Turn of Fortune's Wheel - Planescape Review

 A lot of things have happened since WotC's release of their 5th Edition Planescape box set, and so I sort of lost track of the fact that I started reviewing its three constituent books.

In broad terms, I think that this set is far more useful than the Spelljammer set, which wasted (or perhaps filled) far too many pages of its Astral Adventurer's Guide with ship deck plans I was unlikely to use. Spelljammer was a wasted opportunity to expand and modernize the Spelljammer campaign setting (and I fear might consign it to another 30-year gap for its next update) while the Planescape set does actually feel like it gives you some meat to work with.

That being said, I will still prefer the earlier 5E style of campaign setting book - a thick volume with exciting character options (read: subclasses, races, and even a whole new class in Eberron's case) and lots of adventure hooks but perhaps only a low-level intro adventure to give you the setting's vibe (which I think Van Richten's and Eberron do very well - Ravnica's intro adventure is oddly divorced from guild politics, which is a strange choice).

But, though I hope that future setting books will return to the earlier model (even if they are divided into box sets) we have the rather intriguing Turn of Fortune's Wheel, which...

I guess I'll give my overall impressions up front. Turn of Fortune's Wheel is an amazing skeleton for a campaign. But if you want to run this, you should not run it exactly as written. There are too many gaps here, too many shortcuts. This could have been an amazing full adventure book, but confined to its few pages as one third of the box set, the thing is basically written in fast-forward.

That said, the hook to it is super cool, and I think in the hands of a DM who is willing to do a lot of their own work on creating more content and crafting things for the players, you could have a hell of a campaign.

There is a central conceit here that I'm tempted to put into a spoiler cut, but it's also kind of the crux of the adventure, so let's just get it out of the way:

Your players' characters, until the final chapter, cannot permanently die. Furthermore, the adventure is written in such a way to almost ensure that your party will die early and often.

The characters are affected by a multiversal glitch that causes alternate-timeline versions of them to pop up when they die.

As an aside, before I settled down and wrote a far more reasonable backstory, my very first D&D character was originally written to have three different personalities that shifted in and out. One was what the character actually wound up being, a well-meaning young nobleman who became obsessed with an incomprehensible being from beyond reality, and another version that was a straight up serial killer (also driven mad by his connection to this Great Old One) and a third version that I honestly do not remember. My best friend, who also DMs a lot, told me (rightfully) to simplify that premise.

But this adventure is kind of built for that - and the characters can shift classes and even races (though the latter will require a bit more of an explanation on how that happened). If you have players who are altoholics (see the name of the blog) this is actually great.

Now, you could argue that this diminishes the stakes of the story, but I don't think that's really all that true. There are different stakes - such as figuring out which of these versions is the "truest" version of them, and also the end result of the adventure, which can potentially cause huge shifts in the nature of all the cosmos.

Structurally, the intro owes a lot to the beloved Planescape Torment, and so the players all wake up on slabs in Sigil's Mortuary. This is also where the comically deadly elements of the campaign are introduced, as level 3 characters are sent forth into what is basically a meatgrinder, with hostile Demiliches, a room that incinerates them, and generally a vibe that wouldn't look out of place in the Tomb of Horrors, except that each death merely reveals a new variant (or returns to a previous incarnation).

The party encounters some of Sigil's factions and then gets a job from Shemeshka, the arcanoloth casino owner. Shortly, they leave Sigil and are sent to travel to the various Gate Towns.

Each gate town visit is its own mini-adventure, with stops at 7 out of the 16 towns, which are, as written, probably not going to take very long.

The last stretch takes the party to the Spire at the center of the Outlands and then to the realm of a Beholder deity, the latter of which happens only after the party leaps ahead to level 17 (which I think is also a nod to Planescape Torment, where the final part of the game allows the player to gain many levels before facing the final adversary).

Like Sigil and the Outlands, there's a distinct lack of planar travel in this Planescape adventure, but at the very least we get the flavor of different planes thanks to the Gate Towns.

Still, the structure here is fairly episodic, with a plot conceit justifying the journey to the various Gate Towns. Again, I think that you'd probably want to flesh out both traveling across the Outlands (and there is a section with events that might take place during that travel) and Sigil, and maybe find deeper things to do in the Gate Towns.

Having to squeeze this into a book that's less than a 100 pages, there's some good hooks, but I'd highly recommend building in substantial character-specific quests and side-adventures into this.

I'm not someone who runs published adventures, even if I have almost all of the 5E publications, so take my stances with a grain of salt. If I run a Planescape campaign, I'll almost certainly just do my own thing (and it'll definitely involve traveling to many different planes). But I could imagine both playing and running this to be fun - if the effort is put into fleshing it out.

The natural point of comparison is with Spelljammer, and I think that my issue with Light of Xaryxis was that they really leaned into this kind of 1940s-style serial sci fi vibe - Buck Rogers on one hand and John Carter of Mars on the other. I don't really get why that "planetary romance" style of adventure is pushed so hard with both Spelljammer and Starfinder, when I imagine that most peoples' larger sci-fi points of reference are more along the lines of Star Wars and Star Trek. The former of those was admittedly an evolution of those Buck Rogers-style stories, but there have been generations of post-Star Wars sci-fi created that feel more likely to strike a chord with players.

Planescape, on the other hand, is kind of right as long as it's weird, and I think this adventure does manage to embrace the true oddness of the setting, and encourages a different perspective on what stakes mean for a D&D game.

The Worldsoul Saga and Warcraft's Longterm Story

 Next year marks the 20th anniversary of World of Warcraft. That kind of floors me, because I started playing the game when I was 20, and while that was two years after its launch, I think it invites me to reflect on the passage of time and my own journey out of youth and into middle age. (By my generous reckoning, I consider middle age being one's 40s and 50s, though I suppose that's really more "middle adulthood," but still, it lets me cling to my youth for another two and a half years.)

WoW itself had, as part of its original cinematic, a kind of celebration of being the tenth anniversary of Warcraft as a series - now the old RTS games are almost fully eclipsed by the MMO (and Starcraft was a bigger RTS than I think Warcraft ever was). But just from a human timescale, that's adding up to a really big chunk of time. I was a college freshman when the game first launched, and that means that a kid the same age now would have been born after that point.

With the 20th anniversary approaching, the plan is to try something new, story-wise, by telling a multi-expansion arc. There's some talk (I can't remember how much of it actually came from Blizzard) about this "tying up all the current stories" of WoW, which is surely pretty ambitious. But I also don't know if it's possible to do that and retain any sense of continuity.

In WoW's early years - which I still think of as being recent but that's just because I'm getting old - the focus was very much on following up on stories begun in the RTS games - and even then, its most iconic antagonist characters from its first couple expansions were actually really recent additions to the lore - Illidan and Arthas were both introduced in Warcraft III, which came out only 2 Years before the original World of Warcraft. Like, for real: we got all of WCIII and its expansion, the Frozen Throne, in the space of a single WoW expansion. From Illidan's initial introduction to our defeating him at the Black Temple took just five years of real-world time.

Mists of Pandaria was the first expansion that really had to stand on its own using elements that were introduced in WoW itself - it was the first time we had a final boss (not counting Halion in the Ruby Sanctum as the final boss of Wrath, even if that was technically the case) who wasn't a character from the RTS games. (Retroactively, C'thun became the final boss of Vanilla, but only because Wrath moved Naxxramas to Northrend and made it a level 80 raid.)

The thing about WoW's story, though, is that I think you need to think about it the way that you think about comic books - well before the MCU, Marvel was placing all of its superhero stories (or at least the vast majority of them) in the same world, so that Spiderman could hang out with the Fantastic Four. Epic events could transpire that would seem to blow up the whole universe, but these would just allow for resets of the continuity to explore the same characters - heroes and villains - from slightly different angles.

I actually don't think we'll see WoW go in for quite as massive a transformation, but I do think that we're going to gradually see new characters rise to prominence as old ones fade into the background. We're seeing a lot of highlighting of Alleria, Thrall, and Anduin with the Last Titan - all characters who have been somewhat in the background in Dragonflight (which, admittedly, has rather focused a lot on the dragon characters, shockingly). Alleria of course dates all the way back to Warcraft II, but we only finally got her return in the final patch of Legion, and aside from her role alongside Valeera in their sister Sylvanas' story, she's largely been on the back burner.

There are questions that remain surrounding certain cosmic elements. To an extent, I think the fans sometimes treat these things as more immutable than they truly are. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people say, definitively, that the Old Gods are still around - with the exception of Y'shaarj, who was destroyed long before any of the major stories in Warcraft canon, it seems as if most people believe that Yogg-Saron, C'thun, and N'zoth are all still kicking somehow. But I actually think they are truly dead. Blizzard has said so explicitly and, if I am getting their tone correct, somewhat emphatically.

Likewise, I think that we're meant to understand that the Burning Legion is truly done for - not to say that there can't be fragments and remnants of it that are still active. But Kil'jaeden and Archimonde are perma-dead, and the Legion as we know it is just not really a thing anymore.

Because even if, on a certain level, to maintain an ongoing narrative, we can't fundamentally solve the underlying issues that give WoW its identity (though I'll be pleasantly surprised if we never really go back to the endless war between factions that have, time and again, put their differences aside to deal with the bigger threat) there is just as crucial a need for our efforts to actually accomplish something.

I think it's wise to start looking at these farther-reaching stories. I don't think WoW has ever had a more satisfying villain to defeat than Arthas, but I think that had something to do with how much of an impact we felt from him playing the game. The first character I ever got to max level (back when that was a pretty arduous task that you'd be unlikely to do on more than two or three characters) was my Undead Rogue, and so the legacy of Arthas and the Scourge was a deeply felt throughline for the entire experience of playing the game. Arthas was also the first villain who was really present throughout the entire expansion's story, showing up in quests in nearly every zone and then getting a super-cool dungeon appearance that sold how dangerous he was by making the challenge merely to survive, and not to actually strike against him.

But Arthas had the benefit of being the breakout star of Warcraft III, the central focus of its Frozen Throne expansion, and extensive build-up to him in both vanilla and Wrath.

The Jailer was basically supposed to be the Lich King on a cosmic scale (setting aside the "Primus was the puppetmaster all along" conspiracy theories) but we just did not have enough time to learn to fear him. Yes, I think you can criticize the rote and generic writing for him ("Pitiful mortal" being the first thing we ever hear him say) or his somewhat uninspired character model (big void in the chest: very good. Being otherwise just a big shirtless dude: not so great) but fundamentally, I think the tragedy of the Jailer's underwhelming performance as big bad could have been severely avoided if we'd gotten time to build him up. If we had spent an expansion hearing whispered rumors about some terrible death-god called the Jailer, and perhaps even had him show up during a subsequent expansion for brief, tantalizing moments... it could have made a final confrontation with him that much cooler.

And I think they learned that lesson. I was, frankly, kind of shocked when they confirmed that Fyrrak would be Dragonflight's final boss. Honestly, a big fire-breathing dragon is actually pretty perfect for that, but we've also been pretty clearly told that Iridikron is the actual most dangerous of the Incarnates.

But Iridikron is getting saved for later. And already, just from what little we've seen of him this time around, it feels like that confrontation will be quite epic. (It also helps that there's been some subtly good writing of him - for maybe the first time ever, we have a major villain who actually seems to appreciate that most of Azeroth's big bads wind up getting killed by a group of 10-25 adventurers - and so far he has proven very clever in not becoming a raid boss).

I do think that there's some positioning here to distance us from the Titans as a force. I'm not sure I love this direction - if we wind up having to fight Aman'thul as the final boss of the Last Titan, it will certainly be epic, but I also feel like... we never really got to see the Titans as god-like presences in the world in the first place, so a kind of "rebellion against the gods" feels premature. I still don't think I could tell you the difference between Khaz'goroth, Norgannon, or Golganneth. If we are going to fight these guys, at least let them develop individual personalities first.

Still, I do think that the writing of the story has matured and incorporated greater nuance in recent years, which is great - nuance is what made me like WoW in the first place, and I remember feeling the rug pulled out from under me during the times when they had the Horde (particularly the Orcs and Forsaken) going back to playing largely villainous roles. Seriously, how many other fantasy RPGs have a faction of playable Undead who are (at least capable of being) good guys?

Dragonflight entertains the notion that the beneficence of the dragon aspects and the Titans could be a little bit of "history written by the winners," and while I still think we're meant to come away continuing to feel that, for example, Alexstrasza is a deeply good and kind-hearted person, it's also clear that there were some moral compromises made in creating the world as it is, and the things we fight to defend are not immaculately free of sin.

You need to strike that balance, though. If you make everything too black-and-white, you lose a lot of what makes the game work. But at the same time, I think WoW has an overall positive view of humanity (and we're talking all humanoids rather than just humans here) and is somewhat optimistic in tone even as we struggle with cycles of hatred and violence. And I think that's also a crucial component to what makes the game work.

Anyway, we're still likely about a year out from The War Within, which is only just going to get us started on this new three-part story (and I'm not feeling hugely optimistic that we'll have a lot of victories to celebrate in an expansion called "Midnight.")

It's a little premature to think about what will come after the Worldsoul Saga, but its very existence kind of invites that speculation. I mean, we've never gotten multiple expansions announced at the same time. But if this represents a new longterm plan for the game, it's natural to wonder what that plan is building toward.

The Talent and My Desire for Modern D&D

 MCDM's Talent is presented in large part as a product of comic book superheroics - the Talent NPCs that are presented as exemplars of their subclasses wear form-fitting costumes not unlike a superhero and I think MCDM's approach to marketing the class is done with the popularity (albeit a diminishing one) of superheroes in today's pop culture zeitgeist.

But I suspect that the greater inspiration for the class was likely the kind of psionic archetype that exists in stories like Stephen King's Firestarter, or for a more recent piece that borrows from King's work, Eleven from Stranger Things. (King's a big fan of the psionic ability trope, to the extent that there's a part near the end of his opus, the Dark Tower series, in which many psionics from other stories of his have all been kidnapped and forced to work as "Breakers" to destroy what is effectively the last leyline holding the universe together).

Personally, I've fallen in love with the whole aesthetic of the kind of late-20th-century secret government-funded experimentation into the power of the mind. There were real experiments like MKUltra that involved testing various drugs to see how they could be used for the purpose of interrogation, but especially with Jung's theories (as I've written a lot about in my Alan Wake posts,) there's a sort of circling back around to the idea of supernaturalism via a rationalist, scientific worldview that just intrigues me. It's probably no coincidence that my dad is a professor at a world-class scientific institution, and so the kind of vibe and even scent of scientists who were working on cutting-edge stuff (in my dad's case, computer science) in the 1970s is something near and dear to me.

The Dark Tower really opened my eyes to the idea of fantasy as existing outside of a medieval fantasy context - I loved Lord of the Rings, but the kind of story I'm more interested in telling is one where the castles are replaced by secretive bases and bunkers, and where everything is just a little weirder and more uncanny.

The Talent, conceptually, fits very well into that more modern or recently modern aesthetic (both the game Control and one of its inspirations, the Southern Reach Trilogy, are modern stories that also have an enforced retro vibe to them because of their respective institutions' concerns about basically the technology of the computer age).

I think the most popular alternative to medieval fantasy is the space opera - Spelljammer is a weird case that is really just fantasy in space, but Starfinder is fully futuristic but still has things like wizards and demons and explicitly supernatural stuff.

But it seems that usually we're finding ourselves looking to a pre-industrial past or a super-advanced future, and I'd love to set things in something closer to the modern world.

Now, there is precedent. In fact, I suspect that Brennan Lee Mulligan, main DM and creator of Dimension 20, has similar tastes, because two of the campaigns from their show that have gotten secondary seasons both involve a modernized D&D world. Fantasy High, the first D20 show, was something like a fusion of D&D with a teen movie such as the ones John Hughs made (albeit a little more modern because the kids all have cell phones). In Fantasy High, the world itself is mostly a fairly traditional medieval fantasy world, but the particular nation in which it is set has, through some confluence of magic and technology, approximated a kind of 80s/90s/00s America. In season two (Sophomore year) they leave their home country to journey to other places, where people don't really know what to make of things like a motorcycle or a van (each of which has the soul of I believe a demon and an angel, respectively). Another of their popular series (and one of my favorite stories I've seen told in actual play) is The Unsleeping City, which takes a kind of urban fantasy/magical realist approach, setting the game in the real world, specifically New York City, but one in which, unbeknownst to all of us, there's actually tons of magic and monsters that we just don't see because of the unique nature of the New York mindset, which is extra-well-trained to ignore anything weird and rationalize it (as an example, a centaur police officer is just seen by most people as an equestrian officer).

Personally, I think I gravitate more toward the Fantasy High approach here, though I'd probably do a world where everyone's living at a modern technological level.

Now, I don't think Mulligan works very hard to change the rules of the game to fit the setting. The Unsleeping City's paladin character is not described as wearing armor, but simply gets a normal Paladin AC, and I suspect that "on the character sheet" he is actually wearing armor.

On a mechanical level, I think that a modern-set D&D game presents the following pressures:

First, you need to figure out a way to balance firearms. In D&D, most "martial" classes tend to focus on melee weapons. The Fighter, Ranger, and Rogue can all go ranged (with the latter two probably doing so more often than not) but Barbarians, Paladins, and Monks are basically obligated to stick to melee. To be sure, in the modern day there are still opportunities for people to fight hand-to-hand, but I think that if this happens in a military context, it basically means that things have very suddenly gone very wrong for both combatants. That said, you might come up with a conceit that justifies the re-emergence of melee combat (not to say that it's remotely modern, but the far-future sci-fi of Dune has the existence of personal shields that make high-velocity attacks like from bullets impractical) or you make the player characters the strange exceptions (and if they're fighting non-humanoid monsters, their lack of projectile weapons might simply be part of their nature).

The other I think is vehicles. While D&D has various beasts that can serve as mounts, the existence of high-speed vehicles in our modern day is pretty ubiquitous. So I think you'd need to hammer out rules for high-speed encounters (I actually like the way Starfinder handles this).

Actually, there's a third thing: you'd need to figure out ways to use various skills to represent modern concepts. What is the check to use or understand advanced technology like computers? Does a set of thieves' tools include a Raspberry Pi with some hacking code on it? And what is the proper skill for driving a car or piloting an airplane?

But on a more interesting level, I also feel like there's some questions to be asked as to what sort of character concepts one could have.

The Talent is a full new class, but I could also imagine creating various subclasses that would involve modern ideas. WotC tried this many years ago with its Modern D&D Unearthed Arcana, but it never went anywhere. Still, we got things like the City Domain Cleric (used in the Unsleeping City) and the Ghost in the Machine Warlock Patron (basically what if your patron is a supercomptuer?)

I do think the best thing one can do these days is just a lot of re-skinning. But I keep coming back to the hope that one of the new campaign settings that they teased years ago might be a modern world. Granted, the last couple setting books (even if I liked the Planescape set) have been somewhat light on new rules ideas, but a guy can hope.

Hey, Aren't We Due for a New UA?

 While we got the "Bastions and Cantrips" Unearthed Arcana on October 5th, that means we're about a month and a half out from our most recent UA for the 2024 core rulebooks. And if we're only counting the "big" ones, we got Playtest 7 on September 7th, which is over two months ago.

Now, granted, they've already announced that some of the classes are basically done with public tests (they'll still be refining them in-house, but the final polish is not going to be done in the public eye).

Most importantly, the Monk has only had one test so far, so it will be getting another look.

The Monk is a class that I think could use a radical redesign. One of the simplest changes that I think would be very good for the class is an upgrade to a d10 hit die. It has never really made sense to me that a class that is all about physical conditioning and training one's body to be capable of mixing it up amidst foes in full armor should have the same HP scaling as Warlocks, Clerics, Druids, and Bards. A Rogue I can kind of get because their whole shtick is to attack from the shadows or otherwise avoid harm by not being there when the enemy is ready to retaliate, but I'd like to see a version of the Monk that can stand their ground and be just as effective of a front-line tank as a Fighter, Paladin, or Barbarian.

Other classes had gotten more radical redesigns, and so I was pretty shocked to see the Monk's fundamental features more or less unchanged from 2014. I do wonder to what extent the potential power of Stunning Strike is getting in the way of Monks' other capabilities, but I'd prefer a version that loses that but can effectively stay in melee (I've also generally been growing more in favor of both monsters and player abilities that don't fully shut down a creature on the battlefield for a full turn, but instead just partially hinder).

Now actually looking things up and not relying only on my memory:

It looks like the three classes planned for the next playtest are the Barbarian, Monk, and Druid, with the other 9 PHB classes moving onto internal testing. I remain a little skeptical of the new design for Divine Smite (mainly its requiring a bonus action to use) but hopefully that can be ironed out during internal revisions (I'm not even opposed to limiting it to being once per turn if that's necessary to cut down on Nova potential, but Paladins are getting way more options for their bonus actions anyway).

We do know that the Brawler Fighter is getting cut from the list - I wasn't opposed to the broader fantasy of a Brawler, but I think if you were going to make such a subclass, I'd put it as a Monk one first (more or less what the Drunken Master could have been) and Barbarian second, and only Fighter third. But oh well.

But let's talk about what we want to see with the three remaining classes:

Monk:

    We've covered most of this already, but in a broad sense, to reiterate, I want the Monk to feel like it is just as capable of front-line fighting in the thick of it as any other heavily-armored or otherwise defensively boosted class. And I'd be willing to see a severe nerfing to Stunning Strike if that gets us that capability. Also, probably either increase access to Ki/Discipline points or reduce reliance on said points for their features.

Druid:

    So, I actually like using templates for animal forms, it's just that the ones we got in the first crack at the Druid were so bad that you were probably better off just staying in humanoid form. The second take was better than the first and is probably more balanced than the 2014 version, but we'll see what new concepts they can come up with. I imagine that this will be the main thing they revise.

Barbarian:

    I haven't really ever played much of a Barbarian, but the thing I've always suspected was that they could potentially run out of rages too easily, and that too many of their features rely on Rage. But again, that's an outsider's perspective. I like the direction of the last playtest that made Rages last longer and have more out-of-combat use, and especially giving Barbarians the ability to extend their Rage even if they have nothing to fight at the moment. Perhaps we'll see iteration on that.

Ultimately, with 2024 swiftly approaching us, we're going to need to get the rest of the UAs finished up relatively soon. I imagine that with the internal testing process that follows and then the vast challenge of editing the books and getting them fully ready for publication and then actually printing them, they're going to need to be done with the UA process in at least the first half of the year, if not the first quarter.

For all the complaints I've lodged about the conservatism with which they've approached these new books, the changes do add up to quite a lot here, and so I have to imagine that the next playtest should be coming soon.

Nerdsplosion Day: Amirdrassil Goes Live on All Difficulties

 Today marks the release of Lost Caverns of Ixalan (the latest Magic the Gathering set) along with the launch of Amirdrassil, the Dream's Hope, which is the final raid of World of Warcraft: Dragonflight.

I'm going to touch on the latter more - while what little I've played of the new Magic set seems cool, it always takes a few weeks to get a real sense for the impact of the set on the Standard format (which is what I almost exclusively play).

However, after some helpful videos from Ready Check Pull, I hopped in on my main and checked out the first part of the raid.

LFR sends us to the universally first two bosses - Gnarlroot and Igira (whose shards one might recognize from the previous patch) and then launched us to what is, on other difficulties, one of the raid's last bosses, Smolderon, the new Firelord that replaced Ragnaros as the elemental lord of fire (given that we kill him in the Dream and not the Firelands, I assume he's still around, but likely not going to be much more friendly to use than his predecessor).

On LFR, the bosses are relatively easy to steamroll, though we did have one wipe on Smolderon.

I won't get into the specifics of each fight - from a tank perspective, the first two are pretty normal taunt-swaps and other than facing the boss away from the raid on Gnarlroot, positioning seems pretty forgiving.

I'll confess that I'm... not in love with the grand temple complex in which all three of these boss fights takes place. Given that we're fighting in the Emerald Dream, I'd have expected more naturalistic environments. I think the Emerald Nightmare raid from Legion did a good job of ensuring that its locales were both natural and also dream-like. A Moonglade that is slanted down and being sucked into the Rift of Aln, or the shattered Thunder Bluff - these were very cool environments.

But we're really into the endgame at this point. Players on higher difficulties have beaten the final boss and seen the end cinematic for the raid (I haven't watched it). There is some additional content coming in later patches, and we'll get a Season Four that brings in things like Fated raids.

What Is The Shadowfell, Really?

 I realize that the question up at the top of this post is sort of unanswerable. The truth is that so many writers and DMs and players have and will contribute their own vision of what the Shadowfell truly is that there will never be a real definitive answer. The Outer Planes (which the Shadowfell is not one of, to be clear) are realms of thought and conceptual reality. I think it would be within your rights as a DM to have not just demon lords but every single fiend, and every celestial, represent some concept, to extreme levels of granularity - that they are the idea made manifest, and that the way a mortal mind comprehends places like the Outer Planes or beings from it is by perceiving those abstract ideas as these tangible, embodied entities.

The Shadowfell is one of two planes that were introduced actually pretty recently with 4th edition, along with the Feywild. Notably, 4E moved away from the Great Wheel cosmology that has been part of D&D since first edition and tried to imagine less directly-related planes floating in either the Astral Sea or the Elemental Chaos. Aspects of that "World Axis" cosmology did make it into 5E, but I think the most notable salvage was the Feywild and the Shadowfell.

The Feywild is perhaps easier to imagine because there's cultural precedent for it. The most direct antecedent in real-world myth is the Otherworld of Irish myth. While the pantheon of Celtic deities is certainly not as well-known in modern days as the Greek/Roman (which are technically separate even if the Roman one is very clearly a derivation of the Greek) and the Norse one (personally I was much more familiar with the Greek pantheon growing up, and actually think I spent more time as a little kid thinking about the Egyptian one than the Norse one, but in terms of current cultural impact, the Norse pantheon is pretty big - maybe thank/blame Marvel). But the Irish beliefs about the existence of fairies certainly permeated the culture. The notion of strange, capricious, beautiful but dangerous beings existing in some parallel reality to our own is not unique to the Irish. Indeed, I remember watching an excellent 1964 Japanese film called Kwaidan, an anthology of "ghost stories" whose "Hoichi the Earless" chapter could easily be an Irish fairy tale.

The Shadowfell, though, has less clear cultural precedent. And part of that is that a lot of the spookiness of the Shadowfell is reflected in the very same stories.

Both the Feywild and Shadowfell deal in uncanniness - they are, after all, the planes that are supposed to be nearest to our familiar reality, and are often described as acting as sort of mirror-realms to the prime material plane. The same mountain could exist in all three, though the mountain would take on different aspects depending on its plane (it might be more accurate to say that there are three mountains, but each occupy the same corresponding spot and playing a similar geographical role).

As a child, my sister and I watched the old 1950s Disney movie Darby O'Gill and the Little People, starring a very young Sean Connery. The movie has some very scary parts to it. I was I think 3 when we watched it and my sister was 5, and for years afterward, she insisted on sitting in the middle seat in the back of the car out of fear that the Banshee would come up next to the window, resulting in some unnecessarily cramped car rides. I remember next to nothing about the movie (it's been 34 years - indeed it's been more time since I watched it than how old the movie was when I did, which is nuts) but I looked up some clips a while ago and saw that, in addition to the Banshee, the Dullahan makes an appearance as well.

In D&D, both of these entities are listed as undead, and are more likely to be found in the Shadowfell (though Kobold Press's version of the Dullahan, which predates Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, is actually a Fey creature that only looks like a headless rider holding his head out in one hand, but is actually a singular entity, horse and all).

I think that both the Feywild and Shadowfell operate on dream logic. Indeed, when I was first coming up with my homebrew setting and was a little more ambitious in creating my own planar system, my "Shadowlands" was imagined as more of the Dark World from Zelda: a Link to the Past, and was both the fey otherworld and the land of darkness and peril. Bowing largely to the demands of making the setting more accessible to players familiar with the D&D multiverse, I decided to separate them out again.

But I do think they're linked by this idea of dreaming.

I often describe the Feywild and Shadowfell as being Manic and Depressive, respectively (while the term "Bipolar Disorder" is favored today, when I was growing up people with this condition were referred to as Manic-Depressive, reflecting a swing between these two modes). Mania, after all, is not purely good (indeed, some people with bipolar disorder claim that it's the manic episodes that are harder on them) but it's energetic, vibrant, colorful. The Feywild is also energetic, vibrant, and colorful. The Shadowfell, meanwhile, seems to sap energy and color from its inhabitants. If the Shadowfell becomes, effectively, the plane of the undead, then undeath kind of works as a state of having all emotions, all animating passions sapped from the person - a zombie-like state can feel relatable when you imagine those days when you're feeling like you have no energy, you're extremely bored, you can't find anything to stimulate or excite you.

The thing about the Shadowfell, though, is that as a setting, it's sort of overshadowed by a particular part of the plane - the Domains of Dread.

It would be easy to imagine that Ravenloft simply is what the Shadowfell is. Ravenloft as a setting pre-dates the creation of the Shadowfell, getting codified as a real setting beyond a couple of horror-themed adventure modules in 2nd Edition, and of course getting its big 5E update in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft (after Curse of Strahd several years earlier expanded and updated the original module).

Officially, the Domains of Dread - the actual setting that is referred to as Ravenloft - are a kind of foam of demiplanes on the edges of the Shadowfell, but that issue got further confused when Wilds Beyond the Witchlight introduced the idea of Domains of Delight as the Feywild equivalent, and made Archfeys the Feywild counterpart to Darklords.

Don't get me wrong, I love Ravenloft (and particularly the version of it that exists in Van Richten's - I hated the idea that the domains were geographically connected in the Core, which was basically just a normal continent. Van Richten's changes it so that each domain is kind of adrift within the demiplane, meaning any journey into the Mists could send you to any domain if you don't have a key to ensure you go where you mean to) but I think the potential of the Shadowfell is vaster than the kind of weird prison-realms of Ravenloft.

As anyone who has been reading this blog a lot recently will know, I've been somewhat obsessed with Alan Wake II, which came out a couple weeks ago. The Alan Wake games are kind of psychological horror games, with a big David Lynch and Stephen King influence. In the second game, the eponymous character is trapped in "The Dark Place," which is a kind of nightmare realm where the stories he writes become reality around him (in a certain way, the entire game takes place with him sitting at a typewriter writing the events of the story, but writing himself into the story and experiencing it as it's written as well - it's a real head trip).

Alan Wake, and indeed a lot of the games by the studio that makes it, deal a lot in Jungian psychological theory, and Carl Jung had some pretty radical beliefs about the Collective Unconscious - a sort of shared mental space between all of humanity that, Jung believed, had a tangible impact on reality (I'll confess here that I'm no scholar of Jung, and I think the degree to which he took his ideas literally is open to debate). There's a lot to suggest that the Dark Place in Alan Wake is literally that Collective Unconscious. The main "villain" of the games is The Dark Presence, which literally manifests by turning people into "Taken," who are covered in a protective shadow and become aggressively violent (the core gameplay is that hostile Taken need to first be blasted with light from a flashlight before you can take them down with guns and other conventional weaponry). But the game also strongly implies that the Dark Presence is none other than the Jungian Shadow, the Shadow being the dark reflection we each hold within ourselves - the person we are convinced we could never be, but which lingers and can cause great harm if it is not recognized and integrated into our psyche. (In other words, for example, learning to recognize one's violent urges and accept that they happen sometimes is better than trying to convince yourself that you don't have them, and see yourself act on them unconsciously.)

I honestly don't think that the way the Shadowfell is presented quite fits in that way, but it might be a point of inspiration.

When I was a kid, the first "grown up" show I watched was Star Trek: The Next Generation. In the first season, shockingly, one of the main characters was killed off in the middle of an episode. The entity that killed her is called Armus. The Enterprise arrives at a desert planet and encounters this super-powerful alien entity that takes the form of a dark pool of sludge, sometimes rising out of it as a somewhat humanoid shape.

While this was definitely from Next Gen's awkward first couple seasons (it really took until season 3 for it to hit its stride,) this episode really fucked me up as a kid. I was watching re-runs - the show came out a year after I was born, so there's no way I would have seen this when it first aired - so I was only vaguely aware of the fact that the episodes were shown out of order (and the whole philosophy on lighting the show and the quality of the footage therefore seemed to vary wildly from episode to episode). But that sludge-monster was absolutely terrifying to me, and has kind of stuck with me. While he survives, there's another point in which Riker is dragged into the sludge - a truly nightmarish image.

As it turns out, the explanation for what Armus is is that the civilization that once inhabited that planet has ascended - becoming some kind of higher, extradimensional people who are enlightened. And they did this by shedding all the darkness within them, reducing it to this sludge that they left behind on the planet that they had grown beyond. No one was ever supposed to come back here, and the episode ends with the Enterprise leaving a beacon warning any other interstellar travelers to stay the hell away from the planet.

Now, of course, the Jungian perspective would be that these people have actually failed to properly enlighten themselves. And, of course, what they've done is left behind a deadly danger. Of course, there's a kind of universal dream of achieving that level of purity. What if one could be without dark thoughts - not to merely repress them, but to truly be rid of them?

What if a universe decided to do that?

Ok, so in my homebrew setting, again sort of before I committed to making it compatible with the D&D cosmology (though there are still some scary truths about it that don't conform entirely - is the Far Realm really so far away? And are we sure that there's nothing but the Astral Sea between Wildspace systems, or are we only looking at a tiny fraction of the Prime Material Plane?) I conceived of the world as being the physical shell for a Primordial (not the 4th Edition elemental titans, but instead a kind of divine being that pre-dated the gods and might not be all that different from a Great Old One). My concept was that the Primordial that was the world's heart (also, this was before WoW introduced the idea of World Souls) decided it wished to shed its darkness, and split its soul to separate off the Primordial Shadow, which became the soul of the Dark World, known as the Shadowlands (again, this was before World of Warcraft: Chronicle). Later, it would be forced to balance this act and split off its manic magical energy into the Esperlands, my equivalent of the Feywild.

As I wrote in a recent post, planes are there to play the part you need them to in the story you're telling. I very much like the idea of running a campaign in my world's Shadowfell equivalent. But I think you could also really run with this idea of it being the realm of the Shadow, in the Jungian sense. A dark realm of the mind's hidden truths.

What Do We Want Out of 5E in 2024 and Beyond?

 Next year, we know that they are planning to release new, updated, revised core rulebooks for 5E D&D. Despite next year marking a full decade of 5E, the plan here is not to come out with 6th Edition or even a sort of 5.5, but is instead meant to be a fully compatible update to the game that will allow even the 2014 core rulebooks to be used along with these ones.

I have mixed feelings about this decision:

Part of me think that it's a little overcautious. While the update is looking to fix a lot of quality-of-life issues and tune up some old classes and subclasses that didn't really hit their marks back in the day, and there's definitely some truly new ideas here that I applaud (I haven't playtested Weapon Mastery, but I'm very into it in theory,) there are so many things I could imagine D&D doing that this approach feels too hamstrung to accomplish.

One of my biggest disappointments is decision not to make the Artificer a core, PHB class. I understand some of the logic here: the Artificer plays in territories that exist outside of the core "medieval fantasy" experience that D&D is founded within. But I'll counter-argue that you could say similar things about the Monk. Naturally, this could open up a whole can of worms regarding Euro-centrism (and one of the efforts in the new books is to make the Monk less specifically East Asian, in an effort to make all the classes fit in worlds and cultures inspired by any real-world culture,) but I'll also cite figures like Daedalus from Greek Myth as precedents that can fit perfectly well within a medieval (or classical) fantasy setting without ruining anyone's immersion.

But setting that aside, I think that this part of me really wants to see D&D stretch its wings and fly into new and unexpected places.

However, taking a step back, I can see how the whole point of these core rulebooks, even if they are theoretically compatible with the ones from 2014, is to be the base, you know, core to the game. They're supposed to present D&D in its most quintessential, standard form. Not to mention that they want these books to fit within their bindings.

But there's another thing that's special about the Core Rulebooks:

These are the only books that any other 5E book expects you to have.

And again, there's an admirable goal here. If you are, say, a Critical Role fan who has never actually played D&D and you want to check it out, you might have heard about Call of the Netherdeep and want to run that adventure. WotC's ask here is that you buy three books in addition to that one - just the PHB, DMG, and Monster Manual - and you can start playing.

Now, as someone who has been a pretty thorough collector of the game's books, (I'm on the fence about the Book of Many Things but will probably wind up getting it, knowing me) I would think it kind of crazy not to get at least Tasha's, Xanathar's and Monsters of the Multiverse (which were, appropriately I think, put together in a box set).

However, the official policy is that a book can't be published if you're required to have any other book outside of the core rules (with the exception of the three volumes in each of the Spelljammer and Planescape box sets, which are functionally each a single product).

That's all well and good and friendly to new players.

But what it also means is that some ideas never really get to develop.

The Artificer being a clear example.

The Artificer did get a full re-publishing from Eberron: Rising from the Last War into Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, and even got a new subclass. But in terms of support, it has not gotten nearly as much as the other classes in the game. If you take even a class that has relatively few subclasses, like the Sorcerer, you're still looking at eight subclasses, while Artificers have four - just one added to the class since its introduction in ERftLW.

Now, one thing that was a little encouraging is that in Fizban's Treasury of Dragons, the spell Ashardalon's Stride, which is available to a number of classes, was also made available to Artificers. It wasn't much, but it was something!

    And this brings me to my point:

5E has had a very solid core, and, if you'll forgive a metaphor, it's essentially grown to have a mighty, thick trunk. But all of its branches are stubby little things, barely growing out of that trunk before tapering off with a single leaf.

There's a lot of anxiety surrounding certain releases because the stakes grow very high: if you don't nail, for example, a campaign setting in its single release, that's all you're going to get about that place for a decade.

While I enjoyed what I read of the Dragonlance adventure, Shadow of the Dragon Queen (and certainly will make use of its high-CR undead stat blocks to have an undead army that feels like a real threat) I also imagine that if you've been waiting ages for a true, comprehensive Dragonlance campaign setting book, that was not it.

Spelljammer, of course, is the disappointment I don't think they're going to live down for a while, but the disappointment could have been blunted if we knew that there was going to be some kind of "So-and-So's Atlas of Wildspace Regions" giving us a clear picture of what you can find in Realmspace or Krynnspace, or whatever. Instead, it feels like we're just never (or not for another thirty years) going to actually get anything else Spelljammer-related.

5E has been massively successful. And I understand that that can, in its own way, breed a certain conservatism. You don't want to mess with a good thing.

But I know that as someone who has been playing for most of 5E's lifespan, I'm looking for something deeper. I think WotC should be able to afford expanding the capabilities of its team.

I had feared that Planescape's box set that came out last month would be a repeat of Spelljammer, but thankfully, I think that this set does actually lay out a foundation for a real campaign (the included adventure has interesting ideas but would need to be seriously fleshed out by the DM - it occurs to me I did my Sigil and the Outlands review but not the one for Morte's Planar Parade or Turn of Fortune's Wheel. Should get on that). Still, it's a foundation, but one that could really stand to be built upon. We need a good 5E book (or set of books) that actually details the various Outer Planes that a Planescape game should, in theory, have us traipsing between. The Outlands are great. Sigil is great. But the promise is of a whole wide multiverse, so freaking give it to us!

I love the universal books: Xanathar's and Tasha's added a lot to the game, and I think Monsters of the Multiverse did a good job of modernizing and consolidating the content of Volo's and Mordenkainen's. These are, truly, the kinds of books I get most excited about.

But they also can't make them all the time. Indeed, while the cadence of these books was pretty frequent earlier on, we've seen a move toward campaign-agnostic but still more narrowly focused books like Fizban's and Bigby. To a certain extent, you need to zero in on an idea and look for inspiration there lest what you come up with be too generalized.

But I think we've got a lot of starting points that could be further explored. Give us another Spelljammer sourcebook! Give us another adventure set in Ravenloft! Give us a Manual of the Planes!

(I'll also say that if they gave us a Bigby's or Fizban's style book about Constructs with new Artificer subclasses I'd be... I'd be very happy.)

And, then...

Give us some really weird stuff.

I'd love to see a book that explores something like Modern Setting D&D, or futuristic Sci-Fi. Try something new and unexpected and genre-bending, and see who's interested. Let's look into different styles of fantasy. Yes, that can come with different settings (Dark Sun obviously giving us that post-apocalyptic vibe) but I'd love to play around with official guidance on adding things like modern vehicles, computers, and even just, like electricity to one's D&D games.

The fact of the matter is that if you want to run a standard D&D fantasy game in 5E... all the tools are already there. We've had most of them since 2014. I'm very much in favor of re-tuning all that stuff to fit with modern design philosophies. I love having spellcasting NPC stat blocks that don't require me to track six different wizards' spell slots. And that's not a zero-effort thing to do.

But I think we're ready to branch out, get stranger, start playing in outside-the-box spaces. 5E has lasted almost a decade, and we, as a community, get it. That's great. That's an amazing opportunity. And now that we're in that position, let's get weird.