Alternative Lycanthropy in Candlekeep Mysteries, and Speculation on a Scarier Werewolf

 There's kind of a canon of movie monsters. Universal put out a bunch of horror movies in the 1930s that have sort of come to define a kind of pantheon of horror movie icons. Because they've been such fixtures for so long, most aren't really even scary, exactly, anymore, but are so recognizable that Universal tried in recent years to make their own shared cinematic universe in the style of the MCU based on them.

While the real canon of these may or may not be agreed upon, I think the following list could work pretty well: Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the Phantom of the Opera. (Perhaps it's only because of the period I was born, but the Phantom of the Opera has always been more associated for me with the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical for me.)

Among these archetypes, I feel like vampires like Dracula and werewolves like the Wolf Man are the most broadly popular monster "types" of the classic horror genre. (Frankenstein might be the most iconic though, thanks to the insanely iconic make-up they put on Boris Karloff.) Mummies can be fun, but I think they tend to fall into more of an adventure-horror style, and the others are a little too specific (though a Black-Lagoon-inspired story did win Best Picture at the Oscars for 2017, thanks to Guillermo del Toro, who I think loves monsters the way a toddler loves Winnie the Pooh.)

Anyway, I love werewolves, conceptually, but I think they don't seem to get quite as much love as vampires. I think a big part of that is that vampires (depending on the style/type you go for) still look more or less like people, and so it's both an easier make-up job and also easier for movies and such to make them relatable - which might explain why there are so many subversions where they aren't actually murderous monsters, but are just misunderstood and different.

Of course, another issue with werewolves is that one of the most common elements of the werewolf myth leaves them only really remarkable one to three nights out of a month. I think most werewolf stories are more about the horror of becoming a werewolf than being hunted by one - the idea is more about losing control over the rational and empathetic human being one is and giving in to the violent tendencies of a beast.

What I find interesting about both werewolves and vampires is that there's a broadly-accepted set of "rules" that we, culturally, have agreed on for how they work, even if the ancient folklore behind them is by no means consistent. Vampires are destroyed by sunlight or a wooden stake to the heart, and repelled by a cross (or, in less Christo-centric versions of the story, any religious symbol or even just something the bearer has faith in,) burned by holy water, and often can't cross running water or enter a house if they aren't invited in. Also, they seem to be repelled by garlic (the origin of this part of the folklore actually traces back to a broader idea that vampires are sort of OCD about counting things they see, which could include the cloves in a head of garlic or grains of sand that are spilled. This is actually why Count von Count from Sesame Street works on multiple levels!)

Werewolves have similar "rules." If you get bitten by a werewolf, you become one the following month. When the full moon rises, you transform into a wolf-like beast, and you totally lose your human mind and become a ravenous killing machine, often waking up in strange places because you don't remember what you did while transformed. Probably the most iconic aspect of the werewolf folklore is that you can only be killed with a silver bullet - to the extent that "silver bullet" is now means "the guaranteed way you can deal with this problem." I always remember hearing things like wounds inflicted by a werewolf never healed and there might be something about how killing the "original" werewolf is the only way you can cure someone (which I guess implies there are multiple, independent strains from separate "originals.")

In D&D, there are many variants on "were" creatures. While it's actually a bit of a misnomer that they all use the term lycanthropy (which literally means "wolf"-"human-ness") we've still got a whole bunch of types, like Wererats, wereboars, weretigers, werebears, and wereravens.

This last type is found in the Ravenloft campaign setting, and is actually the inspiration for this post.

In Candlekeep Mysteries, there's an adventure called Book of the Raven. I'll be frank - I don't think it's good, despite coming from lead narrative designer Chris Perkins. It's got a lot of interesting elements that don't really add up to anything, and it's not clear why the players would go to the adventure location, much less stay there.

But, it does provide a new statblock for Wereravens. Wereravens were previously established in Curse of Strahd, but I believe had a different statblock. The Candlekeep Mysteries version changes what is perhaps one of the two really core aspects of the lycanthrope stat blocks - the manner in which silver weapons are made relevant.

In the Monster Manual, lycanthropes are immune to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage from nonmagical attacks that aren't silvered. In other words, if you want to kill a werewolf and you're not a spellcaster, you need either a magical or silver weapon to do so, because your attacks aren't doing anything otherwise.

In Candlekeep Mysteries, however, this immunity is removed. Instead, the Wereravens are granted a regeneration ability - they recover 10 HP each turn, but this is turned off if they take damage from a spell or a silvered weapon.

Let's look at the implications:

If you are a fighter or other physical-damage-dealing character, you cannot kill one of these things on your own without a silvered weapon. The regeneration prevents them from dying if they will regenerate (similar to how trolls work,) and magical weapons no longer bypass this defense. The good news, though, is that if you do have some source of magic damage, like from a spellcaster in your party, you still damage the target. So even if your normal steel sword wouldn't do anything to an old-school lycanthrope, as long as your cleric hits it with a sacred flame before its next turn, you're still contributing to the take-down.

It's an interesting trade-off. I think that, overall, this is probably a better balance because it lets low-level martial characters feel like they're contributing to the fight even before they can get any fancy weapons. And I also like that it encourages you to discover actual silver weapons if you want to take a lycanthrope down... without the aid of a spellcaster.

And I think it's that one caveat that I find just a little frustrating.

You can't really "silver" magic, and for that reason I can understand just making all spells work on them. But that also feels, well, a little cheap.

Werewolves are only CR 3, compared to a vampire, which is CR 13. Hell, even the less-powerful vampire spawn are CR 5, and the lowest-CR vampire that's not specific to a published adventure, Ravnica's Mind Drinker vampire, is CR 4 (which I think is insane - Mind-Drinkers should be, like, CR 16 legendary monsters, not half the CR of Ravnica's Blood-Drinkers. I might be biased toward House Dimir, but still: psychic vampires, right?)

And I get that they work best as monsters to face in the very early levels - before you're tricked out with fancy magic gear, when a single werewolf can be a horrible menace to some small village.

But I hope that Van Richten's will give us some souped up werewolves. I suspect that the Candlekeep Mysteries' wereraven might be a preview of things to come with lycanthrope design. But let's talk about how I'd approach it:

First off, I like the regeneration thing rather than the damage immunities. Not only does it let a physical-damage-dealer feel like they're contributing even if they don't have a special weapon, but it also feels more in keeping with the lore - werewolves don't have impenetrable hides, it's just that they seem to shrug off stabs and slashes from weapons that aren't silver.

I also love that magic weapons no longer work to overcome this: a werewolf should be a difficult problem to solve. By the time players are level 6 or so, a werewolf might as well not have any immunities given that there's a clear expectation that players will have magic weapons (and classes that focus on unarmed attacks have magic attacks by that level.) But if we want werewolves to be a bigger threat that can continue to be scary past level 5, this works better for it.

In terms of CR, I'd just buff them - give them more health, maybe higher natural armor, and buff their attacks (possibly with a strength buff and more multiattacks, though I could also imagine adding poison or necrotic damage to their strikes, maybe even with a "lowers your max HP if you fail a con save" feature to get that "werewolf wounds don't heal properly" effect.)

Now, let's also visit that regeneration effect:

If we want werewolves to really command your players' respect, we need to make it harder to turn off their regen than simply tossing a Firebolt at it. We could just remove the ability for spells to stop their regeneration entirely (though we always run into Chill Touch, which is actually crazy-OP against anything that relies on regeneration to be scary,) but that feels like overcompensation.

For one thing, the Druid staple Moonbeam feels like it's designed specifically to fight lycanthropes. So it seems like that ought to work against them.

It might be that they could have some Rakshasa-like limited damage immunity, or rather, a stipulation in their regeneration ability that means only certain spells will interrupt it.

It would be a bit unwieldy for the statblock to specifically name-check Moonbeam, but one could base it on spell level. Moonbeam's a 2nd level spell, which means that if you limited spells' ability to stop the regeneration to 2nd level or higher, a level 1 or 2 party will only ever be able to fight a werewolf using silvered weapons. That sounds... actually pretty fair. (Well, they might also have a character who can cast Chill Touch, which, again, is crazy OP against vampires, trolls, and anything else that regenerates health.)

You could, of course, also limit it to damage types. I could imagine saying that only silvered weapons or spells that deal radiant or necrotic damage could interrupt the regeneration effect. This actually favors clerics and paladins, who have a bit more access to radiant damage than other classes (and I think clerics might have slightly higher access to necrotic, though that's less limited) which actually works out, given that werewolves are classic monsters that you could imagine a religious order dedicating themselves to fighting.

The whole point to the silver bullet thing with a werewolf is to put the protagonist in a situation where they can't kill the damn thing. As I was writing about earlier, D&D characters by nature are going to try to fight the monsters, but something as iconic as a werewolf should be more than just a random thing you find and immediately kill. As soon as anyone gets the faintest whiff of a werewolf being in the area, the adventure should be a search for the tool to kill it (aka silver) in a race against the rising full moon.

Then, the party can go full-on Geralt of Rivia and attack the monster fully prepared for it (or, in Geralt's fashion, might just knock the werewolf out and then uncover the fact that the person who hired him actually just wanted the werewolf dead because he's their older brother who's poised to inherit the family fortune and... you get the idea.)

D&D is already full of monsters, and what WotC has said about Van Richten's Guide is that it will have a fair number of altered stat blocks to give more of a horror edge to the existing monsters. I think werewolves (and I guess lycanthropes in general, though werewolves are the classic ones) a well-deserved glow-up.

Ravenloft and Stephen King's Terror vs. Horror

 The degree to which players become more powerful as they level in D&D's 5th Edition is pretty huge. As casters get access to more powerful spells and martial characters get various ways to do more damage with their attacks - or get broader access to magical weapons - player characters start to carve through foes that would, earlier in their careers, have been major problems.

I actually think that the clearest way that characters become more powerful is simply their rising maximum HP. The Commoner stat block is meant to represent a typical ordinary civilian of average ability, and they have 4 hit points. While this looks really bad, consider this: a dagger is one of the least powerful weapons in the game, dealing only 1d4 damage on a hit, plus modifiers. If you were to walk up to an ordinary person and stab them (which, you know, please don't. That's attempted murder at least,) that would be a very significant injury. If you hit them in a vital organ, like the heart, lungs, throat, or a major artery, you could kill them - which is basically what would be the equivalent of rolling a 4 on the die.

But even the squishiest of D&D classes, the Sorcerer and Wizard, start off with, at minimum, 6 hit points (and likely more, as either of these classes should probably invest a bit in Con for both HP and concentration,) meaning that unless they crit, a commoner can't take them out with a single stab with a dagger. And that's just at level 1.

If you take the "standard" HP boost with each level, you get to add 4+Con every level, meaning you've got at minimum 10 HP by level 2 (assuming you don't have a negative Con modifier, and I cannot imagine anyone taking a negative Con modifier on a character they want to, you know, survive.) If you roll your health, you're going to have at minimum 7 HP, or on average 9.5, and if you do the Mercer-style "roll but you can always re-roll 1s" style, it's an average of 4 on the die.

(As a side note, I just realized that Mercer's style does actually give you the same average as the "standard" amount. I think I had previously treated rolling 1 as a single re-roll that could still give you a 1, rather than basically ignoring 1s and re-rolling until you roll something else. Another way to think of it is this method turns 1d8 into (1d7)+1)

Anyway, the point is, let's imagine a classic slasher killer like Jason Voorhees. This guy's definitely stronger than average, maybe even really at the pinnacle of human strength at +5. And his trademark machete is, we'll say, the equivalent of a longsword. That means that when he hits an unsuspecting teenager (who would likely have the commoner stat block, though maybe with a -1 or -2 to Intelligence and/or Wisdom) he's doing, on average, 9.5 damage - more than enough to kill his victim outright - no death saves, no nothing, just a splatter of blood and a bunch of trauma for the little kid who wandered into the TV room while his teenage cousins were watching a movie (genuinely not an experience I had, but it feels very right for my age group, who always wanted to seem cool to our older, Gen-X cousins.)

But as we saw, a 2nd level Wizard is already at a point where they will usually survive a slash from Jason, even if they have a +0 to Con. And that Wizard also probably has a Fighter or Paladin friend who can then attack back at Jason, giving the Wizard time to hook their thumbs together and burn the crap out of Mr. Voorhees with a bunch of fire from their fingers.

By level 5, our, again, shrimpy, +0 Con Wizard has 30 health, meaning that Jason's got to get them on average four times to take him down, and I don't think Jason even has multiattack!

And therein lies the problem:

Stephen King defines three types of fear: gross-out, horror, and terror. I'll just stand on my soap box and say that I think his definition of horror and his one for terror should be swapped, but I'll use his definitions just because, well, Stephen King is a much more prominent authority on the subject than I am and more people are likely familiar with his terminology than what I think it should be.

Gross-Out is just gory nastiness - bodies being ripped apart, oozing blood, rotting corpses, etc.

Horror (in his terms) is a clear and obvious threat coming at you - a monster charging you or grabbing you with its claws.

Terror (again in his terms,) though, is a creeping sense of dread, where ambiguity leaves you frozen in the state before your animal brain chooses between fight or flight, where you might not even be sure if there is a threat yet, but you feel afraid. This is the creepy house where you could swear you hear whispering coming from another room that's supposed to be abandoned, or a dark basement in which a strange man is standing facing the wall and won't turn around to face you even when you say hello.

Stephen King's terror is really what makes the horror genre tick - the anticipation is the mood that a good horror story focuses on, those ambiguities in which you're hesitant to turn the page (or continue watching the scene in the case of movies). Paradoxically, once the horror starts - the monster jumps out - the tension is actually relaxed. Yes, you might flinch at the very moment of the jump-scare, but this is generally when the music (and soundtrack in general) gets louder, and the focus is action rather than mood, where either the character is desperately running away from the monster or is now being brutally slain (you can get some suspense out of these sequences by making it an open question if the character will make it out, but it has a very different feel.)

(Ok, one more little soapbox moment: the reason I think "terror" better describes what King defines as "horror" is in part tied to my having spent much of my teen and early adult years in the War on Terror era. When I think of "terror," I think of people in downtown New York running for their lives as the WTC towers collapsed - a very clear and obvious danger. By contrast, when I think of horror, I think of the horror genre, and as I previously described, I think that said genre works best in its eerie anticipation.)

In a D&D game, however, regardless of what class you're playing, the type of character you play is one who has basically made a career out of fighting monsters. And, to be frank, I've always felt that the fantasy and horror genres are actually pretty much the same, except for some differences in tone and expectation. Fantasy is horror in which the protagonists are well-equipped to fight the monsters. Your heroes in fantasy are not the in-over-their-heads teens at Camp Crystal Lake, but are instead trained knights, mages, and martial artists who know exactly what they need to do to kick monsters' asses.

Indeed, if you look at the Evil Dead trilogy (which is really weird because the second movie is more of a remake than a sequel) the first one is kind of your standard "teens go to a remote location and are picked off one-by-one by supernatural evil" kind of 80s horror movie, with a very strong emphasis on gross-out effects. In the second, the breakout character of Ash turns the tables by the end, becoming a monster-hunting badass with a chainsaw attached to the stump of his severed hand.

By the third movie (my favorite by far,) Army of Darkness, the series has transitioned entirely to fantasy, even transporting to the Middle Ages, where Ash leads the defense of a castle against an army of skeletons.

Basically, I think that a D&D horror game is, in almost all cases, going to be distinguished more in aesthetic than actual mechanics. The party is always going to want to, or at least try to, fight the monsters that attack them, rather than always run away. They're not commoners, whose smartest move is to get the hell away from that hockey-mask-wearing, machete-swinging brute.

You could say that a horror version of the game will be balanced against the party - far more deadly encounters, and enemies that the party will have a very tough time facing, which might force them to retreat.

But that's not really outside the realm of fantasy either. If you look at Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship's pursuit by the Balrog is absolutely such a situation - this guy outclasses us, so we gotta run. But that sequence, even if there's a sense of dread and doom, does not have the same feel as a horror movie.

Furthermore, the sequence at the end of Fellowship in which the Uruk-hai attack is similar - the Uruk-hai even manage to kill a party member. Indeed, the Uruk-hai are more or less an entire race of Jason Voorheeses - similarly violent, similarly tough to kill... for an average person. But by that point, the party is basically all at least level 4 or something, so they can carve through orcs with ease. It's really just through overwhelming numbers that the orcs are able to take down Boromir.

I think, thus, that the key to making a horror D&D game is to really emphasize King's "terror." The "jump scare" moment is going to turn into standard D&D combat one way or another, but the build-up to it will be what gives your players a fright.

Fighting Sul Khatesh

 5th Edition definitely favors the players. By tier 4 (levels 17-20) it's insanely hard to throw a tough enough enemy to actually beat them, or even make them all that nervous. I recently ran a level 18 one-shot in which I had Orcus use his undead-summoning abilities to bring in two death knights and an adult blue dracolich and the party (which was six level 18 characters with, perhaps, a generous assortment of magic items) took him to town, with only the cleric dropping unconscious during the fight (I did manage to bloody some of them.)

I've come to the conclusion that almost every foe you want to be a big, epic battle, should be preceded by a pretty serious marathon of other fights to drain resources from the party. If even Orcus with maxed-out health (which I recommend for any "boss" monster) can go down that easily, you've really got to pull no punches when building encounters meant to challenge the group.

As a sidenote: player power here is a feature, not a bug. You want the party to succeed and win their battles. But I do sometimes worry about making things boring if they aren't deadly enough. Given how relatively easy it is to get some resurrection magic (especially in later levels,) I think it's not that unreasonable to want boss fights to see at least two party members knocked out, and maybe even killed (as long as there's an expectation that they can be brought back.) I'm always cheering for my players, but I want them to feel like they really pulled their win from the jaws of defeat, rather than yawning through another easy fight. (That being said, the way I build my characters, I tend to want them to pull off everything impeccably and do massive damage on every round, so maybe DM me and Player me have to have a talk.)

Still, a single solo monster attacking the party starts to feel really hard to pose a threat at higher levels.

But then there's Sul Khatesh.

Now, Sul Khatesh, one of the two Overlords from Eberron, has a beefy CR - she's 28, which makes her tied for 3rd highest CR in the whole edition (Tiamat and the Tarrasque share 1st, so I skip 2nd,) sharing that rank with the other Overlord, Rak Tulkhesh.

Rak Tulkhesh is sort of the ultimate weapon swarm - literally, he's a giant fiend surrounded by a cloud of slashing weapons. He's got a boatload of health and does a massive amount of damage.

Sul Khatesh, by contrast, is focused on magic, with tons of powerful At Will spells (including counterspell, shield, fireball, and lightning bolt. If she gives up her reaction, she can basically sit at 27 AC at all times, which actually makes her as tank-y as my Eldritch Knight Fighter...)

She's also got a sort of Eldritch Blast equivalent attack, and a magic staff, though you'll probably only use these as legendary actions.

So far, she doesn't look that scary with 475 HP, which is a lot, but not insurmountable (maxed it's 700).

But then we get to Arcane Cataclysm.

This once-a-day action calls down three 40-ft radius (which is utterly massive) spheres of disruptive magic that do 11d12 (about 71) force damage to anyone who fails a dex save (oh yeah, the DC is 26, so good luck.) But again, that's just damage. No big deal, right?

Well, the spheres that explode linger as anti-magic zones for an hour.

That's disruptive, to be sure, but given how spellcasting-focused she is, it just means constricting the battlefield, right?

No, because her magic is immune to them.

So Sul Khatesh drops these massive spheres - just one of which is likely taking up most of your battle map - and then steps inside, and she's now immune to everything the spellcasters are doing to her.

Oh, and also the martial classes. Because you know what else? She's immune to non-magical bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage. And if you bring your weapon into that sphere, it just becomes a normal weapon.

In a lot of ways, this looks like a monster designed to be unkillable. And she almost is. Yes, the Arcane Cataclysm action takes a long rest to recharge, so you could wait her out, running away and hiding while you wait for the fields to dissipate. And honestly, that might be one of your best options. She can teleport once a day, so I think, tactically, if she senses that the zones are about to fade she might just peace out and go elsewhere, making it very tough (but not impossible) to figure out where she's gone.

But there are a couple other options.

The first is artifact weapons. Artifacts are the exception to antimagic zone's deactivation of magic items. Now, artifacts are extraordinarily rare, and usually come with some sort of drawback, but if you get your hands on one, this will be an invaluable option for getting some damage on her if she's in her zone.

The second is grappling. As I read it, Sul Khatesh is not immune to the initial damage of the Arcane Cataclysm, so she'll need to move into it. She doesn't have any real mobility tools other than her teleport, which means that for the most part, she's only got a 40 ft movement speed (well, and she can fly and hover, so... ooh boy.)

If she drops one of the spheres just next to her, she can move to its center immediately afterward, which means that you've got to drag her 40 feet out. The good news is that she has proficiency in neither athletics nor acrobatics, and is not immune to the grappled condition. She does have a +4 to Strength and a +5 to Dexterity, so even if your beefiest level 20 Barbarian is the one to grab hold of her, she could escape. As a DM, I'd have her use her action to do so given how valuable staying in the sphere is to her.

But I think what's really exciting here is that there'd be a significant, possibly multi-round effort to just drag her out. And all the while, she's got legendary actions with which she can strike the person grappling her with her magic staff that does 36 force damage on a hit (which most Barbarians can't simply shrug off) or whisper her Maddening Secrets to the Barbarian, who will have to make an impossible-without-bless-or-resistance-or-something Wisdom save or get stunned.

I'm tempted to run another one-shot and unleash a fully-rested party against her and just see if they can even do anything to her.

We Need Higher Level Published Adventures

 I was looking through my collection of D&D books. I have everything published officially for 5th Edition with the exception of Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage. Now, it's ironic that that's the book I've just mentioned because it holds a unique place in 5E: it's the only published adventure book that goes into tier 4, and furthermore, goes to level 20.

First, let's break down tiers of play: In the simplest terms, they're just level ranges. Tier 1 goes from levels 1-4, Tier 2 goes from 5-10, Tier 3 goes 11-16, and Tier 4 goes from 17-20.

Lorewise, the broad assumptions the game makes about these tiers also applies to the notoriety of your player characters, with 1 representing local heroes, 2 representing heroes of the kingdom or nation, 3 being heroes of the entire world, and 4 being heroes of the multiverse. These categories are less hard and fast - they make an assumption that you're doing the standard style of D&D campaign in which you start off fighting bandits and end up fighting gods.

Mechanically, though, these levels tend to represent clear breakpoints: because even pure casters will only have access to 2nd level spells in tier 1, and Revivify, the lowest-level resurrection magic, is a 3rd level spell, by necessity a tier 1 adventure is going to be a bit scrappier. Upon hitting 5, the wizard can get fireball, the cleric can get revivify, and all the martial classes (except Rogues) can start attacking twice a turn.

Indeed, pure casters will get a new level of spell at the start of each tier that generally represents a big step up in power from what was previously allowed. Compare Fireball (a 3rd level spell that does damage to every creature in a sphere when it goes off) to Shatter (a 2nd level spell that does likewise,) and the jump from 3d8 (average damage 13.5) to 8d6 (average damage 28) is pretty ridiculously huge. At tier 3, pure casters get 6th level spells, which, while perhaps not quite as iconic, are distinct in that a half-caster like a Paladin will never be able to cast stuff at that level. Then, at tier 4, pure casters start to get 9th level spells, which become godlike in power, like True Resurrection, Invulnerability, and most of all, Wish.

In theory, D&D is supposed to scale up to keep the difficulty relatively smooth - you throw tougher monsters at your party as they get more powerful. The truth, though, is that this isn't really the case. In the earliest levels, largely due to the fact that player character health is very low, but also because there just aren't that many options for the players to take, success and failure can happen very swiftly. My roommate, for example, while running the campaign he does with his work friends, unexpectedly killed a player character with a swarm of bats (hardly the sort of thing you'd expect) and in the same combat, another character gave a healing potion to the group's bard - whose player chose, as what he thought the character would do in a panic on his next turn, to cast thunderwave, which wound up instantly killing the character who had just healed him.

Not only is this far less likely to happen at higher levels, but the consequences are potentially negligible. My the time your cleric is level 17, even disintegrating a player character need not mean the end for them (I remember being shocked to discover that True Resurrection can even revert someone from undeath.)

D&D is very popular these days, more than it has ever been. But how many people do you know who have run high-level campaigns? To an extent, simply making it that far can be a challenge, even when using milestone leveling. I have only briefly run one-shots at higher levels (level 18,) and so I can't speak from a great breadth of experience, but my sense is that you can't just throw big, hard-hitting enemies at them and expect it to be a challenge. I used Orcus as my big bad with maxed-out health on the more recent of these one-shots (summoning a dracolich and two death knights to aid him) and didn't kill a single player character, despite the fact that, by the game's encounter-building rules, this was supposed to be a very deadly fight.

Again, I'm not sure I have the experience necessary to evaluate exactly how to change things, though I have two theories: the first is that monsters' health does not keep pace with the party's ability to inflict damage. By this point in my regular campaign where the players are level 11, a 200-health dragon can barely withstand a single round of combat against my player characters, and yet the very beefiest monster in any of the books has only a bit more than three times that amount. I also think that their ability to inflict damage is not as massive as it seems they should be. Orcus, for example, has a terrifying reputation, but in terms of the actions he can perform, they're a bit underwhelming. His melee attacks will do 68 damage in a round if they both land, and the spells he can cast through the Wand of Orcus do either a fireball's worth of damage (as we established earlier, averages to 28) or 61.5 against a single target - which is honestly not a lot against a high-level PC.

Strategy is, of course, necessary to make these a bigger challenge. One thing I've been playing around with is the need to drain player resources over the course of an adventure (which makes one-shots tough.) The dungeon model is designed around the idea of denying players the chance to take long rests, and making short rests rare reprieves. The players in my current campaign are in the midst of a huge battle that has a few overtuned fights in the hopes that their final confrontation against the adult blue dragon who will serve as the boss actually manages to give them something of a challenge (he'll also be taking great advantage of his ability to fly to make it harder for them to get to him.)

But here's why I want more published adventures for high-level play: give me something to model.

Reading through Candlekeep Mysteries, I do think the quality varies from adventure to adventure (Kandlekeep Dekonstruktion has overtaken Shemshine's Bedtime Rhyme as my favorite, perhaps purely because of its absurd story,) I can definitely see how most of the adventures will work, some being more combat-oriented while others are a bit more of an investigation. So, it frustrates me that the highest-level adventure in the book is for level 16 - just shy of peeking into tier 4.

I'd love to see an example of a Wizards-approved tier 4 one-shot. How do you build something that's a challenge to people who are, by this point, planes-hopping god-slayers?

I suppose I will need to complete my collection and actually get Dungeon of the Mad Mage at some point, but I'd also like to see some more work done in that high-level space, to encourage groups to try to push onward and reach that epic tier of play.

Candlekeep Mysteries First Impressions

 I picked up my copy of Candlekeep Mysteries today (from my friendly local game store) and I've started reading through it.

So far, I've read through the first four adventures and am nearly done with the fifth, the delightfully creepy "Shemshine's Bedtime Rhyme." Unlike the previous anthology books, I think that the adventures contained within here are actually likely to be doable in a single session, and are all built to work as either a one-shot or as a brief interlude in an existing campaign (or in some cases, a great jumping-off point for a major chapter in a campaign.)

The book begins with a description of Candlekeep, the library-fortress on the Sword Coast, which also happens to be where my most-played character, an Eldritch Knight Fighter, developed his Sage background. (I'll have to discuss with my DM as to whether he technically counts as a member of the Avowed or if, by leaving the citadel, he has forfeited his right to come and go as he pleases.) There are some fun bits here, including stat blocks for the Sages and Master Sages who make up most of the Avowed (Candlekeep's monastic librarians) as well as a draconic ghost who guards the depths of the castle's vaults. (These would be cool stat blocks for any big fantasy library. I definitely think I'll borrow them for the Isemeri Library in Ravnica when my players inevitably have to explore that to find out about enemies they might have in House Dimir.)

Unlike the Yawning Portal's pretty classic dungeon crawls, the emphasis here is much more on, well, unraveling mysteries (as such, reading the adventures as a prospective DM really spoils the surprise, so reader beware - some of the adventures are something like "this place is abandoned, because this one type of monster moved in and did bad things to the people here," which sounds dull on paper but can be very atmospheric if you run the adventure with an eye toward keeping things obscured.)

Occasionally, you might need to do a bit of work to motivate the players to investigate. Chris Perkin's Book of the Raven points the players to a creepy place, where they might discover more or less what happened there, and they can stumble into a very dangerous place indeed, but what defines "success" in that adventure is sort of up to the DM - it's mostly a lore dump and a pretty good prologue for a Ravenloft campaign.

Organizationally, they've played a bit with formatting in what I assume is an attempt to make it easier for a person to run things out of the book - non-Monster Manual stat blocks are put in the adventure chapters themselves rather than an appendix at the back of the book. The downside is that it's harder to just rush to those chapters and see what the cool new monsters are. The emphasis here, though, really is more on the exploration and mystery, putting the Exploration Pillar front and center in a way that I guess other adventures haven't.

There are 17 adventures here that provide stuff up to level 16 (which is the highest level of tier 3.) I'm a little disappointed there's nothing here for tier 4, as I'm really curious to see how the pros structure an adventure for people that powerful (I still need to get Dungeon of the Mad Mage.) You could just make a campaign out of the book, but these are probably better designed to do individually.

For now, the one I'm almost finished reading, Shemshime's Bedtime Rhyme, is my favorite - filled with atmosphere, though definitely an adventure that you should do after getting a clear list of soft and hard limits on creepiness factors.

Tarrasque vs. Clay Golem

 The Tarrasque grabbed me when I first picked up the Monster Manual. It's the highest-CR creature in the game (aside from Tiamat, found in Rise of Tiamat) at CR 30. The Tarrasque has more health than any other monster in 5th edition, and has an AC of 25, which I believe is the highest AC of any monster in the edition (though there are others that share that.)

That being said, the Tarrasque is actually fairly simple, mechanically. Most of what it does is just a bunch of melee attacks, and some defensive features that seriously limit the kind of magic you can throw at it. (Spell attacks and "line" spells like a Lightning Bolt just glance off its armor, and have a 1-in-6 chance of getting reflected back at you.) But its threat is just a bunch of, notably non-magical, melee attacks with its bite, horns, claws, and tail.

Its only source of non-physical (well, non-BPS) damage is the acid in its stomach, which anyone swallowed by the Tarrasque is subject to.

It's enough to make it genuinely difficult for level 20 adventurers to stand toe-to-toe with it. Your best bet is to try to attack from range and use magic to hinder it in various ways. (Dex saves are a serious weakness for it, as it's got a whole +0.)

Or, you could just throw a Clay Golem at it.

A Clay Golem is a lowly CR 9 Construct. But it happens to have just the right immunities to defeat a Tarrasque single-handed, as it will, in a pure toe-to-toe match, take precisely zero damage from the Tarrasque.

Like all Golems, a Clay Golem (arguably the most "classic" Golem from Jewish folklore) is immune to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage from weapons that are not magical or made of adamantine (hey, does this mean my Fighter's Adamantine Plate isn't magical, so in theory he could get it enchanted to be +3 plate...?) A Tarrasque's horns alone deal 32 damage on average, but they ain't made of adamantine (unless the DM wills it so) and as such do nada to the golem.

Clay Golems, then, are also immune to acid damage, which they absorb and get healed by, similar to how Flesh Golems are healed by lightning and iron golems are healed by fire.

Therefore, all the damage that the Tarrasque does is stuff that can't touch the Clay Golem.

Meanwhile, the Tarrasque has a similar immunity (minus the adamantine option,) but a Golem's attacks are, in fact, magical.

As such, I think the most likely scenario is that the Golem is immediately swallowed with the Tarrasque's bite attack, which actually protects it from any other serious threats, and the golem now gets to attack twice per round, hitting only if it rolls a 17 or higher on the attack, very slowly whittling the Tarrasque down by 2d10+5 damage at a time. But the Golem wins every time.

A Caveat:

While creatures that have immunity to physical damage can do quite well in combat against foes that don't have magic weapons, it's not a blanket immunity. For example, a Golem will still take falling damage because the ground isn't making an "attack." I'd probably rule the Tarrasque can't just step on the Golem because I'd count that as a sort of unlisted "Stomp" attack, but I'd probably allow the Tarrasque to grapple and then fling the Golem hundreds of feet in the air (note: the Tarrasque is Gargantuan, which is usually just 4x4 on a grid, or 20x20 feet, but its description says it's 70 feet long, so I'd actually make that a 14x14 square on a grid map - we're talking really freaking big.)

Still, the Tarrasque isn't a genius, and might swallow a Clay Golem it's fighting before thinking through the hazards of doing so.

I also think that you could have some crazed archmage in ages past who decided that the best thing to spend their life on would be creating a massive legion of clay golems in case the Tarrasque ever threatens the world. You could even make it look like the Terra Cotta Army of Qin Shi Huang...

Oh, crap. Did the first Emperor of China know something we don't?

The Feywild and the Fey

 Because I'm secretly a goth, I tend to focus a lot on the Shadowfell as the planar area I'd like to explore most in D&D. Blame it on the fact that the Scourge are my favorite Warcraft villains and that I was seven years old when The Nightmare Before Christmas came out, plus the fact that I watched through the entirety of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel my freshman year of college, and that my mom ran our neighborhood's community Halloween party - I love the spooky stuff (despite being a total lightweight when it comes to horror movies.)

But the Feywild has a ton to offer too.

In 5th Edition, we haven't got a ton of planar sourcebooks. We'll be getting a big chunk of the Shadowfell in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft (though Ravenloft's Demiplane of Dread works differently than the broader Shadowfell, partially because it pre-dates the Shadowfell itself.)

There have been other books published about the Feywild in 3rd and 4th editions, but I'm going to mostly be working from what we know in 5th Edition and then looking at other possibilities for inspiration.

In the DMG, there's only three paragraphs describing the Feywild itself, with a few others to talk about the Seelie and Unseelie Courts and things like Fey Crossings and effects the realm can have on outsiders.

The Feywild is described as being a parallel plane to the Prime Material - if you cross into the Feywild, you'll find a similar geography, but with differences - a mountain might be replaced with a massive glowing crystal, and a rather ordinary forest will become a misty tangle of vines and enormous flowers.

Overall, I'd say the Feywild is kind of like reality-plus - colors are brighter and emotions are stronger. Furthermore, the sun hovers above the horizon in a perpetual golden hour, which then sort of alters the experience of time.

The powers of the Feywild are divided between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts. The Seelie is ruled by an archfey known as Queen Titania and her Summer Court (you might know her from a little play called A Midsummer Night's Dream) while the Unseelie are ruled by the Queen of Air and Darkness and her Gloaming Court.

The Seelie are associated with light and could more easily be seen as "the good guys" in contrast with the Unseelie's association with darkness. It seems that in most interactions, they tend toward those associations, but these moral associations are not explicit, and they're really just two rival factions more than a cosmic struggle between good and evil.

The real-world myth basis of the two courts might be an import of the Norse/Germanic concept of "Light Elves" and "Dark Elves," with elves from that mythos corresponding roughly with the Celtic fairies (for those keeping score, that means that Norse Dark Elves might have inspired three things we think of as separate in D&D - dark elves, dwarves, and unseelie fey.)

The Seelie and Unseelie seem to be composed of classic fairies, while creatures like Hags, Fomorians (which are adapted from Celtic myth) and other "ugly" creatures belong to neither court.

One of the things that remains a bit ambiguous to me is what, precisely, counts as a fairy - in other words, what would you classic archfey look like?

Elves in D&D originally took form from the spilled blood of Corallon, but I feel it's implied that that blood was initially spilled in the Feywild, and so Elves have the "fey ancestry" trait that links them to the Feywild. Eladrin are even meant to be elves who still inhabit the Feywild primarily, and arguably serve as the sort of "main" race there despite being humanoid.

I do wonder, should the Gothic Lineages remain relatively unchanged from their UA, if we're going to see more playable races with two creature types. We already have some playable Fey races (in MTG-based settings, though) and it strikes me that Eladrin at the very least should count as Fey rather than Humanoid (ironic, given that I think they were originally introduced to be the Chaotic Good counterparts to Lawful Good angels, and were found more in places like Arborea and other Chaotic Good Outer Planes, and were thus Celestials.)

Anyway, Pixies and Sprites represent what I think most modern readers would think of when they think of fairies, but the fairies of Celtic myth and Irish folklore are quite different. For one, rather than being six inches tall, they're more like 2-4 feet tall. This actually makes the UA playable fairy race appropriately "small" size.

Fairies, also known as the Fair Folk, are infamous because their codes of conduct are utterly foreign to us. In a lot of ways, that's kind of what defines them - it's not that they have no morals or ethics, but rather that we're not equipped to understand them, and they will act in ways that feel utterly insane.

Among recent novels (also adapted fairly well as a TV miniseries) I highly, highly recommend Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel by Susanna Clarke if you want a sense of what to expect when dealing with fairies. In the novel, set within an alternate universe in which there was a period of historically recorded magical practice and a period in which "Northern England" was a separate kingdom under the rule of an immortal magician-king, Mr. Norrel is the world's only "Practical" Magician in the early 1800s Regency period. (Practical Magician being as opposed to Theoretical Magician, the latter of which means someone who studies the history and nature of magic but is incapable of producing any magical effects.)

Mr. Norrel, in order to promote his capabilities and convince the government to allow him to use his powers to fight Napoleon, uses magic to raise the young wife of an up-and-coming military officer from the dead after she died very suddenly. To do so, he calls upon a fairy - the Gentleman with the Thistle-Down Hair. This deal winds up causing many problems and is a driving force behind much of the drama of the story.

The fairy, as payment, takes the poor woman to his castle in the Land of Fairie every night and forces her to participate in an unending costume ball. Additionally, following his invitation to Earth, he takes it upon himself to make a servant of the house into the next King of England, despite the man's total lack of desire for anything like that.

What I think is key to the Gentleman with the Thistle-Down Hair's character is that for all the torment he inflicts and all the chaos he wreaks, none of it is done with malice. If anything, he thinks he's doing everyone a favor (particularly Stephen Black, the African-British servant in whom he wants to invest sovereignty over England.)

A common trait amongst the Fey, then, could be unbreakable convictions - once they get an idea into their head, they will refuse to part with it regardless of reason or practicality. On one hand, this could be very dangerous for conventional reasons - if you insult a fairy you meet, they might assume you hate them and figure that you'll be deadly enemies. But it's even more fraught than that, because if you, say, tell them that you're enjoying a party they're throwing, they might then assume you'll never want to leave, and will do everything they can to prevent you from escaping lest they be thought they're a poor host.

And this kind of tunnel-vision can lead to absurd behavior. They might even try to kill you, believing that the insult of not keeping you entertained enough to stick around is a worse injury against you than death.

As such, someone who understands how to navigate the Feywild would be someone who discovers the extreme subtleties of courtly protocol to ensure that no one is insulted but also that no one is over-complimented either.

I think you could describe the Fey in general as taking their emotions and convictions too far - we see that manifest in the Eladrin, where their mood physically changes their appearance and alters their magic.

But there are also a number of Fey who are more or less embodiments of emotion. Meenlocks are born out of fear, for instance, while Redcaps are rage made manifest. In fact, you could argue that a lot of Fey work similar to the Sorrowsworn found in the Shadowfell, though while the Sorrowsworn seem to all be depressive emotions or expressions of depressive states, the Fey are manic.

Aesthetically, the Feywild gives you some options.

Most traditionally, I think you can go for classic fairy-tale archetypes. Thus, your Fey courts are mostly Eladrin, Pixies, Sprites, and maybe your odd Satyr, with the overgrown woodlands filled with ugly hags and their servants, like yeth hounds and the aforementioned meenlocks, redcaps, and such.

But I think there's an opportunity to go a whole lot weirder.

The Feywild is meant to feel alien and strange compared with the fantasy world that D&D is typically set in. Given that most D&D worlds already have things like dragons and liches and orcs and goblins and such, I think sticking to the standard stuff is a bit unimaginative. In a lot of ways, a fantasy world is already one in which you've taken the fairy-tale stuff and made it part of the mundane world. So you need to heighten things a bit more if you're going to go into that world's "weird fairy world."

One point of inspiration I think of is the Court of the Childlike Empress in the Neverending Story, where you have a lot of weird, unexplained creatures, like some with giant heads and I think one that has three faces. I wouldn't worry too much about giving these things stat-blocks, but throwing in unique creatures and monsters that are just part of the set-dressing is going to help with the weirdness factor you want to cultivate in the Feywild.

I think Lewis Carrol's Alice books are also great sources for inspiration for the Feywild. While Carrol was largely making weird math jokes and contemporary jokes about politics, the absurdity of the world combined with its fairy-tale aesthetic have the disorienting dream-logic I think the Feywild operates on. For example, you likely remember the Mad Hatter's Tea Party. In the book, the Hatter and his companions are there because they were "killing time," and that colloquialism was interpreted as a threat against time itself, which, anthropomorphically took revenge upon them by keeping them stuck at 4:00 in the afternoon, aka Tea Time, which is why their tea-party never ends.

I guess another way to think of the Feywild is that it's a place where the utterly absurd is deadly serious.

I don't know if the UA with Feywild races is a guaranteed portent of a Feywild book coming out, but I think it could be very interesting to see D&D explore that space. Personally, I think we've had plenty of stuff in the Prime Material Plane, and I'm more than ready to start getting weird and planar.