysical jaunt through the Mists, rather than a physical one. Still, I see no reason why the rivalries and scheming between Darklords can't continue (especially in your game,) and thus your character might actually be serving a being like Strahd while you and your party fight off the undead zombie hordes of Falkovnia (which will be what's going on there in 5th Edition.) Warlocks often have a "deal with one evil to defeat another" vibe going with them, and so it could be fun to play as the agent of one against another. Vecna hasn't been in Ravenloft since 2nd Edition, but I sort of love the idea of serving the Whispered One.

And of course, relationships with Warlock patrons can run the gamut of trusted servant or bitter enemy. While some mechanics are a little worrying if you're not on good terms with your patron (like the level 20 feature that allows you to plea with your patron for ten minutes to get your spell slots refunded) the folks at WotC have generally ruled that once a pact is made, the power the Warlock gets is permanent, and that they likely already fulfilled their end of the bargain to get that power. Personally I find it more dramatic when the Warlock still has work to do to pay the patron back, but if you go this "settled" route, you can have a lot of fun playing against a patron who will really regret making that deal with you.

Given the prevalence of undead foes across D&D, this is a subclass I think can very, very easily work in any setting. As I said before, the Obzedat Ghost Council in Ravnica could be a great option for a council-style patron (with perhaps different relationships with each of its members).

Mechanically, assuming things don't change that much from the Unearthed Arcana version (though I really think they'll nerf Form of Dread/Grave Touched combination as that would essentially turn every Eldritch Blast into a crit, and every crit into a double-crit) the Undead Warlock might actually have some difficulty fighting undead, given the focus on necrotic damage, which many corporeal undead are resistant to and to which ghostly undead are typically immune. Still, this is often an optional thing.

One of the interesting aspects of the Undead as a patron is that they used to be mortals. Now, granted, in D&D oftentimes beings like fiends and celestials actually did begin as mortal souls, becoming fiendish or celestial after they died and went on to the Outer Planes, and in fact a lot of the gods at least in the Forgotten Realms were powerful adventurers who ascended to godhood once they amassed enough power. Still, the undead are probably more closely connected to their mortal lives, which gives you an opportunity to potentially give them a lot more of a human personality.

Granted, there's a tendency for undeath to kind of dull the good parts of a personality. Vampires are typically portrayed as having lost all the moral inhibitions of their mortal lives (often in a kind of seductively sensual way, but also in the whole "I'm ok with tearing out other peoples' throats to feed" way) while Liches in the Monster Manual are described as having become obsessive husks of the dynamic minds they were as mortal wizards. Still, I think there's plenty of wiggle room in that (and room for interpretation) that you could have a fun and/or funny relationship with your undead patron in a way that might be harder to do with, say, a Great Old One. (I wrote a character backstory for a warlock who carries his patron's phylactery around because she can no longer manifest corporeally thanks to the wards placed on said phylactery by her literal saint of a brother, and she acts as a bored, mischievous troublemaker/imaginary friend rather than some kind of dark corruptor.)

Unlike Celestials, Fiends, Archfeys, and Genies, Undead patrons likely originate on the Material Plane (outside of those found in Ravenloft) and thus could more often be a real presence in the campaign.

Additionally, given this patron's formerly living status, you could easily have a patron of this sort be an ancestor of your character's. Perhaps a noble family's secret to their power and prestige is that their great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother is a powerful lich whose lair extends deep below the family manor.

So, ultimately, I think this subclass is filling a niche whose only reason for not existing yet in 5th Edition was the existence of the rather lackluster Undying. The possibilities for such a patron are vast. It's less thematically limited to the Gothic setting of Ravenloft than the College of Spirits Bard (though as I say in the post on those folks, you can easily reimagine them for a different vibe) and so I hope that if 5th Edition gets another setting-agnostic rules expansion like Tasha's Cauldron of Everything that we'll see these reprinted (for those of us who play Adventurer's League.)

Flavoring The College of Spirits Bard

 One of the upcoming subclasses in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft is the College of Spirits Bard. Yes, Bards got a new subclass in another setting book - the Eloquence Bard in Mythic Odysseys of Theros - that was reprinted in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything so that it would be setting-agnostic and AL-legal, but the flavor of this subclass plays beautifully into the Gothic Horror theme of Ravenloft.

The typical Bard is usually portrayed as someone who casts their magic and inspires their allies using music - Bards get to use musical instruments as spell foci and they have abilities like Song of Rest that imply their arts are purely musical in nature. But the truth is that Bards are ultimately weavers of stories and lore more than anything else. I like to think that a Bard is basically an emotion-mage. They can induce a useful mood for their companions while also messing with the emotions and perceptions of those around them - Bards tend not to use big destructive spells like Fireball, but have pretty broad access to mental-manipulation magic. Indeed, their beneficial spells can be thought of as just another form of mind-manipulation, only in this case it enhances the subject's capabilities rather than hindering.

"Spiritualism" was a major craze in the 19th Century. While belief in ghosts and unseen spirits and demons has been part of human culture since, well, humans have had a culture, the Spiritualist movement of the 1800s was, in large part, a reaction to the age of reason and the enlightenment. The enlightenment saw a huge transformation in the way that society was run - people started asking questions like "hey, why is that king allowed to rule over us when all he did to be king was be born into a certain family?" The enlightenment brought massive cultural change, and also powered technological change, which in turn also brought massive cultural change. Naturally, there were some who felt that all this change was leaving some things behind - the Romantics (who, among others, included Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein - which one could argue is the most important work in all of speculative fiction) sought to bring emotion back into what had become a cold and ultra-rational style in fiction.

Of course, with the wave of rationalism and science becoming a major part of the common person's daily life, the stage was set for pseudoscience - fantastical (sometimes intentionally misleading) beliefs garbed in the trappings of science. Rather than odd mystics and witches, people who presented themselves as doctors or professors would suggest that they had a scientific method for interacting with a supernatural world.

Spiritualists would often provide entertainment at parties or on stage, performing séances to contact the spirits of the dead. To what degree people were "in on the joke" or not depended I think on the individual - I'm sure for some fans of spiritualism it was more like going to a magic show than some religious rite. (I'm assuming most people who go and see magicians these days understand that it's all clever sleight of hand and not actually supernatural power.) But the people who would give these performances would certainly be the model for a College of Spirits Bard.

While this archetype could certainly be a model for your Spirits Bard, there are, of course, other models as well. At the heart of the imagery of this subclass is its reading - using a divinatory device to get various "stories" that then provide buffs to allies or problems for foes. One of the main suggestions for how to do this is to use a deck of cards. Tarot cards are associated with fortune-telling, and you could easily play a Spirits Bard as someone who draws cards from a deck to determine the spirits they call upon.

The Tarot deck is not too dissimilar to a standard deck of playing cards, with four suits that have numbered cards, with the top numbers represented by things like "queens" and "kings," though there are four "face cards" for Tarot as opposed to the standard deck's three. The big addition, though, are the many Joker-like "Major Arcana" cards (as opposed to Minor Arcana.) Things like "The Tower" or "Death" or "The Hierophant" exist outside of the four suits. In a lot of works of fiction, these Major Arcana are the only cards we see dealt in a Tarot reading, perhaps because of their iconic looks. But I believe that most fortune-telling practices also incorporate the "Minor Arcana," assigning meaning to cards like the Five of Cubs or the Eight of Wands.

The fortune-teller character is a trope often associated with the Romani people. Traveling carnivals are often associated with the itinerant Romani people, and whether genuine Romani or merely appropriating cultural signifiers, a lot of fortune tellers trade on the exoticism of being from a different culture to appear more credible, or at least add to the mystery and atmosphere.

The Vistani in the Ravenloft setting are modeled on the Romani people. This... has come with a bunch of problematic stereotypes (sadly, the Romani have historically been treated pretty terribly throughout Western history) and I have big hopes that Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft will work to address some of the harmful tropes it inherited and carried on from earlier genre works.

As Curse of Strahd begin, one of the first things the players do is get a card reading from Madam Eva, the leader of Barovia's Vistani people. This is a crucial part of the adventure, as the readings she makes literally determine where certain items and characters are found in the adventure. Much of the adventure's middle act is the discovery and collection of the items hinted at by Madam Eva, so this reading is crucially important.

Madam Eva uses a Tarokka deck, which is very clearly meant to be an in-universe equivalent to the Tarot deck, though it has different cards. As such, though, I think a College of Spirits Bard, especially in a Ravenloft campaign, could use a Tarokka deck as their spellcasting focus. WotC even sells actual Tarokka decks. There's also an artifact in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything that is a very powerful Tarokka deck that houses spirits trapped within it.

Now, the carnival fortune-teller or the 19th century spiritualist are two archetypes you can definitely play into with this subclass. Both would, I think, fit nicely in the Ravenloft campaign setting, which is where this subclass will primarily be promoted. Much like the Undead Warlock, it adds a Gothic spookiness to the players themselves.

Still, just as Bards can play against type as any kind of powerful story-weaving character (I can imagine playing one as some kind of tribal story-weaver for a stone age civilization, for instance) I think you could definitely flavor this in other ways as well.

I've always been kind of fascinated by the broad categories of animism and shamanism. To profoundly boil these ideas down (and I could totally have the definitions off, to disclaim) animism is a type of spiritual worldview in which everything - from living creatures to natural objects like hills, rivers, and stones - contains a spirit that we can communicate with. Shamanism is related, but its focus is on invisible spirits that permeate reality, sometimes requiring a shaman to contact the spirit world.

I could absolutely see a College of Spirits Bard lean into these belief structures, perhaps more the latter. Remember that not all priests are Clerics and not all Clerics are priests (though the latter case is more common,) and you could play a College of Spirits Bard as a religious shaman who interprets the will of the spirits through your practices, aiding your community by serving as a connection to the spirit world, trading the Western trappings of the 19th Century Spiritualist for a more diverse set of real-world cultural inspirations.

Lineage, Ancestry, and the Future of Race in D&D

 In Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, new rules related to player character race were introduced. In an effort to reckon with the history of racial stereotypes in the fantasy genre, and in D&D in particular, WotC has been revisiting some of the old tropes of the game in an effort to approach things in a more modern and inclusive manner.

While human beings in the real world are physiologically very homogenous, without any major advantages or disadvantages that come on a racial-genetic level (as opposed to a cultural-historic level, such as longstanding racial biases in culture and society) the fantasy races of a D&D world are somewhat more distinct. Even if the core races of humans, halflings, dwarves, and elves mostly look like one another except for a pointy ear here or a propensity for beards there, part of the fantastical world in which we adventure does involve physiological differences that are far more pronounced than they are in the real world. Again, even in the core races you have things like an elf's better vision in the dark or a dwarf's resilience against poison, but then when we introduce beings like dragonborn, tieflings, and further out people like warforged, there's a need to address that in game mechanics.

Let's also not forget that a part of the puzzle-box of character-building is playing around with those racial abilities, or playing around the lack thereof (for instance, my Human Warlock was a bit more eager to take Devil's Sight than my Half Elf one, given the lack of darkvision as a man of less diverse ancestry.)

But there are some elements that have been, on one hand, problematic from a social point of view, but also limiting in terms of gameplay. The first and most obvious thing to address is ability score bonuses, and even more, penalties.

As originally published in Volo's Guide to Monsters, Orcs ("pureblooded," rather than the PHB's Half-Orc) had a penalty to Intelligence. Orcs, after all, have historically played the part of the massive, savage horde that invades, murdering and pillaging as they go. But if we are also referring to orcs as a humanoid people, it's a bit disturbing to describe them as inherently stupid. Furthermore, it also makes them less interesting even if they do serve primarily as invading foes. To take an example from a different game, the Orcs in Warcraft I and II were purely bad guys (it wasn't until WCIII that they began to suggest that they were a more nuanced culture that was being misled, and that there was potential for heroism amongst them.) But even though they were just bad guys, the worst of them was Gul'dan, a warlock who was a brilliant genius and subtle manipulator behind the scenes. Indeed, the Orcs in Warcraft, even prior to their revision as people normally capable of honor but misled by demonic manipulation, were filled with intelligent shamans and warlocks alongside the more traditional berserkers. And it made them more interesting as bad guys.

So, the first thing to happen with these changes was the removal of racial ability score penalties. Orcs didn't have to be stupid and Kobolds didn't have to be weaklings.

But the bigger change came a bit later, namely, the freeing up of ability score bonuses. This had two effects, both socially and gameplay-wise, that I think were both fantastic. The rule, as changed, is that any ability score increases could be reassigned to the abilities you want. For example, a Dragonborn get a +2 to Strength and a +1 to Charisma. Under the new rules, if you want to play, say, a Wizard, you could change the +2 to Intelligence and the +1 to Constitution. Most races (sometimes when combined with a subrace) bring with them a +2 and a +1, but there are some exceptions. A Triton, for example, gets +1s to Strength, Con, and Charisma. But if you wanted to play an Arcane Trickster Rogue, for example, you might choose to take bonuses to Dexterity and Intelligence instead of Strength and Charisma.

I'm a huge fan of this change because I think that it's best when every player character can start with at least a +3 to their most important stat, and this way playing, say, a Dwarf Wizard is not going to see you handicapped and not maxing out your Intelligence until level 12 while you sit around with a mostly-useless boost to strength.

The further change, though, has been a broad separation of traits that are physiological versus those that are cultural. As an example, Dwarves have something called Dwarven Weapon Training, which gives them proficiency in various dwarf-themed weapons like warhammers and battleaxes. While this can be really cool in niche cases (thanks to the expanded Monk rules, your Dwarf Monk could fight with a Warhammer) it's also clearly meant to represent something you picked up growing up within a traditional dwarven society. So what happens if you want to play a character who was orphaned and raised by a family of elves? The elves' culture doesn't revolve around these particular techniques, and it's possible you didn't even learn the dwarvish language.

The new rules allow you to account for that by swapping out various proficiencies that come with your race. You might be a stout, bearded little monk, but the language you spoke at home was that of the elves, and so that's what you're comfortable with.

But let's now talk about Lineages.

The three Gothic Lineages that are coming in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft are quite different from other playable races - to the extent that they're not even called races.

I'd argue that there is precedence for this, though: the Simic Hybrid in Ravnica is a "race" that represents those who participated in the Simic Combine guild's Guardian Project. This project, meant to create super-soldiers, basically took (mostly) humans, elves, and vedalken (all common humanoid races in Ravnica) and mutated them, adding things like extra arms with big crab claws, manta-ray-like fins, or other weird animal parts that became part of their bodies.

Like the Gothic Lineages, Simic Hybrids are not born this way, but rather become them (to be fair, some of the Gothic Lineages you can be born that way). The status of a Simic Hybrid is actually almost entirely physiological - you don't even have to be a member of the Simic guild.

Given that these changes are coming several years after the release of 5th Edition, there's a sort of retroactive patch job that needs to be used to alter the rules to work this way. These Lineages, though, are coming out after this philosophical development.

As such, the rules as presented separate out the stuff that's very much for a player to decide. Your Reborn character could have been any existing D&D race, from Halfling to Githyanki. And indeed, you might even be a construct of members of many different races. Because the Reborn lineage takes over all the physiological differences, it becomes a big umbrella to many kinds of people raised from the dead. Meanwhile, as you craft your character backstory, you can assign things like languages known and ability score bonuses based on who that person was before they died, creating that cultural tie to the past.

Racial physiological bonuses are generally not game-breaking, so I think this winds up being well-balanced. Essentially, I think there's no downside to this, and only an upside.

So, what about the future?

Well, I don't think we're going to excise races entirely in the next major update - whether that's a 6th Edition or a 5.5. But I do think we're likely to see a clearer distinction between race and culture. Now, ultimately, I think this might also require Humans to be rebuilt slightly. Granted, I don't know of anyone who doesn't got the variant human route, as that level 1 feat is pretty great. But the flexibility of their ability score bonuses has been a pretty big deal to making them appealing. Now that that's universal, I'm curious to see how humans work in future editions. It's possible they'll remain appealing just because, well, it's the easiest race to "hook" onto. In a lot of ways, I see these changes as just allowing other races to catch up to human flexibility.

Flavors of Horror: Part 4 of X: Lynchian/Surreal Horror

 David Lynch's works were a big influence on me despite the fact that I didn't watch any of his work until my sophomore year of college. His television show, Twin Peaks, co-created with Mark Frost, premiered in 1990, and ran for two seasons before its cancellation, getting a prequel of sorts in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me in 1992 (not long after the end of the show) and a much-later followup in 2017 with Twin Peaks: The Return, effectively a third season that leaned much harder into the surreal side of the show, likely because of the increased clout Lynch had to wield.

While surreal horror is a much broader genre than just the works of David Lynch, I think he's a good person to look at when considering the aesthetics and nature of the surreal horror, even though I suspect that he might take issue with my using such a term to describe his works.

At the heart of surrealism is incongruous reality. Things appear in ways they are not supposed to, or rather in ways that they don't in our waking experience. While not all surrealism makes this a direct line, the surreal typically takes on the logic of a dream. The things we see are not literal, but metaphors for something else, and the way they behave has its own logic that, at least while experiencing it, appears consistent even if it ultimately isn't.

The connection between dreams and storytelling is a rather obvious one. Just like dreams, stories operate on their own logic, sometimes eschewing realism in the name of serving the deeper thematic purpose.

However, I would draw a bold line here between storytelling and dream-logic, in that a story is constructed with intention, and the meaning of its metaphors is something that can be discerned through study and analysis. There is certainly a case to be made that A: not all metaphors or thematic connections are intentional, and thus can be discovered by critics (meaning those engaged in artistic critique, rather than those judging a work good or bad) even if the author was unaware of the connection and B: the imagery and themes of dreams could also be based on internal, perhaps subconscious metaphor, and thus could also yield more concrete meaning with sufficient analysis.

Surrealism as a storytelling style, then, plays with this, and can take different forms depending on how deeply the author wishes to delve into that dream-like nature. Because art is created for others to experience, there are two layers on which art can operate: there is art for the audience's perspective, in which all that we can consider is that which exists in the text, sussing out meaning and subtext using only the work itself, and, in the second layer, the deeper meaning for the creator.

In the first case, the symbolism of surrealism is almost a sort of puzzle that the audience can work out - and is often the realm of dream-sequences in otherwise straightforward narratives. The second case, though, can create a serious sense of disorientation.

What I think makes Lynch such a fascinating artist is that he seems to conjure up imagery and metaphors that even he does not know the meaning of. Yet his imagination allows him to create this imagery in a way that is fascinating and compelling to watch.

The difficulty in adapting this style of storytelling to any interactive medium - from video games to tabletop games to other forms - is that a game (or other interactive medium) requires some kind of consistent rule set for players to feel like they are doing something meaningful.

This series is about the Ravenloft setting, and building adventures into different subgenres of horror.

Well, one thing we haven't touched on yet is just what makes surreal horror distinct from surrealism.

And the answer, unfortunately, isn't readily apparent. In simple terms, it is about nightmares rather than dreams.

A nightmare is a dream that fills us with fear, or less commonly, other unpleasant emotions. But this is not a total dichotomy, as dreams can often be just sort of weird and confusing, rather than being the pleasant counterpart to the nightmare.

However, I think one of the major elements of surreal horror is the breakdown of the barrier between a predictable, mundane reality, and the illogic of dreams, to the extent that one might be put in danger by this breakdown.

I hesitate to cite it given that I'm less than 100 pages in, but Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves seems (to the extent that I've read) to be another example of surreal horror - there is a nested narrative of analysis that goes into the details of a non-existent (within the narrative) documentary about a house that has spaces inside that seem to grow and expand despite the house seeming to be the same size on the outside.

In one of the cited scenes in said documentary, the family living inside discovers a passageway between two of the bedrooms that hadn't been there before they left on a vacation, and then they discover that the passage is 3/8 of an inch longer than it should be compared to the house's exterior. But the family learns to live with it and the matriarch builds a bookshelf using the walls of the passage as bookends. When one of the books falls off what had been a perfectly packed bookshelf, she screams, and I, for one, experienced a chill down my spine, reading it.

Surreal horror uses dream logic to turn things that ought to be mundane and unremarkable things into monsters as frightening as ghosts and vampires. The great monster of Twin Peaks, at least in its original run, was an entity named BOB, who appeared like a normal, middle-aged guy in a denim jacket with long, stringy grey hair.

Lynch, always ready to seize on an instinct, created the character after one of the set-dressers accidentally got trapped behind a bed on one of the sets, and so Lynch simply cast him as this otherworldy creature who ultimately turned out to be the possessing spirit behind a cycle of horrific murder and abuse (spoilers, I guess, though I feel like spoilers don't really apply to Lynch stuff.)

I find that Cosmic Horror often works well with Surreal Horror. The distinction between Lovecraft's creepy crawly alien entities and traditional demons and evil spirits is more about the framework within which we see them. Demons, for instance, in the Christian view, are understood as beings who rebelled against God, a perfect, eternal, and invincible nexus of all that is good and right. This makes demons very frightening, as beings who chose to rebel against that, but also creates a framework by which they can be opposed, with the strong implication that victory against them is guaranteed as long as you keep up the fight.

Lovecraft's monsters, though, exist within an uncaring and godless universe - or worse still, his most vast creatures are the true gods of the cosmos. But beyond that, while the Christian view of God still holds that He is something that cannot ever fully be understood by anyone but Himself, He's benevolent enough to give us a set of rules and guidelines to ensure that we can act in a harmonious way with Him. In Jewish tradition, he is less anthropomorphic than in Christianity, yet is also all the more logical and reasonable - a sufficiently wise and thoughtful person can argue with God and come to a better understanding.

Meanwhile, Lovecraft's conception of these god-like beings is that there is no simplified language that allows humans to commune with or converse with these entities - communication will inevitably shatter human minds, which are insufficient to address the complexity of these entities.

But Cosmic Horror renders this, often, with a kind of regressive aesthetic. Reason is abandoned and instead we have a return to pre-rational understandings - cults and magic and demons.

Lynchian Horror, though, suggests that we must go on a journey to discover a new language for understanding the forces at work.

Ok, but this is a gaming blog, and I've rambled on for a long time about this genre. What about practicalities?

The notion of a darklord is pretty core to the Ravenloft setting, but an antagonist is also somewhat less important to the subgenre. Instead, I think the key thing to emphasize is how unreal the Domains of Dread are.

Remember that Barovia and the other domains are not on the prime material plane. While there is the appearance of a physical reality that operates on real-world logic, in fact the Demiplane of Dread is more like a preserved nightmare afloat in... um, the Ethereal Plane or the Shadowfell. I'm going to let Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft answer that definitively.

And in that way, I think that one needs to remember that the real and the illusory are one and the same. Indeed, this is actually connected to earlier lore, where illusion magic was deeply tied to the Plane of Shadow and later the Shadowfell. If you want to heighten the sense of weirdness, consider making momentary impressions persist.

To take a page out of House of Leaves, one thing could be that the structure of a building in which the players find themselves changes over the course of their adventure. This is, admittedly, hard to pull off (especially if playing with a physical map and miniatures - you know, post-pandemic of course).

Likewise, allow things that are plainly illusions to become all too real - maybe a whorl in a piece of wood that kind of looks like a face changes its "expression."

The appearance or disappearance of NPCs without comment can be disconcerting.

Another thing to play with is how well your players take notes. If, for instance, the party encounters some innkeeper and her family, maybe the next time the party goes there, there's an extra kid. Or better yet, there's a different inn. This can be a little tough - because the players might simply miss these details or think they've made an error. You'll thus probably want to call attention to it.

But this is important: some of these changes don't mean anything (at least nothing obvious or strictly relevant to the adventure.) The appearance of a new teenaged son for the innkeeper will likely get players thinking of doppelgangers and changelings and all sort of magical creatures that can be "solved" with a classic monster battle. But we want to try to keep things disorienting - so such changes should usually be uncommented on, and the new reality that replaced the old should simply be off-putting, with no obvious narrative to attach to it.

Overall, I think this is a tough genre to built an entire domain of dread around, at least in a way that will play well into D&D's problem-solving gameplay. But I do think it's a really good genre to look into for creating a sense of otherworldly dread. In Ravenloft, reality isn't really trustworthy because, well, it's not "real" in the strictest sense.

Some of my favorite works in the subgenre include, in no particular order:

Legion - the TV show based on the Marvel character, but unlike any other comic book superhero show you'll ever see. It's about a man with nearly omnipotent powers but who is also profoundly mentally ill, and the reality of the show is the world as seen by him.

Welcome to Night Vale - a podcast about a small American town in the Southwest where every conspiracy theory is true, and where the most horrifying, dystopian, nightmarish, and simply bizarre stuff is treated as the charming quirks of their lovely burgh, taking the form of a local radio show.

Twin Peaks - a TV show that is ostensibly a police procedural about a troubled prom queen who's found murdered, while also being a demi-parody of soap operas as well as a story of otherworldly entities spreading hate and corruption... I think.