Vagaries of Law and Chaos

 Apparently, the earliest editions of D&D had a simpler form of what we now know of as "alignment." Initially, there was only a single axis of "stances," and you could be lawful, neutral, or chaotic. These were viewed as kind of cultures, to the extent that they even had languages associated with them (well, in theory.) (A lot of this post is reflections and thoughts on Matthew Colville's Alignment video, and I wanted to give credit where credit's due.)

Indeed, I think that it many ways Law and Chaos is a more interesting divide than Good and Evil. Naturally different people will have different definitions for everything, but in its broadest terms, most people will agree on the essence of good and evil. If you're going around and healing the sick, protecting innocent people from danger, and generally making the world an easier and safer place to live for others, we'd agree you're doing good. By contrast, if you're inflicting pain and suffering on others, taking things you don't need from others who do need them, and generally making peoples' lives more miserable, I think we'd agree that that's pretty evil.

Admittedly, I think there's nuance to these concepts (there's nuance to basically every topic,) such as concepts like "tough love" or incentivizing people to empower themselves. As someone who was born and raised and is an American, there are popular concepts in our culture that suggest that it's better to let people struggle if it means they'll find the strength to get themselves out of their own predicaments, and come out better off in the end. Personally, I think that the way that's expressed in our politics is at this point just a bad faith argument made by people who are, well, less interested in being good than they are in absolving themselves of their obligations to help their fellow citizens, but that's not the point of this article.

By definition, we want goodness. The only reason we'd want evil to win in a story is for catharsis - for us to feel "ok, well, that was rough, but it's fictional, and my life feels a lot better in comparison." Our conception of goodness is based on what we consider the ideal type of behavior - that which we want to, or at least feel we should, exhibit. And it's for that reason that just about everyone in the world thinks that they're a good person, or at least striving toward goodness. Even those who reject moral frameworks typically thereby create a new moral framework - the Nietzschean "superman" has merely redefined "good" to mean "rejecting received wisdom about morality in favor of your own will."

But we're not here to talk about good and evil ("Good!" says Nietzsche from beyond the grave). Instead, let's examine the two more nebulously defined, debatable directions of alignment: law and chaos.

Lawful seems easier to define. And I think the reason for that is that law is all about definition.

If we look back to the history of law, we can go all the way back to Hammurabi's Code, which dates back to ancient Babylon. Hammurabi was the king, and used large stone steles to post the legal code out in public for all to see. While humanity's vastness even then means that this probably wasn't the first time anyone had thought to do it, but this was revolutionary in the following way: rule had always been established by the powerful, and one was at the mercy of the powerful ruler's choices in how to exercise their power.

By putting the laws up for all to see, though, a citizen could understand what behaviors were acceptable and which were not. If there's a law saying I can't, say, set up my vendor stall right next to the town well, now I know not to do that, and can avoid getting in trouble with the king's enforcers.

It would take a while, I imagine, for the idea that these posted laws would also restrict the powerful, but it at least gave you a list of things that the big bully ruler especially didn't want you to do, and was a way to tell people "here's what not to do if you don't want my soldiers to beat the crap out of you."

And that was pretty freeing, actually. It also gave the ruler greater legitimacy, and a reason to trust him. The power of law has become, over the course of human history, an extraordinary one, and I think that the vast majority of people within any society will generally prefer to have some system of consistent laws rather than none at all.

So what, then, does it mean to be chaotic?

I think chaotic evil is a lot easier to define than other forms of chaos, and at points in D&D's history, the alignment system was even collapsed into a single spectrum that went from lawful good to good to neutral to evil to chaotic evil. I'm glad that that was blown out again into a multi-axial system (for one thing, I think lawful evil is a really fascinating alignment) but I do understand why it's easiest to imagine chaotic evil:

Chaotic evil is unfettered menace - serial killers and mass murderers, the kind of monsters that go on killing sprees and just want to inflict as much damage as possible with zero concern for consequences. The Red Dragon, which in D&D represents the most classical fantasy dragon type (it's funny, for some reason as a kid I always felt like dragons were typically green, which might be due to the original art of Shivan Dragon from MTG though I think probably pre-dates even my forays into MTG as an 8-year old,) fits chaotic evil to a T - it's the kind of monster that flies in unexpected, destroys a village, and flies off for little other reason than that it just wants to.

It is an enemy of law, because it cares nothing for who the rightful ruler is of that village or what the regulations on how big a bonfire you can light are, and it's evil because it's really just having fun killing people and burning their houses down.

A chaotic evil character doesn't have to be dumb and also doesn't have to be flashy. In fact, I think that chaotic evil can be a very fun villainous alignment for brilliant schemers. Fraz Urb'luu, one of the demon lords, is a master of subtlety who is all about manipulation and long-running cons. What makes him chaotic evil is that his actual goals are ruin and disorder for others.

So, how do we then define chaotic neutral or even chaotic good characters?

A chaotic good character is actually easiest to define when put in opposition to a lawful evil antagonist. The heroic rebel is a classic chaotic good archetype - they live in an oppressive society in which the evil and selfish use a lawful system to keep themselves in power and wealth while inflicting suffering on the masses. A chaotic good character wants to tear that system down. A lawful good character might be an ally in that endeavor, but the lawful good character will inherently find it more difficult to do so because a lawful evil establishment by definition has some kind of legitimacy granted to them by the law - and the lawful good character must balance their respect for law against their desire to remove these evil actors. The chaotic good hero has no compunction about breaking the rules if it means accomplishing what's right.

Matthew Colville has a great explanation of these concepts using the Marvel film Black Panther. To tear out a page of his essay, he explains how Okoye, the leader of the Wakandan royal guard, and Nakia, one of the country's top spies, come into conflict over law versus chaos after the film's antagonist, Killmonger, bests protagonist T'challa in a duel and thus takes the throne.

Nakia is a chaotic character, or at least neutral, and what she sees is simply that a bad person has replaced a good person in charge of their country, and that this obviously means that he needs to be overthrown and some better person put in his place.

Okoye, as much as she also fears the implications of Killmonger sitting on the Wakandan throne, refuses to help because she is duty-bound to serve the monarch. As the head of the royal guard, she cannot simply make the choice of who gets to be in charge. Okoye's a good guy, but she believes in the principle of her position and the sanctity of her oath of office more than what her own moral sense tells her.

In fact, the only way that Okoye does join the fight against Killmonger is when T'challa emerges, alive, not to begin some new challenge, but to continue a challenge that was improperly deemed complete. By arriving on the field of battle alive, T'challa has demonstrated that Killmonger's power was never truly legitimate, and thus, Okoye is relieved of her lawful obligations to the tyrant who took the throne. It's a relief to us as well as to her, but it can only occur because the conditions of law have been met.

But stepping back a bit, Colville makes an interesting argument: that because of this tradition of the challenge, in which a king must face any who wish to challenge his claim to the throne in single combat, that Wakanda is actually a chaotic society.

I think it's tempting to assume that in a D&D world, law and chaos line up with civilization and wilderness. That's certainly a way to do it, but Colville has an interesting interpretation that allows for a chaotic society that has rules and traditions without being "lawful" in nature.

To boil it down as best as I can, he argues that a society in which leadership is determined by rules - rules of succession, criteria of leadership selection, etc., is a lawful society. In a lawful society, a leader only has legitimacy because the rules in place have made them the leader, and they can only be removed if the rules deem it so.

In a chaotic society, a leader is only allowed to continue to lead, and ideally only gains a position of leadership, because of a demonstration of their ability to do the job.

Thus, a chaotic society is one that is built on traditions that allow the better-suited leader to take over from the more poorly-suited one.

I like this conceptually, though I'm not sure I think it works 100%.

It's easiest to think of the aforementioned lawful society within the context of a hereditary monarchy. You have a monarch (usually a king, though England seems to have these super-long-lived queens) and that person gets the crown through male (or later any-gender) primogeniture - the oldest kid of the current king becomes the next one when they die. While there are some advantages to this model (raising a kid from birth to understand their job, and ensuring that the same family with the same general value system will maintain all the old ties from generation to generation) you also sometimes get nightmares - monstrous tyrants who abuse a power that was granted them only through the lottery of birth. A Song of Ice and Fire has one such example in Joffrey Baratheon (though the series also plays with this by making him secretly illegitimate - we're so tied into the idea of lawfulness that it's not enough for him to be a piece of shit to get rid of him.) If we go into that series' backstory, though, we can see how Jaime Lannister's life and reputation were basically destroyed because he chose a chaotic good act - killing the Mad King Aerys before he could blow up King's Landing - over his lawful duty - protecting the king he was sworn to. And unlike Joffrey, Aerys was 100% the legitimate king of Westeros. And Westeros is such a lawful society that even though the Mad King is remembered as a horrible, murderous tyrant, Jaime's breaking of his oath is still enough to make him a pariah. It's also so lawful that even after he literally killed the previous king, he's still on the Kingsguard because dammit, that oath is for life!

There are two questions that Colville presents as a quick litmus test of law versus chaos. The first is this:

You're driving out in the country, far from any major highways. You come to four-way intersection, another road crossing the one you're on. You can see almost a mile along both directions of the other road, and you are sure that there is no other car around. At the intersection, there's a stop sign. Do you stop?

The second is this:

Let's say you're in a military unit - an order of knights that have an important job. Through the laws of your order, a new commander is put in place. You know this commander well enough to know that they are a bad fit. For whatever reason, you know that this person being in charge will mean bad things for the unit and/or its mission. You are in a position to remove that person from power and replace them with someone better suited to the task. Do you do so?

Obviously, the latter is higher-stakes than the former, but they're similar scenarios: do you break the rules if you think the result would be better. Morality doesn't really enter into this: in the stop sign scenario it's just a difference of a few seconds of stopping your car. And in the latter case, I never said that your order's mission was a good one - maybe you're the local dictator's death squad going around rounding up dissidents, and the more effective your unit is the more evil you can accomplish. The scenario is just as valid as if you were a righteous group of knights who fought off dangerous monsters threatening the innocent.

A critique a friend of mine made to this was that the "chaotic" notion could be based not on the strict, specific bylaws of your order, but on a "higher law" of deep principles.

And that's kind of what makes this whole discussion so fascinating. Do a set of principles inherently make one lawful?

I think you could define it that way, but I'd argue that doing so robs chaotic characters of nuance. Essentially, if we say that lawful means being principled and chaotic means not being principled, then at some point we just turn chaotic characters into people doing random things for no reason.

I'll allow that you could say that this is what happens in a place like Limbo, the chaotic neutral plane. But I think you're going to get more interesting stories if you give "law" a narrower definition than just "principles."

We can say that laws, when it comes to alignment, must be a systematic and laid-out set of rules to follow. Chaotic characters are then free to have their own well-thought-out, consistent principles, but they are by definition more vaguely defined. A chaotic character could say "we need a leader who can get the job done," and will back people they think can do so, but will accept any and all methods to accomplish said job as long as they do so effectively. If you're chaotic good, "getting the job done" could include that "part of the job is making sure that innocent people are kept safe."

But that also opens the door to the difficult subtleties and contradictions that arise in moral arguments. Much as Okoye's lawfulness made her refuse to rise up against the obviously evil Killmonger, a chaotic character might consider the violence and loss of life that occurs, say, during a revolution, to be worth it for the greater good. The lawful good character might oppose a chaotic good character because they fear the latter will throw out many useful systems and rules in an effort to rid the world of the bad ones.

Law and chaos is endlessly debatable, and I think creates more interesting tensions than good and evil, in large part because we aren't automatically sure which side to root for, but also because there's plenty of room for interpretation for just what is law and what is chaos.

As a final note, something silly:

I think Sovereign Glue was invented in Mechanus. Because law is ultimately about putting into practice that which is conceived through language (or math, or more broadly, concept,) I like to think that Sovereign Glue was invented in Mecanus because it's the physical manifestation of the very idea of adhesive. Some construct in Mechanus defined sovereign glue as "something that will keep one thing stuck to another thing." Universal Solvent, then, is basically an amendment to that original "law." Once the forces of Mechanus created Sovereign Glue, they realized that its perpetuation could only lead, inevitably, to a universe that was stuck together completely, gumming up the works, as it were. So Universal Solvent was invented to be an exception to that law.

Candlekeep Mysteries, Reviewed

 Candlekeep Mysteries is the latest anthology of D&D adventures in the vein of Tales From the Yawning Portal and Ghosts of Saltmarsh. Unlike the earlier ones, though, these are all new adventures original to 5th Edition. They were submitted by members of the D&D community, and are each built around the discovery of a book in the famous library/fortress/city of Candlekeep (which happens to be where my Forgotten Realms-based Eldritch Knight Fighter grew up.)

Like previous adventure books, this also serves as a partial campaign setting sourcebook, giving you some hooks in the setting of Candlekeep if you're running FR-based campaigns. There's even a semi-benign ghost dragon with a stat block that's not in any of the adventures proper.

Now, there's also some controversy to this book that I think ought to be addressed. We'll cover that when discussing the adventure with the controversy, which is The Book of Cylinders.

Notably, the book has some structural changes that I think might be welcome or unwelcome depending on how you want to run the book. Stat blocks and magic items show up in the individual adventures, rather than in a big appendix at the back, so if you just want to pillage the book for stuff like that, you'll need to page through individually to find, say, a Lichen Lich.

Additionally, alignments are largely left out of the stat blocks, which is mainly weird only because I'm so used to seeing them there. I think this is an effort to introduce some nuance that is often lost to the traditional alignment system. The character represented by the aforementioned Lichen Lich stat block, for example, is certainly an antagonist and has been doing horrible things, but the degree to which their evil is intentional is definitely open to interpretation.

But let's go forward with these reviews.

The Joy of Extradimensional Spaces - Level 1

This is a great starter adventure for new players, as it's primarily the exploration of an artificial space akin to Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion, and has ways to avoid most fights. It also has a book on a chain that functions as a +1 Flail, which I think is amazing. There are puzzles and nothing too crazy.

Mazforth's Mighty Digressions - Level 2

This one is, I'll be honest, a little thin. The party is eventually able to track down a group of Jackalwares, but the adventure is very much built so that the players can choose whether to make it a blood bath or a role-play-centric negotiation.

Book of the Raven - Level 3

This one drips with atmosphere, but there's very little substance to it. The party goes to a spooky house that serves as a headquarters for a group of Wereravens that use it to store dangerous artifacts. There are things to find here, but very little clear motive for the players to actually stay there and investigate. There's a shadow crossing that can lead players into the Shadowfell where they'll face a pretty insane battle for level 3, but nothing there to really tell them to go there. Basically, it feels incomplete.

A Deep and Creeping Darkness - Level 4

This is actually kind of fascinating exercise in using a single monster statblock to great effect. Mostly built on exploring a seemingly abandoned town, the party eventually finds the wicked monsters responsible for the town's desertion. Very creepy and atmospheric, you'll want to really invest in building up a sense of dread before the party finds the monsters.

Shemshine's Bedtime Rhyme - Level 4

I guess level 4 is for the creepies. This is one of my favorites, and is structured in an interesting way - there's a series of events that play out in a largely open area to explore, and it's just about surviving a kind of quarantine for a magical menace with, well, the whole thing's built around a spooky rhyme and a pop-up book. Combat-light, it's nevertheless very dangerous. (A friend of mine wiped a party with it.)

The Price of Beauty - Level 5

This one will probably be pretty heavy on RP as well, and has you investigating a beauty spa that has been twisted into something more sinister. It's a great chance for player characters to "play along" as they try to uncover the sinister happenings beneath the surface.

Book of Cylinders - Level 6

I think we need to address the controversy with this one first. The author, Graeme Barber, has disowned the adventure after editorial changes that introduced some problematic colonialist language (referring to the race of frog-people Barber invented, the Grippli, as "primitive," for instance) and removing much of the deep mythology the adventure was intended to tie into. The adventure itself involves evil yuan-ti invading a grippli village and actually some good yuan-ti who have been trying to help the grippli and study the temple nearby. I didn't find it that interesting reading it, but I wonder if the author's unaltered version would have been more interesting.

Sarah of Yellowcrest Manor - Level 7

This one's pretty cool for those of us who enjoy stories of evil cults and cosmic horror. It's pretty dark, involving the main bad guy murdering his own family, and basically becomes a small dungeon crawl when you get to the cult's headquarters. Pretty straightforward and functional.

Lore of Lurue - Level 8

This is one of the adventures to largely take place in a demiplane, in this case being one that takes the players through a very linear progression to the end. I think you could have a lot of fun with the concept of being in a storybook, though this will be, by definition, on rails.

Kandlekeep Dekonstruktion - Level 9

My favorite in the whole book. This adventure is profoundly silly, and I really don't want to spoil the batshit crazy thing the "bad guys" are trying to accomplish. To give you an idea, the first NPC the players see, a defector from the cult, is known by the name Rooster Muffin, and all the other cult members are named with similar conventions - livestock animal and food item. It's a quest that will be plenty of fun if the party wins, but also pretty freaking hilarious if they fail.

Zirkan's Zephyrean Tome - Level 10

The players in this one are asked by a djinni trapped in a book to help him escape, which can only be done by defeating the mage who created the tome. There's nothing particularly crazy here, though you'll have to go through two mini-dungeons.

The Curious Tale of Wisteria Vale - Level 11

This is another of my favorites. Like Lore of Lurue, it takes place in an obviously artificial demiplane, and has a kind of fairytale logic in which you are trying to find a long-imprisoned Bard who was sealed away to keep him from harming anyone after he was cursed. You now have the cure for him, but a Beholder dreamed itself into the demiplane and took over, so you have to deal with him. I will warn DMs that there is one room here with a kind of BS Tomb of Horrors-style instant death kaizo trap, which you might want to alter.

The Book of Inner Alchemy - Level 12

This is, on a basic level, a sort of kung fu movie in D&D adventure form. The party has to journey into the woods to face off against a group of martial artists who have unlocked powerful magic to steal the life force of others. It's very combat-heavy, but the characters who feature in it could make for really cool recurring villains (or even allies!)

The Canopic Being - Level 13

This one's got a lot going on, and has a big dungeon to explore that is actually structured like the interior of an Egyptian pyramid. I honestly don't have a great sense of how this would play, but unlike a lot of these adventures, I think there's no way it'll be doable in a one-shot.

The Scrivener's Tale - Level 14

Hey, you know what 5E hasn't given us much of? Archfeys. This one involves some fey politics and some very fey curses, which will motivate the party to go investigate an ancient ruin where an archfey has an opportunity to escape her imprisonment.

Alkazaar's Appendix - Level 15

If you like ancient ruins in deserts, this'll be the one for you. The party finds an ancient stone golem that will travel with them, and must finish the work of his former master, safeguarding a powerful ancient scroll and keeping it from falling into the hands of an evil blue dracolich.

Xanthoria - Level 16

A horrifying fungal plague is sweeping across Faerun and the party will come across evidence that its source is a druid who transformed into a lich after being driven mad by Zuugtmoy. This is going to throw a lot of very tough monsters against your party, though I guess by level 16 they can handle it.

So, perhaps unsurprisingly, the book is a real mixed bag, though I'd say there are probably more hits there than misses.

Hacking D&D As a Sci Fi Game

 D&D is a game where homebrew stuff is sort of the lifeblood of the game. Homebrewers are the ones who then make official D&D content if they're commissioned or, more rarely, hired.

I imagine the most common form of homebrewing is the creation of settings and adventures. While I'm running a game set in Ravnica and playing in one set in the Forgotten Realms, but general assumption is that one typically runs things in a homebrew setting - much as I'm enjoying the Ravnica game, I'm champing at the bit to get back to my own world of Sarkon (though the siren call of Ravenloft is drifting into my ear).

I've also been doing a lot of homebrewing of monsters - while there are plenty of things I'm eager to use from the Monster Manual (I still haven't run a Beholder combat encounter, for example) I do really enjoy creating my own monsters and creatures for the party to deal with.

But there are deeper hacks to the game that I've been hesitant to delve into given the enormity of the complexity involved.

I've actually homebrewed some subclasses, but I have yet to playtest them. I actually did adapt the Vampire playable race from some of the MTG Planeshift articles (breaking the Ixalan one into two subraces for Ravnica's blood-drinking and mind-drinking varieties) that have seen some play.

But even then, that's sort of the modular stuff. D&D is built to allow for a constant flow of new monsters, subclasses, races, etc. I think the deepest of homebrews is when you really get in there and truly hack the game.

Now, there are ways you could make a seriously different game by altering it in a few ways - for example, I could imagine a setting in which the path to magical ability is extremely limited - you could make a game in which no one gets any magic unless they get it from some more powerful entity, and thus the only spellcasters are warlocks. No gods, and no way to simply "learn" magic without having some other entity actually enact the magic. So you'd be cutting a whole bunch of classes (maybe Artificers could stay, but flavored specifically as using technology rather than magic.)

But I'm proposing something even deeper than that. I'm talking about really taking apart some of the fundamental rules of the game to service a different type of game entirely.

Can we hack D&D 5th Edition to make a sci-fi game?

First off, I should point out that the folks at Paizo, who publish Pathfinder, did something just like this, creating Starfinder. While Pathfinder was based somewhat on 3.5 E D&D in response to the unpopular 4th Edition, Starfinder used the basic rules concepts from Pathfinder and adapted them to a space-travel-based adventure game.

D&D has also played with Science Fiction, including the hugely unpopular but cult hit Spelljammer campaign setting. Spelljammer's a bit weird, though, as it's only aesthetically sci-fi. In fact, it's meant to coexist with the other canon D&D settings, and thus has explicitly magical justification for its version of space travel, which is actually based on Medieval theories about the nature of the cosmos (specifically the idea that a geocentric solar system was a "crystal sphere," and proposed that each canon setting like Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, etc., existed in its own solar-system-like sphere - like "Realmspace" or "Greyspace.")

Spelljammer still has wizards and paladins in science fantasy settings that are far "softer" sci fi than even Star Wars.

What might we change, then?

Well, first off, let's look at the absolute core of the game - the six abilities: strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma.

These are meant to sum up as best as possible the general strengths or weaknesses of a character. I actually think these work pretty well for the most part in most genres. Some games separated Charimsa out into separate stats, like Black Void's "Presence" being a kind of majesty or seeming importance in contrast with Charisma being more one's ability to talk people into something. Thus, you could have a scrappy fast-talking street rat whose charisma is high and can convince people to listen to what they have to say, but who will be barred on sight from any palace or high-end bazaar because of their low presence. On the other hand, you might have some noblewoman who has been raised to project power and importance, but who is actually quite socially awkward, with a high presence and low charisma.

What I'm saying is that we could actually expand these. Indeed, the Dungeon Master's Guide actually has two suggestions for additional ability scores: Honor and Sanity.

Honor I think could work quite well - a sort of alternative to Charisma that plays a similar role to presence. Indeed, I could even imagine that if you were using Honor as an ability score, you could even alter Paladins to have Honor be your spellcasting ability and determine the value of your aura of protection.

I'm going to look at my two biggest sci-fi influences from childhood to talk about the tone I'm looking for in this thought experiment: Star Trek (specifically Next Generation) and Star Wars (the original trilogy.)

In Star Trek, I think that intelligence plays a huge role in the characters' successes. The utopian vision of Star Trek is that a rational, enlightened future would be a utopian one, and so the series really emphasizes that everyone in the main cast is smart. Even Worf, who's basically the crew's Barbarian, is still extraordinarily well versed in technical knowledge, history, and culture. I don't think there's anyone in the bridge crew on the Enterprise D with an Intelligence lower than 16.

Therefore, it might be interesting to break up intelligence into different abilities. Maybe there's a broad "knowledge" that allows you to recall information and recognize symbols or cultural signifiers (something Captain Picard would have a ton of) while there's a separate "intelligence" that governs the ability to, say, solve complex technical issues. Geordi Laforge would probably be Picard's superior in the latter, but Picard would have a higher value for the former.

Proficiency skills would likely also change. Arcana in a sci-fi setting that doesn't (technically) have any magic might transform into "technology," and thus allow a character to better identify or futz with pieces of technology.

Interestingly, both Star Trek and Star Wars do have some canonical melee fighters. The former is more of a traditional practice, where the Klingons have ritual duels with bat'leths or other bladed weapons. Star Wars does have the iconic lightsaber, but that's extremely limited to the tiny fraction of the population with force sensitivity.

Now, if we look at another insanely influential sci fi story, Dune justifies melee combat by having technology that renders firearms and energy weapons totally unfeasible.

So, even within the genre, you could justify the use of melee weapons, but you'll need to go out of your way to do so.

If you get rid of (or reduce the viability) of melee weapons, this will have an impact on the usefulness of Strength as an ability score - one that a lot of players already kind of ignore given that only front-line fighters are likely to use strength-based weapons (Monks, Rogues, and technically even some Paladins and melee Fighters can actually build around Dexterity instead, so the only class I think really truly has to focus on Strength is the Barbarian.)

But hey, maybe we can work with that! Consider that Strength generally indicates a character's general physical capabilities and the fact that Constitution is used for a character's general hardiness, and you could actually probably combine the two of them and it'd still work. So maybe we just get rid of Strength as an ability and have anyone who wants to focus on brawniness just invest heavily in constitution. Con then takes over Strength's former roles, determining things like jump distance, carrying capacity, and melee attacks and damage.

Now, what about spellcasting?

If you've got a non-magical sci fi setting, you could just get rid of all the spellcasters. But, alternatively, you could also reskin spells as some sort of technological feat. Maybe you're not casting healing spells, but you have a medical tricorder that only has so much of a charge on it, and can only restore so many hit points.

If you want to keep things simple, you could suggest that there's some broadly-applicable power source that can be channeled in various different ways to simply keep the magic system more or less intact, but flavor "spell slots" as amounts of fuel. I'd look into the DMG's "Spell Points" system as an alternative to spell slots (having grown up playing video games with Mana or MP, I remember being very confused when I first started figuring out how D&D magic works.)

Anyway, this is all the tip of the iceberg.

A sci-fi hack of D&D would probably need you to build new races, new classes, and likely a lot of new mechanics for things like operating a starship. But it could be very cool.

Well, that's Three

 Last night, in the Ravnica game I'm running, the party was assaulting the facility at which a blue dragon named Zagothar, who was the Izzet representative in a plane-spanning conspiracy to bring the Phyrexians to Ravnica, has been constructing a Darksteel Colossus to assault the city and distract from the other conspirators' activities. (So far, the party has defeated the Simic and Rakdos members of the conspiracy.)

In a grueling fight within the central building of Zagothar's floating factory/laboratory, we picked up in the middle of combat from the previous session and the party finally eliminated the two iron golems they had been in combat with (among other things - its a very climactic fight.)

Seeing that the sequence to launch the Colossus (one that the party has just discovered is only one of two,) the artificer ran following signs labeled "Master Control" that pointed them toward the large shaft in which the now-absent colossus had been assembled.

It was there that Zagothar was waiting, and while the artificer survived (barely) a blast of Zagothar's lightning breath, they were subsequently buried by a pile of fallen scaffolding (one of the dragon's lair actions). The artificer had formed a very close bond with the goblin fighter (a member of the Boros Legion,) who, despite being only at 2 health, charged in (the artificer's flight spell and the fighter's Boros-charm-activated haste spell were both active, so they were able to climb the 85 feet to the dragon with ease.)

The dragon then used his three legendary actions that round to smack the goblin, first knocking them unconscious and then killing them with two additional strikes.

While the party took this in good sport, and I don't think I was unfair here (this is a seriously evil boss who isn't going to miss a chance to take out a party member permanently,) I gotta say it didn't feel great.

In the past, I've erred strongly on the side of giving player characters a chance to survive. For one, I've tended to have monsters ignore unconscious people and go after the conscious ones - which has a certain logic to it, as they're still threats.

But I think that, given that the players are not only in tier 3, but also facing a major villain of the campaign, I couldn't just let things slide. I don't know precisely what the chance is for a character to survive on a full set of death saves (it's a little better than 50%, given that you have an 11/20 chance to succeed, and a natural 20 brings you to 1 hit point, though a nat 1 gives you two fails,) which likely would have been what happened to the fighter given that they were so far away (vertically) from the rest of the party.

I also think I need to forgive myself, because this wasn't really a question of tuned fights. Yes, the golems were a huge challenge for the party, but one that I was confident they could handle. I did not force them to run into the dragon fight while still fighting the golems.

In fact, I made a couple of assumptions: that the artificer would be able to cast Fly on the Barbarian to get a tank up in the dragon's face, and also that the party would be able to take a couple minutes before entering the shaft and "aggroing" the dragon, allowing the Cleric to do a prayer of healing, or for people to drink healing potions and take a breath before the final fight.

The massive golem fight was meant to drain health and spell slots so that the dragon would be a bit scarier, and in fact, a major boss fight carrying the threat of death is something that I'd hoped for.

And they're level 11. They have a grave cleric. They might not be able to get the fighter resurrected within Revivify's 1-minute window (in fact, if I were better about keeping track of rounds, I think some spells might have expired in this pretty lengthy fight) but they will certainly have the opportunity to get them alive again.

Now, however, the big question I have for myself is if I want the stress of this event to cause one of the involved characters' planeswalker spark to ignite. I'd intended to save that for higher levels, but this feels like a big enough moment to do this.

So it'll either be when the artificer learns that they got their sibling killed or it'll be the fighter's shock upon returning from the dead. Either way, one of them might be going on a solo adventure on a random plane!

The Guildmasters as Campaign Bosses

 I've got external enemies in my Ravnica campaign. I guess I'm sort of OCD about the status quo and "canon" and, knowing the fates of many of the Guildmasters in Guilds of Ravnica/Ravnica Allegiance, I'm reluctant to put my players on a path toward a fight with them (though my current intention is to make Elesh Norn the final boss, with the party recovering the Golgothian Sylex that I've had Urza hide pieces of across various planes, forcing them to collect them, to detonate on New Phyrexia.)

But we do have ten nice stat blocks representing the various Guildmasters. But how do they stack up?

The Guildmasters are all legendary, appropriately enough, though they weirdly don't have lair actions. I'm also a little surprised at their relatively low CR. Niv-Mizzet is the toughest, at CR 26, but things go down pretty rapidly from there, with Rakdos at 24, Aurelia at 23, Jarad Vod Savo at 22, Isperia at 21, and the rest of them under CR 20.

The weirdest of them is the "Obzedat Ghost" block, which represents the five members of the Orzhov Syndicate's ruling ghost council. We'll return to this one.

What I've found running a higher-level campaign (they're only level 11 at this point - though they stand a good chance of hitting 12 after tonight) is that a single monster can be intensely high by CR and still struggle to threaten a big party.

I think that D&D has tended to focus on tier 1 and 2. And to be fair, it's manageable for both DMs and players. But it's also a bit frustrating given all the really cool things you start to get at higher levels. Obviously, it's those really cool things one gets that makes it tougher to balance higher-level content, but I'd like to see the game designed a little more around the assumption that you're going to be taking things to those high levels.

Let's look at each Guildmaster statblock and do a bit of an analysis on how tough they would be. Naturally, given the positions they hold, I'd never have any of these people fight the party on their own, and the composition of the Guildmasters' squad is naturally going to be a major factor in making them a bigger challenge. But let's look at their own capabilities and see how tough they hypothetically are.

We'll go alphabetical by guild.

Azorius - Isperia:

Isperia's a big honking Sphinx, but at CR 21, having only 261 health and an AC of 17, she's actually pretty fragile. She does have immunity to psychic and nonmagical weapon damage, though the former will only affect a narrow category of player (and the latter is sort of a given for any high-level monster and is rarely relevant.) The fact that she can fly is, I think, going to be a key way she avoids getting killed.

She's a spellcaster, which I think is always a little tricky for boss monsters, given the action economy of spellcasting. Granted, her multiattack allows her to use her claws and a spell, which helps with this. But her spell selection is almost all utility. She can cast Imprisonment twice a day, which is massively flavorful, but I think most of her spells are better used out of combat, perhaps if the players come to her for aid (and fill out the proper forms.)

Supreme Legal Authority is really what makes her shine, with a high-DC Intelligence saving throw (one that some player characters might automatically fail without something like bless) that she can use to lock down entire action types - she can prevent the Barbarian from attacking, the Cleric from casting spells, etc. This is, honestly, pretty nasty, and while one can become immune to it for a day if one succeeds, I think few players will, and also, she can keep doing this all day, potentially locking down more and more types of action.

Boros - Aurelia

Aurelia's got 287 HP and an AC of 22, which is decent, but she'll still want to rely on her extremely fast flying speed to evade danger (150 ft.)

Aurelia doesn't have a ton of unique features. What she does have is a pretty intense damage output, dealing about 120 damage per round (if she hits with all three attacks, which she probably can with a +15 to hit.) Her Warleader's Helix (a reference to a classic Ravnica card, Lightning Helix) isn't going to pump out as much damage, but can keep an ally in the fight.

Aurelia has the condition immunities that you'd expect an angel to have, as well as the damage resistances/immunities. But there's nothing here that's mechanically all that crazy - nothing to really shut down players other than the massive damage she can put out. I almost suspect that she's more likely to be an ally to players than a foe (which is how I'm intending to use her when the Darksteel Colossus the Phyrexian conspiracy has been constructing is unleashed on the Tenth District - using the Warforged Colossus stats and treating it as if it's got adamanine armor and having her "tank.")

Dimir - Lazav

Lazav is the first of the "really, only CR 17?" guildmaster stat blocks. At 18 AC and only 204 health, he will get shredded if the party actually manages to get into melee with him. The key, though, is that Lazav should never, ever stand and fight. He's the leader of the sneakiest, most clandestine guild, and he should always know exactly where to run to make sure the party following him falls into a bottomless pit. With a +19 to Stealth, he's going to have a very good chance of evading detection. He can shape shift as a bonus action and thus should be able to dash into a crowd and disappear at the first sign of trouble.

In terms of damage output, he puts out a modest 60 damage per turn if all his attacks hit. Again, I think this stat block is entirely built around his escaping the party, and his psychic defenses trait means that the party will never know for sure if they're talking to him unless they incapacitate him.

Golgari - Jarad Vod Savo

At only AC 17 and 180 HP, he looks very fragile, but he also regenerates 25 health per turn unless he takes fire or radiant damage, which should extend his life a bit, depending on party size (and how much access they have to those elements.) He also has a zombie's undead fortitude, which can save him even if they do burn him down (though radiant will get around this as well.)

As a variation on liches, he's got a lot of spellcasting, though only up to 7th level spells. Unlike Isperia, these are a bit more combat-oriented, with stuff like finger of death, cloud kill, etc. Also, like Isperia, he can replace one of his melee attacks with a spell.

Like any Lich, I think you want an absolute wall of undead minions to defend him to make the fight even remotely challenging. Finger of Death is a scary spell, but if it's the one action he gets to do before he's dead, it's not actually going to be a big deal.

Gruul - Borborygmos

Borborygmos has a somewhat healthier HP at 270, but only an AC of 14, which means that it'll be rare for higher-level players to miss him.

Beyond legendary actions, he's actually not too dissimilar from your standard cyclops. His maul hits hard and can knock a creature prone, but I think this is another case in which you're going to need a ton of minions to keep the fight interesting.

Izzet - Niv-Mizzet

Kind of a variant on an Ancient Red Dragon, he's got an AC of 22 and 370 HP, which is decent if a bit low for CR 26. Again, flight is going to be important to keep the party from shredding him.

While he's got a dragon body and a pretty nasty fire breath (DC 25 Dex and 26d6 damage in a 90 ft. cone) the focus here is very much on his spellcasting, because he's a wizard.

Here we actually get some cool things. His Locus of the Firemind trait allows him to concentrate on two spells at once, so he can Maze the non-intelligence caster and then use Reverse Gravity to deal with the melee folks. He can also change the elements of his spells, like casting "thunderball" instead of fireball and "chain cold" instead of chain lightning, which might not come into play super often, but is something I might just have him do to show off.

He also actually gets a 9th level spell, and can cast Prismatic Wall, which he absolutely should.

Still, you'll want him to stay aloft or behind the Prismatic Wall and keep foes at a distance, as his melee damage output is only 60 per round, which at his level is not going to be as big a deal as what he can do with his spells.

Orzhov - Obzedat Ghost (Council)

Ok, this one is probably the weirdest and the one I struggle the most to evaluate. The idea here is that you're never going to face just one of these guys at a time. They have an action called Convene the Ghost Council, which allows them to summon the other four members nearby. Each is only CR 8, but according to Xanathar's Guide, CR 8 monsters are one that you should have with about a 1:1 ratio with level 20 characters in a balanced encounter.

The thing is, by spreading out the danger between five creatures, a few other elements go down - their save DC for their spells is only 16, and they only have a +8 to hit, which means that they're just going to be missing players pretty frequently.

And each of them only has 110 HP. They do grant an additional 1 AC per other member of the council nearby, so they should usually have an AC of 18, but... it's a little underwhelming.

You're going to need a ton of scary minions to keep this fight challenging, and ironically, the Obzedat members themselves might play more the role of the minions in the fight, with maybe some big death knight or other undead hulk being the "big scary monster."

Frankly, I might change the stat block in a few ways, perhaps treating them a bit more like a Hag Coven (with shared spellcasting capabilities) and make that shared spellcasting much scarier with a much higher DC, and also having them use a single health pool (550 total HP) so that the party can't just focus them down one at a time and make the fight trivial toward the end.

Rakdos - Rakdos

Weighing in at 300 HP with an AC of 22, this demon lord is decently beefy (ironically his damage resistances/immunities are more like that of a devil in normal D&D) and I think it's always important to point out that he can fly, which will help him survive.

Maybe the biggest thing for Rakdos that's going to make him nasty is Captivating Presence, which is a passive aura that charms creatures nearby with a DC 25 Wisdom save - something that many player characters simply won't be able to make without supernatural help.

Rakdos puts out 74 damage per turn with his attacks and can cast 5th level Hellish Rebukes all day, so it's going to be extraordinarily punishing for melee characters.

While I think any charm-immunity spell like a devotion paladin's aura is going to trivialize a lot of Rakdos' worst nastiness, and his 300 HP isn't really all that much for a high-level party to handle, I think we've got one of the better and scarier boss-monsters here. (Fitting, as he's also the second highest CR at 24.)

Selesnya - Trostani

Trostani has an AC of 17 and 252 HP - but I think that perhaps more than any other guild leader, you're not going to fight her (plural them?) alone.

There's nothing really amazingly unique here, except that, like a lot of spellcasting guildmasters, she can do melee attacks and a spell within her multiattack, though most of her spells are concentration ones, so you'll have to figure out how to actually use that (at will dispel magic can mess with a party's buffs, though.)

In fact, I think that her anti-magic capabilities are her real interesting strong suit, like how her Touch of Order can "turn off" a magic item for a turn. Her spell save DC is 24, so a damaging spell like Moonbeam will be hard to avoid (though since her spells are innate spellcasting, she can't upcast them.)

Simic - Zagana

Zagana is second-lowest in terms of CR, and has a paltry 130 hit points and an AC of 16 - there's a good chance the party's tankier characters will have more health than she does.

I think you're going to want to take advantage of the fact that she's a merfolk to put your party at disadvantage in an underwater fight. Indeed, her single weapon attack causes a thunder wave-like effect that deals a bit more damage underwater.

Mostly, though, she's a spellcasting wizard, and you'll want to use her prismatic spray, wall of ice, and other high-level spells.

But again, you also want her to have a ton of massive Krasis monsters to act as tough tanks and minions while she can evade the party and cast spells from afar.

    Conclusions:

I think the stat blocks I've come to like the most here are the ones with a really unique flavor, particularly those that can lock down a party in a nasty way, like Rakdos' charm aura or Isperia's Supreme Legal Authority. A lot of these are just kind of beefy monsters, but don't really inspire.

In theory I love the Obzedat Ghost stat block, but while having a "collective" boss monster is very cool conceptually, I think there are some issues with the implementation which would make these feel like a pretty underwhelming fight. I might give them some much more powerful cleric spells but have them share spell slots. Basically, give them higher save DCs and let them share health, essentially acting as a single powerful monster with multiple bodies and a lot of legendary-ish actions.

Pacing and the Future of Shadowlands

 Patch 9.0 is huge. There's stuff I definitely have yet to do in this first patch of the expansion. The Shadowlands are a fascinating setting and the lore-expansion to WoW is amazing.

It's just a real shame that things have been going so slowly.

Shadowlands was delayed by about a month, and as someone who was playing on the Beta, I was fully in favor of the delay. Things needed another coat of polish, and frankly, it seemed like they put in just the right amount of time to get things working mostly well. 9.0 came in as a big success.

9.1, while it has been announced and we have a good sense of the content it's bringing, is still coming way, way later than I'm sure Blizzard originally intended. Based on typical PTR cycles, it's possible that the gulf of time between 9.0 and 9.1 will actually be longer than the gap of 7.0 and 7.2 - the entire 7.0 and 7.1 cycles combined taking less time than 9.0.

Castle Nathria's a good raid, but I've also hit a point where I'm just not running it anymore, having gotten a bit burnt out. (The fact that the droprates are so low has also kind of sapped my will to try to farm the transmog appearances even though I really, really want to get the full cloth plague-doctor set.)

Now, the explanation for this is obvious: we're now over a year into a quarantine dealing with Covid-19 that has been a huge disruption to nearly every industry. Hell, we were supposed to get the Black Widow movie from Marvel a year ago but as much as I've looked forward to that, I ain't going anywhere near a movie theater until I'm 2 weeks past my 2nd vaccine dose (so a little under a month) and case numbers are down to a point where it's unlikely they'll surge back again. (Remember, contagions work exponentially - if cases begin to drop faster, they'll shrink even faster. Unfortunately, cases are actually on the rise right now, so unless we get serious about masks, vaccines, staying home, and all the other methods we're using to deprive the virus of its ability to spread, it's going to surge back.)

Even if Blizzard has gotten up to nearly their previous capacity for progress converting to at-home work, there was a big interruption, and WoW is a game where the people working on it are always many steps ahead of what's actually live.

So 9.1 is taking far longer than was expected.

It's not something I think any WoW fan is happy about (including those working on the game,) but it's also something that I totally understand.

To me, though, my biggest fear is the pressure of what is to come next. Shadowlands is the high-concept, tier four (to borrow a D&D term) kind of story that I really love playing through in WoW. While I get that grounded stories can be fun, I'll be honest in that I really wish that BFA had focused far, far more on the cosmic-horror epicness of N'zoth rather than retreading the old Alliance/Horde conflict yet again.

I want Shadowlands to have a chance to be everything it could be. Warlords of Draenor was an expansion that was cut short - whether planned to be because of a naive ambition to make WoW expansions an annual thing or simply because they realized that the expansion just wasn't really all that, you know, good. Warlords only really got the one major content patch (people from Blizzard have admitted that the ill-received 6.1, aka "selfie camera patch" should have been a minor 6.0.5 or something) but while it was tough to be stuck in our garrisons for two years, I'm not sure there was really anything I was truly missing from their having jumped off of that to work on Legion (Warlords would have been an... infinitely cooler expansion if they'd leaned into the time travel weirdness of it).

But Shadowlands is such a cooler concept than Warlords was, and it would be a real shame if they cut major content patches in order to keep pace for the expansion to follow it (crazy to think that it's only a few months until we'll find out what that is, assuming that things follow the usual schedule.)

I don't think anyone expected the quarantine to last as long as it has, and unfortunately, the dismissal of its importance has, you know, extended its necessity. The deployment of the vaccine(s) is a very hopeful sign, but we're also basically in the largest drug trial in history, learning how effective it is, and the logistical challenge of getting those shots into peoples' arms is an enormous one.

But if distribution continues at its current rates, there's a chance that by the end of this year, we're going to be looking at a far more normal world.

And hopefully, in the little WoW corner of that world, we'll have the time to see the full potential of this expansion in all its glory.

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.