Into the Grand Archives

 To be honest, at this point I think I'm officially "through" the Grand Archives - I believe I just have the bridge before the Twin Princes left to do.

But I will say that I found the area to be a little tricky for a caster. The other crystal sage relocates each time you damage him on the way up to the top levels, and pelts you with some pretty nasty magic spells - even as an Intelligence-based character with a fair amount of magic resistance, I was getting slaughtered fairly regularly.

Conceptually, though, I think that the Grand Archives is one of my favorite spots in the game. I love the way that the scholars there douse their heads in wax to protect their minds from the eldritch knowledge in the books there - signified by ghostly hands that reach out of them when you pass by. The wax protects you from these if you also dunk your head in there. It also seems to give you some immunity to the damage of spells cast against you by the crystal sage and the scholars, though that seemed inconsistent (and you still get knocked back).

If I wanted any evidence to support the notion that a ranged caster build made the game easier, the best evidence was the three player-like NPCs at what I believe is the route to the bridge. These guys were very tough when I fought them as a melee class, but while I did run out of FP (and Ashen flasks) before I got the last of them down, I was able to take all of them out in a single attempt.

Anyway, I have yet to go to Oceiros' area - I considered going there before even starting the rest of Lothric Castle, but instead went up to the Grand Archives. Naturally, I'll have to go do that for the Untended Graves area and Archdragon Peak.

Rewinding a bit, fighting the Dancer of the Boreal Valley, I was surprised that my spells took out an enormous chunk of her health - roughly a fifth per cast. But she's difficult to dodge, given the fluidity of her movements, so it was more about finding the proper opportunity (my ember was immediately lost when another player invaded me in Lothric Castle).

I'm trying to remember how to open the door near the Dragonslayer Armor, where I believe the Warriors of Sunlight covenant can be upgraded. I also have only taken out one of the two big dragons in the Dragon Barracks (and holy crap is having a ranged playstyle a bonus for that.)

Anyway, I'm nearing the end of the "main quest" areas in this playthrough, though naturally I have a ton of other stuff to do. I'm probably a little over-leveled (though I haven't done a ton of farming - I think I just haven't died as often and thus haven't lost souls as often.) With something like 63 intelligence, I think I might start putting some levels into other stats to help with weapons or other things.

Anyway, yeah, the Sorcerer build definitely takes getting used to if you haven't played one before (and I think Curse-Rotted Greatwood is a lot harder) but I do think it's something to check out if you want the game to be a little easier - the game isn't easy per se, but I definitely seem to be having a somewhat easier time.

Aldrich Down

 Aldrich is actually a fairly simple boss on a ranged character, but simple doesn't mean easy. If you stay away from him, he does basically three things: he summons the little purple missiles that lock on and shoot at you, he does his big magic blast (usually two in a row, though one time I got eight) and he does his arrow barrage. His various melee attacks only come into play if you get near him.

That said, it's not an easy fight. The arrow barrage is extremely nasty, but mostly because it can distract you. The big magic blast is what killed me on almost every attempt, and when you're casting Great Heavy Soul Arrow, you need to be damned sure he's not starting this off when you start casting yours (or drinking an Estus Flask) because it will hit you.

With both Yhorm and Aldrich down, I was summoned to the room where the Dancer of the Boreal Valley is fought, though I decided it was time to let my heart rate slow down (and allow my roommates to use the TV).

I've actually been looking forward to getting to Lothric Castle, which I think is a pretty cool area of the game. One of the really intimidating things about that area is all the heavily-armored knights, but on this Sorcerer playthrough, I've found that, well, actually, those types of enemies aren't actually that hard to deal with.

I'm trying to recall my general mental map of Lothric Castle and the Grand Archives, but I think that I'll be focusing on at least getting to the Twin Princes before I head into the Painted World. I suspect Prince Lothric is going to be tough give how long it takes to cast spells and how quickly Lorian teleports around the room. Of course, if I can get Oceiros down, that'll open up a few other avenues of exploration in addition to the DLC stuff. I'm hoping/expecting that I'll start finding significantly more Titanite Chunks in Lothric Castle, which will allow me to finally let my Court Sorcerer's Staff catch up in rank to my original Sorcerer's Staff (though in terms of Spell Buff, it's already ahead, and so it's the one I've been using.)

Oh, and I took out the Old Demon King, which I was profoundly over-leveled for. I didn't take a single hit, and I think probably got him down in like 4 or 5 casts of Great Heavy Soul Arrow. And he didn't give me enough souls to level up once, so... yeah. Poor guy.

I don't really like the Demon Ruins - they're sort of generic and same-y. I guess they're supposed to be a bit of a labyrinth, but especially given that you come there right from the Catacombs of Carthus, it's a bit... dull.

I am really curious to see if we some day get a much easier Souls-like game (probably from a different studio) with a very different visual design. To be fair, that might exist already, but I'm not aware of it.

On Magical Big Bads

 When you DM, how do you think about spellcasting?

I've always struggled with spellcasting enemies. The premise is strong - fantasy is awash in magically-empowered villains. Indeed, in some works, the very use of magic more or less makes you a bad guy, but even in those where magic is something to be practiced by people of all kinds of moral alignments, it's a major trope.

So, it makes perfect sense for a big bad in your D&D game to have a whole bevy of spells that they can cast. Ancient wizards (or Ancient Undead Wizards, in the case of a Lich) are a great option for a Dark Lord that will be the final boss of your campaign.

And it seems only reasonable that in a world where player characters can cast magical spells, it stands to reason that periodically, they should come across foes who can as well.

The thing is... it's always kind of a pain to track. There are a million things that a DM needs to keep track of, and tracking each spellcaster foe's spell slots is a fairly big burden. Admittedly, this can be a bit easier if it's just the one major spellcaster, like a Lich, but even then, you've probably got a bunch of villains to handle too.

In his video on Vecna and big villains, Matt Colville, I think, identifies the real issue: spellcasting is a system built for player characters, and it doesn't work as well for NPCs.

As an example, spellcasting stat blocks usually have spells of many different levels. A Lich has spells from 1st to 9th level, and the spell slots of a character who has gotten to level 18. Those first level spells are almost certainly not going to be cast in the course of a battle, and certainly not at 1st level. If a party can't kill a Lich before it's run out of higher-level spell slots, the Lich has almost certainly killed them by that point.

We've heard that future monster books are going to see a revision how spellcasters work, to lessen the burden on DMs running them.

As an example, the updated version of the Warlock of the Great Old One, a statblock introduced in Volo's Guide to Monsters, now has a dagger attack that does an extra 3d6 psychic damage, and an ability called Howling Void, which lets them hit a 30-foot cube, letting creatures within make a Wisdom saving throw, doing 2d8 psychic damage and frightening them until the end of the warlock's next turn on a failure, or half the damage and no fear on a success. Then, there's an innate spellcasting ability which has various spells that can be cast at will or once a day, but none of which are damaging, battle-spells (except Mage Armor, which you can presume they've already cast on themselves). That and a Whispering Aura that deals 3d6 psychic damage to nearby creatures within 10 feet of the Warlock's choice if they fail a Wisdom saving throw, and you've got the whole statblock, more or less.

Compare this to the original, Volo's Version. Here, the Whispering Aura is the same, but the statblock has a full Warlock spellcasting ability along with its Innate Spellcasting (which is clearly meant to simulate eldritch invocations).

The older version is more flexible, and is, thus, arguably more powerful. But as a DM, I can really imagine grabbing the new version and saying "ok, I want this NPC to do some damage. I can put out about 30 with two dagger attacks, or if I want more crowd control, I can use his Howling Void". Now, I don't need to look up all the different spells he can cast.

What I am really eager to see is how they apply this treatment to more powerful foes.

Again, the Lich is certainly the most iconic monstrous spellcaster in the game. As such, it will need to retain the utility that make it a really legendary (both in the mechanical and cultural senses) monster. But I'd also like to see what their take is on "this is what the lich does when they want to kill some heroes" ability.

Actually, I think Dragons serve as a pretty good model on how to do this - dragons come with various bells and whistles, but ultimately, their breath weapon is the way that they take care of business. If you're not a dummy like me and forget that not having a Hover flying speed still allows them to end their turn in the air (it just means that getting knocked prone is bad) and thus you can keep the dragon flying out of reach of the Barbarian and the Fighter until its breath weapon comes back, the awe and terror of what a dragon can do becomes apparent - big blasts of damage during the short window when you can actually damage it.

This is a pretty big shift in monster design philosophy, but I think it could really make the game easier to run, especially at higher levels. I remember running by level 18 one-shot and breaking out Orcus as the big bad for them to fight. But I found myself kind of shocked that what he can actually do on any given turn is pretty underwhelming. You've basically got Finger of Death, Power Word Kill (which won't actually do anything until you've done a fair amount of damage to a level 18 party,) Blight, Circle of Death (which, big radius, but it's just a Fireball's worth of damage, which isn't really that much at this level) and then his melee attacks, which, though they have a +19 to hit and thus probably will, only do a total of about 68 damage per turn.

Sure, he can summon a whole bunch of undead, but I do feel like the demon prince of undeath should have some massive necromantic ability that dwarfs anything a player necromancer could pull off. (Which, again, his summoning 500 HP worth of undead isn't nothing - you can get two death knights and a dracolich.)

Right now, I'm slowly herding my party in my Ravnica game into a quasi-dungeon that leads to a true dungeon, at the end of which is the Golgari member of the Phyrexian conspiracy to take over Ravnica. I'd always intended to use the Devkarin Lich stat block for him, though I do have a couple issues to anticipate:

The first is that the Devkarin Lich is actually pretty low CR for what they can handle at this level. The party is all level 13, and we usually have 5-7 players active at a time. A Devkarin Lich is CR 14. I'm tempted to instead just re-skin the Jarad vod Savo stat block (and in fact, I've sort of justified it in that the bad guy has captured the Golgari Guildmaster and is drawing on his energy to try to open a portal to New Phyrexia so that the glistening oil they get stops getting diluted by exposure to the spark of the planeswalker the Phyrexians have been using to transport the oil from NP to Ravnica).

Jarad does have some interesting abilities of his own, but I'm also tempted to take the Devkarin Lich as a framework and build something that anticipates the design for these new types of monsters.

Of course, in the back of my mind, I'm always worried about the potential for a TPK. My general belief is that if a player character dies, that's either bad luck or bad strategy. If there's a TPK, the DM probably made the encounter too hard.

Right now, rather than buff the boss fight to an extreme (though it will have multiple phases with some big enemies) I'm hoping instead to make the dungeon before it a bit more grueling. They're going into the Plagueworks, and I think that while inside, they're going to periodically (probably once for each wing they enter, of which there are three that will each have one or two combat encounters) have to make Con saves against the noxious fumes everywhere and take a significant though perhaps not massive amount of poison damage on a failure, to just keep some ticking damage on them and drain their resources a bit.

Actually, I almost never use traps. This might be the time to do so!

Anyway, this is getting more specific, and I wanted to touch more on the general issues with running spellcasting monsters/NPCs.

Screw You, Aldrich

 Well, given that I spent several seconds mucking about trying to find the Storm Ruler to equip it, and then forgot how to actually activate its weapon art, I actually got Siegward killed while he was tanking for me, which it turns out is a one-time thing. Still, Yhorm is actually not terrible difficult to dodge, so on a third attempt I was able to get him down.

This leaves me at a point where all roads lead to Aldrich (well, also the Old Demon King, which I guess I could do). (Also, I've been spelling it "Aldritch" all this time, I guess thinking of the word "eldritch.")

One one hand, I got the Devourer of Gods down below 50% on my first attempt, but damn is it hard to dodge his arrow-barrage on the second phase. I'm contemplating doing some farming around Yhorm's bonfire to bump up my Intelligence a little higher and get him down just a little quicker. Unfortunately, I spent the two Titanite Chunks I got on my Sorcerer's Staff, and while at a +6 the Court Sorcerer's Staff outdoes it at +7, I don't think I'll be able to get the upgrade materials until I get past Aldrich and then the Dancer of the Boreal Valley (I assume Chunks only drop in Lothric Castle, with those few exceptions.)

The scaling on the Court Sorcerer's Staff is already quite fantastic, so any Int I get will be a big help. I did spend four levels getting my Strength up from 8 to 12 so that I could wield some more weapons. Looks like I'll need 4 more to get the Moonlight Greatsword, though if I can get up to Lothric Castle, there's an absurd farming spot with a single beefy Lothric Knight that is in the room with the bonfire.

Two things are tough with Aldrich - there's the aforementioned arrow barrage, which I only sometimes survive on phase 2, and then there's the tricky part on phase 1, which is that his really huge spell blasts are sort of hard to dodge because their hitboxes are so enormous. At the very least, as an Intelligence-based character, I do have significantly better magic absorption, but one of these still takes off about half my health.

Anyway, I've hit a bit of a bottleneck here, but I figure once I can get to Oceiros, I can go do Untended Graves or Archdragon Peak (very curious to see if the Nameless King is easier on a caster. Phase one I bet is, though phase 2... maybe not.) I do think I'm going to wait until I at least get through much of Lothric Castle before I head into the Painted World. I might go there before I take on the Twin Princes, though, since that's a boss I kind of want to be overpowered for.

Favorite Subclass: Sorcerer

 I liked doing the somewhat exhaustive review of all the official subclasses published for 5th Edition D&D and giving a brief review of what I thought was the most mechanically powerful, and which had flavors I liked (Hexblade and Great Old One Warlocks, for instance, being both a bit imbalanced, with Hexblades having amazing mechanics and really dubious flavor, while Great Old Ones have fantastic flavor and mechanics that I think scream out for a redesign.)

But I figured I would take a moment to talk about my personal favorites for each class. Rather than getting bogged down in things like the Purple Dragon Knight, I'm going to be looking at only the subclasses that really excite me from a lore and mechanical standpoint. I'm not really making the argument than any of these are the "best" mechanically, as I think that D&D is such a situational game. But I'm going to more or less describe these in the ways that I think make them compelling.

Also, because I have little restraint, I'm probably going to touch on two subclasses for each class, with one focusing on flavor and the other on mechanics, unless they happen to be the same. We'll see how it all turns out.

I decided to start with the Sorcerer. It's actually a class I've played up to level 7, though I think I never quite got the hang of it (I might have underestimated some of the metamagic options like Quickened Spell.) My "pretty prince of parties," the Eladrin Wild Magic Sorcerer, was a great high-concept, low-depth sort of character to play in Adventurer's League, but as fun as the Wild Magic table is, I kind of think it's a bit of a gimmick.

So, let's focus on the ones that I'd actually want to play "for real" at some point.

Mechanics: Aberrant Mind

One thing I sometimes find frustrating in a fantasy setting is when everything is reduced to a good side and an evil side. It's actually something I really like about the way that D&D handles the outer planes, where devils and demons are equally evil (even though I think a lot of people think of demons as the extra-bad ones, I actually think it works best if devils only seem less evil because they rely on tricking us into thinking that's the case). But I also really like having the wildcard that is the entire aberration creature type - here are things that are so alien and so strange that they don't even exist within that planar framework, and are the one thing you could possibly threaten a demon with that would make creep them out.

Still, when connecting with that aberrant space, I think I prefer the warlock angle on it from a flavor perspective. Warlock-like backstories can easily be used to justify Sorcerers, though - the pact is less the "I borrow your power" and more the "you change me into this new thing" nature.

But what really makes the Aberrant Mind stand out to me is that, mechanically, it's actually really, really good.

A big part of this is their Psionic Spells. Just getting more spells is fantastic on the infamously spell-starved Sorcerer, and being able to swap these out for spells of appropriate schools (from other class lists!) makes this an amazingly versatile bonus.

But while the Clockwork Soul has a similar feature, the Aberrant Mind takes it a step further with Psionic Sorcery at level 6. Allowing you to spend Sorcery Points instead of spell slots gives a nice bit of flexibility to the class, but on top of that, casting them this way effectively gives you both the Subtle Spell metamagic effect while also allowing you to ignore any costly material components - such as the 400g one for Summon Aberration (in fact, that's the only spell on this list that has a material component with a cost, at least before you swap any out). I'm always a fan of classes that can function when they're dumped naked into Avernus (ahem) and I think it's pretty amazing that a level 7 Aberrant Mind can, with only a thought, summon a Beholderkin, Star Spawn, or Slaad to help break them out of a jail cell.

What I think some people might not clock about this feature, also, is that if you'd rather have the sorcery points, and would prefer to just expend the spell slot, you can effectively do that by using Flexible Magic to convert the slot into sorcery points right before or right after you've cast the spell, either refunding or paying for the spell that way - which is a viable way to do it unless you need your bonus action for some reason or want to cast it as a quickened spell (though you can always get the points back on a subsequent turn if needs be.) So, really, you'll never have to cast any of these spells the normal way once you get this feature.

This, to me, is the real mechanical advantage to be found within this subclass.

The level 18 feature, Warping Implosion, really makes quickened spell shine - you can warp out and suck your foes to a point before dropping some big AoE spell on top of them as a bonus action.

It's a subclass that I would really love to play, and if I ever return to my original GOO Warlock, I'm tempted to multiclass him as this (though I'm also the sort of player who likes taking a Warlock all the way to higher levels - I'm really hoping that the 5.5 PHB gives us a revision to the class that's worthy of its lore.)

Now, for flavor, what do we think?

Here, I'm defaulting to what I actually think manages to land as the most "quintessential" sorcerer subclass, which is funny because it's actually not one of the PHB options (most classes, I think, have a "quintessential" subclass option in the PHB, which are basically Berserker Barbarians, Life Clerics, Circle of the Moon Druids, Champion Fighters, Open Hand Monks, Devotion Paladins, and Fiend Warlocks, with only Rogues, Rangers, Sorcerers, and Wizards being in a more ambiguous place).

And that, to me, is the Storm Sorcerer.

For whatever reason, I've always kind of liked lightning more than fire as a magical element to throw around at foes. That might be my fierce loyalty to the color blue (I know that lightning is basically white, but it's often depicted as blue) but I also think it's just... cooler. And I also think that living in Southern California for the past 13 years has made me nostalgic for rain and lightning storms.

Storm Sorcerers have a couple cool features that can help them get out of a jam (though might struggle for relevance if you're where a sorcerer should be, which is far away from the action.) The thing that really inspires me, though, is the level 18 feature - at this point, you're fully immune to lightning and thunder damage, and you have a 60-foot fly speed (which you can share with eight friends by reducing it to 30 feet).

I think that if I ever DM a Storm Sorcerer to level 18, I'm contractually obligated as a DM to have them fight an Elder Tempest solo - because they are actually immune to everything that the elemental can do as long as they're high enough up that they can't be knocked into the ground by one of the thing's legendary actions. I'd love this to be a sort of rite of passage.

Given that Sorcerers, unlike Wizards, are unlocking this deep power within them rather than learning their magic academically, the primordial power of a storm feels like such a great theme for a sorcerer's power.

Now, mechanically, I think that there are only two real downsides to the subclass: the first, as I mentioned before is that Tempestuous Magic, Heart of the Storm, and Storm's Fury all sort of rely on the sorcerer getting close to the enemy, which a Sorcerer should generally try to avoid (well, to be fair, Tempestuous Magic is for getting away from the enemy). The other is not really an issue with the subclass but more just the relatively limited number of good lightning/thunder spells. There are, in fact, only 15 on the Sorcerer list (including cantrips) and that's counting Chromatic Orb, Chaos Bolt, Prismatic Spray, and Dragon's Breath, which aren't really built around those damage types. The two lightning damage cantrips are also built around melee, with Shocking Grasp being a melee spell attack and Lightning Lure only damaging the foe if they do get dragged to within melee range of you. And then there's Booming Blade, which uses a melee weapon attack to see if it does anything. And Thunderclap also requires things be within 5 feet of you - there's no ranged lightning or thunder cantrip, which seems almost cruel.

There is a lot that is very cool about this subclass, but I think that when you weigh all the things that, well, weigh it down, it's a bit frustrating.

We're still 2-3 years away from the "5.5" core rulebooks, so I don't think we're likely to see a redesign of this any time super soon - though I think that, thematically, a version of the Storm Sorcerer would be a great thing to include in the Player's Handbook.

On Yhorm, Past Suleyvahn

 I'd been worried about Suleyvahn, but it turns out that, especially as a caster, you can just summon a friend to tank and he's a pushover (I had actually found him surprisingly easy on my Dex-based melee character, as his attacks can be somewhat easily parried).

Again, I have no shame whatsoever about summoning NPCs to help out with bosses - the game is still very hard, and this is one of the ways they make it easier (though Embers being so finite makes it a bit tougher - I think in Bloodborne you can just keep starting new easy Chalice Dungeons to farm Insight, and I don't know that I ever used a Madman's Knowledge to get more.)

Having gotten Siegward out of his prison cell, I'm ready to take on Yhorm. I've done, I believe, a pretty thorough search of the Profaned Capital (which is, honestly, a pretty small area, though those hand-eye-elephant monsters are a nightmare, both in their visual design and in how tough they are (I think they have resistance to magic damage.) With the Court Sorcerer's Staff (still buffed less than my Sorcerer's Staff, but even at a lower rank, by now my Intelligence is enough to make its better scaling allow it to pull ahead) I'm landing some very heavy Great Heavy Soul Arrows - the only downside to that spell is how slow it casts. When dealing with Silver Knights past Suleyvahn, I've been packing normal Great Soul Arrows to make sure I can get a cast off before they shoot me with one of their enormous honking dragon-slaying arrows. (Ideally, if I can get one cast off before they notice me, I'll go with a Heavy/Normal one-two punch, which takes them down.)

I think the only real downside to playing a character like this is that the range at which you can lock on to enemies is really short, and it's very hard to "free-aim" your sorceries. But, being able to blast a foe down before they get to you has made the game, I think, way, way easier. There's less of that rolling/dodging interplay, but honestly, that's fine.

I know some complained about how Bloodborne's gameplay is more or less the same regardless of your build. I still think I like that one the best of the Souls-like games, but it has been fun getting into the whole spellcasting style (though for the most part, it's just some variant on Soul Arrows to blast foes with.)

Anyway, I'm curious to see how Aldritch is on a spellcaster (and I'm utterly terrified of the Twin Princes.) I suspect I'm going to just get a good Int-scaling melee weapon eventually, though I used the one Crystal Gem I found on my Mail Breaker. (Will have to look up how one gets more of those... if one can.)

Anyway, getting to this point in the game I have to remind myself that there's actually a fair amount left - even just Lothric Castle is a pretty enormous area (especially when you include the Grand Archives,) and I've got the secret areas to look for as well. And then, of course, the DLC.

On my original character, the only bosses I hadn't defeated were the Nameless King, Dark-Eater Midir, Slave-Knight Gael, and the Soul of Cinder. To be fair, I never even attempted Gael or Cinder. I'm hoping that Midir at least is easier on a ranged character, because my experience fighting him on my Dex character has been nothing but pain.

But that was also years ago.

Epic Fantasy, Dark Lords, and D&D

 Tolkien didn't invent the fantasy genre. Stories like Conan the Barbarian came decades earlier than The Lord of the Rings, and of course there have always been tales of magic and adventure. I'd argue that fantasy is actually one of if not the oldest of all fiction genres, though I'll also concede that the earliest examples - myth and legend - existed in this sort of ambiguous space between fiction and history.

One could argue that Tolkien was the first to craft a fantasy world utterly disconnected from our reality - though the initial concept of Arda (and the continent of Middle-Earth) was of a prehistoric era of our world. (Conan took place in the Hyperborean Age, a sort of post-Atlantis but pre- known history period, and C. S. Lewis' Narnia has characters from not only our world but more or less contemporary times traveling there).

What I think is hard to argue against is that Tolkien's opus, The Lord of the Rings, is the quintessential fantasy story - the first example most people would think of. Peter Jackson's film trilogy (the first of which came out nearly 20 years ago, which makes me feel ancient!) solidified it in the public consciousness, and I think that a ton of fantasy is written as a response to what he established - with deconstructions like The Witcher or A Song of Ice and Fire (and its TV show Game of Thrones) or more straightforward iterations on the genre conventions like what I'm led to understand The Wheel of Time is.

D&D is a foundational game for the RPG - it established a lot of the conventions of the genre in an attempt to allow players to feel like they were living through a fantasy story.

But I think it's interesting, and also telling, that the inspirations were more of the pre-Tolkien pulp novel adventures like Conan the Barbarian. My understanding is that Gary Gygax built the game around delving into mysterious dungeons and looting treasure because the intention was to build a game that focused more on self-interested adventurers looking for personal power more than any larger struggle of good versus evil.

Greyhawk, the first official setting (I believe) for D&D, is a morally grey world where players are likely to be that sort of self-serving adventurer. Now, an individual character might serve a greater good, but as I understand it, adventures were still built more around the fancy treasure that the players could get their hands on than resolving some imminent crisis.

But I think that many players (including DMs) find that kind of epic struggle to be a fairly compelling thrust to a narrative. Indeed, many of 5th Edition's published adventures are built around the premise that the adventurers are there to solve a really big problem. The fact that these adventures still tend to start you off at level 1 has always felt a bit like the way that the Doom games (at least the old ones) start you off with a simple pistol, and just expect you to gather a vast arsenal.

One of the things that makes Epic Fantasy like Lord of the Rings so epic is the scale of it - we have massive battles like Helm's Deep or the Pelennor Fields. D&D was in part built on a framework of older "war games" that were more about armies clashing than individual heroes, but I think that the game has gotten much more specialized around the actions of individual heroes.

In a weird way, this actually makes D&D a bit more like the superhero genre - a group like the Avengers is a fairly high-level D&D party, and I could imagine running a battle like the Battle of New York at the climax of the original Avengers movie would be way more feasible than running the battle of the Pelennor Fields.

Still, thanks to genre, D&D can borrow the (imagined, unless you have some very high-quality miniatures and terrain) aesthetics of Lord of the Rings.

One thing I was thinking about earlier (and started another post that I never finished) was the use of Sauron in the Lord of the Rings. I started that earlier post with this rhetorical question: What statblock would you use the depict Sauron in a D&D campaign?

My answer: a Ring of Invisibility.

Sauron manages to be a very memorable and scary villain, and yet not once in the entire novel trilogy do we actually see him. Pippin's palantir conversation with him (and Aragorn's later threat) are only described after the fact. Jackson's films made the Eye of Sauron literal - the massive fiery eye that arced between the two horn-like spires of Barad-dur - which was a departure from the novels (in which the eye was more of a metaphor for Sauron's far-reaching gaze) but one that worked quite well visually.

Apparently there was a plan originally to have Sauron appear at the battle at the Black Gate to fight Aragorn, appearing in a beautiful form (it was going to be Kate Winslet, with whom Jackson had worked before on Heavenly Creatures) in an attempt to sow doubt and confusion in the forces of the Free People. (This would also have been a departure from the lore, in which Sauron lost the ability to appear in any appealing form after his first death.)

But I think that Tolkien understood something that it takes DMs a while to learn: as soon as you give something a statblock, it becomes less of a threat. Sauron manages to be this ominous presence of darkness and evil, casting a shadow over the entire saga, and at no point can that sense of how dark and terrible he is be undermined.

Notably, this is not the way to make a grounded and human villain - I think that modern audiences usually like to see nuance in their bad guys, getting a sense that they are flawed and maybe even a bit likable, but for their methods or the premise of their philosophies. Now, in fact, Sauron is actually somewhat nuanced in Tolkien's deeper lore - he's someone who believes so strongly in order that he actually thinks he's doing the world a favor by enslaving it under his rule.

But by the time we come onto the scene in Lord of the Rings, Sauron is too far gone. There's nothing redeemable about him left, and thus, his function in the story is to represent all that is terrible and evil.

He can be defeated - but Sauron's ultimate defeat is unconventional - the heroes don't confront him in battle as a big final boss. It is the destruction of his artifact that renders him permanently defeated. (And, in fact, it's only through divine intervention that the last person holding the ring falls into the volcanic fires to destroy the ring - no mortal has had the strength of will to let it be destroyed).

This post is rambling, and I don't have much of a thesis - more just observations.

It seems likely that the Lich in D&D took inspiration in part from Sauron - though Sauron would probably be classified as a Fiend, the idea that the existence of this artifact allows him to come back from bodily destruction certainly feeds into the Lich mechanics (there are other folklore examples like that that pre-date Tolkien, like Koschei the Deathless from Russian folklore).

The Lich stat block, as it stands, is honestly not all that scary. With a standard HP pool of 135, even a mid-level party could, with some lucky initiative rolls and good attacks, potentially take one down in a single round. Its rejuvenation feature means the Lich can keep coming back as long as the DM keeps the phylactery hidden from the party, but that, I think, gives the Lich more of a recurring supervillain vibe, necessarily, than an ancient evil.

In fact, if we want to look at Sauron for inspiration here, a Lich regenerates after 1d10 days - basically less than a week, usually. Sauron, by contrast, was killed the second time by Isildur at the end of the Second Age, and it's about three thousand years before he returns in earnest. One of the things that makes him such a scary threat is that while he's been building up his power in all that time, the rest of the world has grown complacent. Indeed, the Witch-King of Angmar, the most powerful of the Ringwraiths (who, for those keeping score at home, would be Death Knights,) actually got to play the part of the most scary evil dude by creating his own evil kingdom meant to destroy the good guys' kingdom of Arnor (which was the northern counterpart to Gondor, and... I think it's their kings that Aragorn is directly descended from?) The Witch-King is, himself, this evil from the distant past (both Arnor and Angmar ultimately fell, which is why the north-western areas of Middle-Earth are pretty much a bunch of independent towns and villages with no real sovereign authority over them).

I think if you wanted a Lich to play that Dark Lord vibe, you might change the interval of their regeneration to be much longer - it means you don't get to just bring them back again and again against the party, but it would allow you to, narratively, make a story more about the calamity that is the return of this ancient evil.

And if you want to go full-Tolkien, consider never even letting the party meet them directly - they only ever encounter their minions, the most powerful of which can be full-on campaign-boss-level monsters.

Sometimes, less is more.