Time Scales and Elves

 It's a classic trope that sci-fi and fantasy writers have no sense of scale.

For example, space travel, specifically interstellar travel, would require an enormous amount of time without some sort of faster-than-light capabilities. The nearest star (other than the sun, of course) to us is, if I recall correctly, 4 light years away. Even getting to within a tenth of the speed of light (which would be a profoundly difficult thing to do) means it would take 40 years to get there. So you need a cheat of some sort.

In World of Warcraft, one of the really major events in Azeroth's past is the War of the Ancients. This took place 10,000 years ago. For context, human history on Earth is generally considered to be 6,000 years - dating back to the invention of writing. Certainly there were probably towns and even maybe cities before writing was invented, but basically everything prior to 6,000 years ago has to be reconstructed by archaeologists. But on Azeroth, there are individuals who were already alive at the time. Hell, many of the Draenei are over two and a half times as old - Velen looked about middle-aged when he left Argus 25,000 years ago, which would mean that the guy is probably over 50,000 years old.

I've been tooling around with the timeframe of my own homebrew D&D setting. The world has undergone many different major changes over a vast timescale. Its current era, which followed the catastrophic fall of the Parthalian civilization, has been going for about 19,000 years.

Now, there's a part of me that wants to retcon that and divide everything by ten. 1,900 years would put the era of the "Dragon Empires," which emerged after the "Reign of Madness" (the period of anarchy and cosmic horror that followed the fall of the Parthalians) at a distance that is comparable to the Roman Empire from our perspective.

Perhaps the scale is not quite right - I think the Dragon Empires ought to be more comparable to the Mesopotamian civilization, so perhaps they should have been 5000 years ago - dividing my timeline by a factor of four rather than ten.

The thing with fantasy worlds, though, is that the existence of long-lived races makes things tricky. I'm pretty confident no one on Earth could identify all their ancestors that lived 5000 years ago. But according to the Player's Handbook, elves take 100 years to be considered mature adults and can live up to 750 years. If we consider the current rough life expectancy for humans, which is 70 (remember that this is average - if you make it to age 10 you're a lot more likely to live longer,) 5000 years represents about 71 exclusive generations (by exclusive generations I mean generations that die off before the next, rather than just parent-to-child generations - the idea being that this would be a generation that won't personally know that previous one.) To an elf, though, it's only about 6 or 7. This effectively means that to an elf, 5000 years ago is the equivalent to the way we think of roughly 1560.

So, you know, certainly a long time ago but not beyond the mists of history.

You know, actually, I'm sort of talking myself into shrinking things by a factor of four. 5000 years is a lot of time for things to happen, and I actually think it's far enough back for the long-lived races that it doesn't feel like it would make the period feel insignificant to them.

And this has been my thought process!

Hey, so Let's Talk About The Latest Critical Role

 While my interaction with Critical Role is that of an audience member, and I kind of treat it like one of the shows I'm watching regularly, I figure it's still gaming based and thus works for this blog.

If you're not familiar, Critical Role is probably the most popular streamed D&D "real play" game on the internet. The cast is a bunch of voice actors who are fairly prominent in animation and video games. In fact, if you're a WoW fan, some of the biggest characters' voice actors are there: Rexxar DMs, and Jaina, Illidan, Turalyon, and Darion Mograine are all players (among a couple others.)

The group make it very entertaining to watch, really buying into their characters and giving us some really dramatic moments and arcs along with the usual action and typical TTRPG silliness. So I recommend it if you want a massive amount of content to watch through (it's also in podcast form - great for long walks or drives or if you can listen to podcasts at work.) Also, while the first campaign gets fantastic eventually, the early stretch is a bit rough, as the sound quality was terrible and the pacing was not super conducive to a game with an audience. So I'd say start with the second campaign - there's very little continuity in terms of narrative, so you won't be lost (it's even set on a different continent.)

Anyway, the show is known for its huge twists and turns, and this campaign has had a lot of really crazy moments, but maybe the biggest just hit. Follow me past the spoiler break.

Uro Banned

 Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath, has been a major party of the Standard metagame for a good long while now, before and after the standard rotation. It's the sort of card where if you're playing Green and Blue, you should probably put as many copies as you have in your deck. And if you're playing green without blue, you might want to toss in a couple dual lands to make sure you can play Uro.

So I can't say I'm shocked that the old drippy-chain-titan got banned in Standard today.

For those of you who maybe haven't been playing lately, here's how he works:

Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath is a 6/6 Legendary Elder Giant for 1UG. When he enters the battlefield or attacks, you draw a card, gain 3 life, and you can put a land from your hand onto the battlefield. When he enters the battlefield, sacrifice him if didn't escape.

Escape: UUGG: exile 5 cards from your graveyard to place Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath onto the battlefield.

So basically, in the vast majority of cases, you play him like a sorcery that gives you some life, a card, and potentially a little ramp. But if your graveyard gets full enough, you can pop him out for just four mana and he becomes a major threat - swinging in for 6 and healing you and potentially allowing you to ramp some more (though I think this element becomes less significant in the late game.)

I wouldn't say this is a case like Oko, Thief of Crowns which was just crazy broken on its own, but Uro is just such solid utility that it's a practical must-have in any deck that is even remotely capable of playing it.

I imagine this will shake up the metagame in interesting ways. I'm curious to see how my Nissa of Shattered Boughs deck shapes up thanks to this ban, as the huge thing here is that blue isn't going to be an inherently ramp-y color now.

Horror One-Shot and My First Player Character Kill

 With our usual DM feeling sick this weekend, I volunteered to run a one-shot I'd cooked up (intending to play it in October, but oh well) which was largely inspired by a particular "Haunt" in the game Betrayal at House on the Hill (whose Avalon Hill publisher is actually owned by WotC, so... there you go.)

Anyway, as the adventure begins, the players arrive at a charming inn within a town that's a day's travel from the imperial capital in my homebrew setting. When they fall asleep, though, they are magically transported to the Shadowlands - my version of the Shadowfell - into the "Cutter House."

Here's the conceit:

The characters arrive inside wooden boxes in the attic of the house. They're all wearing the same three-piece suit, and don't have any of their equipment.

The house gives off a very haunted-house vibe, with spooky magical effects and such. Worst of all, the party finds other groups of adventurers who have been gorily slaughtered, as well as a few mentions of Bloody Oleg. The party must use the exploration time in the house to gather equipment - usually sub-par stuff (Padded Armor, Greatclubs, etc.) - as well as spell components if they are casters. The moment anyone sets foot in the front hall, the grandfather clock on the second floor landing begins to chime (despite clearly being broken - there's a dead halfling stuffed inside) and after 13 chimes, Bloody Oleg, an undead dwarf berserker dripping with blood, walks in and attempts to carve the party to pieces.

The trick is that if they kill Oleg (and it's easy to do this the first time as he only starts with 10 health) he'll disappear after a few moments and once they go back to exploring the house, he'll arrive again, this time with 5 extra health (capping at 25.) The only way to permanently kill him is to do so on a circle of infernal runes in a secret room in the basement (the players can find this room without checks if they just go into the basement and look around, finding a secret door).

Only by killing Oleg permanently can they escape from the house.

Exploring the Cutter House, they can discover a strange and ultimately inconsistent story: Darion Cutter and his husband Samuel ran a shipping business about a hundred years ago. They had an argument, Darion worrying that Samuel had made some reckless decisions. The players can find letters that indicate this conflict, surrounding a ship called the Mary's Mercy, which Samuel purchased apparently in defiance of Darion's wishes. Eventually, the party can find the master bedroom, where a note from another sea captain claims that Samuel died when the Mary's Mercy sank, and in the master bathroom, they find a skeleton, presumably Darion, with sleeves rolled up, and there's a razor blade in the tub (well, if they look in the murky water.)

They also find references to Bloody Oleg, as well as some children's drawings in the nursery - presumably for the girl the couple intend to adopt, named Henrietta, though the drawings are by "Darion, Age 7."

The truth is that they are not in the material world, and instead in the Shadowlands, and as such, the house represents not an actual tragedy that took place, but instead the extreme worries that Darion held, which bled into the Shadowlands. In truth, he and his husband were perfectly successful, and lived long and happy lives, but the worst case scenario that played out in his head manifested in the Shadowlands. Furthermore, his childhood boogeyman, Bloody Oleg, also manifested here as a violent undead dwarf. At some point, the monster made a deal with a number of fiends exiled from Infernus (my version of the Nine Hells, which was conquered by the Angel of Death and literally froze over to become The Necropolis instead) in order to keep coming back - only he didn't actually fulfill his end of their bargain, so they manifested their trap to kill him once and for all.

All the while, the vampire Lord Valdarren has used the Cutter House as a sort of audition for adventurers he wishes to bring under his employment.

While my party were able to find the infernal shrine in the basement before facing Oleg the first time, the older human druid Velthe, who had kind of spearheaded the plan to lure him down to the basement, ultimately fell to Oleg's greataxe, and given that this monster lives to murder, he chopped off Velthe's head - literally the turn before he was destroyed.

Given that it was a one-shot and that it felt motivated by the monster, I didn't feel too bad about this, though in now five years of running D&D games, this is actually the first time I've killed off a player character.

I guess if it had to happen anywhere, a one-shot specifically in the horror genre is not a bad place to do it. At this point in my Ravnica campaign the characters have so much access to resurrection magic that it's not until I start throwing monsters that can cast Disintegrate that I think they're in any real danger (and there's always True Resurrection.)

(Oh, and there's one character who might summon a Nightwalker if they succeed on a Divine Intervention... so there's that.)

Anyway, the one-shot was a bit of a back-door pilot, as I've been thinking of running a campaign set in the Shadowlands, which certainly has spooky Shadowfell-feeling locations but is more of a broader fantasy "Dark World" akin to the Dark World from Zelda: A Link to the Past. I don't think this adventure would be the first session - we'd likely go about things differently, and maybe make an entirely different starting point for their entry into the Shadowlands (possibly even have it start in the material plane.)

While I think the risk of danger makes a game like D&D an interesting challenge, I also tend to focus on the group storytelling potential of it, and I want players to feel that they can invest in a character with a reasonable expectation that they can explore their story - basically, I like to give players an out should something befall them.

And yet, I've only really come within killing range of a character once before, and I sort of fudged things (letting someone do some mage-hand healing potion shenanigans that probably should have cost more in the action economy) in the players' favor.

What is Spelljammer?

Given the announcement that WotC is working on three new campaign setting books that are all based on classic D&D settings, I figured I'd go and do an overview of the various settings I think are most likely (or the ones that I'd most like) to see printed.

The big caveat here is that I am coming to this pretty green myself. Case in point: my only experience with the Spelljammer setting was a single one-shot in which I and a group of Adventurer's League players, having finished Descent into Avernus, decided to play in an all-Warforged (though one player missed this and brought a human) party - I resolved to make my character as non-AL legal as possible, making a Warforged Artificer with the Izzet Engineer background.

Anyway, that's beside the point. What is Spelljammer?

Spelljammer is a campaign setting for D&D that is built around pseudo-science-fantasy, primarily taking place on magical spaceships, of which the Spelljammer is the most legendary example (which is sort of the Flying Dutchman equivalent.) This, like Planescape, is something of a "meta-setting," which links other existing D&D worlds, so you can travel, say, from Toril of the Forgotten Realms setting to Krynn of the Dragonlance setting.

While the setting uses a lot of sci-fi imagery, the manner in which space truly works is quite different, and is actually based on medieval theories about the nature of the cosmos. In Spelljammer, each world exists within its own Crystal Sphere. These spheres are named after the various settings, so Toril is within Realmspace and Oerth, the world of the Greyhawk setting, is in Greyspace. The space within these spheres is referred to broadly as Wildspace, and looks a lot like ordinary outer space, except that gravity sometimes works a little differently - large flat objects will often have gravity simply pull things to its surface (so if you want a flat world, you can do that.)

The Spheres themselves separate Wildspace from the Phlogiston, an ocean of some sort of fifth element that can only exist outside of the crystal sphere, and it's along the currents in this vast space-ocean that Spelljammers can travel to other crystal spheres, and thus other worlds.

Even within the spheres, there are planets and asteroids and such beyond the main world, and so even with a ship that is unable to journey through the phlogiston, you can still do some planet-hopping.

Tonally, Spelljammer is famous or infamous for its silliness. For example, Gnomish ships in the setting are generally powered by Giant Space Hamsters, powering the ship by running on wheels within the ship's engines. While you have alien threats like the Neogi - a type of aberration with no concept of understanding others as anything but a slave or a master - or, of course, the Mind Flayers (whose Nautiloid ships can be seen in the Baldur's Gate III trailer,) the overall vibe of the setting is a parodic send-up of sci-fi.

Spelljammer didn't actually sell that well after it was first released in 1989, and so the setting hasn't been revisited since the 90s, apart from the occasional monster stat block.

Despite, or perhaps because of this, a lot of D&D fans have clamored for it to make a return. Personally, given that the Forgotten Realms already provides a pretty perfect standard-fantasy setting where most fantasy tropes are fair game, I'm much more interested in different takes on the genre, and space-faring science-fantasy would 100% be a different take.

Nissa Ramp Is Really Awesome When It Works

 I decided to burn some mythic wildcards and get four copies of Nissa of Shattered Boughs (which, by the way, is pronounced like you're bowing on stage, not shooting a bow... dear lord is English ambiguous in its pronunciation).

So, this Nissa of course replaces Nissa Who Shakes the World as the primary standard version of Zendikar's favorite elf planeswalker. The latter was profoundly powerful, could easily win games on its own and was a staple of practically any green deck.

Shattered Boughs Nissa is going to be harder to work with, as she's now in Golgari colors, and frankly, I don't think she's quite as powerful as the previous version.

That being said, she's still got some really powerful tools. So let's look:

She costs 2BG, which is a manageable cost. I see her as primarily showing up in green ramp decks with a dip into black (I don't know if it makes sense to pair her up with Garruk, Cursed Hunter, but I love that card and might see if I can manage that somehow.) She starts with 4 loyalty, which is nice as her only negative ability costs only 5.

The thing that makes her potentially insane is that she has Landfall: when a land comes into play under your control, put a loyalty counter on Nissa of Shattered Boughs.

This, of course, lets you build loyalty with relative ease, but where it gets insane is when you have a lot of land-placing ramp cards like Cultivate or Beanstalk Giant or what have you. Also, Ashaya, Soul of the Wild, is a very useful card in any landfall decks (it makes all nontoken creatures count as forests, and also as lands) and is a friendly pair with Nissa.

In my last game, I got her up to 11 Loyalty. It makes you feel free to spend her negative loyalty ability, which will actually help keep her alive.

The +1 Loyalty ability resembles her previous incarnation, though it's not quite as powerful. You untap a land, then you may (which is nice if you don't want to expose it to creature removal) turn it into a 3/3 elemental with haste and menace until end of turn. The until end of turn bit of course makes this not quite the army-animator that Who Shakes the World got us, but just being able to untap a land is pretty good, and getting an attacker who can often swing in and smack the opponent for 3 isn't too bad.

The final "ultimate" (though I'd recommend treating Nissa as a longterm permanent and try to keep her on the board) is her -5 ability. You can put a creature from your hand or your graveyard into play with two +1/+1 counters as long as its converted mana cost is less than or equal to the number of lands you have in play.

So, this isn't going to let you bring in some insanely expensive creature on turn 5, but what it does mean is that your opponent is going to have a rough time dealing with your biggest threats. In my recent game, my Ashaya came back multiple times, of courses triggering landfall each time and remaining a massive 14/14 monster the opponent ran out of ways to deal with.

Another good pairing with this is Grakmaw, Skyclave Ravager. This is a legendary hydra for 1BG, 0/0 but comes into play with three +1/+1 counters. When a creature that has a +1/+1 counter on it dies, you get to put one on Grakmaw (and you'll potentially have several of those with Nissa's negative ability.) Then, if Grakmaw dies, you put a token into play that's a hydra with power and toughness equal to Grakmaw's when it died.

So you basically get to copy the hydra, only with its power and toughness locked in the second time around. Bringing him out or back with Nissa gives you a 5/5 that then replaces itself with a 5/5 (or more) each time, which seems like a tough thing to deal with.

Anyway, I have yet to determine if this is going to be a format-defining card or just a cool one that works.

One of the downsides of Golgari colors right now is that there is no Pathway land for that combination - four "guilds" lost out, as I believe the current ones are based around the "RPG class" creature types (which are typically found in one of two colors) as well as two green ones (the RPG classes don't cross over with green, though there are some green cards that count as all four types, which should actually make green a really solid option for "party" decks.)

Still, I think they've more or less confirmed that the four missing Pathway lands are coming with Kaldheim early next year, so I think this is a card to keep an eye on.

Planar Rules and the Planescape Setting

 One of the most exciting possibilities for a possible new campaign setting book would be Planescape. Arguably, this already has some detail in even the core books, with the Dungeon Master's Guide giving descriptions of the various inner and outer planes.

The various "outsiders" found in the Monster Manual, and also found a lot in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, also gives us examples of monsters to use in these settings.

So the thing I wonder about, as a player who has played D&D for about... six years now? But one who has not been steeped in its lore since childhood like some others, is where the general understanding of the planes ends and where the Planescape setting itself begins.

I did buy on DM's Guild a 2nd Edition Planescape Campaign Setting book (published in I want to say 1994.)

The core focus of that book (I think the very first Planescape book came out in 1987 or so) was on the city of Sigil and the Outlands, which are the outer plane usually ignored in the "Great Wheel" charts given that it sits in the center, though not to be confused with the center that is occupied by the prime material plane.

Really, it helps to think of it as a 3D model rather than a 2D chart. You can think of the Outer Planes as existing above (or, if you prefer, below) the inner planes, with the Outlands at their center, and then the Inner Planes existing on a different vertical level, this time with the Prime Material Plane really at its center.

This cosmology has changed with different editions - 4th Edition really upended things and had the "elemental chaos" as the location for several planes including the Abyss, but 5E has generally held the four elemental planes (which are kinda sorta one big plane, with border regions that mix those elements) as separate, Inner Planes from the Outer ones.

The Planescape Book features a mostly familiar cosmology with the Great Wheel even illustrated quite dramatically as a kind of giant pie with the Outlands as a sort of circular piece in the middle and the city of Sigil orbiting (it's a ring-shaped city that only has an inner edge, and gravity basically goes "out") an impossibly tall spire coming out of its center.

My sense is that if you're talking about the Planescape setting, it primarily refers to Sigil and the Outlands. The extent to which Sigil is "in" the Outlands is sort of a matter of interpretation - the only way to reach Sigil is through magical portals; you can't go there traveling, you know, spatially.

The Outlands, beyond Sigil, are also really interesting. One of the premises of Planescape is that a region can literally become part of a different plane if enough people or activities embodying a different alignment congregate in that area. If the demons invading Avernus were to truly dominate the region and drive the devils back to a different layer, Avernus would become part of the Abyss (though dang, if that place isn't chaotic evil already...)

The Outlands are the True Neutral plane, shaped like a big disk. Around the plane, there are "Gate Towns" that allow passage into all the other outer planes. But given that, and the way that the planar mechanics work, each of these towns needs a perfect counterbalance. For example, Automata, the town granting access to Mechanus (which was also sometimes just called "Nirvana") is the super-rigidly structured, lawful neutral town you'd expect... until you find the crazy bacchanalian society that exists underground, which keeps Automata from simply becoming part of Mechanus and, you know, ceasing to serve its purpose (the Abyss gate town of Plage-Mort is apparently new because the old one got sucked into the Abyss.)

Culturally, the Planescape setting also has some interesting notions - particularly to the city of Sigil, which has its own very special and odd rules. For one, its ruler, the Lady of Pain, is basically infinitely powerful, at least inside the city, and she bars any and all gods from the city, and can erase a god and every one of its worshippers if they try to get in (also, do not, under any circumstances, try to worship her as a god. It will not go well for you.) The city is run by a number of "Factols," which are factions that are actually somewhat analogous to the guilds found in Ravnica, each with a fervently-followed and often strange philosophy.

People from Sigil are a bit like people from New York (caveat: I like New York and New Yorkers, and this is said more as a native Bostonian with a bit of a chip on his shoulder) in that they look down on anyone not from there. In particular, "Inners" from the Inner Planes and, above all, "Primes," meaning people from the Prime Material Plane, are seen as dumb hicks from the boondocks. Unlike my home city of Boston, Sigil can actually make a reasonable claim to be the hub of the universe (it's even shaped like a wheel!) so you can see where they'd get the inflated hometown ego, but still.

While the Outlands and Sigil are obviously really cool locations, what I'd argue is the biggest appeal to the setting is that all the planes are open to you. Really, the entire D&D cosmos is the setting, which could range anywhere from The Uphill Climb, the one operating tavern in Caer Dineval, Icewind Dale, to the palace of Everlost, in Thanatos, the Demon Lord Orcus' layer of the Abyss.

Actually, an interesting note: in the late 80s and the 90s, the rise of "moral guardians" (particularly the Christian right) singled out Dungeons & Dragons as a particularly dangerous practice for children, believing that its depiction of demons and devils would encourage satanism among kids (frankly, I think the vast majority of people who identify as satanists today do so because of the hypocrisies of the religious right, but that's not what I'm here to talk about.)

While for all I know this boosted sales of the game, TSR (which owned D&D before they were bought by Wizards of the Coast in the late 90s) decided to rebrand somewhat. The Nine Hells were renamed Baator, and devils were renamed "Baatezu." Demons were renamed "Tanar'ri," and daemons were renamed Yugoloths.

Once the Satanic Panic wound down, WotC brought back the pretty standard, recognizable fantasy creature names (except Yugoloths, which stuck probably due to how confusingly similar their names were to demons.)

Now, I don't know if this is just a relic of the fact that the sourcebook I was reading was from the early 90s (and that was probably the case,) but even though those names were created as a concession to a repugnant social movement (one whose effects we continue to suffer) to be honest, I kind of like how it redefines the outer planes - less the classical heavens and hells of various real-world mythologies, and more like alien worlds that we'd better not make too many assumptions about.

Planescape is cool, which is sort of half my point.

The thing is, while it's a very cool setting, I'm always interested in tools to homebrew concepts and mechanics. I don't know if I'll ever be able to match the massive amount of detail that has been poured into the Planescape setting, but when I first started designing my own setting, I took the license to create my own multiverse and ran with it. So while my Tartarus probably shares a lot with The Abyss, I'd really enjoy some more general mechanical concepts for planar adventures.

I think the plane that most fascinates me is one of the inner planes - the Shadowfell. This plane has actually only existed since 4th Edition, being a kind of merging of other concepts from earlier editions that was, canonically, merged in the massive events that took place between 3rd and 4th Edition.

There was a 4E book about the setting, and I've been tempted to pick it up on DM's Guild. But in more general terms, I wonder if there's a place for a book that's less about the specificity of various planar settings - less about telling me about specific NPCs and dungeons found on a particular giant gear in Mechanus than giving us monsters and environmental mechanics.

Actually, thinking about this, I couldn't imagine making a book that ignores such specifics. But the real question is how broad such a book could get in its subjects.

If we look only at the Outer Planes, we still have 17 entire universes to explore. If you take just the Nine Hells, that's still, you know, nine layers that each have their own different locations. Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, finds enough content for levels 5 through 13 on just the first layer.

So I have to imagine that a book that tried to give details about all of the Outer Planes would wind up only being able to touch on each briefly.

That being said...

The MTG crossover books (and to an extent the Eberron book) are broken down in a rather clever way. (For the sake of my typing fingers, I'm going to just call these by their setting names.) Ravnica has chapters divided by guild - there's a chapter for player characters of each guild, one for adventures that involve each guild (and broader suggestions on possible villainous plots by those guilds as well as missions the players might be sent on by those guilds) and the treasure and monsters, also divided by guild.

Theros does the same with its pantheon of 15 gods.

So perhaps a Planescape book could do the same, but focusing on each of the 17 Outer Planes - with sample maps, monsters and NPCs that you'd be likely to find in those planes, some extra playable races (bariaurs, for example) and maybe some subclasses, and you've got a comparable 5E setting book.

Honestly, I would not be surprised at all if we get something like that in 2021.

However, while I think this would probably get a lot of fans in a nerdy frenzy to grab the book, I feel like the Inner Planes get neglected.

I guess it's an open question: would players be more excited for an updated, 5th Edition version of the Planescape setting's most iconic elements, or would we want something a bit newer, focusing on aspects of the D&D cosmos that haven't gotten a lot of attention?

Screw it, I'm going to get that 4E Shadowfell book on DM's guild.