The Darkest Realm in the D&D Multiverse

 What's the worst place you could possibly go in the D&D multiverse?

There are a lot of answers. One could easily throw out "Hell," by which of course you mean The Nine Hells (or Baator if you're old-school or trying to avoid the Satanic Panic). But then, what about the Abyss? Or Hades? Moving away from the Outer Planes, what about the Negative Energy Plane, a realm so hostile to life that merely trying to enter it usually causes a Nightwalker to emerge in your place? What about the Shadowfell, and particularly the Domains of Dread, where Darklords and innocents alike are trapped in an endless cycle of horror?

And maybe, depending on your philosophy, it's the Prime Material Plane. Hell is empty, and all of its devils are here.

The truth is, if you'll join mere here behind the DM screen, is that it depends on the story you're telling.

So, while this isn't meant to be a look at any specific campaign or game, there is a bit of a spoiler here for Baldur's Gate 3. So we'll do a spoiler cut.

Once More Gushing About Alan Wake II

 It might be surprising given that I've been posting about it almost nonstop since playing it last weekend, but I haven't actually picked up Alan Wake II to do any replaying or anything. This is despite the fact that, unlike Control, which still is probably my favorite (of three, the other two both being Alan Wake games) Remedy game I've played, there's actually a way to save your progress while still going back to replay the game.

Alan Wake II's save system is basically between a Quicksave function that I believe works in tandem with the auto-save function to just get you in at the most recent checkpoint you've hit (often auto-saving before a boss, for example) and a Manual Save, which allows for three different save files that won't be updated until you overwrite them. Mostly thanks to luck, I happened to manually save right at the start of the "We Sing" chapter, which is probably the most talked-about moment in the game.

Still, even though I'm not rushing back to play the game again, it has sat with me.

Sometimes, you encounter a work of art and step away from it and think "I've just witnessed something historic." I think these moments are best when you don't get too much hype in advance. For example, in 2015, I went to see Mad Max: Fury Road, and the movie had been so profoundly hyped up that when I actually watched it, there was a little skepticism in me. I remember thinking a couple times "wait, is this really it? Am I missing anything?" Upon rewatches and some artistic digestion, I realized that yes, I had been missing something, and I think largely it was just my expectations getting in the way of letting the movie stand on its own.

I did get very hyped for Alan Wake II. But I did play the game more or less right when it came out, and before there was much of a public discourse beyond early previews (and to be fair, I saw some good chunks of the Room 665 and Local Girl chapters). But there was a lot that I discovered on my own. I had a vague sense of something musical coming, but was not prepared for the insane audacity of We Sing, and certainly not the treat at the end of the Zane's Film chapter.

There are lots of games that I think are art. Frankly, I think the only reason people have had doubts that the medium could be art is that the language with which to describe the art form is still evolving. An early game like Super Mario World struck countless young gamers in ways that we're only now learning to describe.

Alan Wake II comes at a point when gamers and game developers have matured a lot. It wrestles with more complex themes than we usually get. And it also approaches those themes at oblique angles. On a technical level, it's one of the most amazingly immersive games I've ever played, the sheer level of detail staggering. If its locations were film sets, I could imagine it winning awards for production design.

Also on the technical side, there are some invisible elements that amaze when you notice them. The seamlessness with which you can enter the Mind Place and the Writer's Room, for example. And both of these could have simply been presented as some kind of pause menu, but instead they are worked into the "diagetic" nature of the story. But they load in as smoothly as if you were just pressing pause.

More than anything, though, the game feels like an uncompromised artistic vision. At the heart of that is, of course, Sam Lake, who throws himself into this game fully. There's a world where I could see him placing himself in the game as Alex Casey's model (and at one point appearing literally as himself, which is one of the few things in the game I'm willing to dismiss more as a gag than as having any real narrative implications) as an act of ego-stroking. But in the way that he comes off in interviews, at least, he appears to be doing so not out of a lack of humility, but as an act of total investment.

I don't know what the culture is like at Remedy Entertainment, and of course there are some places (like Blizzard, which is hopefully on the mend now) that I had previously thought likely to be good places to work that then turned out to be anything but, but my impression of Sam Lake is as a thoughtful, generous, and collaborative artist.

Perhaps a game that is, thematically, all about the way that our art reflects our inner and outer lives, the primary artistic voice behind it ought to be a visible part of it.

It would also be easy to feel strung along by the mysteries of Alan Wake II if it were handled in a less elegant manner. Despite being a huge Lost fan when it was on the air, I've grown skeptical and tired of "mystery box" style storytelling. But the ambiguities and enigmas in Alan Wake II feel far less like something being teased to string the audience along, and much more like an invitation for the audience to interpret. The answers are withheld not to tantalize, but to invite engagement.

A work of art is an act of collaboration between the creator and the audience. Perhaps that is no truer than in interactive media like video games. And while yes, Alan Wake II has a singular story it is telling, rather than the massive branching narratives that something like Baldur's Gate III has, I think the game is an invitation for us to look into our own fears, our own Dark Place.

Perhaps it is serendipitous that this game comes along while I am working on a story that also concerns itself with the Jungian Shadow. The conflict of this game is internal - even if the Dark Place is literalized as a kind of extradimensional realm, ultimately Alan's struggles are entirely with the darkness in his own mind, the form the Dark Place takes being a reflection of his own darkness, both in the conscious exploration of that darkness he has done through his fiction and the fears he holds of his own impulses and needs.

Indie gaming has become much bigger over time, as the tools to make games become more widely available. At the same time, the AAA, big-budget gaming industry has ballooned, making game-making extremely expensive. And, with expenses, you often get corporate forces urging creators to avoid big risks, to make the safer products.

Somehow, Remedy has the budget to make big, stunningly gorgeous games, but I detect not even a hint of artistic compromise. That might just be because it's well-hidden, but no one else, to my knowledge, is making games quite like this.

I don't want them to rush, but I hope that when we eventually get Control 2, it will equal (if it doesn't surpass) Alan Wake II's ambition and grace.

Appreciating Remedy's Use of Live Action in Their Games

 So, among gamers I think I count as among the older generation. While the NES came out before I was born, the "video game" as an artistic medium is not a whole lot older than I am. To be sure, the debate over whether games are art is still somewhat active, but I think most people born after, say, 1970 can recognize the artistic merits of video games.

I invoke my elder status mainly because I remember the times in the 1990s when a fair number of games experimented in using live-action, or it was called back then, full-motion video, in their games. One of the games that has had the biggest artistic impact and influence with me is Myst, which came out in 1993. The surreal puzzle game incorporated live-action performances by the Miller brothers who created it, with Robyn Miller (who also composed the game's memorable score) playing the refined but cruel Sirrus, while Rand Miller played both the brutish Achenar and the family's benevolent father, Atrus.

They shot performances in front of a color key screen (while green screen is more common these days, I think the standard used to be blue screen) and imposed these performances over the digitally created environments.

To give an idea of how influential Myst was, I think it may have been the first game, or at least the first really popular game, to have fully 3D-rendered elements that actually had textures, and while the game obviously looks very simplistic to modern eyes, in 1993, it was mindblowing.

Myst had very little in the way of animation - most of the game was still images, the illusion of motion created by simply shifting perspective as we stepped from one tableau to another, with occasional jaw-dropping moments of animation as the exception rather than the rule.

However, some of the big, exciting moments were when we brought pages of the prison books that held the two brothers (each claiming the other was evil - and neither actually being wrong) and we'd get a broken-up, static-y message from them. If the game is completed with the "correct" solution, we meet face to face with Atrus, who seems to be sitting at a digitally rendered desk but who plays with full live-action motion.

Lots of games had these filmed segments. The production quality was often not great, and even if they got big names for them (like Tim Curry) there was definitely not the budget or the expertise or the care required to produce top-quality stuff in most cases.

And then, by the 2000s, CGI got good enough that you could make dynamic characters with real facial expressions, and the industry started to move away from live action. Why bother when you could animate a character to be just as expressive as a real actor?

Just this weekend, Blizzard announced the next three expansions for World of Warcraft, and the cinematic trailer for The War Within focused primarily on a simple two-hander scene between former Horde Warchief Thrall, an Orc, and the you King Anduin Wrynn, the human king of Stormwind (the main human kingdom in the game). And Anduin looks insanely realistic. The young king, who was a small child when WoW launched, but has aged along with the game so that he is now roughly 30 (if we assume the 5-year time jump between the previous expansion and the current one is accounted for,) could almost fool you into thinking he was a live action actor.

Indeed, I think that as time goes on, our eyes become trained to spot the very subtle signs that something is CGI, and if I had seen this trailer only five years ago, maybe ten, I might have had a hard time believing they weren't just shooting footage of a real actor on a set.

Now, World of Warcraft doesn't actually look like that trailer when you play it. The characters and world are stylized in such a way that you can easily forgive less-than photorealism, because it's not even shooting for that. Indeed, in part this allows players with ordinary personal computers to play the game without too many issues, and while the graphics tend to improve with each expansion, those improvements are still made with the intent to allow older computers to run the game smoothly. The slightly cartoony style of the world helps lower the demands for graphical fidelity.

But the point is, graphics are getting better and better over time. Indeed, Remedy's games are often at the forefront of graphical advancement, with Control and Alan Wake II pulling off amazingly impressive lighting and pioneering ray-tracing technology.

And that's why I'm all the more impressed with their choice to use Live Action/Full Motion Video. It's not that they can't make gorgeous CGI cutscenes. It's that they choose, artistically, to incorporate this mixed media.

And it seems they're getting bolder and bolder with it.

Of the three Remedy games I've played, chronologically the first was Alan Wake. Alan Wake uses live action sparingly - pretty much only on some televisions you can find, sometimes with footage of Alan in the Writer's Room in the Dark Place, during the week in which he wrote Departure, and sometimes as episodes of Night Springs.

The latter of these is fun, conceptually, but if you actually watch the shows, the production value is... well, it looks a bit like someone shot it on a camcorder with non-professional-actors. As a background thing in a video game from 2010, it's fine, but it has a bit of that same 1990s FMV vibe, of being sort of a gesture toward what Night Springs is meant to represent in the world of the game more than what it would actually be like.

Control came out nine years later, and shows a big step up in terms of production value. But the use of live action is still pretty limited. We basically get two versions of it: Dr. Darling's various presentations about concepts involving the Oldest House and the FBC, and then the Hotline calls primarily from Trench. Oh, and how could I forget Threshold Kids, the horrifying, Candle Cove-esque "kid's show" apparently created to educate (and scare the everloving shit out of) kids... growing up in the Oldest House, which seems almost like it would have to just be Dylan.

The latter of these is meant to be amateurish and bad, but one gets the sense that that's something they're going for rather than accidentally achieving. Darling's presentations (which have a similar vibe to the Marvin Candle films from Lost) look real and true to the world, helped in large part by the fact that Matthew Poretta is most certainly a professional actor, but also because the admittedly limited sets are well-decorated and in keeping with the environments we see in-game. The Hotline calls are extremely stylized, but again, they're employing real, professional actors and shot with a sense of artistic intent and vision.

And I think here, the choice to use live action starts to take on a clear thematic purpose. It's supposed to feel a little weird that they're in live action. Control is all about Jesse entering into and fully embracing the strange and uncanny to become the hero she is meant to be, and in a literal sense, the live action elements of the game are all means for her to learn about that world - receiving the memories of the past through the Hotline, getting clear explanations in Darling's filmstrips, and getting the bizarre edutainment of Threshold Kids (which I think might also be Darling's woefully misguided attempts to introduce big ideas to kids in a way that is simultaneously patronizing and also tone-deaf, even if well-intentioned).

And that brings us to Alan Wake II.

Alan Wake II uses live action more than either of the other games I've mentioned (naturally, talking about Quantum Break here would be useful, given that I think it was intended to be kind of half-game, half-TV series, but I haven't played it).

The uses of live action come in a few different forms. Once again, it represents in-universe media. The Koskela brothers' various commercials are all shot in live action. Additionally, Saga's use of her profiling abilities depicts the people she's profiling in live-action shots behind her. But most of the live-action is used in the Dark Place. And here, it's often when Alan is at his most disoriented. The segments when he sort of warps from the dressing room to the stage of In-Between with Mr. Door have him find his own face on a TV before he enters the live-action world of that television for a time. A similar thing happens when he visits Room 665 at the Oceanview Hotel, his meetings with Tom Zane only taking place in live-action, other than the phone calls. There's also the whole fifteen-minute short film, Yötön Yö, which is all live-action, and can be seen on the cinema screen when the main challenges of the "Zane's Film" chapter are completed. We also get the videos recorded for Alice's "The Dark Place" photography exhibit in live action. And, we get important moments involving Alan's confrontations in the Writer's Room in live action.

Live action comes in at important points in the story, but also always seem to show up when the story is at its strangest.

Notably, there are a few characters we never see in the video-game-y, computer generated world - Mr. Door, Tom Zane (apart from over the phone,) and Alice (the latter of whom did appear in-game in the original title).

In part, the use of live action grounds the game, giving a little more weight to its events because Alan comes off as a little more "real" of a character than just a video game character. But I think it's also notable that the game calls attention to the switches to live action. In Control, there are some cutscenes where we get live-action Courtney Hope portraying Jesse, usually when the Hiss threatens to invade her mind. Interestingly, our single glimpse and line from Jesse Faden in Alan Wake II is during one of these live-action sequences, seeming to look in from the television set into Room 665, which sends Tom Zane fleeing, fearing that she'll find him.

Transitions for Alan into the world of live action usually require entering the medium in a manner that only works on dream logic. You can find television screens that show Alan standing still and staring at the camera, and focusing on them starts a live-action cutscene. In Room 665, the actual room we enter is empty except for a projector and a big blank wall, but the Alan in the film that we then see enters a fully-furnished Room 665 that contains within it his Tom Zane doppelganger.

My interpretation is that "game Alan" simply feels his consciousness enter this live-action world as he does this, but I suppose you could read the entire thing as "game Alan" watching the live-action segment take place (the reason I'm less inclined to favor this interpretation is the way that Alan finds himself in the "game" version of the talk show stage after the live-action talk show segments end.

But this use of mixed media I think really enhances the disorienting nature of the Dark Place and the paranatural in these games, offering us something both surprising and also exciting.

What is the Meaning Behind Yötön Yö?

 In the third of Alan's main chapters in Alan Wake II, we travel to the Poet's Theatre, a cinema that was host to a murder involving the Cult of the Word and that revolved around the screening of a clip from the elusive film Yötön Yö, or "Nightless Night," made by Thomas Zane before he came to America and made his acclaimed film Tom the Poet, which supposedly is the basis of the Tom Zane we thought was the "real" one in the first game. (Though the line between real and fictional is extremely blurry.)

If you complete the mission, finding the murder scene and sending the ritual totem (in this case the deer-skull mask) to Saga so that she can enter the Overlap, on your way out of the cinema, you can wait in the theater and watch what might be the entirety of Nightless Night (I'm sticking with the English title now because my American hands are not used to typing accents).

Note here that a player could easily miss this, but staying inside the movie theater while it plays is possible - the restless shadows won't even bother you there.

Spoilers Ahead

What Alan Wake II Could Tell Us About Control 2

 It's probably not really fair to jump immediately in attention to an independent studio's next game (I think next?) little more than a week after its most recent release. Alan Wake II took 13 years to come out, and Remedy's previous title, Control, came out four years ago.

But if you'll forgive me, while I adore Alan Wake, and loved the sequel for its story and world and audacity (I'll confess that I'm not sure survival horror is my favorite style of gameplay,) Control seemed to hit me almost dead-center in my tastes for the New Weird, its fun action and exploration, and just its overall... thing.

(Just give us some kind of New Game Plus or multiple save files, for the love of Ahti.)

Control and Alan Wake are, of course, the cornerstones of the new Remedy Connected Universe, linking the games of Remedy Entertainment in terms of its universe and lore, with crossovers and enigmatic connections (and less enigmatic ones as well - I mean, the FBC plays a pretty unambiguous role in Alan Wake II).

But I think another connection between them is one of how the original game had to compromise on some of its conceptual ideas.

While in development, Alan Wake was conceived to be relatively open-world in structure. The idea was that the player would be able to seek out places in and around Bright Falls as they uncovered the game's mysteries. But they were unable to accomplish this, instead structuring the game as a series of fairly linear levels through which one navigated.

But with Alan Wake II, this structure was restored. Yes, each chapter of the game tends to have you stick to one of a number of areas - Saga starts with the Cauldron Lake shoreside, then has her second big chapter in Watery, and her last before the finale in the Valhalla Nursing Home just outside of Bright Falls, but in all of these, you can explore elsewhere, and return to old locations to find new clues and puzzles and stashes. Similarly, Alan's Dark New York functions as a hub, and his chapters take you to the subway, the hotel, and then the movie theater, but it's all ultimately available for you to explore.

In other words, the original open-world ambitions of Alan Wake are realized in the sequel.

Control, as much as I love it, presents us with a fascinating concept: that the Oldest House in which it takes place undergoes shifts, changing its room's layouts. We see the aftermath of some of these shifts, with halls and rooms arranged in nonsensical manners, clearly the result of some shift that turned a former office basically uninhabitable. But the only time we really experience one of these shifts is at the very beginning of the game, when an elevator appears that wasn't there previously. We get something kind of like this when we secure certain Control Points, but this is usually just a bunch of weird concrete blocks receding into the wall and restoring the area to its brutalist grandeur.

What seems implied instead by the concept is something more uncanny - that you might find yourself coming back into a room you had previously visited and finding either a totally different room or one that is eerily similar, but maybe the doors or stairs have changed.

Now, I'm a little conflicted in what I want here:

The Oldest House was a cool setting for a game. But the FBC feels like it's too big to simply be stuck in lockdown with the Hiss for a whole other game. I'm hoping that whatever we deal with in Control 2 has nothing to do with the Hiss (other than maybe having to deal with Dylan's recovery or perhaps even refusal to recover from the Hiss). And, frankly, I'd like to see Jesse get to leave that building.

Make no mistake, the Oldest House is designed to be as big as the authors of the game want it to be, and they could forever iterate on its various departments and laboratories.

But I wouldn't want Control as a franchise to never leave the one building. For one thing, Alan Wake II makes it ambiguous if the Oldest House is still, four years later, under lockdown. Do people outside even realize Jesse's the new director? (Given how quickly everyone recognizes her as such in the first game, perhaps they do.)

I'd suspect that instead we might have the game take place at the site of some AWE - maybe even showing us what is left of Ordinary, Maine.

But does that mean that we have to give up on the shifting space concept?

In a way, we know that Remedy is capable of something like that already now. Alan's seamless transitions with the Angel Lamp, as well as his re-writes, shows how they're capable of having an environment utterly transform instantaneously (less flashy, but just as impressive, is how instantaneous the transition into his Writer's Room or Saga's Mind Place is, which is just as responsive as hitting a pause button).

There's no reason to say that we couldn't see weird environmental warping in Control 2. Indeed, I wouldn't be opposed to having a part of the game take place in the Oldest House, as long as we get a chance to see what it's like when Jesse gets to leave the place.

I'm sure we've got another several years to wait before we even get a teaser trailer for Control 2, but it's encouraging to know that they're already working on it.

MCDM's Talent

 So, not long after the release of their excellent Flee, Mortals, MCDM has come out with a new class for 5E: The Talent.

Regular readers of this blog will know that there is little that gives more more delight than working science-fiction tropes into fantasy games. My favorite kind of story and world is one that heavily blurs the line between the two genres, sitting at the fuzziest part of the Fantasy-to-Sci-Fi spectrum (bonus points if it's disorientingly weird).

While 5E has played a little in the space of psionics, for the most part it's basically been a different kind of spellcasting - Mind Flayers can cast familiar spells, but they do so without any components - they just need the will to enact the spell. The Soul Knife, Psi Warrior, and Aberrant Mind subclasses further explore this concept.

MCDM has gone in its own direction, and created a class that is meant to really fulfill the Psionic fantasy.

Before we get into the meat of its mechanical concepts, let's talk flavor.

MCDM's Talent does have the pieces you need for a classic "psychic power" character, with characters like Eleven from Stranger Things, Professor X and Jean Grey from X-Men, and a few other cultural touchstones.

Flavor-wise, and certainly in the art for the 100-page supplement (which includes not just the class but also a take on Gemstone Dragonborn and several NPC stat blocks to represent Talents) leans heavily on the comicbook, superhero vibe. Personally, that's less my taste, but to each their own - I'm very much into the Stephen King/Stranger Things (maybe a bit of Dharma Initiative from Lost, and absolutely "Parautilitarians" from Control) version of it.

So, how does this class work?

On the surface, there's a lot of overlap here with both Wizards and Sorcerers. You have a d6 hit die, using Intelligence as the ability that determines the attack bonuses and save DCs of your Powers.

Powers are similar to spells in that there's a big list of them at the end of the class description, and you'll be choosing from amongst them to define your capabilities. Powers come in different orders, similar to spell levels, but there are only 6 orders of Power, and 1st level orders are more or less your "cantrips," which you'll have no problem using as many times as you like.

However, this doesn't make Talents half-casters. 6th level powers are comparable to 9th level spells, but there's a mechanical reason they don't go as high in number.

Because in theory, you could keep manifesting (the term used to distinguish from casting) your most potent Powers without end. It's just very unlikely.

The core idea is that when you manifest a power, you roll your Manifestation Die. This starts off as a d4 at level 1, going up to a d6 at level 5 and a die 8 at level 13. When you manifest a power, (specifically when you finish manifesting it, so if it takes a long time to manifest and you get interrupted, no worries) you have to roll your die.

Depending on the order of the power you're manifesting and the number of powers you are concentrating on (because you can concentrate on multiple powers at a time,) your target Manifestation Score goes up.

If you manifest a 2nd order power (which you can from level 1,) the score is 2. If you're concentrating on another power, you add 1 for each thing you're concentrating on. You roll the die, and then one of three things happen:

If you exceed the score, you're fine - the power goes off and there's nothing else to worry about.

If you meet the score, you manifest the power, but you gain one Strain.

If you roll lower than the score, you still manifest the power, but you now gain Strain equal to the power's order (2, in our example case).

    So, what the hell is Strain?

Strain is a set of class-specific effects that will build on you as you tax yourself using your psionic powers. If your strain exceeds your maximum, you will drop dead. The maximum goes up as you get to higher levels, making it safer to risk gaining strain, but that's the sharp end of the deal here - with great power comes a high chance of dying of an aneurysm. If you're revived after dying as a result of this strain, you revive at your maximum strain - basically saying "stick to the 1st level orders or you're going to probably die again."

But strain is not simply a score to keep track of. Each point of strain you get begins to stack up various effects on you. Each time you gain strain, you choose whether you gain it in your Body, Mind, or Soul. There's then a table that shows what effects affect you with each level of strain on those tracks. And some of these are actually blank.

For example, let's say that I have just gained three strain during the first encounter of the day.

I can put each of those strain in a different category - the first Body Strain effect gives me disadvantage on Strength and Dexterity checks, which could be a challenge if we're doing a lot of physical exploration, but is maybe not too bad if we're in some place that's easier to get around. I could put a point into Mind, which prevents me from taking the Dash, Disengage, or Dodge actions. Not great, but also not a problem if we're unlikely to deal with much combat. Maybe I put it into Soul, getting disadvantage on Wisdom and Charisma checks.

You only actually get a detrimental effect every other time you gain strain in one of these three tracks, but they start to get pretty bad.

The good news is that you can recover from them through a number of ways. When you finish a long rest, all of the strain goes away, much as a spellcaster would get all their spell slots back. But you can also spend hit dice to reduce strain during a short rest (instead of healing with it).

    So, the upshot here is that you can push yourself to maintain more powers at a time or use more high-order powers, but the risk goes up. In tier 1, you're going to have a d4 Manifestation die and be able to manifest 1st and 2nd order powers. Again, you don't need to roll for 1st order powers, but each time you manifest a 2nd level power, you've got a 25% chance to gain 2 strain, a 25% chance to gain only 1, and a 50% chance to gain none. If you're concentrating on another power, you start to become more likely to gain strain. But again, strain will give you some problems, but it won't be fully debilitating, and as long as you don't exceed your maximum, you won't die (from the strain at least).

In other words, it's a lot less predictable how much you'll be able to handle. On a good day when the dice gods love you, you can manifest a lot of powers. On a bad day, you might be forced to slow down.

Dramatically, though, it also has the potential to create some really risky plays: if surviving requires you to get your party the hell out of the way of some horrible aberration, and you desperately need to Fold Space (which does take 10 minutes, but work with me here,) maybe you'll risk taking the 6 strain from rolling a 5 or lower on your d8, potentially killing you, if it means the rest of the party surviving. And hey, with luck perhaps you'll roll a 7 or 8! Maybe you can survive a 6 (giving you just one strain) and only nearly dying.

Now, where the class becomes somewhat Wizard-like is that you can actually learn more Powers beyond what you might have gotten on level-up. When a creature you see manifests a psionic power within 30 feet of you, you can roll your manifestation die and, if you roll over the power's baseline order (no worrying about upcasting) you begin to learn the power, and if you spend an hour a day practicing (including during short rests) you can learn that power after a period of a few days (more days for higher-order powers). Some of the monsters in Flee, Mortals have unique powers that you can learn if you encounter them.

Powers are a wholly separate list of features than spells, even if a lot of them have clear spell equivalents. Powers come in various "specialties," which are roughly equivalent to schools. These are Resopathy, Pyrokinesis, Telekinesis, Telepathy, Metamorphosis, and Chronopathy. These are also, notably, also the subclasses for the Talent, along with another subclass, the Maverick, which has no preference for any particular speciality.

    I have not playtested the class, but I'd really, really like to in a one-shot or short adventure, as it seems super cool. If I like it, I could even play it in a full campaign.

The booklet (well, at a hundred pages it's really just a book) also includes some magic items that can enhance Talents and other users of psionic powers.

The "Continent" of War Within: Khaz Algar is WoW's Underdark Expansion

 So, Zaralek Cavern accomplished something that Blizzard had been forced to abandon after the initial pitch for Wrath of the Lich King. Northrend, of course, is the home of the ancient kingdom of Azjol-Nerub, but the subterranean realm was reduced to mostly just two dungeons and a handful of outdoor areas (such as the pit into which Arthas had tossed his heart, which we found during the Matthias Lehner quest chain).

It was roughly fifteen years later that we got a true underground zone, which allows you to just fly right in (or, I guess, walk) and appears to be seamless, but is actually some complicated engineering that allows them to hide the fact that there's actually a kind of "virtual load screen" going on as you transition through the caverns.

Clearly, they felt this was a great success (and it was) because The War Within, as the name implies, really doubles down on it.

The four zones in War Within will be pretty much stacked on top of one another, with the leveling process likely having us delve deeper into the ground, discovering newer and stranger regions as we go.

The first zone is the Isle of Dorn. This appears to genuinely be above-ground, an island that seems to be somewhere between Kalimdor and Pandaria, and is home to the local nation of Earthen Dwarves. The Earthen are divided into three groups, with one group remaining steadfast to their devotion to the Titans and the directives they were left with, another group seeking to live free of those tenets, and another that seems to be tied to the ancient Titan machinery on a spiritual level. The capital city will be here, and is called Dornogal.

    (As a side note, the name reminds me of Donegal, a region in the north of Ireland (though not Northern Ireland - it's in the Republic of Ireland,) and I almost wonder if our Earthen will have more of an Irish accent than the traditional Dwarven brogue that is more in line with a Scottish accent.)

The next zone is the Ringing Deeps, home to the aforementioned Machine Speakers, and seems to be a combination of traditional grand Dwarven mine with a bit of a Lost World vibe, with plentiful wildlife, as well as various cenotes that allow light from the surface to shine down.

Next, interestingly enough, is something completely different: Hallowfall is home to a group of Arathi Humans who have been here for centuries, battling it out with the Nerubians. Hallowfall is a vast and open cavern with a giant crystal that functions as its sun, giving the illusion that you're aboveground unless you look carefully. The Arathi here look to be very strongly bound to the Light as their shield against the darkness below, and while there's a bit of a steampunk vibe as well (with lots of dirigible airships) I also suspect we might see some of that zealousness perhaps manifest in... less benevolent ways. Anyway, I always find it cool when they find new places for human culture to exist in Azeroth.

The final, deepest zone is Azj-Kahet, a Nerubian city that is all creepy and spider-ridden and is where Xal'atath is gathering her power and "evolving" the Nerubians into deadlier soldiers to assault the surface world and, likely, the very World-Soul of Azeroth.

    Now, naturally, there's every likelihood that over the course of the expansion's patches we'll get one or two additional zones. But I'm very eager and curious to see how it will feel to explore these zones.

Dragonflight being built from the get-go as a flying-centric expansion allowed the world-designers to play around in a way we haven't really seen since Mists of Pandaria, and... well, honestly since Wrath. With flying considered a reward for completing world content or hitting max level, zones become kind of flat as a necessity. But in Dragonflight, we saw a return to zones with lots of verticality like we had seen in Storm Peaks and Icecrown. Thaldraszus couldn't really exist if you didn't have access to flight.

The entire expansion here looks like it will really double down on that idea of verticality, and I'm very excited about that.