Roll20 is Teaching Me Things About Darkvision

 As I posted earlier, I've been futzing around with Roll20's Dynamic Lighting system.

The goal of this system is to allow you to plop your characters' tokens on a map, and they'll only see on that map what their characters see. As a DM, you might have some monster hiding in the shadows, but if the characters are unable to see it, the players won't.

By default, dynamic lighting assumes there are no light sources on the map. You can alter this in two ways. One is a blanket "daylight mode," in which the whole map is illuminated. The only reason to use this (and not just not use dynamic lighting) is if you want to retain the ability to obscure things. In this case, large objects like buildings can still obscure areas if you paint a sight-obstruction into the map. This could also be used for a well-lit interior dungeon environment. The downside is that the shadows cast by the obstructions are invariably stark black - which can be a bit intense if you're just trying to show that the party can't see behind that big tree.

The other way is by adding light sources via what is essentially a "torch stamp" that they have added. Now, this is something that I've had some issues with when actually using it - I'll put it on the dynamic lighting layer and people won't get any light from it, even though on my GM's screen it shows and even when I "re-enter as player" I still see it. So, either there's bugs to work out or I've missed some element of the UI.

In terms of gameplay, though, one thing that's really interesting about this is how it shows you in real-time the radius of sight for characters with darkvision. Turns out a 60-foot radius is enormous. Then, there's characters like Drow or Deep Gnomes who have 120 feet of darkvision, which is even crazier. A Twilight Cleric, whose darkvision extends 300 feet, basically means practically no map will be large enough to escape their vision (they could see from one side of a 60x60 grid to the other, and Roll20's default map size is 25x25 - less than a quarter the size.)

To be honest, I think that the lighting effect is the coolest with characters who don't have darkvision. I made a map in which there's a lone candle on a desk in an out-of-the-way room. Its 5 feet of bright light and 5 feet of dim light appropriately feel like this minuscule beacon.

I think generally that darkvision is a real time-saver for players and DMs alike. When everyone in the party has darkvision, you don't really need to worry that much about illumination. But as a DM, I do think there are some times when using light can be really exciting. But I do think that sometimes it gets lost a bit when describing things in the "theater of the mind." Generally, humans visualize spaces to make a mental map, and so there's a kind of mental darkvision as you hear a place described, even if you're told you can't see it.

Doing this on a service like Roll20 gives you the visual queue to think about darkness. (It's also fun that individual players only see what their characters do, so if a character with darkvision is warning the character without about the big monster in the shadows, the same asymmetry of information exists for the players.)

I am trying to figure out if Roll20 plays precisely by D&D rules - something a lot of players and DMs forget is that in pitch darkness, a character with darkvision still only sees as if they were in dim light. In practical terms, this only means that they take disadvantage to perception checks (though it should also mean a -5 to passive Perception).

As a DM, you need to also try to separate out what you know versus what your monsters know. For example, my upcoming session of my Ravnica game has the Golgari wing of the Phyrexian conspiracy unleashing a plague of zombies on the surface (honestly, this isn't totally outside of standard Golgari behavior, but I think the version of Ravnica that my campaign takes place in is a somewhat more stable and cooperative one than you might choose to portray). The zombies all have standard 60 foot darkvision, which they'll use to chase down Commoners in order to turn them into Husk Zombies. I might play a little fast and loose with how good the commoners are at evading the zombies. The implication is meant to be that this is happening across the 10th District, so the commoners won't necessarily know to run off the map. I'm leaving it up to the players to figure out how to corral the commoners to keep them safe (or if they think scattering them would be wiser). But I'm considering giving the monster tokens their own visual ranges to make sure that they can sense the living mortals they're trying to convert.

I think ever since I took a class my freshman or sophomore year of high school called "Back Stage Magic," which was about the tech side of theater (I still wound up doing more acting and some writing/directing, but the tech stuff was also something I found cool) I've really enjoyed seeing what one can do with lighting to change the feel of an environment. If you've ever been on a Disney ride when it breaks down and they turn the "house lights" on, it's shocking how immersion-breaking the effect can be. But that just goes to show you how effective the lighting design was to begin with.

Finally Getting into Dynamic Lighting in Roll 20

 My Roll20 game has gotten better since I started using the website to run my Ravnica-based D&D campaign. I've gone from crudely drawing my maps with the simple lines and shapes the website provides and moved on instead to using another site, Inkarnate, to generate much better-looking maps.

My roommate has started running D&D professionally, and as such he's learned a lot about the Roll20 systems.

One of the systems I got acquainted with pretty early on was Fog of War - this is a simple way to block off part of a dungeon map until the party actually gets there, at which point you can reveal an area, potentially with bad guys within.

But there's a system that they implemented after lengthy experimentation, and I'm finally jumping into the fray with it - Dynamic Lighting. The idea is that a character can see what their character can see, and map will change as the character moves to reflect their perspective.

I'm certainly still just figuring out the basics of it, but here's my level of expertise:

The first thing you need to do is turn on dynamic lighting for a map in your campaign (I've got so, so many maps, but this will just be on new maps moving forward). Next, you need to make sure that the characters have the right vision settings.

Drag a character token to the map and click on it with the cursor to get the various buttons around it to pop up, and then click the gear symbol. Here, you can go to the tab marked "Dynamic Lighting" along the top of the options, and first things first, you need to toggle on Vision. If the character is a human, halfling, or other race without darkvision, you're basically done, but if the race does have darkvision, you can turn it on with the "nightvision" option, and even set the range (so your Twilight Cleric will have their crazy 300 foot darkvision that means anything on the map will be visible to them... for now.)

Now, these adjustments only count for the token on the map - you then want to go to the character in your Journal and click edit, then "use selected token." (This is also a great thing if you want to be able to pop out Large creatures or objects that have a token, as you can set the size and then make that token size the default.)

Now, your characters are set up to actually use the dynamic lighting.

Actually, one last note: if you have a character that lights a torch or casts the Light spell (or Dancing Lights, or what have you) you can actually edit the token in the same way and have that token radiate light in a set radius.

Ok, with characters figured out, we now can play with light sources.

If you have a pitch-dark dungeon map, then congratulations - you're done with this step. But if you have, say, a city street with street lamps, you can make those lamps radiate light. What you'll want to do is go to the new Dynamic Lighting layer and then use the little torch icon that is below the ruler. You can then stamp it on each location where you want there to be a source of light - essentially it's a token that doesn't present itself as a token and lives on its own layer of the map, but (unless my experiments have led me astray,) it should create a source of light in the location, illuminating any tokens that are caught by the light and making them visible to everyone.

At this point, every character, regardless of their ability to see in darkness, should be able to see every light source and any tokens representing creatures or objects that are within that light at any distance - even if you've got a night-blind warforged character across the entire map, if there's a lantern or something in the distance, they can see the light and anything within its radius of illumination. But that's not totally ideal, is it?

After all, if you have some urban space with alleys and buildings, these large objects would obscure things. How do we deal with that?

Once again, we want to be on the dynamic lighting layer. Now, we can use the same rudimentary drawing tools that we once used to make our maps (before we got fancy with Inkarnate or some other similar service) and draw lines where we want the light to be blocked.

Some of this is a little unintuitive. If you outline a building with light-blocking lines, the building itself will be hidden in perpetual darkness (and your players might wonder what this big block of black is). Instead, my friend recommended drawing a line along the building's primary gable (aka the bend in the roof along the top). That way, the half of the building that the characters are standing next to is still visible, but anything the building is blocking is obscured.

The result is very cool. That said, there will be edge cases in which this doesn't work quite so well - if, for example, your Monk runs up the side of the building and gets on the roof, they should be able to see past that obstruction, but in practice, whichever side Roll20 decides the token isn't on will be obscured (it's not a 3D map, after all). Also, sometimes certain building shapes can be a little harder to work with - a circular building like a tower or dome is a bit trickier. My best effort has been to use the circle tool and just figure out how much of the dome or turret at the top to obscure. Then, you'll have an obstruction regardless of what angle the player token is at, at the cost of losing the top of the building. The other option is drawing an X on the top, but this will mean there are sort of "threshold angles" at which the visibility suddenly shifts, which might not be quite what you're looking for with a circular building.

What I imagine this really excels at is the classic dungeon crawl. Now, you can just outline each room with light-obstruction (and possibly mark stationary objects that way as well - I haven't figure out if you can do this with a token, though, which could be awesome (like having the massive dragon obscuring the path out of the room).

Because the light-obstruction lines are invisible to players, I recommend using bright colors that are easy to see on your map - I tend to go for highlighter green and bright red. I also recommend color-coding. For me, the green marks are permanent things like walls and buildings, while I use red marks to denote things like doors or rubble that can be cleared away. This way, when the party opens a door into the next room, you can just quickly step into the dynamic lighting layer, delete the red mark over the door they opened, and they'll be able to see inside.

I'm prepping for a combat encounter in which an urban district is about to become overrun with infectious zombies - some Zombie Plague Spreaders from Van Richtens, only I'm letting them recharge their infection ability and turning their victims into Husk Zombies from Wildemount. The combat itself is a bit unconventional, as it's going to be less about a single central set-piece and more about trying to wipe out the husk zombies before they can turn more of the many, many Commoners I have walking around the neighborhood.

It could be a disaster, but I think the image of a desperate midnight scramble to contain the outbreak with just a hint of Zombies Ate My Neighbors (which I actually never played) could make for a cool encounter. And the obscuring nature of the special lighting will play into the search - the party won't initially know where the plague-spreaders are, so they'll be searching mid-fight.

It's a proof of concept in a couple different ways, but I'm really eager to see how the lighting enhances the gameplay.

The next thing I think I need to experiment with is "explorable" versus "permanent" darkness. In our Curse of Strahd game, which we haven't played in months, sadly, we've been exploring the Amber Temple, but it's slightly frustrating that the way that the dynamic lighting is set up has left every room behind us totally obscured and pitch-black, as opposed to, what I think this can now do, which is to leave it desaturated and keep any creature tokens obscured, but still let us keep the "map progress" we've made.

I believe Roll20 had changed the Dynamic Lighting system since then, and certainly our DM (the aforementioned friend) knows a lot more about using the system now.

EDIT:

I've been playing around a bit with explorable darkness. This one can be a bit tricky, but can be great for a dungeon crawl. Essentially, anything on the map that the players see will be permanently revealed. However, if it's not currently in their line of sight, it is shown in black and white (or at least very desaturated) and any tokens in that area are not visible.

The idea here is that the players will essentially be building a map as they explore, but they don't have up-to-date knowledge of what's currently happening there. For example, the party might walk through some big cavern and then go into a chamber holding a dragon's hoard. While they're in the hoard room, they trip an Alarm spell, which alerts the dragon to their presence. Knowing that the party has to come back out through that cavern, the dragon and its minions lie in wait. So the players obviously know that the cavern is there, but they don't know that there's a big dragon and a bunch of other monsters that have now taken up position within that room.

On a more human accessibility side of things, this is also nice because it lets the party build out the map, but by dimming the explored space to black and white, players can very quickly figure out where their character is on the map.

While I'm certainly anxious that something could go wrong, I'm also very eager to try this out during my Monday game.

The Ongoing Battle of Story and Mechanics

 The party has gathered in the home of the Golgari Swarm's Matka, Izoni. They are searching for the Lost District Tartelos, a region of the deep undercity of Ravnica that has passed into myth and legend. They have reason to believe that vast Phyrexian conspiracy has used this remote location as the site for the Plagueworks, which the conspiracy will use to create monstrosities and biological weapons to unleash upon the city and corrupt its citizens into bio-industrial horrors. The party is there because the party's Eladrin Druid is Izoni's black sheep daughter, the product of an affair with a high elf in the Simic Combine. The Golgari Swarm is a guild with many powerful factions and houses, and as such, for reasons both political and genuinely romantic, Izoni has been seeing a younger devkarin man named Taelos vod Savo, a member of the Golgari guildmaster's own house.

Taelos comes off as arrogant and prissy at first, but when the party first tells him that they are searching for this lost district, a boyish enthusiasm ignites, and he eagerly begins to gather all the books and research he has done on this esoteric subject.

Going to speak with him again, the party comes to dinner at Izoni's house and awaits Taelos' arrival. He comes in, carrying a stack of books and several rolled-up scrolls, and sets them down on the grand banquet hall. They discuss the history of the Lost District, and his theory that it might actually be closer (at least horizontally) than they might have previously thought.

And then, mid-sentence, he drops dead.

Midnight Tears - a clever, magical poison that has no effect when ingested until the clock strikes midnight. And then - death, abrupt and instant.

This was the scenario that took place in my Ravnica game this past Monday. I'd threaded in hints that there was some tumult in the Swarm, and that someone might be making a play for Jarad vod Savo's seat (I should specify that they were making a credible play, as the Golgari Swarm is always a massive overlap of court intrigue and secret vendettas and plots).

But this assassination, the party quickly (and correctly) theorizes, was not about who stands to rule the Golgari, but was instead an effort to delay their discovery of the Plagueworks.

Here, however, is where things get tricky.

The Artificer, knowing that the party's Cleric was unavailable, prepared Revivify. Seconds after Taelos' body slumped in his chair, his mouth foaming with poison (he would have had to been given many, many doses given that he had a "Drow Favored Consort" stat block, but whatever) the artificer popped over and cast the spell.

Now, I guess in theory I could have just let that happen. Indeed, I'd even considered allowing Taelos to serve as a powerful NPC ally in their dungeon delve down into the deep undercity. But dramatically, it would have been pretty damned anti-climactic to just have him go "wow, that sucked. But I guess I'm fine now?"

This is one of the issues you get with D&D as a storytelling medium. TTRPGs are built more than any other type of game I've played to let the story drive the game, and for players to interact with a world that can respond immediately to unconventional (or even just unexpected) ideas.

But I also think this is an area where the abilities that characters get can make it hard to dramatize certain moments - especially as they get to higher levels.

Because really, D&D is two separate things stapled together. It's a tactical strategy game, where players are encouraged to build characters as platforms for the most useful and effective abilities to defeat monsters and navigate dungeons, but it's also a storytelling game in which players are encouraged to inhabit a role that is different from how they are in real life and imagine how that person would act in a way that is dramatically interesting.

For the first version of the game to work, resurrection has to be relatively cheap (ok, you could argue that you could do a game without any resurrection magic - like Tomb of Annihilation - but I think resurrection magic is a net positive for the game). But in a certain way, especially given that the game's rules don't really make any strict distinctions between player characters and NPCs, it can sometimes break the drama.

My goal in this post is not really to find a solution to that problem, but more to simply observe it. As a DM, we're all kind of in an endless pursuit to provide the most satisfying game - coming up with engaging and challenging tactical situations that are just hard enough to make the players feel they really earned their victories (but also balancing them so that the players are likely to win) while also telling an engaging fantasy tale that gives each character (and thus the players playing them) satisfying emotional arcs sprinkled with badass moments.

Figuring out how to balance the sometimes-conflicting goals of a game like D&D is one of the big challenges for a DM (and, frankly, a player - I've been trying to figure out how I'm going to get my naive recent college graduate wizard in our Wildemount campaign to start feeling more comfortable melting peoples faces off with Tasha's Caustic Brew, which is something I think that, tactically, he'll need to start doing relatively soon.)

The Campaign's Big Kickoff

 The first session of D&D I ran, at the beginning of what would be a multi-year campaign that sadly fell apart (as seems to be so often the case,) I had my players meet one another at a party being thrown by the Sand Prince of Camrada, a drug-addled, manic playboy who served as a figurehead for the crime lords of the city of Camrada. The party was going to his palace to get him as a patron to create an "Excavation Company" that would explore the ruins of the super-advanced, long-lost Parthalian civilization.

It was my first time DM'ing, but not my first time weaving a story, and I wanted to start big. So, I had the character who was intended to be (and in theory still could be if I ever pick that campaign up again) the final boss (though arguably not the main villain) of the campaign show up at the party, ostensibly as some form of entertainment or at least an interesting "mystic" to add to the mix of interesting people the Sand Prince would invite to make his party noteworthy and prestigious.

Instead, this "mystic," offering prophecies to the Sand Prince, responded to the question "how long will this grand palace stand" with "no more than two hours," and then began some sort of incantation that caused a nearby hill to erupt, revealing that beneath it was the dreaded Tarrasque, the massive, kaiju-like monster that is basically designed to destroy cities.

The party, thus, was forced to flee the city while chaos descended, having their first actual combat against just a couple of kobolds (it would take me a long time to figure out encounter balance, but I can tell you that two kobolds versus even a level 1 fighter, paladin, and wizard was not enough).

Now, I'd already done a lot of work world-building for this setting. So I eventually clarified that while the Tarrasque destroyed a big swath of Camrada, the city itself survived, and the party would later meet the Sand Prince (whose full - and pretty obviously embellished - name was Feyd Yanek al Dastran di Macchi Keotopoles von Shunt) staying with the NPC who actually became their patron, dispossessed of his title and going through rehab supervised by the benevolent Baron Siegfried von Angir IV.

I still think it was a pretty cool way to start a campaign, even though I think there are elements of the execution I could have gotten a bit better. Probably the biggest thing is that I had to kind of just handwave that the Tarrasque disappeared mysteriously after destroying a fifth of the city, because I wanted the players to feel like they could go on unrelated adventures and not have the entire world panicking that the Tarrasque was out there, squashing cities.

And, frankly, the motivation for the villain summoning the Tarrasque was pretty vague - mostly it was to keep a major war going as a distraction, though I think the way I portrayed the villain and his minions made it seem more likely that making no announcement of their presence at all would have been a better way to pull it off.

What I wanted was the big set piece to kick off the campaign.

There is a balance to be struck.

Here's the advantage I see in having something huge happen as a campaign begins:

So often, the stakes of a story, and I think particularly of a D&D campaign, feel really small at first. Campaigns seem to always start with you fighting bandits (either of the broad range of humanoid races or of the kind of "low level bandit" monster types like goblins and kobolds.)

And sure, there's something to be said for a story that starts with seemingly innocuous things happening that turn out to be tied to much bigger things - this is kind of the mystery narrative, where some smaller thread like a single person's murder turns out to be part of a much large tapestry of plot and conspiracy - maybe that person was murdered because they found out about some magical material that was being stolen, and that material was being stolen because it could be used to open a gateway to the Abyss, which some evil wizard wants so that they can learn how to become a lich from Orcus, but Orcus is actually just using the wizard to invade the mortal realm. You can trace a direct line from the small-scale crime to a massive, epic fantasy plot (and in only a couple steps,) but you won't really know that big things are happening until there's a major plot reveal likely very far down the road.

The "big kickoff" presents different challenges, but I think it's something DMs should consider using more often.

Really, this is about modulating the stakes. With the aforementioned plot two paragraphs up, you have ever-raising stakes. First you're looking for a murderer, and then you've uncovered some kind of organized crime plot. So, now the party isn't just looking for one killer, but a whole mob with which they've gone to war. But then, when they realize that the mob is just doing a job for this other individual, and they realize they've got this powerful necromancer they're fighting, the stakes go up again. And then, when they realize that the wizard is working with Orcus, you've got one of the most epic and iconic villains in D&D to deal with. The ramping up of stakes works pretty well with the way that D&D sees players grow in power as they level up. A party of level 3 players taking on a city's thieves' guild? Sure, that tracks. They're at the right level for street-level fights. And as they level up, they're now fighting more powerful, more inhuman threats.

But let's also consider a classic example:

In Lord of the Rings, the first monster the party faces is a Ringwraith. There's a lot of exposition that starts things off, with Bilbo planning his birthday and then Gandalf coming and convincing him to leave Frodo the ring, and then Bilbo pulls his cheeky little disappearing act (which is pretty obviously the ring trying to influence him not to relinquish it - let's just take a moment to remember that only Bilbo and Samwise ever actually give up the ring voluntarily, which I think makes them the most virtuous people in the story) and there's a pretty big time jump (I think in the books it's actually several years) before Gandalf shows up and tells Frodo he's got to get the hell out of there before the Nazgul come and slaughter him for the ring.

Frodo and Sam set out, and they come across Merry and Pippin, but the most dangerous thing they face (at least in the movies) as they make their way through the Shire is a farmer who is pissed off that the latter pair stole some vegetables... and then, suddenly, they have what is basically a Death Knight sniffing at them, inches away from finding them and utterly eviscerating them.

The Nazgul/Ringwraiths are the top-level henchmen of the story - indeed, given that Sauron is only ever this disembodied presence (literally a big flaming eye in the movie, though I think the books treat that more as a metaphor for his lingering, incorporeal and invisible presence,) the Nazgul represent the biggest physical threat of anything that even shows up in the story (ok, maybe the Balrog.)

After they escape the Nazgul and get to Rivendell, their subsequent adventures are far more "level-appropriate," but that beginning sequence - in which actually fighting the Ringwraiths is not really an option until they get the much-higher-level Aragorn in the party, and even then, he's only able to scare them off - pushes the narrative forward from the tranquil innocence of the Shire.

It's also some great foreshadowing for the kind of dark and terrible powers that the party is going to face down the line.

One of the big things that took me a while to internalize when I started off as a DM is that, just because a monster has a stat block with hit points and attacks, it doesn't have to act strictly as a fight for the party to overcome.

Powerful monsters can show up as NPCs. But they can also show up as monsters that are there to kill things - but not necessarily the party.

Consider the opening of Skyrim. You're carted off to a small fortress where you're going to be executed as a spy for crossing into the country in the middle of a civil war. But right as you're about to have your head chopped off, Alduin - the final boss of the main story campaign - shows up and begins to tear the place up. In point of fact, he's there to kill you (so he'd have been better off just waiting) but you don't know that, and maybe he doesn't know which of these puny humanoids is you yet (you can forgive me for not remembering all the details - the game turned a decade old yesterday).

You're not expected to fight Alduin during this opening sequence. Instead, it just establishes the kind of powerful threat that this world-eating dragon represents, and gives you a hint as to what you might find yourself concerned with moving forward.

So, I think if you want to do a big kickoff for a campaign, one thing to consider is getting a very large monster - ancient dragons (or greatwyrms!) or the Tarrasque or a Kraken are all great possibilities, because these are the sorts of monsters that can threaten entire cities - and that means you always have the excuse not to kill the party, because the monster is going to be focused on other parts of the city. But in the meantime, you've got this massive thing that is flying overhead or shaking the ground with its steps, or the party can see flailing tentacles tossing broken ships around the docks.

I am a big fan of starting level 1 characters off against zombies. Zombies are relatively durable for such a low-CR monster, but they're slow and almost impossible to miss, so your players, who are likely trying out a new character for the first time, are going to get the satisfaction of landing hits or seeing the zombie fail its dexterity saving throws, and if they're smart, they can always move far enough to keep the zombies at bay.

So, while it's not a scenario I've personally used (I did send my party up against zombies in the first official setting of my Ravnica game, but it wasn't quite the same) I think another huge set-piece you can pull off is a massive zombie plague. The party is only going to be fighting balanced encounters with an appropriate number of zombies, but the scene you describe will show that the dead are rising all over the city or town where they start.

I guess one common thread here is that this tends to work best when things start off in an urban location.

One streaming show that I think did this very well was The Unsleeping City. The conceptualization of basically all the Dimension 20 shows is incredible, but the first big fight in The Unsleeping City saw the party fighting a bunch of mutant Santa clones in the middle of Times Square, with a kind of horrifying "hive queen" Santa clone in the center.

It was huge and utterly ridiculous. And actually, unlike the examples I've been talking about, it is actually balanced for their level (which was like 2 or 3).

Thinking about published adventures, it occurs to me that I think Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus missed an opportunity. That adventure begins with the city of Elturel getting abruptly dragged into the Nine Hells, leaving only a massive crater behind in the continent of Faerun, and the party is motivated to eventually travel to the Hells in an effort to restore the city and save its people from being forever claimed by the Hells.

Or, rather, the adventure begins after this has happened, and the party arrives at Baldur's Gate among a throng of refugees seeking shelter in the neighboring city. How cool would it have been if the first session of the adventure has the party facing off against some Zariel cultists on the outskirts of the city, only for their initial victory to suddenly turn to defeat as they witness the city vanish.

I think that most of us get into games like D&D because we want to take part in those huge, epic moments. And I certainly understand the need to start things a little slow and build up to the heightened stuff. But I also think it's worth it to give the party something really exciting off the bat to whet their appetite and start things off with a bang.

9.2 Eternity's End

 The official announcement has come. 9.2, Eternity's End, is what's coming next for World of Warcraft, and appears to be the final major patch of Shadowlands.

The patch will take us to Zereth Mortis, a beautiful land at the heart of the Shadowlands that we first visit by navigating a realm of endless mists. There, we'll meet the Automa, a group of constructed creatures built by the First Ones to generate additional afterlives like the ones we've seen in the expansion. We'll also meet the Enlightened, a group of Brokers who have set aside their pursuit for material wealth (whatever material wealth is in a spiritual realm) in order to help to safeguard the region.

It appears that there will be a campaign over the course of the patch in which, among other things, we learn the runic language of the Automa in an effort to learn what knowledge they hold.

However, the bigger issue is that the Jailer has invaded, and his Mawsworn forces are pushing into the Sepulcher of the First Ones, which will be the big raid where we finally face off against Zovaal.

The Sepulcher will see a return of class-themed tier sets, though it does look like each of these sets is going to have a very similar visual language and color scheme.

In terms of unique gameplay and system changes, I don't see a whole lot. That, of course, might be fine - we don't want a situation like BFA where every patch brings an enormous new system to unlock and learn.

Zereth Mortis looks very pretty - it's divided between a lush zone with water that one can walk on, and lots of this mechanical life. The other side is a dry desert, which is apparently meant to represent reality's state prior to the First Ones' intervention.

While the preview video Blizzard posted focused a lot on the world design and lore of the new area, I got the sense that they were being a little cagey - the First Ones are creators not just of the Shadowlands, but the whole of the Warcraft universe, and so I would be surprised if we don't get some huge lore bombs.

I don't know how big Zereth Mortis is supposed to be, though I suspect it's going to be much larger than Korthia (ideally it'd be the size of the whole Maw, but I'm not going to hold them to that expectation.)

Mainly I felt that details were somewhat sketchy - I don't think we should expect this patch to drop super soon - perhaps waiting until spring of next year.

Blizzard talked about this patch closing a chapter that started in Warcraft III, (which oddly reminded me of the way Nintendo was talking about Metroid Dread,) though I don't know what that actually means. They're not ready to show us what the next expansion will be, but that will presumably be the next big announcement to follow this patch.

Dark Sun and Possibly Missing Hints?

 In an interview with Todd Kenreck, D&D's Jeremy Crawford was talking about the Owlin, a playable race of Owl-folk that will be coming with Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos. The Strixhaven book is D&D's third book based on content from Magic: the Gathering (MTG had its own crossover the other way with this year's "Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms" set) though it's a bit different from the conventional campaign setting sourcebooks, Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica and Mythic Odysseys of Theros. The Strixhaven book is going to be more of an adventure book, with, if I recall correctly, four different adventures that can be linked together to form a full campaign, all based around the magical school of Strixhaven.

Though the Owlin were initially being presented in the "Folk of the Feywild" Unearthed Arcana article that gave us our first look at the playable Fairy, as well as the Rabbitfolk, who became the Harengon in Wild Beyond the Witchlight, the Owlkin, who would become the Owlin, were being previewed for the other book (no word yet on the Hobgoblin of the Feywild.)

Now, sure, sometimes things in UA just don't wind up coming out. The Brute Fighter was previewed along with the Circle of Spores Druid and Order Cleric and School of Invention Wizard. Spores and Order were published in Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, while the School of Invention's central conceit was reworked as a magic item - the Mizzium Apparatus, which members of Ravnica's Izzet League can get when they hit a certain level of renown. I suspect the Brute Martial Archetype was probably being conceived to thematically serve for members of the Gruul Clans or maybe the Cult of Rakdos, but mechanically and perhaps conceptually, it didn't really jump out as well as the ones that did get published.

But the point I'm actually trying to make is that UA articles are not always presented as playtesting material for a single book. And that got me thinking... Did we miss something in the most recent UA, Travelers of the Multiverse?

Travelers of the Multiverse presented several new playable races - the Astral Elf, Autognome, Giff, Plasmoid, Hadozee, and Thri-kreen.

This seemed to confirm that there is a Spelljammer book in the works - my hope is that it's a setting sourcebook like Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft.

Giff, seen in 5th Edition in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, premiered in the Spelljammer setting. And the sci-fi feel of Autognomes and Plasmoids both make them clear fits for Spelljammer's science-fantasy premise. The Hadozee, a race of simian humanoids who can glide around like flying squirrels, I believe, are very similar to a playable race called the Yazirians in Star Frontiers, a different game published by TSR in the early 80s. In fact, a race very similar to the Yazirians were depicted as "Shadow People" in Dragonlance and then, as Hadozee in Spelljammer, meaning we've got a pretty obvious connection there as well.

Given the weirdness of the science-fantasy Spelljammer setting, it's conceivable that the UA post was entirely about Spelljammer.

But...

First off, we have the Astral Elf. The Astral Elves are from the Astral Plane. One of the oddities of the design here is that it's presented as its own race, rather than as a subrace of the elves from the Player's Handbook. I suspect this is to enshrine the new design philosophy toward races - in the PHB, all elves get a +2 bonus to Dexterity, with a +1 to something else depending on their subrace. In a world in which new races are being given the option to choose any +2/+1 distribution or a +1/+1/+1 distribution, it might get a bit muddied.

The Astral Plane does, in some ways, serve as a "space"-like realm for D&D. But Spelljammer focuses instead (at least in the previous editions) on fleshing out the Prime Material Plane as one with its own magical phenomena. The Astral Plane is more like space for the Outer Planes, but too alien to simply be the space between worlds of the prime material.

But honestly, the Astral Elves aren't what got me thinking.

It's the Thri-kreen.

The Thri-kreen have been in 5th Edition as creatures in the Monster Manual since the beginning. But the Thri-kreen were a playable race in Dark Sun, and have been one of the options for that setting in every edition that has portrayed the setting (which I believe is 2nd, 3rd, and 4th so far.)

Dark Sun was a very popular setting in the 90s, depicting a desperate, resource-starved world under the control of dystopian sorcerer-kings. It certainly had that very edgy 90s feel to it that might not be as strongly in vogue these days, but it's one of those settings that seems to really push the game out of its comfort zones - not only focusing on a desert environment, but also making the very use of arcane magic a dangerous prospect, and making something as simple as metal a rare commodity. Notably, as well, Dark Sun has a strong theme of psionics (I believe that Dune was a major inspiration for the setting, which is a story in which extraordinary mental abilities play a huge role, not to mention a strong focus on control of resources, a desert world, and god-like rulers overseeing a cruel civilization.)

My general stance is that I'm more interested in settings that do something really unique and different. Dark Sun sounds like it would stand out.

We know that there are a couple classic settings being worked on. Spelljammer seems practically confirmed. But I haven't really seen a lot of buzz around Dark Sun.

Doing some cursory research (a.k.a. looking it up on Wikipedia,) it looks like most of the classic Dark Sun races already have some representation in 5th Edition. Thri-kreen are one of the few missing. Another that seems interesting is the Mul - which are half-human/half-dwarves. Actually, given that we have half-elves and half-orcs, I'm kind of shocked that half-dwarves aren't a more common trope (there's a ton of precedence for half-elves. Did you know that even Elrond in Lord of the Rings is actually half-human?)

Anyway, it's a possible hint. I know that some of the more traditional settings like Greyhawk and Dragonlance have their fans, and for all I know, they might be really cool. But I think that, having the Forgotten Realms already, I'll find it a bit harder to get really amped up for another traditional medieval fantasy setting. Spelljammer and Dark Sun, though? I'm on board for sure.

Censoring Knowledge and Players Who Are Also DMs

 Some DMs will say: "don't read the Monster Manual." If you're playing a game in which you're going into the lair of a green dragon and one of the players pops out the Monster Manual to read up on all the abilities that a green dragon has and goes "ok, let's make sure to do a Heroes' Feast so that we can negate the dragon's breath weapon," a DM might feel that's unfair - that the players have taken knowledge from outside the game and used it to overcome (or at least seriously mitigate) one of the challenges they had come across.

But is it unfair?

D&D, especially when it comes to combat, is a strategy game. Its combat is highly tactical, with each action and decision representing calculated risks that the player makes. My Paladin is going to go up to that dragon and hit it with my weapon because I've decided that the risks of getting into melee range of the dragon (namely, getting hit with its melee attacks or its breath weapon) are worth it because the damage I can do to it might help us take it down faster than it can take us down. Maybe I'm going to be even more specific, though, not only approaching it but also making sure that I am standing on the opposite side of the dragon from my Wizard friend - figuring that it can breath on one of us, but not both. That is a tactical decision that, yes, comes with its own risks (by opening distance between us, our Cleric healer might not be able to get to both of us should they need to) but is also probably a sound decision.

Fighting smart comes in two related but separate concepts - tactics and strategy. My paladin's actions in the above example are tactics - the small-scale, in-the-moment decisions that affect the outcome of the fight. But strategy is larger-scale, a question of logistics and planning and broader movements. A General is interested in strategy, leaving tactical decisions to officers that they trust to lead their troops. A lieutenant might concern themselves with how the soldiers under their command will take some river crossing, but it's the general who determined that they needed to control that river in the first place.

For a TTRPG, there's only so much that a DM/GM can do to plan things out - if I'm a DM and I've got some ancient lich who has been orchestrating a plot to take over a nation by instigating a war, I think we can generally assume that most DMs aren't actually as smart as the lich that they're trying to portray.

As such, there's some shorthand. This often involves a kind of "schrodinger's hallway" solution - the illusion of an open world with many options that ultimately lead to the same destination.

I'm getting a little off-topic here.

Going to our first hypothetical, having a player sit there with the Monster Manual in hand, looking up the stats on any monster the DM hints is coming, feels like cheating.

But for some of us, we cannot help but read the Monster Manual in our head. I was a DM well before I was ever a player, and I can tell you that I've memorized that, for example, a green dragon both produces and is immune to poison damage. I know that nearly every devil is fully immune to fire damage and will often be resistant or immune to nonmagical weapons that aren't silvered, whereas a demon tends to have resistance to fire, cold, and lightning damage and its "physical resistance" is typically not affected by whether the weapon is silver or not. I know that acid, while very useful against both of these, will be worthless if you find yourself facing yugoloths, as those neutral evil fiends from Gehenna are immune to it.

Experienced players of D&D will internalize a lot of this information, especially if they've ever run a game of D&D. How, then, do you deal with this?

My answer: you don't.

I think it's fine for players to know a monster's weaknesses and resistances. Yes, when I play a low-intelligence monk, it might be hard to explain why my character would know not to hit the black dragon with acid, but then, he's not likely to do that anyway, given his class.

The point is, this game is not going to be a perfect simulation of a fantastical reality, and we are piloting characters who also benefit from our own knowledge. As a player, you can do your best to simulate the ignorance of the character, but I don't think that you should be required to. Let's not set ourselves up for a situation in which the DM is left suspicious of whether the player is only coincidentally never using damage types the thing is resistant or immune to, or if they're making that choice intentionally - instead, let's just accept that a knowledgeable player will play smart.

But is this an unfair advantage? To a brand-new player, it might be a surprise to learn that not all dragons breathe fire, and they might get very excited when they hit a blue dragon with a lightning bolt, only to find that it does exactly zero (when they could have use fireball and gotten the full effect.)

There are two ways I think we can approach this.

One is that there are tons of ways that experience makes a player more effective. A new player might see a cantrip like True Strike (which at best I think is something a legendary spellcaster might use with a legendary action before casting a powerful spell attack on their turn) and erroneously think it's a good one to pick up, while veterans would see it as a mostly useless trap. I think a good DM will let the player make that mistake, but then be lenient with them if they wish to, say, swap out that cantrip for something better. That same DM might not be so forgiving when a veteran player does the same.

The other thing, though, ties into what I think is an issue with Intelligence-based ability checks in general.

DMs are often too precious, if you ask me, about the specifics of mechanics of their monsters. As a result, a character having a high intelligence and proficiency in various knowledge-based skills often winds up getting, at best, some lore fluff when they succeed on a check. Let's say that the characters go into a hollowed-out tree surrounded by bloated, foul-smelling corpses. I think any decent Nature check should allow the player to know that this is the lair of a green dragon. But that's usually as far as it goes, regardless of how well the person rolls.

I think successful intelligence checks should provide actionable information. If the Artificer gets a 28 on their Intelligence check to see what they know about green dragons, it's all well and good for you to say that they're manipulative and deceptive, like to live in forests, and are generally bad news, but I think you owe it to that player to give them a peek behind the curtain - clearly, what they, as an adventurer who is likely to face a green dragon soon, wants to know, is important information on how to kill it. So, with a good check like that, I think you should be willing to tell them that the dragon's breath is a poisonous cloud and that the dragon itself is immune to any such toxins. You could also throw in that a dragon's breath is unpredictable, sometimes coming back mere moments after their last one, or sometimes taking a few more seconds to recuperate, during which a dragon will either fight with tooth and claw or will take to the skies and create distance until they can unleash the devastating breath again.

The whole fun of the game is the way that these characters develop skills and abilities that allow them to overcome the monstrous obstacles set in their way. As a DM, you're not trying to beat the players. You're trying to present them with exciting challenges that will feel very cool to overcome.

And knowledge is one of the skills that they bring to bear.

That doesn't mean you can't shake things up for your players. I think a DM should assume that at least some players will be able to identify anything you throw at them, especially if they know that the player is an experienced D&D veteran and/or has DM'd before. If you're worried that you can't surprise them, you're not being imaginative enough.

Let's take that green dragon lair. You've got a hollowed-out tree that leads into an underground cavern. Every sign points to the monster within being a green dragon. But when the party gets down to the bottom of it, what if it's actually a Beholder? The Beholder petrified the dragon and took over its hoard, claiming the stony dragon as its own property. Or maybe, there's a powerful illusionist who invented the dragon, and the reason why all the signs point to a green dragon is because this wizard had reasons to make it seem there was one.

Here, the DM can use the party's expectations against them.

And let's also not forget that not every monster is as easily prepared for. A green dragon does have Heroes' Feast as a real Achilles' heel, with the immunity to poison damage and the frightened condition taking some major pieces out of the green dragon's playbook.

But the very preparation that a party makes to face down a particular kind of foe could even tip that foe off. If a spy in the employ of a green dragon sees the party buying a big jeweled chalice, they might suspect its purpose. They report back to the dragon and the dragon responds by having her hoard moved elsewhere and then getting the kobold engineers in her employ to rig the entire lair to be nothing but a death trap.

Now, the challenge is completely different - rather than an angry, poison-breathing dragon, the party finds whirling blades and falling rocks and then, at the end, just a big old pile of barrels filled with smokepowder. A challenge requiring a quick tactical reassessment.

I guess my point here is that I don't find "knowing stat blocks" to be a game-breaking example of metagaming. Embrace it. Build around it.