Playtest 8: Bastions and Cantrips - Bastions Round One

 The latest UA for the 2024 Core Rulebooks throws us something profoundly new: a whole new gameplay system that is to be found in the DMG. Part of the fantasy in D&D, especially as one climbs to higher levels, is to see your player characters become movers and shakers in their fantasy worlds. While yes, you can have a campaign that goes all the way to level 20 just exploring and traveling from place to place, many campaigns at some point have the party set up a home base (urban campaigns, like those set in Ravnica or Sigil-focused campaigns in Planescape certainly lend themselves to this).

This system is big and new, and so I don't think I can do a full comprehensive breakdown of the system here, though I'll do what I can.

Somewhat like the Starship system in Starfinder, your "budget" to create a bastion is pleasingly divorced from the regular gold economy - sort of. Basically, building the Bastion happens as a result of leveling up, starting at level 5, but expanding it and sometimes making use of its facilities requires the investment of gold.

Honestly, this might not be such a bad thing, because if you're not a Wizard and you've gotten the best equipment that gold can buy (which usually excludes most magic items, which have to be found, typically) you usually run out of things to spend your gold on other than the occasional costly spell reagent.

Interestingly, each player gets their own Bastion, though the rules suggest you can easily build them together to have a singular group headquarters. But this does allow for a little independence and separate flavoring. A Wizard could go the classic route and have a tower, while a Monk might build a monastery or a Fighter might built a fort. An Artificer probably has some kind of workshop (though we'll get into the specific facilities, one of which is the Workshop, which Artificers ironically don't qualify for unless you count tool expertise as a kind of skill expertise).

For the most part, maintaining the Bastion is free - you have hirelings that keep the place running, but the assumption is that the business that they get up to is self-sustaining and pays their salaries.

Bastions function a bit like downtime activities, and usually get to take a "turn" every seven days, which allows players to set the facilities and their hirelings on a course of action that will have some benefit, most of which don't require the player character to be there.

Bastions accrue "Bastion Points" or "BP" on each of their turns - each special facility contributing a certain number on each Bastion turn. Different facilities roll a different die when they fulfill an order, or just 1d4 if they are told to simply "maintain." When a character levels up (or when they hit the XP required for an Epic Boon) BP can then be traded in for various things, but primarily magic items - including up to legendary quality items (though I suspect that it will take a long time to acquire the 700 BP required to get one). The DM of course remains the arbiter on whether a magic item can be attained, but this provides a way for the players to seek out and target a particular magic item.

BP can also be spent to spread word of how great the player character is, giving them advantage on charisma checks, or 100 can be spent to resurrect them if they die.

Indeed, the idea here is to encourage players to get creative on building their own locations and NPCs, which I think is fantastic. Most facilities come with at least one Hireling NPC, and the player is encouraged to come up with the name and personality for that character.

Facilities come in the basic or special varieties. Basic facilities are mundane rooms like kitchens or bedrooms, and are there primarily for flavor purposes. Special facilities have a function, which we'll list in an abbreviated manner. Rooms range from Cramped (4 5x5 foot squares) to Roomy (16) to Vast (36), and gold can be spent expanding facilities to larger sizes if needs be - which can have a mechanical benefit on some rooms.

Bastion defenders can also be hired, and serve to defend the bastion in the event of an attack. Again, these are supported by the budget of the bastion, so no bookkeeping required by the players.

On your bastion's turn, you can give orders to each of your special facilities. These facilities have level requirements, and you start with two, getting two more at level 9, one more at level 13, and another at level 17. (Basically, it's your PB other than starting with only two at level 5).

Facilities have level requirements and sometimes other prerequisites - such as needing to be able to use an Arcane focus to have an Arcane Study facility (which makes it nice that Arcane Tricksters and Eldritch Knights can now use those).

The orders you can give your facilities are as follows, and the facilities can, I believe, each do only one of these other than Maintain, which is a catch-all when you don't want to do anything in particular).

Let me do a quick rundown of facilities:

Level 5 Facilities:

    Arcane Study

Requires the ability to use an Arcane Focus. Can Craft blank books and arcane foci, which can be sold for gold. Also lets you cast identify once for free if you spend a Long Rest here.

    Armory

No requirement. Lets you Trade to arm your bastion defenders, making it less likely you'll lose any if your bastion is attacked.

    Barracks

No requirement. Lets you Recruit to add four bastion defenders to your bastion, with room for up to 12 (or 25 if you upgrade the facility to Vast for 2000g.)

    Garden

No requirement. Lets you Harvest to gain Decorative plants (which can be sold for gold,) Food (which can also be sold), Herbs (enough to make a single potion of healing) or Poison (enough to make two vials of Antitoxin or one of Basic Poison). You can swap what the garden is growing but this takes 21 days. You can also enlarge the garden to vast for 2000g and you can have two crops growing at once, or two of the same.

    Library:

No requirement. Lets you Research to gain information about legends, events, locations, people, creatures, or famous objects. You get up to three accurate pieces of information about the topic, determined by DM.

    Sanctuary:

Requires the ability to use a Holy symbol or Druidic focus as a spell focus. Lets you Craft to create a Sacred Focus (a Druidic Focus or Holy Symbol) that can be sold (or used, of course). If you spend a long rest within the bastion, you can cast Healing Word once for free at half your level, rounded down

    Smithy:

Requires Fighting Style or Unarmored Defense. Lets you Craft to create twenty pieces of simple ammunition or a simple weapon at half the normal cost. You can also spend 14 days and 800 gold to make a simple Masterwork Weapon, which is nonmagical but permanently becomes a +1 weapon if the Magic Weapon spell is cast on it. You can also craft a suit of Medium or Heavy armor, 20 caltrops, a 10-foot chain, a crowbar, a grappling hook, a hammer (regular or sledge,) 4 horseshoes, a hunting trap, a set of manacles, a miner's pick, 10 iron spikes or pitons, an iron pot, a metal Shield, or a shove. The work takes 7 days or 21 days for a suit of armor, all at half cost. Or! You can make a martial weapon after 14 days at half price, or a masterwork Martial weapon, which takes 21 days, and has the same benefit of becoming permanently magical if Magic Weapon is cast on it.

    Storehouse:

No requirement. Lets you Trade to acquire up to 500g worth of nonmagical items, or you can have them sell these items off with a profit. At level 9, the total you can buy and sell increases to 2000g, then 5000 at level 13. At level 5, you get a 10% profit on selling these things. At level 9, the profit is 20%. At level 13, it's a 50% profit, and at level 17, you make a full 100% profit.

    Workshop:

Requires Expertise in a skill. Lets you Craft a tiny nonmagical object that can be made with Carpenter's Tools, Cobbler's Tools, Glassblower's Tools, Mason's Tools, Potter's Tools, Tinker's Tools, Weaver's Tools, or Woodcutter's Tools. The process takes 7 days and costs nothing as long as the object is not worth more than 10g. If it's more, you pay half the item's cost. If you spend a Short Rest int he Workshop, you get Heroic Advantage (the new name for Inspiration) and can get this benefit once per long rest.

So, that's all the facilities you can get at level 5. There are several others that you can get at level 9, 13, or 17, which we'll get into in later posts.

Broadly speaking, I think this probably works better as a more mechanically simply form of Downtime. It does still require players and DMs to track time, which can be a challenge, but I think there's a lot of fun to the concept here, and it's something genuinely new, which has been somewhat lacking in this playtest.

Playtest 8: Bastions and Cantrips - Cantrips

 In a surprise move, we got the next UA hot on the heels of playtest 7. But unlike all the previous ones, which were focused on classes (and species) and content in the PHB, this one is giving us a major feature from the DMG.

Now, I have not yet read the full Bastion section, which is a system meant to give mechanical benefits for maintaining a party headquarters - something that will surely work better for some campaigns than others, but could potentially be fun.

However, we've also got a lot of revisions for Cantrips, which to be fair probably will be found in the PHB. And there are some big changes. Some are getting nerfed, some are getting buffed. One is getting at least halfway to being more appropriately-named.

So, let's go down the list.

    Acid Splash:

Acid Splash is now a true AoE cantrip - rather than hitting a secondary target, you target a point and creatures in a 5-foot-radius sphere have to save or take damage. While the damage is, of course, on the low end, Acid is one of the more reliable damage types (if you're not fighting Yugoloths) and being able to hit multiple targets for free is good. Friendly fire is going to be a new concern with this version of the spell, and I think the chance of hitting three targets in a 5-foot radius is unlikely, but I might still consider this a slight buff.

    Blade Ward:

Similar to revisions to Guidance and Resistance, Blade Ward is now a reaction used to impose disadvantage on someone targeting you with a melee attack. So, this is quite different: the old version gave you resistance to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage. This one will work better against foes that are doing force damage with their attacks, which seems to be the new version of "the attacks count as magical" but this will no longer help against ranged attacks, and will be less powerful against swarms of enemies or monsters with lots of attacks. Making this a reaction certainly helps it, but I still doubt I'll ever take this version either.

    Chill Touch:

Hoo boy. Chill Touch is now a Touch spell, which gets it halfway to actually matching its name. It now deals 1d10 damage (which is still Necrotic, not Cold). It also still prevents healing for the next turn, but it no longer gives undead targets disadvantage on attacks against you.

So, here's my thoughts: I think maybe they nerfed it in the wrong way. As a DM, it's always a little frustrating that so many monsters' cool and unique thing is hurt by Chill Touch. Vampires regenerate unless they're hit with radiant damage - which is thematic and cool. But Chill Touch also prevents it. Loup-Garou fixed the werewolf problem where spellcasters could just ignore the whole "need a silver weapon" thing, and also fixed the problem where any old magic weapon could harm them. But a simple Chill Touch also gets around it. These problems aren't fixed with this change.

Now, it does make it a little more risky to actually apply the spell to a foe - you need to get into melee range, which a Wizard probably doesn't want to do with a Troll or other thing you want to shut down healing for. Still, I liked Chill Touch thematically for a Necromancer character as their go-to damage cantrip. So I'm not really into this change.

    Friends:

Friends now straight up charms the target for a minute. Now... this is certainly better (there's also no rider that the target will become hostile after the duration ends, though I think that's up to the DM to kind of work out). The issue here is, other than its limited 10-foot range, is this just better than Charm Person? Are we getting an equivalent effect for free with this cantrip? The target will automatically succeed on its save if you're fighting it, to be fair. So maybe this is just a decent buff? My concern now is that it's too powerful, rather than not powerful enough.

    Poison Spray:

Ok, so Poison Spray now has a 30-foot range and is made with an attack roll rather than a Con save. It's also now a Necromancy cantrip rather than a Conjuration one. This is, unquestionably, a buff. Con saves are the one save that basically every monster is going to be decent at (there are vanishingly few creatures with negative Con modifiers) and I think in general, usually an attack roll is a more reliable way to deal damage (it gets around things like magic resistance). Poison as a damage type is, of course, still very risky with the existing monsters in 5E, as most undead, constructs, and fiends are fully immune to it (maybe Celestials too?) And 30 feet is better, but still pretty limited. Still, this is a buff in almost all situations. So good.

    Produce Flame:

The big change is that the spell is now a bonus action, but throwing the flame even on the first turn is an action. The good side about this is that there's nothing about whether you need to have an open hand, and the flame emits no heat and ignites nothing (while in your hand) so you should be able to keep the flame in the hand even if you pick up a weapons or something. Also, you only need the bonus action to start the spell - hurling flame doesn't consume the fire. Additionally, the range has increased to 60 feet.

So, I think the issues with this spell are largely now dealt with. It's a little action-costly on the first round, but I think this become a pretty solid option for a ranged Druid spellcaster.

    Shillelagh:

Two changes: Rather than making the weapon "count as magical," you can now have it deal Force damage - which is consistent with a lot of the recent design. The other change is that the damage now scales up with tier. At level 5, the damage goes up to a d10, then at 11 it becomes a d12, and at 17 it becomes 2d6.

Interesting that at tier 4 it goes up only by .5 average damage. I think it's wise that they didn't let you do something like extra attack with it as it scaled, because I think a lot of characters will either dip into Druid to get this with a class (like Ranger) that can multiclass or otherwise use it in conjunction with such a feature. I don't have any issues with these changes.

    Shocking Grasp:

Shocking Grasp gets two nerfs: the first is that you no longer get advantage if the target is wearing metallic armor. The second, and arguably more relevant one, is that you prevent only opportunity attacks, not all reactions.

I think the intention here was always to use it as an emergency-escape cantrip, so a Wizard could run away from the big armored knight that just got into range. You will no longer be preventing Counterspells or Shield spells with this. Mechanically, I think that's a fair nerf. Thematically I'm less in love with it, as it seemed appropriate that shocking someone would make it harder for them to react in any way, but I guess that's the compromise of flavor and mechanics.

    Spare the Dying:

This got a buff in that it now has a 15-foot range, rather than being touch. (A previous version had it restore 1 HP to the target, but that was also when they were testing the confusing "1 HP but you're unconscious" rules). This is certainly better. While a Healer's Kit will do the same thing and leave you an open cantrip slot, I still like this as a spell.

    True Strike:

Ah yes! The worst cantrip in all of D&D! The spell where you might as well just attack instead!

True Strike has been totally redesigned, as well it should be.

As an action, you make an attack with the weapon used as the spell's material component. But you make the attack and damage rolls using your spellcasting ability rather than Strength or Dexterity. If the attack deals damage, you can make that damage Radiant, or its normal damage (your choice). At level 5, the damage of the attack deals an additional 1d6 Radiant (regardless of your chosen damage type). At 11, you get 2d6, and at 17 it's 3d6.

Phew. So... this could actually be... good? Like, not mind-blowing, but consider this: If you're a 1st level Wizard shooting a Light Crossbow, this will have the same bonus to hit as your Firebolt, but will deal 1d6+3 (assuming standard 1st level stats) or 6.5, which is more than the 5.5 of your Firebolt. And it's Radiant damage, which very few things resist (and which sometimes has bonus effects such as against Zombies and Vampires). At level 5, you'll be doing say 2d6+4, or 11, which is the same as the Firebolt. By level 11, assuming you're maxing out Intelligence to start with, you're doing 3d6+5, or 16.5, which is still keeping pace (and that's without any sort of magical bonus like a +1 Light Crossbow).

Of course, I think what's more likely is that you'll use this as some kind of hybrid role, like an Eldritch Knight. While not as good as Booming Blade or Green-Flame Blade for them, this will let you weave in a cantrip (that said, an EK might prefer regular attacks or the aforementioned SCAG cantrips because their Intelligence is unlikely to be as good as their main weapon attack ability).

Still, I actually think this cantrip is remotely useable now, which is a massive upgrade!

Recurring Details in Remedy Games (Alan Wake in Particular)

 So, because I've been visited once again (and very hot on the heels of the last visit) by a certain stupid freaking virus, I've had a lot of time on my hands sitting here at my computer. This, as it turns out, is the exact state ideal for watching nearly three-hour-long video essays about games, so I watched Hidden Machine's "Exploring the Remedy Connected Universe," which goes all the way back to Death Rally and up through Control and its DLCs.

Spoiler warning: this post touches on elements of existing games but also the previews we've gotten for Alan Wake II.

Factions and the Planes: Alignment is a Lie

 So, not long from now, we'll be getting our 5th Edition Planescape box set. While there's a lot of wariness around, well, just having a box set for a campaign setting rather than the thick books we got earlier in 5E for places like Ravnica, Eberron, or Ravenloft (and I know some people didn't like Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, to which I respond "what is wrong with you?") I do think some of the recent previews have reassured me that there's some substance here, including (admittedly only two pages) for each of the Gate Towns in the Outlands, unlike Spelljammer, which truly lacked most of the "setting" to the setting (beyond the Rock of Bral).

One of the cores to the Planescape setting is its Factions. As someone running a long campaign set in Ravnica, I've been dealing with a similar concept - a bunch of philosophically distinct groups that represent certain worldviews.

But I've been thinking more and more about the way that the various planes work and the various ways that the factions see things, and it calls into question one of the fundamental principles of D&D's cosmology:

Are we sure that the planes are really based on alignment?

Obviously, on a meta level, they are. Indeed, some have complained that the in-between planes like Arcadia or Carceri are almost redundant - characters are typically described in a kind of 3x3 grid, where each position is basically a set of coordinates: Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic, and Good, Neutral, or Evil.

But the planes don't totally represent those forces precisely. Acheron is the plane of war, but its position and historical "official" alignment is lawful neutral/lawful evil. And sure, the organization of armies and military hierarchy is surely a lawful one, but the actual practice of war is one of the most chaotic things in human experience. That order serves, if anything, to impose some degree of order upon a chaotic thing.

In contrast, Carceri is the Prison Plane, and is aligned as Neutral Evil/Chaotic Evil. But isn't a prison, a place where one's existence is regimented and controlled, more of a lawful kind of thing?

There are certainly some factions that seem to have particular alignments: the Mercykillers are pretty obviously lawful evil, believing in draconian punishment and oppression as the only way to enforce order (and therefore justified) and so their place on Acheron makes a certain sense - their real goal is law, but they use evil eagerly as a means to achieve that.

But then you have people like the Fated - a group that basically believes that the rich and powerful have every right to exploit others and take from others, which I would say puts them in a kind of neutral evil/lawful evil kind of alignment, yet their home plane is not Gehenna, the plane of greed, but instead Ysgard, which is the chaotic neutral/chaotic good plane. (Maybe the original designers were fans of Ayn Rand and wanted to place such a worldview in a more flattering position. As someone born during the Reagan administration and who has thus never lived in a country with a healthy social safety net, I am not a fan of Objectivism.)

The notion of the Great Wheel suggests that these planes all exist in an alignment relationship to one another, but it might actually make more sense if we think of them all independently as simply representing what they really focus on. Gehenna is a place of selfishness and greed, and that means its indigenous fiends, the Yugoloths, are all about profiteering in the Blood War. But we don't necessarily need to then say that it occupies this specific place between the Nine Hells and the Abyss (indeed, given its position you might assume they favor the Devils over the Demons because they're next-door neighbors).

A lot of this ambiguity is part of the 2nd Edition books that established Planescape. The books emphasize that the "Great Wheel" model points to the shape of the Outlands as evidence of its truth, but that critics of this theory say that the shape of the Outlands was the first inspiration for the theory, making the whole thing kind of circular logic.

But if we accept the idea that alignment, as a way of categorizing moral and ethical worldviews, is actually just a system imposed upon a much more nuanced cosmos that's more open to interpretation, well... Honestly I think that makes things a little more Planescape.

We'll see if 5E's release tries to iron out the wrinkles in the setting. The fact that designers have been referring to Sigil as the center of the multiverse while in 2nd Edition one of the three major rules of the universe was that there was no singular center to the multiverse does make me worry that things are getting simplified.

The weirdness of Planescape is not just that there are strange creatures popping up in Sigil. It's that the underpinnings of the epic struggles between light and darkness on the Material Plane are exposed as far thornier, ambiguous ones out here in the Outer Planes.

I will say that I really think we could use a 5E Manual of the Planes. The Gate Towns will be useful to give us a flavor of the planes, but in the absence of a whole Planescape product line like TSR released in the 90s, we could use a revisit to the planes themselves, both for conventional campaigns where traveling to them is a climactic moment and for Planescape ones where you're hopping from the Abyss to Bytopia at level 1.

Speculating on the Plot of Alan Wake II

 So, this is a case where I don't know if I just don't know all the deep lore of Alan Wake or if there simply isn't as much. I played through the original game and its two DLC chapters after finishing Control (with the release of Alan Wake Remastered) and so I think I have the bulk of the story.

I never played Alan Wake's American Nightmare, which I think was an exclusive to Xbox (and might have been on the 360, which we have at my apartment, but we weren't doing a lot of online stuff in that console generation, and I think it was like, part of their Xbox Live service or something). But I'm given to understand that American Nightmare was basically one episode of many in which Alan tried to write himself out of the Dark Place.

As we know, and experience in the DLCs, Alan is trapped in the Dark Place as a sort of dramatic balance to allow his wife, Alice, to escape from the lake for real, rather than in a twisted mockery the way that Thomas Zane revived his girlfriend, Barbara Jagger.

As far as we know, Alice was truly herself after escaping, and we know from Control that she actually visited the FBC for an interview, in which she complained that someone who looked exactly like her husband was menacing her.

The ending of Alan Wake sees the introduction of Mr. Scratch, but as far as I can tell, outside of American Nightmare (in which he does play the key villain role and is theoretically defeated,) he doesn't really pop up in, for example, the Signal or the Writer DLCs. He's a doppelganger who seems to embody all the worst aspects of Alan's personality - I heard it described (possibly by creative director Sam Lake, who's kind of the face of Remedy Studio, and literally the face of Max Payne/Alex Casey) as if Mr. Scratch is all the worst rumors about Alan's behavior manifested.

While it's more backstory than part of the main game, Alan Wake has a reputation for drug and alcohol abuse and getting into physical altercations, and rumors that he's kind of a psychotic asshole. Of course, we know that he's not really that - just an artist struggling to keep up with the demands that fame has placed on him - but Mr. Scratch, well, is. And he seems to be a full-on monster.

While Stephen King's books are clearly the biggest point of inspiration for Alan Wake, the influence of David Lynch and particularly Twin Peaks is also a big source that the game draws from. The Oh Deer Diner we visit at the start of the game is clearly modeled on the Double R Diner from that show, and the Pacific Northwest setting as well (if it were pure King it would be either set in Maine or Colorado).

At the end of the original Twin Peaks run in the early 1990s, central protagonist Dale Cooper travels into the Black Lodge - an otherworldly place beyond our reality, not unlike the Dark Place. And like Alan, Cooper spends over a decade (more than one in Cooper's case) trapped within it, the distant "sequel" series, Twin Peaks: The Return finally has Cooper escape it. But within the Lodge, Dale meets his doppelganger - a version of him that seems to contain the evil spirit BOB that is behind much of the terror inflicted on the eponymous town. The Return shows us that Dark Cooper, as some call him, has been operating as a basically pure evil gang leader who murders on a whim and explicitly does things because he wants to do them, not because he needs to do them.

I think Mr. Scratch is likely to play a similar role.

Specifically, the "real world" side of the story in which we'll be playing as FBI Agent Saga Anderson has us travel to Watery (the neighboring town to Bright Falls) to investigate a series of ritualized murders that are related to something called the Cult of the Tree. There's a rumor that the leader of the cult is missing author Alan Wake.

So, naturally, I think it likely that this cult leader is, in fact, Mr. Scratch - this doppelganger born of the Dark Place.

Maybe this is obvious. But I think it'll be interesting to see how much of Alan is really in Mr. Scratch. In the DLCs, we face off against another doppelganger, but in this case it's half of Alan's psyche, while the Alan we're playing as is actually the rational, determined part of him.

Alan Wake II looks to be all about dualities - two player characters, two realities, and of course, two Alans. I'll be curious to see how deep this theme goes.

The idea of the doppelganger is a potent trope in psychological horror. The doppelganger can be our opposite, standing in for all the things we're opposed to, but because of this, they take on our own shape. Or, more insidiously, they can represent inner truths we believe about ourselves. Maybe the monstrous doppelganger is the real us, and that the persona we've crafted to serve as our identity is a false facade?

Jung wrote about the Shadow - this kind of dark reflection of the things we know. Our self-perception can also be shaped by the perceptions of others, or even our perceptions of those perceptions. Alan Wake, the character/person, seems to be a mostly good guy who maybe has a temper and doesn't deal with his stress in the healthiest ways, but ultimately means well. But this image that has been pieced together by the public of his worst moments has created this image of an unstable menace, and Alan is well aware of that image, which feeds into the creation of Mr. Scratch.

The Dark Place is almost a literal representation of the Shadow - the Taken, who are claimed by the Dark Presence, are warped and violent versions of themselves.

Ok, let's go deep, though:

Barbara Jagger is clearly named that as a reference to Baba Yaga, the quintessential witch in Slavic folklore. The game is not subtle about this: the cabin that Alan and Alice go to through Jagger's manipulation (and that doesn't, strictly, exist) is called Bird Leg Cabin, a reference to Baba Yaga's hut, which walks around on chicken legs.

Baba Yaga is actually not always the villain in the stories where she appears. But she has an immense amount of power, and is tricky to deal with.

But to go a step further, the very concept of the Witch is typically a kind of shadow of what we expect an old woman to be like. If the idealized old woman is the kind and caring and giving grandmother, the Witch is the old woman who is nasty, self-interested, and demands heavy prices if you want something from her.

Now, that archetype is, of course, born out of a patriarchal system, where women are valued as caregivers and expected to give more than they receive. As such, in a modern, anti-patriarchal way, the archetype of the witch has transformed into something more aspirational.

The point is, what Barbara Jagger came back as was the shadow of what she had been. In 1970, when she was still alive, she was Thomas Zane's girlfriend. We actually don't get a great sense (as far as I can tell) what sort of person she really was, but it's her Shadow that actually emerges from the lake. And even when Zane tries to kill her, it turns out to be impossible.

In Control, the notion that humanity's collective unconscious shapes reality has real practicable effects - objects of power and even just altered items tend to be things with a strong, iconic appearance - something that we would all instantly recognize.

The Dark Place seems to empower an individual to shape things in this way on an individual level.

But we also see that the Dark Place is fluid and shapes itself around the person within it. In the DLCs, we mostly saw a dream- (or nightmare-) logic version of Bright Falls, but in all honesty that's probably because they already had those assets to work with. In Alan Wake II, Wake seems to be trapped in the grimy, noirish version of New York that his Alex Casey novels take place in.

The power of the Dark Place seems to allow one to shape this reality with ease, but it's clear that one can also do that in the real world with the Dark Place's power.

Indeed, there's a real chicken-and-egg question with a lot of the stuff going on in Alan Wake and Control. Control's AWE expansion implied that Jesse may have been created by Alan's writing about her (indeed, Jesse's backstory, which you can piece together over the course of the game - the events in Ordinary that she and Dylan were the only survivors of - sounds just like a Stephen King story, especially the details about a bunch of bullies being transformed into monsters by something called the Not-Mother, and with Wake loosely based on King, it would make sense that he could write a story like this). But we also seem to see Thomas Zane, and he looks just like Alan. Did Alan write Zane into existence? Did Zane write Alan into existence?

And are those two even mutually exclusive?

I don't know to what extent Zane will play a role in Alan Wake II. He was necessary as a literal guiding light in the first game, but after thirteen years, Alan's needed to come up with new strategies to survive and escape.

It does appear, from one of the trailers, that Alan does make it out of the Dark Place - we see him meeting Saga (or at least, it seems like we do) but I don't know when that will happen. My assumption was that we'd spend most of the game with Alan still in the Dark Place, but maybe not.

We also don't know if the FBC or Jesse Faden are going to play a big role. I think they probably want to allow each game to stand on its own for the most part, and Saga and her partner Alex Casey (who also looks identical to Sam Lake) are from the FBI, not the FBC. Still, while I don't think they need to go full-on latter-day MCU on this, I am curious to see if there are any hints at what we'll be seeing in Control II.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

I don't know what role, if any, Alice will play. Sadly, Alice's voice actor, Brett Madden, died in 2020, and I don't know if they'd want to recast or potentially even suggest Alice died as well (given that she was being menaced by Mr. Scratch, it wouldn't be terribly surprising, but it might also be considered insensitive as a choice given the reality).

Anyway, you can probably tell I'm hyped for the game.

Baldur's Gate 3 Has Done a Lot to Convince Me that Martials Need a Buff

 I love Karlach. I'm a big fan of Lae'zel. But I rarely use them in my party.

Here's why:

When I can have Wyll and Gale dropping Fireballs on massive groups of Absolute Cultists, as awesome as Lae'zel's Great Weapon-master strikes can be, it just doesn't make up for the multiplicative damage potential of hitting a whole bunch of targets at once. Lae'zel, when a GWM attack lands, hits like a freight train, to be sure. If she's using a Glaive with a +2 enchantment, she's hitting for like 1d10+7+10, or 21.5 damage. And with two attacks (we're level 9 at the moment) she's doing this twice. So, say, 43 damage overall (if the attacks hit).

But if Wyll drops a Fireball on some fools (and as a Warlock, it's upcast to 5th level) we're looking at 10d6, or 35 damage on a failed save. But even if every target succeeds on its save, if I hit three targets (which is usually my threshold for dropping a fireball) or more, we're looking at 17.5 thrice over, or 52.5 damage. In other words, Lae'zel's best case scenario is not doing as much damage as Wyll's worst case scenario.

Now, sure, the idea here is that spells cost resources. But at least in BG3, you have a lot of control over how frequently you rest, and the camp supplies to do so are plentiful (which I'm very grateful for - this isn't a survival horror game, and I don't want to be scrounging constantly while nearly dead for food). The only times when you are really forced to commit without taking long rests is a few "dungeon" areas, but even then, if you consider HP a resource, the ability to clear out, say, a giant swarm of undead with a Fireball will save you a lot.

Now, here's where I think martials could also potentially have a lot of power - their survivability. My main character in BG3 is a Paladin built for tanking. He has some fancy heavy armor (taken from the main villain of act two) and an adamantine shield that ultimately leave him with a 23 AC - so attacks do actually miss him most of the time.

But I think that the survival capability of literally just staying at range is actually stronger. It's rare that Gale or Wyll go down or even take damage, much less knocked out.

On top of that, it's relatively easy to outfit ranged characters with nearly as good armor as melee characters - and sometimes easier. Medium armor is nearly as good as heavy armor until you get to the very pinnacle of it (assuming you have the requisite dexterity). You do have to be tactical and keep your ranged characters at range, but there are lots of tools to help with that (I basically try to get Misty Step on any character who can have it).

I don't really know what the design solution is here. Do we have martials get significantly higher HP? Like, should a Fighter have 50% more or even double the HP of a Wizard? Should they get tools to reduce incoming damage even when they take it? (The Barbarian has this, of course, but also tends to have lower AC, balancing it somewhat with other martials, but not against ranged spellcasters). Do we need martials to deal significantly more damage with their weapons? Or do we need to give them Area-of-Effect tools?

See, my original class-based RPG I played was World of Warcraft, and while balance has shifted over the years, generally every class has area-effect capabilities, and so the many melee classes are pretty great when in the thick of it - a Demon Hunter blade-dancing through swarms of foes, or a Paladin laying down a Consecration to burn any foes standing near them.

It's a very different game, to be sure (for one thing, the monsters are very deterministic in their behavior, and will, for example, happily run into said Paladin's consecration) but it does strike me that D&D could use a way to make the armored knights (and particularly the unarmored monks) shine.

I think in theory you could suggest that in a single-target situation, martials might be better. But it's incredibly rare to face a single monster on its own - the action economy sort of makes such a fight far too easy.

Anyway, given how closely the BG3 mechanics are based on 5E, it actually serves as a kind of accelerated playtest for the game - you can get through several combat encounters in a single sitting, when at a table you're probably doing at most two or three in a night.

A Climactic Boss Fight in BG3

 So, spoiler alert here. I'm talking about what is, I think, the resolution to the plot in the Shadow-Cursed Lands. It also involves a villain with a rather famous voice actor (which probably just gave that away) and is a really big moment when the stakes and plot of Baldur's Gate 3 start to truly come into focus.

Spoilers ahead: