Ben Stovall Blog

Author: Ben Stovall

  • Legion Remix and the Mage Tower

    Legion Remix and the Mage Tower

    Last week, Blizzard announced in a blue post that during the upcoming Legion Remix event, the unique weapon appearances from the Mage Tower will not be made available again. This was a rather contentious announcement – there are many who want the weapon appearances to return, and there are perhaps just as many that want them to remain gone to elevate the weapon appearances; to grant them a level of prestige from their exclusivity.

    As someone who’s been playing Warcraft way too long, I’ve got my own opinion.

    A Brief on FOMO

    I’ve written on my blog before that I find weaponizing FOMO (the Fear of Missing Out) to be a blight upon game design. Usually, they’re used to pressure players into spending money on microtransactions, to incentivize daily engagement, or prolong retention. Frankly, I think if a game isn’t simply fun enough for its players to want to log in every day, or week, or month, then maybe the game has other issues it should address?

    Presently, there’s a few events going on in World of Warcraft. Right now, there’s Turbulent Timeways, which grants a unique mount for playing a handful of Timewalking Dungeons for a number of weeks during the event’s duration. There’s Collector’s Bounty, which has boosted the drop rates of many rare mounts and items from old raid and dungeon bosses. There’s Greedy Emissaries, treasure goblins from Diablo invading our capital cities and the patch zone that give you currency when killed that you can use to buy recolors of an HD updated version of one of the classic and iconic class sets from the game’s earliest years.

    To some degree, these all engage in some level of FOMO, to varying degrees of vexation. First, the special recolor armor sets from the Greedy Emissary event, we have no information on if they’ll ever be available again. Get them now, or maybe lose the chance to earn them forever. Second, the Collector’s Bounty event offers a greater amount of efficiency to earning old, rare mounts and items, but those items will remain in the game after the event ends; you’ll only lose the increased efficiency. Lastly, for engaging in Turbulent Timeways, the unique mount you can earn will likely become available for Timewarped Badges (a currency earned from Timewalking events) the next time the event runs, like the two mounts from the previous time this event has been available have.

    Naturally, I think the Greedy Emissary event is the most egregious with FOMO – but even it is something you can earn every reward from in one week if you’re willing and able to put in enough time. For Collector’s Bounty, missing out on the efficiency will be tough, but all the items will still exist. For Turbulent Timeways, I myself realized I started engaging in the event a week too late, and until I discovered the mount would likely be made available again in the future, I was really kicking myself for missing one week too many.

    Luckily, between Remix events and the game’s monthly Trading Post, the items from the Greedy Emissary event will likely come around again in the future – but right now, we don’t know if they ever will.

    But enough about that. Let’s discuss the Legion Remix.

    The Mage Tower

    During the Legion expansion, in patch 7.2, our brave heroes returned to the Broken Shore to establish a foothold and stage an assault on the Tomb of Sargaeras raid when it launched a few months later. As part of this patch, there were several buildings the players could cooperate to construct, and the most compelling to many players was the Mage Tower.

    The Mage Tower provided everyone with a single-player boss scenario focused on mechanics to overcome, and when successful, you’d unlock a special appearance for your artifact weapon and an achievement for doing so. These are some of the most unique and special weapon appearances that exist in the game, and at the end of Legion, they were removed when the Mage Tower became inaccessible.

    Now, after nearly nine years, we likely have players who’ve come to the game who, if they’re the same age I was when I started playing, would have been in preschool during Legion. These players could be some of the best in the world – they may become world-first class raiders. But they can never earn these weapon appearances because they weren’t playing the game at the right time?

    To me, that sounds like bullshit.

    And, before anyone wants to say that I just want to earn these weapons myself – I told you I’ve been playing this game too damn long. The 7.2 patch launched on 03/28/2017. This is my former main, who has the achievement for A Challenging Look from the first time the Mage Tower was built, earned on 04/05/2017. Throughout the expansion, as players earned more gear and more power from their artifact weapons, these challenges became easier. I completed them on classes I had no business playing by the end of the expansion, they became so simple. Completing the Mage Tower challenges now, with the scaling tech involved, is harder than they were at the end of Legion.

    But I don’t feel like my achievement is any less valuable for other people having earned it themselves. I have a sense of prestige not because I own this appearance, but because I overcame the challenge. And if these weapon appearances will give people an incentive to challenge themselves, then I say they should come back. Give us a reason to enjoy remix. Lock our scaling in the Mage Tower to retain the challenge? Whatever. Just let people earn them again.

    A recolor is the least Blizzard should do, but I think they should just come back in full.

    As always, thank you for reading. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some more Stonecore runs to do to see if I can loot this dragon.

  • Reworking Tyranny of Dragons 2: Preserving Characters

    Reworking Tyranny of Dragons 2: Preserving Characters

    One of the ways I think Tyranny of Dragons is most inconsiderate of its own resources is the way the module uses its own characters. Particularly the villains of Hoard of the Dragon Queen (the first half of the module, formerly sold as a separate book). By the time the party hits Rise of Tiamat, they’ll be interacting with the Council of Waterdeep and meeting familiar faces when they do. Before then, who do they have? Leosin? Maybe Rath Modar’s apprentice, if they interact with him during the On the Road chapter?

    Cyanwrath and Mondath are meant to be discovered in the Dragon Hatchery and likely killed on what is at most their third interaction with the party (but more realistically, it’s the second). Rezmir travels incognito, so they won’t interact with her much before facing her in Skyreach Castle. Within Skyreach, they’re meant to encounter Rath Modar who escapes, but the first time I ran this module, he failed to do so. (Sentinel and one spell cast per turn really messed him up.) The party has no way to learn about Dralmorer Borngray before facing him in Naerytar. These characters all have custom stat blocks! Official artwork! Yet none of them get used more than once?

    It’s wasteful.

    So, we changed a lot here – at least for some of them. Let me explain.

    Langderosa Cyanwrath

    Named Langdedrosa in the module, Cyanwrath is presented as a champion fighter of the Cult of the Dragon who loves a good one-on-one duel and is willing to exchange captured hostages to the party’s custody to get one. He’s even got a savage streak, striking them once more when they’re down or killing the NPC that will duel him (if the players refuse) after he’s already beaten.

    I changed him entirely.

    Back in session zero, I told my players that there would be opportunities throughout the campaign to pull people out of the Cult of the Dragon – that very few of them were so far gone as to be absent all reason. I had two specific characters in mind when I said this: Azbara Jos (more on him later) and Cyanwrath.

    Cyanwrath from the Hoard of the Dragon Queen Module
    Re-imagined Cyanwrath made with HeroForge

    Rather than the brash and devoted warrior, I reimagined Cyanwrath as someone who’d never been given any agency in his life. His father, Lennithon, the blue dragon that aids the assault on Greenest, had allied with the Cult of the Dragon before his birth, and he was raised in that cruel and careless environment. I envisioned him as possessing a strong sense of honor and compassion – one he had to actively work to suppress while with the Cult of the Dragon to the extent that he would overreact to any doubts or aspersions with vehemence. But nevertheless, it peeked through.

    His mercy at Greenest was the first of these cracks the party witnessed. With that flimsy justification of a duel, he was able to allow the heroes to escort the villagers away and still hold that shred of believability. Later, when our party rescued the villagers from the cultist camp, they saw Cyanwrath at the edge of the entrance, in position to try and chase them down and perhaps catch them, slowed as they were by their charges. Instead, he returned to the camp.

    Over the course of the long trip from Baldur’s Gate to Waterdeep, the party kept working at this knot, and eventually Cyanwrath sought them out himself, trying to make sense of his inclinations and his upbringing. He even joined the party as an ally as they delved into a homebrew dungeon I added in the middle of the On the Road chapter to break up the days and days of travel, aiding them in rescuing a pregnant mother from the clutches of a hag (more on that in a future post).

    However, despite how he tried to hide his decision to aid the party, Frida and Rezmir knew, and tortured him for failing to cut them down.

    And on his behalf, the party intervened. They broke Cyanwrath free and sent him onward to Daggerford.

    And Frida came down upon them immediately.

    Frida Maleer

    In the module as Frulam Mondath, this was a character the players had no chance to turn away from the cult. However, instead of leaving her to die in the Hatchery, I retained her as the cult’s primary face during the long journey north. She served as Rezmir’s voice on the road, and when the party sprung Cyanwrath, she insisted they be ejected from the caravan. The captain of the caravan tried to mediate the situation, but it was simply one party’s word against the other’s. With Frida as the only cleric in the caravan, no impartial party could provide a Zone of Truth.

    The captain managed to have them agree to allow the priests at the Temple of Waukeen to adjudicate once they reached Daggerford that afternoon. The trial ultimately fell the party’s way, but despite her arrest, I’d intended to keep using Frida – perhaps have the party encounter her once more in Castle Naerytar or Skyreach, but thanks to a few high perception rolls and Sending spells, the party intercepted Frida and the cultists who’d gone to break her out of prison and defeated them all.

    Despite my plans getting upended, I certainly feel like I got a lot more out of Frida than I would’ve gotten from Frulam Mondath. Even in death, thanks to a Detect Thoughts spell, she gave the party a lot of information about their upcoming adventures.

    Frulam Mondath artwork from the Hoard of the Dragon Queen Module.

    Azbara Jos

    Despite some major edits to his character, I didn’t actually change this name much. I settled on “Azbara Jhos,” so for clarity, we’ll use Azbara when I mean the version of the character from the module, and Jhos when I mean my version of the wizard.

    Now, first things first, I think there’s too little race-variety in this module (it’s one of the reasons I made Leosin into the orc Brok) (I also just like orc heroes). One of my players picked genasi for her race, and I made Jhos one, too. I imagined him as a young wizard – a true apprentice, one who fled Thay and had no option but to accede to his master’s plans. At only 19 years old, this was another character the party could’ve pulled out of the cult.



    Azbara Jhos re-imagined with HeroForge
    Azbara Jos from the Hoard of the Dragon Queen Module

    (That “could” is giving a lot away, isn’t it?)

    As in the module, Jhos joined the caravan and didn’t socialize much. What few times he might’ve been seen, he’d have been talking to Frida, until trolls ambushed the caravan. There, he got a proper introduction: flinging fireballs at the trolls when the party was only just cresting level 4. Even despite benefiting from the caravan’s ability to travel safely and without delay, it’s hard for me to imagine Azbara doing the same. Jhos got hailed as a hero, and then the party started poking at that scab throughout their journey.

    They were only a few carefully chosen words from rescuing this guy, but, unfortunately, it didn’t materialize. He met his end when the party battled him and Rath Modar in Skyreach Castle. When they arrived, they overhead him just about to spill the beans on them all to Rath Modar after the two had discussed the cult’s swelling need for mages. Taking that last tidbit to heart, our party’s fighter felt they couldn’t risk leaving Jhos alive, and struck him down.

    Rath, however … Heh. Let’s just say I only ever need to learn a lesson once.

    Rather than being present in the flesh, I imagined that Rath might need to be in many places at once to prove his value to the cult. Thus, the Rath Modar present at Skyreach Castle was merely a simulacrum that crumbled into a rapidly melting mound of snow upon his defeat. The party still got to learn a lot about the wizard – his capabilities, some of his spells, but he was never in danger of being lost so early.

    And, there’s one final character I wanted to discuss here.

    Talis

    Shortly after session zero, I asked my player who chose to play a Draconic Sorcerer if he’d be up for a connection to a character in the module in his backstory. I pitched that he and Talis were childhood friends, meeting while both under the tutelage of a wizard. (I also did make her a wizard, rather than a cleric.)

    While on the road, the party used Sending to contact Talis and discovered that she’d become a hostage to the Cult of the Dragon, just as the sorcerer feared. She was unable to tell them much about where she was, but the party encountered her exactly where they would in the module: the Hunting Lodge they teleported to following their adventure in Castle Naerytar.

    There, she told them a troll kept her within the grounds, and that an abishai would often return to the lodge and might have some field around the area that would alert him if she left. Reunited with his childhood friend, the sorcerer urged his allies that they rescue her, and they battled the troll, then later the abishai as they flew up to Skyreach Castle.

    Once there, Talis revealed that she had developed some level of kinship with the white dragon within the castle – that he’d given her scales to make into armor (and here she dispelled an illusion that revealed the scale mail she’d been wearing all along). She urged that they visit the dragon, that perhaps she could turn him to their cause!

    And she absolutely betrayed them.

    It was glorious.

    Talis the White from the Hoard of the Dragon Queen Module.

    I think this wouldn’t have worked if the party hadn’t been successful with turning Cyanwrath. Even then – the party’s ranger/rogue multiclass was about the scrap the whole plan, feeling off about the whole thing. (Expertise in Deception never served me so well.)

    With Glazhael fighting them, Talis managed to effect an escape after a delightful villain monologue, and at time of writing, she has yet to turn back up in our game. Considering that the last time I ran this module, she died within an hour of the party arriving at the Hunting Lodge? I’d say we’re doing pretty well here.

    So! That’s how I’ve adjusted some of the characters from the first half of the Tyranny of Dragons module to give them some more longevity, some … recurrence. Even those we’ve lost along the way have still impacted the campaign in a much fuller way than their counterparts in the module. Now, I wouldn’t just outright say this is better as a matter-of-fact; it’s only different.

    And more to my liking, I guess.

    Anyways, thank you for reading! Good luck out there, heroes.

  • The Lasso Way

    The Lasso Way

    On the whole, I don’t subscribe to many streaming services. I’ll have something for a month or two when something I really want to watch is airing, but I need that push, that hook, to cave and check something out. When the Murderbot adaption started airing in May, I ended up using the AppleTV service for the first time.

    Now, between writing, painting, and gaming, I wasn’t sure I’d get around to watching a lot of what the platform has on offer. I’ve been keeping up with Murderbot, of course. I’d heard no end of praise for Severance, so I watched that. Then, I had a friend and my brother both recommend Ted Lasso, and somehow this one about an old commercial character snuck in between all the rest and grabbed me.

    I’ve never had much interested in sports (much less English Football), but this show firmly establishes that as its backdrop for the interactions of these characters and their arcs early on. They’ll show snippets of games, but how these people come to interact with football, their teammates, and the other people in their lives is what the show is really about.

    And, it’s a damn good show. I wanted to hit on a couple of reasons as to why I think that is. Spoilers ahead.

    Impeccable Characterization

    If there’s a spectrum, this show sits more on the sitcom end than the drama end, but it’s still not entirely the former. Each episode progresses the overall story of this football club, and our characters don’t regress between the credits and theme song. They evolve (sometimes for the better, sometimes the worse) and retain that evolution unless they work to undo it.

    None exemplify this more than our lad Jamie Tartt. In a show full of standout characters, I don’t think there’s anyone else who grows as much as this guy.

    At the start, he’s a self-absorbed ass. He’s incredible at football and he knows it. During that first season, we see Ted slowly chip away at this exterior shell he’s built up, but just before we break all the way through, Tartt is transferred to another team. The reason behind this is unknown to our characters at first, and Jamie takes it personally. He thinks it was Ted’s choice to do this; that he’d been rejected, in the end.

    Still, Lasso’s impact on Tartt shines through. If it weren’t for a last minute pass – something he’d never do before Lasso’s training, his new team wouldn’t score a goal that ends their game in a win against Lasso’s team, Richmond. (The kind of game that’s about to be called a 1-1 victory for Richmond.)

    And that’s just his arc in the first season.

    But, when it comes to this shows incredible characters, the stand out for me is the man himself.

    Ted Lasso Is Superman

    Now, I don’t mean that literally, of course. He’s not secretly extraterrestrial and flying around or anything like that. However, this character behaves the way Superman does in his best stories.

    Ted Lasso has a nearly endless well of optimism and friendliness we seldom see break. He gives it is his all to inspire these footballers to be better versions of themselves, and he forgives them for their worst moments easier than they’ll forgive themselves. It starts slow, but we have no trouble believing how he manages to win all these people over – it’s the Lasso Way, after all.

    There’s been a thread or two on reddit with viewers seeing the same thing about this character – and that’s not hard to believe. We have a handful of little things that make this sound more intentional than not: Lasso’s from Kansas, the team’s primary colors are blue and red, and a major supporting character’s surname is Kent. They even reference the Daily Planet within the first two episodes.

    At a time when it’s easy to be cynical, it’s wonderful to have a little light shone. These stakes might not be high in the grand scheme of things, but that doesn’t make them any less meaningful for our characters.

    Not All Sunshine and Rainbows

    Naturally, the show isn’t just hopeful beat after hopeful beat. It’s got its share of drama and emotionality. Sometimes it’ll try to wring tears from your eyes just by showing you how far a character’s come since we’ve met them; others, it’s showing you how our characters got to where they were when they started, and asking implicitly how you think you’d behave under those circumstances.

    Now, it can be a little overwrought at times. The show is rarely subtle and even more rarely restrained. On the whole, I think it earns most of its indulgent moments, but that might not be to everyone’s taste. I’d still recommend the show, but I wouldn’t fault anyone for washing out.

    Luckily, the show’s primarily concerned with making its audience laugh and smile, so I never found it hard to watch.

    So, that’s Ted Lasso. Consider this a secret Ben Recommends. As always, thank you for reading. Now to figure out what the hell “offsides” means …

  • OneD&D, One Year In

    OneD&D, One Year In

    Almost a year ago now, Wizards of the Coast launched their slate of updated Core Rulebooks for D&D – then branded “OneD&D,” but mostly referred to as D&D 2024 or 5.5e by the community at large. After running the game using these books since December, I thought it’d be a good time to sit down with this edition’s update and consider what it’s done for this hobby and game during its tenure, and perhaps speculate on what it might mean for its future.

    A Refresher on My Credentials

    I’ve been running D&D or another system for more than half my life at this point with few breaks or stoppages. Since late 2020, I’ve run a weekly game through discord and talespire. With my table, we’ve run a homebrew game from level one to twenty, tried pathfinder 2e, ran a “season” of Blades in the Dark, and we’ve been working our way through Tyranny of Dragons for over a year now with a few roster changes along the way.

    I’ve also been playing as a fighter in a game run by another friend once a month for a year now with a rather large party, made of mutual friends from our guild on World of Warcraft.

    Lastly, I’ve also been running a biweekly/once-a-month game with my brothers and my mom (who practically never played D&D before) since January.

    I play D&D a lot.

    The New Player Experience

    Much like 5e before it, I think 5.5 still serves as an excellent entry point into this hobby. While the rules hide a secret complexity beneath the hood, they rarely layer on themselves so precariously that it becomes hard to understand. Since the launch of 5.5, I’ve seen a total of about 9 people play D&D for the first time, and each of them is becoming more and more proficient with the rules each session.

    This system has always had the benefit of its ability to just get out of the way when it needs to. It’s got a looseness to its rules that leave it feeling more malleable than something more nailed down, like Pathfinder 2e. Even leaning into something that isn’t intended by the rules for the sake of the fun of your players rarely backfires too terribly; as DMs, we have a wide arsenal of knobs and dials we can twist to keep the game balanced and fun for the whole table.

    As an example, in the game with my warcraft guildmates, we’re running the rules on the monk’s ability to grapple and how effective it is in a way that’s a bit more powerful than it would be with the exact language of the rules. But, it’s been a blast for the monk and everyone else, and the DM will always have the opportunity to run monsters that can break grapples more efficiently – or perhaps incorporeal foes that can’t be grappled to begin with, should he need that to be relaxed for an encounter.

    And, for returning players, the game feels near-frictionless to those of us who spent any amount of time playing 5e. It is, after all, almost the same system.

    Character Options and Power Scaling

    Out of the whole system, I think this is where the bulk of the adjustments lie, and they run in both directions. Outliers in balance from the original 5e launch have been reined in; many classes and abilities that were falling behind have been brought forward. This hasn’t been perfect, obviously. Some changes still fall way off the mark, such as the Ranger’s level 19 capstone buffing Hunter’s Mark’s damage dice, but I think most have been good.

    Smite, for example, took a nerf, requiring a bonus action to cast. This reduced the ability of a paladin PC to “nova” – to spend their resources at an extremely liberal rate to burst through the enemies faced in an encounter. Sharpshooter and Great Weapon Master both lost their ability to take a reduction on your roll-to-hit in exchange for damage, but when something provides that much additional throughput, it stops being optional. Taking that direct power away from those feats brought them more level with other options, and both still provide valuable bonuses to appropriate characters.

    Healing spells have taken a large swath of buffs; Cure Wounds and Healing Word both roll twice as many dice when cast. Aura of Vitality no longer requires your bonus action each turn to activate its healing. Where these spells often felt like a misused action in 5e, in 5.5, they can truly make the difference in whether or not a PC falls in combat before reaching 0 hit points.

    Weapon Masteries on the other hand, have an odd level of impact. Some, like Vex and Nick, adjust one’s playstyle with enough impact that they’re easy to remember and use each turn. Others, like Slow, rarely feel like they’re meaningful with how sticky combat in 5.5e continues to be. (The fighter I’ve been playing has been using a longbow almost exclusively, and I’ve never remembered to call out Slow.) Then, options like Push and Topple are very potent when compared to the other mastery options. The table’s got some wobble, is all I mean to say – not that it isn’t good for martials to have these abilities.

    Nerfed Spells

    As part of the redesign, a couple of spells took a hit. Some are a bit odd – changing Inflict Wounds to a Constitution saving throw instead of a hit roll to eliminate its ability to critically strike while also reducing its damage by 1d10 seems heavy handed to me. This was a staple spell for our cleric in the game I ran to level 20, and it never felt like the spell that made him too potent in any battle. If any spell claimed that title, it’d have been Spirit Guardians, which itself took a mixed adjustment. It now can effect enemies whenever they enter the area, meaning you can use it like we might in Baldur’s Gate 3 and run over enemies like a lawnmower on our own turns; however, it also only affects enemies that remain in the effect at the end of their turn rather than the start, where before it might eliminate an affected target before it could act.

    Counterspell also had a major adjustment that changed the texture of the whole spell, but I think it’s for the better. We’re up to level 9 in my Tyranny of Dragons campaign, and at a similar level in the homebrew game prior, Counterspell got a lot more use. Now, it’s much less automatic; both as an option, and also in effect. Now that this spell always involves a die roll, I feel it’s better on both sides of the screen. Neither your players nor your monsters will have their entire turn upended by a single reaction; instead, it’s always down to the dice.

    Monster Adjustments

    I remember in the run-up to 5.5, back when we were on the edge of the horizon getting Mordenkainen’s Monsters of the Multiverse, people were worried that many monsters were going to be doing Force damage with their physical attacks; that many spells had been replaced by “spell-like abilities” that would not be valid Counterspell or Dispel Magic targets. So far, I haven’t used anything in my games or faced anything in my friend’s game that did Force damage when we expected Bludgeoning, Piercing, or Slashing.

    I have, however, used some of the new spell caster stat blocks, and their multiattack spell blasts are pretty wild. I appreciate the goal here – just writing a list of spells the DM needs to familiarize themselves with isn’t a particularly elegant way to write a stat block; however, these not-spells often have a very high damage output, surpassing even that of Fireball when that spell is intentionally over-tuned. The only drawback there is that you’re only hitting one creature at a time, but then, if you’re playing with experienced Dungeons and Dragons PCs, they’re already spreading out to dodge the fireball they’re expecting from an enemy wizard.

    And, the “Arcane Burst” or similar abilities allow the wizards to use their bonus actions for Misty Step and get around the one-spell-per-turn-rule while also avoiding attacks of opportunity. (Of course, Arcane Burst can also just be used as a melee attack, so they don’t really even need to move when they use it.)

    On the whole, I think monsters have changed for the better. Player Characters got a bump in power; monsters received the same. That allows the choices made in encounters to be more interesting and dynamic, and that’s always a good trend for the design of D&D.

    The Opportunity Cost

    Despite being an overall positive adjustment to the game, I can’t help but feel a sense of … uncertainty when it comes to 5.5. Over its ten years on the market, 5e swelled D&D’s popularity to never-before-imagined heights from a confluence of events no one could’ve predicted. An easy to run and play ruleset met the rise of actual-play podcasts and unscripted shows using TTRPGs as their engine. Critical Role, Dimension 20, NADDPOD, The Adventure Zone and so many more broadened the appeal of D&D to a whole new audience; one that continues to expand.

    With all that in mind, it’s easy to see why Wizards would choose to stick close to 5e and only make tweaks to their rules, rather than scrap it all in favor of something new. They truly captured lightning in a bottle in 2014, but now, in 2025, I’m not one to bet on them managing that again.

    That game is the same, ultimately, and it feels like it’s losing steam. Right now, we have Daggerheart as the new kid on the block, and it’s getting a lot of buzz – including Crawford and Perkins joining Darrington Press just a few weeks ago. Couple that with WOTC’s seeming inability to make good decisions, and it’s easy to see why people are happy to look for something new. Hell, I’ve been running this game forever and I’m extremely comfortable with it. I’ve got stat blocks lodged into my brain; I don’t even use notes at all for some of the sessions I run for my family. And yet, despite that familiarity, of the three or four campaign ideas I have rattling around in my head to run after Tyranny of Dragons, only one feels like it would fit best with D&D. Everything else might be better served by another system.

    Personally, I believe launching a fresh 6th edition would’ve been the better choice, and an almost surefire win for WOTC. If it’d been good, it’d have recaptured the audience and held them in. If it wasn’t, people would’ve kept playing 5e, just like they did when they didn’t like 4th edition as much as 3.5, and we’d be in more-or-less the same spot as we are now. Instead, WOTC doubled down on 5e after it has already been showing its age, and I’d hesitate to say they’ll have the same level of buy-in for their next edition. If they even get one.

    And it’d be sad to see it go – I’ve loved D&D since the first moment I played it. But, as I said when we hit the OGL drama in 2023, this hobby is bigger than D&D. It’s grown beyond it, despite how much it still dominates as the most popular game within it.

    As always, thank you for reading. Good luck out there, heroes.

  • Reworking Tyranny of Dragons 1: Greenest

    Reworking Tyranny of Dragons 1: Greenest

    I mentioned last year that I’ve been running Tyranny of Dragons for my table. I used the module once before – back when it and 5e were in their infancy, and I was a much younger DM. I held onto a lot of lessons from running that game, and now, revisiting the module, I’ve made many changes to improve on what WOTC published.

    Because, frankly, the module is written as a pretty sloppy railroad.

    That doesn’t mean there’s not the potential for a good game in it, though.

    Improving Greenest

    As the module is written, the game opens with the party arriving while Greenest is under attack. From the road, they can see the smoke from the fires rising skyward and the blue blur of the cult’s dragon ally swooping overhead. There’s powerful imagery there, absolutely, but it also leaves a little too much to chance, doesn’t it? It wouldn’t be unreasonable for a party of level 1 adventurers to see the ongoing raid and think, This is too much for us. We’re nobodies. To assume that to intervene will end only in their own deaths – and the module is printed to begin at first level.

    I imagine WOTC hoped that this immediate, dynamic set of encounters would help onboard players into the campaign, but unless you run a really good session zero that impresses upon your players that they’ll be expected to play incredibly heroic to meet the module where it is, it leaves a lot open.

    I did two things to improve this.

    Starting on the Road

    I started with a much lower stakes first session, having our party all be part of a caravan journeying to Greenest from an undisclosed elsewhere. I left it up to each of them to decide why their characters were part of this caravan – perhaps Greenest wasn’t their final destination, perhaps they’d been following the trail of destruction left by the Cult of the Dragon as they raided Greenfields. (As part of our session zero, I encouraged the players to build PCs that would oppose the Cult of the Dragon’s activity and let them know they’d fight a fair amount of dragons throughout the campaign, inviting them to build characters with that style of encounter in mind.)

    We had a new player join the table for this campaign, so this slower start also helped them ease into character and the style of table we have. As part of this session, we had a small roadside ambush encounter and an investigation to discover that one of the travelers was a member of the Cult of the Dragon who’d drawn the guard and ambush drakes to attack the caravan. The death of an NPC guardsman ally with family in town gave them a reason to care about at least one group of potential survivors in the upcoming raid on Greenest, and delivering his belongings served enough of a quest to keep them together. (This was all emergent from the play of the first session – if I were to run this module again, I’d consider trying to lean on this further. Maybe I’d make this NPC the captain of the caravan and have them speak to the PCs individually, especially if they were not yet a group, just as mine weren’t.)

    (Also, I’d made some tweaks to the ambush drake statblock, but more on that in a later post.)

    The other major change – they leveled up from this encounter and investigation. Now at level two, they’d feel at least slightly more powerful for the incoming “dungeon.”

    Arriving at Greenest

    Map of Greenest from the module.

    Time is the most potent tool in the GM toolkit. See, I’d planned to kick off the assault on Greenest at night and I wanted the party to start in the center of town, inside the inn. However, the party was a group of particularly active characters, so I needed to ensure they stayed in Greenest overnight. Thus, After a long day of travel, just as twilight strikes the skies, you finally arrive at Greenest, exhausted and road-weary.

    I still had them propose leaving town after delivering the guardsman’s sword to his family to camp, to get that one hour of travel they could still swing based on the time of day. So, even this wasn’t perfect – but it did work.

    They ran a few errands in town, bought some supplies, and settled in at the tavern for some character RP. After a few minutes, I, despite having the information available surreptitiously, asked them outright for their passive perception scores. As they handed them in, I paused, then told the PC with the highest total that they began to hear something unusual – a slow thwump… thwump… thwump, muffled not only by the walls, but by distance. However, they were growing steadily louder: Thwump, Thwump, Thwump.

    And then, an unconscious stillness shattered against the dragon’s roar.

    The Raid on Greenest

    I opened with the blue dragon blasting a line of lightning through the town that struck the walls of the inn. Everyone in the party failed a Constitution save and were stunned as the inn trembled and lost one of its walls. They recovered after a few moments – had it been minutes, seconds? And heard the sounds of violence outside!

    In the town square, the cultists had swarmed into the market and were swiping goods from abandoned stalls and menacing townspeople. Our heroes erupted into action!

    I left many of the scenarios of the raid unchanged, though I adjusted the encounters in some areas. With all the people they rescued from the town square (including their guardsman ally’s family), they delivered them into the keep through the secret passage, then they held off against the cultists trying to breach into the fort, used the ballista to scare off the blue dragon (which required some doing! It had been in disrepair and the fighter literally braced the arms of the ballista on her back to allow the ranger to fire it), then ventured out into the town to reach the chapel of Chauntea to rescue the townspeople trapped within. (Here, I borrowed a little from Ebonskar. While the town burned, the chapel hadn’t caught fire despite the cultists’ attempts to set it ablaze.)

    And, finally, as they worked their way back to the keep with these townspeople in tow, they encountered the cult’s lieutenants: Langderosa Cyanwrath and Frida Maleer. (Yes, I changed their names from the module, I didn’t like them much.) As we’ll discuss in the next post in the series, I’d made some MAJOR changes to these characters, including ones I thought would make Cyanwrath more likely to allow the heroes to rescue the people within the chapel – though he still demanded a duel. Our melee-focused sorcerer accepted, got torn apart, and Cyanwrath held to his word (despite Frida’s jeering) and allowed them to escort the townspeople to the keep.

    However, there were many other townsfolk who did not benefit from the party’s intervention, and they were carried off to …

    The Cultist Camp

    I preserved the encounter with some lazier members of the raid lagging behind from the rest, and our party elected to steal their robes to infiltrate the camp. Within, the party was able to see the cult preparing for a mass sacrifice later in the evening – the reason they’d captured the townsfolk to begin with. There were more prisoners than just those taken from Greenest; the cult had taken some hostages from the other towns they’d raided, and it was going to take some serious finesse to rescue them all before the pyre burned.

    Luckily, they had an ally within. I made major changes to the module’s character or Leosin Erlanthar – namely, I changed him into an orc monk named Brok Stonebrow. He’s still a member of the Harpers, but one of the members of the party was his protégé, and had come to Greenest with Brok to try and infiltrate the cult.

    Surreptitiously, they met in the small caves that wind through the walls of the gulch, and they were able to work with him to devise a plan to rescue the townsfolk. This was almost entirely player-directed – I gave them the scenario, they worked it out from there. They knew they needed to handle the cultists in the watchtowers, and lead the townsfolk around the edges of the gulch to avoid the eyes of the celebrating cultists and mercenaries.

    I recognize this amount of freedom might not work with every table, but that’s the benefit of Brok / Leosin not getting himself captured. If your party needs more direction, he can give them more straightforward ideas; at a minimum, he can point their thoughts to the problems they need to solve, to save them from getting stuck on a tangent or lost in the weeds.

    The players ultimately succeeded, and this gave me another opportunity to display the cult’s ruthlessness. Rather than cut their losses, when the party later returned to investigate the Hatchery (some more on that in the next post), they discovered the cultists substituted their sacrifice of the villagers with the mercenaries who’d aided them in their assaults. Such savagery would only hint at the things to come …

    Wow! That was a long one. Before you go, I wanted to direct anyone looking for further reading right now to the subreddit dedicated to discussing this module. It certainly gave me many ideas that I’ve been using in my game.

    As always, thank you for reading! I hope this series of posts will be of use to someone – maybe even just as an example of how we might improve upon the ideas we find within the pages of a module. But, that’s certainly enough out of me; see you in the next one. Good luck out there, heroes.

  • June 2025 Irregular Update

    June 2025 Irregular Update

    So, here we are again. Look, I won’t beat around the bush. It’s been a tough year, hasn’t it? With everything going on in the world, (especially right now) it’s been hard to get into a space for writing. There’s been a lot of times this year that the only thing that could still my mind at all was this hobby I returned to in December (more on that later).

    I’d love to be showing up with great news about a project, but the truth is I don’t have anything to report on. As mentioned before, the Tide rewrite totally stalled out, and I almost got started on something else before getting entirely derailed. And not by video games this time.

    So. Let’s dig in.

    Returning Hobby?

    When I was in my teens, just after I’d been working for a while and had this sudden surplus of disposable income, my friends and I got into the nerdiest hobby on the planet: Warhammer 40k. We assembled and painted overpriced plastic miniatures and played pretend-war on the tabletop and had a blast. Some of my fondest memories are of those days – of visiting a local game store and playing all day, getting everyone some food at McDonald’s or Cici’s Pizza for cheap.

    And, my first models for Warhammer 40k were a gift from my grandma. When we started, our friend had gotten the Assault on Black Reach starter set, and two people locked in with the Space Marines and Orks. The original owner of that set settled into Eldar, and I started with the T’au Empire. We played games (not to exact specification of the rules – we never ran objectives and had little in the way of terrain), painted, and enjoyed talking about the game and lore.

    I probably hadn’t painted any models in 8 years by the time December rolled around. But, after playing some Space Marine 2 with my friends and peeking at the minis, I finally caved at bought back in, starting with the Orks – the army I’d been leaning toward switching into near the end of our original time in the hobby.

    See, as teens, we all painted our share of orks. Our friend had more bodies than he could paint himself, and we were all happy for the practice. I got pretty good at painting orks, and, honestly? I think I’ve retained that skill.

    It’s been a much needed piece of serenity these last few months, and with the friends I’ve made in my guild on Warcraft, we’ve got our own little meta forming; one guy’s playing Death Guard and Custodes, another’s on Dark Angels and he’s brought in a friend playing Votann and Chaos Knights; we’ve got players on Tyranids, Imperial Guard, and Necrons. I’ve gotten a fair few games under my belt, and I’m looking forward to trying to find some time to play in person at a local store again. (We’re all across the continent, so we’ve been playing on Tabletop Sim.)

    So, that’s been my main focus the last little while. It hasn’t entirely stamped out writing, of course. I’m still running a D&D game weekly, and I’ve been running a once-to-twice a month game for my family. And, I’ve written little bits of lore about my army of Orks and the characters therein, written up some small narrative moments from some of the battles we’ve had.

    I mean to say I’m still exercising the muscle, even if I don’t have a book to report any progress on.

    … But You Will Write Another Book, Right?

    Yes. Yes, absolutely.

    Look, there’s been times when this has been disheartening. There’s been times when I’ve questioned whether it was worthwhile to keep paying the upkeep on the site and blog – especially since I have these long stretches where I do nothing with it. But, ultimately, writing means a lot to me. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care if no one read me – I want my stories to mean something to people.

    For that to happen, though, I have to write the damn things.

    So. I’d better do it then, huh?

    How’s About the Blog, then?

    Oh, yeah. So, you might’ve noticed the new digs. I’ve changed hosting services, and, after all the work I put in over the last week to set this all up, I’m going to hit myself if I keep letting this slip through my fingers.

    I get into my head about it, is the problem. I often feel like I have little to add or nothing of note to say. But this is my corner of the internet. If someone doesn’t want to hear what I have to say, they can good and damn well leave, can’t they?

    And if you’re one of the ones sticking around, thanks. Thank you for reading.

    I’ll see you again in the next one.

  • 2024: Year in Review

    2024: Year in Review

    For me, it feels like the theme of this year was that I wish I’d done more. I read fewer books than I’d planned to, I didn’t play very many new games, I scarcely watched movies or tv shows. And I certainly didn’t write as much as I’d wanted to. It’s like I stalled out after the first third of the year, but we talked about that plenty in the Irregular Update a couple weeks ago, didn’t we? Despite a relatively austere year, I had the privilege of experiencing some media that really stuck with me, grabbed me, or inspired me.

    Let’s get into it.

    Books

    I had a much easier time burning through books back when I wasn’t working from home, to be honest. Taking them in to read during my lunch break really worked out, and often left me on some interesting cliffhanger that made it easier to read some more once I got home. With my current schedule, I only have a 30 minute break for lunch, and often don’t read during that window. (Exceptions were made for Wind and Truth this month.)

    Over time, I was excited to play different video games and hopped right into them when I was done with my shift. I played a lot of Warcraft following the War Within’s launch, and other games kept drawing me back like a magnet over the year. So it goes.

    I think, when I brought a book in to the office and didn’t have something else I could be doing, it made it easier to stick with things that weren’t grabbing me in a vise-like grip. I could muddle through something I had a middling opinion of just to fill the time. Couple books this year I grit my teeth and plowed through, and it might’ve proved detrimental to my desire to keep reading through the rest of the year.

    (I just need to throw my smartphone in a box and take a book into another room to get around this.)

    Anyway.

    Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

    This was a book I read early on in the year and it ruled. I loved the intrigue, I loved Gideon and Harrow’s fraught relationship, I loved reading about space necromancers. I’m looking forward to reading more of the series in 2025, and I can’t recommend this book enough.

    The Sunlit Man by Brandon Sanderson

    I got around to the other two Secret Projects back at the start of the year. In the afterword of the Sunlit Man, Sanderson called the project a book he wrote for his fans – where Yumi and Tress had been more as gifts for his wife. I have to say, as a fan, Sunlit Man absolutely rules. It left so many questions in my head, waiting for Wind and Truth. It had a breakneck pace and excellent action. It is, without a doubt, the most cinematic cosmere novel so far. A movie could be made from this book practically one-to-one and it would rock.

    I also greatly enjoyed Yumi and the Nightmare Painter and Wind and Truth this year from Sanderson, but I wanted to specifically celebrate Sunlit Man for the ways it’s different from many cosmere novels here.

    The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman

    This book is a lot easier to recommend than Between Two Fires. It’s a fun classic quest from the perspective of our eponymous thief as he’s taken on a march across the continent with a host of interesting characters and fun action. It was fun to read despite some grim details in the setting, and books that are just fun to read will be a balm to many in the coming years.

    Movies

    I think I went to a movie theater once this year. Whatever time I might’ve spent watching movies, I think I watched longform video essays instead – like F. D. Signifier’s many drops throughout the year, Lindsey Ellis’s nebula-exclusives, Matt Colville’s video about the Elusive Shift, and videos about movies from Patrick H. Willems. And I thoroughly enjoyed them all!

    Point is, I saw like three movies this year total, and we all know which ones I’m going to be talking about here.

    Dune: Part Two

    A cinematic achievement. An excellent adaptation. Incredible effects, an excellent story translated near-perfectly to screen. I love Dune, and I loved these movies. The way they’ve infected culture, with people jokingly calling their friends Lisan al-Gaib or Maud’dib or permutations thereof is endlessly entertaining. What more is there to say, really?

    Furiosa: A Mad Max Story

    Fury Road is one of my favorite aesthetics in modern fiction. I love the wasteland, I love the motorized bikes and buggies, and I had a blast with this film. While many bemoaned it as an unnecessary addition to the canon, when every minute of this movie is as awesome as this was, it needs no further justification.

    TV Shows

    I didn’t watch much TV either, to be honest. I had Netflix for exactly two months this year; I watched a lot of Peaky Blinders when I was running Blades in the Dark near the start of the year for inspiration, and I returned for one month specifically for the first show below (but ended up watching the second show on this list too, on the recommendation of a friend). I never got around to temporarily using Hulu to watch Shogun despite meaning to, and as much as I love Invincible, I do think it was hurt a little by splitting up the season. House of the Dragon? Woof. I hope there were some external circumstances behind that season’s ending, because that was a fine episode in a vacuum, but not as a season finale.

    Anyway, onto the good.

    Arcane Season 2

    Arcane’s final season aired a little over a month ago, and I’m still thinking about it – mostly the small moments, like those which filled the seventh episode. I remember the end of the first batch, with Ambessa’s plan revealed as the music swelled with the punctuation of the crowd beating their chests – what a moment that was. This show is so far beyond the gold-standard for animation it isn’t fair. It’s so premium in its presentation, I loved every minute.

    Delicious in Dungeon

    So, I don’t really watch anime.

    Look, it’s a personal thing, okay? It’s nothing to do with animation – three of the shows I’m mentioning here are animated. It’s … more to do with the common themes that exist in anime not being those I’m particularly interested in. Delicious in Dungeon (or Dungeon Meshi) doesn’t avoid these things, but I liked everything else about the show enough to get over them. The aesthetic of a classic D&D party delving into a megadungeon rules. The show’s got some problems with an inconsistent tone – it doesn’t want you to take it too seriously, but things keep happening that feels like they should be taken seriously. Without spoiling anything beyond the show’s very first scene – our hero Laios is fighting a huge dragon with his party when he realizes he’s so hungry he can’t fight. And it’s pretty funny – except, people are getting mauled in the background and someone gets full-on eaten.

    If any of that’s a dealbreaker, probably safe to skip this one. Otherwise, you might have a fun, zany little show to enjoy.

    The Legend of Vox Machina Season 3

    Critical Role continues to make inspired adjustments to their live streamed D&D game to make for a compelling TV show. There were some fans disappointed by the changes made to this specific leg of the campaign – from people disliking the stakes becoming more personal for our heroes, to a couple of beloved moments from the campaign not occurring as the fans expected.

    I, however, think there’s something to be gleaned from these adjustments. If you don’t want any spoilers, skip to the next section.

    So, one major criticism was the change to Grog’s delivery of “Fix him!” in the show. In the livestreamed game, Travis yells the words, shouting for Scanlan to be resurrected following his death at the hands of Raishan. In the animated series, Scanlan is unconscious after escaping certain death at Thordak’s claws, and the delivery of the line is much more subdued. There is certainly a lot of power and pathos in the original delivery – but perhaps it always felt out of place? Immediately after that shouted line, Travis speaks his next few lines in a more mundane register. Perhaps, with how much closer he and Pike have remained (with her not being absent for so much of these adventures) has developed Grog into someone who’s much more reluctant to scream at her – especially when she’s trying her best.

    The next major problem many fans had stems from the Bard’s Lament moment being skipped – at least, that’s the way it appears. There’s still certainly enough in the show to bring the moment back in season 4, but given the show’s uncertain future, they decided not to leave the team on such a bitter, tragic note. If this had been the final season, Scanlan blowing up at his friends and entirely withdrawing from the team would’ve been a rather sour note, and all of the ingredients for the moment are still there. Perhaps Scanlan will be hesitant to return to the party come season 4 – let’s give the team some grace, eh?

    Fallout

    Ella Purnell makes the list twice! This show was a good, fun romp through our favorite wasteland, and I’m looking forward to seeing more. The moment toward the end of the first or second episode where our heroine’s chipper attitude holds despite her needing to decapitate someone just really sells the whole vibe of the show.

    Video Games

    Much of my year was spent enthralled to my old staples – Warcraft and Deep Rock Galactic. I played a few new games; things I saw on the odd stream, a few anticipated titles. And I got around to getting a Nintendo Switch, more on that later.

    Balatro

    Last year, I had this long paragraph about how much gameplay matters in a roguelike game – about how if the game isn’t fun, it won’t work? Balatro has the sauce. This indie game from a solo dev blew everyone’s minds this year for good reason. Hell, it had an honest chance to win Game of the Year at the VGAs, and while I haven’t had the chance to play Astro Bot myself, I’ve heard a wealth of good things about it. Whatever LocalThunk makes next is sure to be on everyone’s radar.

    Windblown

    From the developers behind Dead Cells comes this little isometric co-op roguelite I’ve been enjoying with a friend. It’s been a blast to play, and every time I launch the game I can’t bear to skip it’s little anime intro! It’s still in early access right now, but I’m willing to stake my flag and say this will be one worth checking out.

    My Game of the Year: Tears of the Kingdom

    See, this is the benefit of being behind on some games. I get to celebrate Baldur’s Gate 3 last year, and the Legend of Zelda this year! I get to have the cake and eat it after all.

    Jokes aside, yeah. Nothing this year grabbed me half as well as Tears of the Kingdom. It was an excellent evolution of everything Breath of the Wild did, and the new tools were so fun to play around with. With some truly stellar cinematic fights and small ways the game broke the expectations it gave you, I loved every minute. Never would I have guessed how powerful a handshake could be. (If you know, you know.)

    So. That’s the year as remembered by me. Here’s hoping for some good media in 2025!

  • December 2024 Irregular Update

    December 2024 Irregular Update

    Hi.

    Yes. I know. It’s been much, much longer than I intended since the last one of these. Since the last blog post in general. I … did not mean for it to go this way. Hell, I think the only thing that’s putting a fire beneath my ass to do this now is that I have my 2024 Year in Review post ready to go and it feels like I should probably address some stuff before I do that.

    So. What the hell happened, huh? Maybe we can both figure it out after prattling on for a while.

    Where were the blog posts?

    Well, at the top of the year, I had some turmoil with D&D. Well, more correctly, holdover turmoil from our experiment with Pathfinder. The homebrew game I was running petered out. We had one player who wasn’t all that jazzed about going back to D&D and another who was losing availability for a couple of months. So, we wrapped up the dungeon we were in and called the game.

    Not something I’m unfamiliar with – I’ve been running D&D for nearly fifteen damn years at this point. I’ve had more games get canned than reach their intended conclusion. Still, this one stung. This game was practically full-on sandbox and I wanted to more or less run the game as a gift for the table, let them explore and self-direct to the extreme. I was happy to put in the extraordinary time I might need to week-to-week to set the track down right in front of the train, but it still didn’t work out. And perhaps the complete lack of direction wasn’t the right fit for the table or the characters they made, maybe it was entirely down to the external obstacles, but it stung to lose that campaign.

    After that, I ran Blades in the Dark for about three months or so with the two players who stuck around. That system was some good fun, and we enjoyed it well. It’s built incredibly well for allowing the players to have the initiative in their choices and actions – it’s the exact inverse of D&D. In the latter, the DM has a situation they present to the players and the players respond; in Blades, the players lay out a heist (called Scores) and the GM reacts to their actions. Perhaps a bit of an oversimplification, but it runs well and we had some good fun!

    Once we got to the end of our “first season” of that game, we got one of our players back and were joined by two others and we went back to D&D. I’ve been running Tyranny of Dragons since June and it’s been going well. It’s my second time using the module and I’ve made some major edits to its structure – ones I’d love to share here on the blog, but half of my table has a habit of reading this blog, so that’ll have to wait – at least until we’ve passed the moments that have been adjusted.

    (I know, I know. How can someone have a habit of reading this blog when it’s been silent basically all year. Hush.)

    Another major source for much of my RPG related-posts was playing in a friend’s game who was running the game for the first time. I had the boon of seeing someone with no experience running the game and it reminded me of many of the lessons I’ve learned over the years – and he managed to do some inspired things despite his inexperience that I wanted to praise. Unfortunately, that table also dissolved due to out-of-game circumstances (luckily after the module’s completion).

    I’ve since had the privilege of joining another game that’s run once a month run by another friend, but I had this block, this wall up, that held me off from drafting anything.

    I had some other topic ideas at the start of the year, which made me feel fired up enough back in the January Irregular update, but … well. I lost confidence in claiming that I had any worthwhile experience to actually write those posts.

    These ideas were about the steps I took for independent publishing. Problem is, it’d be delusional to say I’ve done this successfully – at least, to the degree that I feel like my experience would be valuable to someone desperately googling for advice. Regardless of the validity of that worry – it held me off from drafting those posts. So. There it is.

    And … Red Watch?

    In January, I was feeling good about my decision to rewrite the first two books, and I still think pulling them down was the right decision for me. By February, I had completed the draft of A Violent Peace, and sent it out to several folks, people who’ve previously read for me. To my knowledge, none of them ever got around to it, or got very far into it. And I do not begrudge or blame or have any negative feelings toward them; beta reading is a lot of work for no compensation – any time it’s done, it’s a favor, and I’m thankful for them all offering to begin with.

    The point is, the complete lack of engagement was disheartening. The book probably still has many problems. I think there’s some stuff within it that works well, but there’s likely far more that just isn’t working.

    I spent the next two months diving headfirst into the rewrite of A Tide of Bones. I made some excellent headway and I was really liking some of the changes I made. … But there were many more things that were proving exceptionally difficult. I had adjusted the characters a little to provide a new central tension in the first quest of the book, but those changes were … I don’t know if they were right. And I just kept struggling with more and more things; with proper POV division, with some repetitive motivations following the events in Souhal. There’s obviously too many characters, too, but I don’t know what to do about that.

    I mean, clearly the solution would be to cut characters. But to do that would be to surrender the goal I had of not completely changing the canon of the stories so returning readers could pick up A Violent Peace. And would require major rewrites to A Violent Peace, given that it was written with the previous canon to begin with.

    So … do I scupper the whole thing? This project is like a hydra – every problem I address spawns more. How much more do I want to wrestle with it? How much does it get mangled before it’s unrecognizable? Am I going to tie myself to this anchor and just keep on with it? Or do I cut it loose?

    I think … it’s probably the latter, isn’t it? It’s been eight months since I’ve written a word that wasn’t for D&D because of this weight around my neck. I even flubbed the journaling.

    “Sometimes, taking a leap forward means leaving a few things behind.”

    Maybe it’s time to do just that, Ekko.

    So … what’s next?

    If I’ve learned anything, it’s that making promises or exclamations in a random blog post aren’t worth a damn from me. Lately, I’ve been failing to find things to do – to find distractions that will keep me busy and off-track. For a long time this year, I was playing too much Warcraft, too much Baldur’s Gate and Deep Rock Galactic, over-prepping for D&D, all sorts of stuff. But, the sheen’s wearing off.

    When I’m not doing anything else, I end up writing.

    So. Let’s see what we end up working on, then.

  • Third Time’s the Charm

    Third Time’s the Charm

    I’m not a particularly spiritual person, but I can see the appeal of something like numerology. You can do a lot with numbers to fit them into a narrative. They’re malleable and also observable.

    Growing up playing Super Mario 64 and Zelda games, three’s always been a bit weighted in its appearances. Throw Bowser three times; collect three spiritual stones to unlock the Temple of Time; you’ve got three days before the moon crashes into Hyrule–good luck, kid.

    We like making three significant. We like to see Threes. Trilogies, acts, whatever.

    But this post isn’t about magic numbers or video games.

    Instead, it’s about my books.

    The Third Book

    That heading’s a bit ambiguous, isn’t it? I released Ebonskar as my third book, sure, but I was working on the third Red Watch book first. I finished Ebonskar before completing a draft of A Violent Peace, but the latter is the third book in its series. That’s the numerology coming back around.

    And, truth is, those two are only two-thirds of what I had in mind when writing that header.

    Let me explain.

    So, Ebonskar. That book really grabbed me when it did. There was no way for me to get around it. It was all I was thinking about at the time – my head didn’t have space enough for it and Red Watch 3 to linger in there. I had to get it out first.

    And I’m really proud of it. I’m not just being a salesman when I tell people I think it’s my best work yet. It’s a good book – it’s not perfect, but the people who’ve liked it loved it. (So far as I’ve heard, anyway.) With Ebonskar, I felt like I crossed a new threshold in my ability as a writer. I can see the difference in its quality and that of my earlier works.

    Which, has caused some turmoil. Namely, that I don’t feel right selling my first two books anymore.

    Flipping through the pages of A Tide of Bones or Legacy is more liable to make me cringe than not. There’s some good ideas and such in there, yes, but my inexperience really bogs them down and makes what good there is hard to appreciate, even as the author of the work. Truth is, I fumbled.

    It was a lot of work to write a book. I didn’t want it to be for nothing; I didn’t want it to be a fantasy. I’d wanted to write my whole life, and I had, so, why not sell it? Right? I got goaded and I goaded myself into releasing it.

    If I could go back, I’d tell myself to wait. I’d tell myself to keep writing and learning, and to come back to Tide someday. Which brings us to today.

    A Really Dumb and Necessary Plan

    I’m proud of A Violent Peace. I think the third Red Watch book has some good bones, and I’m excited to hear back from my beta readers. Problem is, I don’t know how I can sell it if I don’t feel right selling the two preceding books. I have to find some way to be happy with them again to sell the series at all.

    Good news, though: I’m this whole business. I can do something dumb, something semi-self-indulgent, something necessary for me and I’m only affecting myself.

    So, effective immediately, A Tide of Bones and Legacy are no longer available for sale. They’re off the market.

    Until I finish rewriting them.

    My plan is to redraft A Tide of Bones and its sequel and release them again this year. If all goes as I hope, there will only be a few months between each book, and A Violent Peace will still be available toward the end of the year.

    This is the announcement.

    Strap in, readers. It’s going to be one hell of a year.

  • Starfield

    Starfield

    Last summer, I bought a new PC just before the release of Baldur’s Gate 3. I can’t imagine how poorly my old rig would’ve handled that game, but it ran very well on my new machine and I couldn’t have been happier with it. A side benefit of this purchase was I received a code to gain a free month of Xbox Game Pass, and I thought, “Oh, neat. I can use this in September to try out Starfield!”

    Starfield’s early release window rolled around, and news began to break. It was divisive. People were tearing the game apart, people were cheering it on. This article boosted a sentiment from its fans saying the game really picked up 12 hours in. I avoided reading too much into any of this, content to wait and form my own opinion once I could play the game myself.

    Due to my usual weekly schedule, I didn’t check it out until the Thursday after it’s full release. I launched the game after work, I threw together my character, and I played for three hours before I decided it wasn’t working for me and I uninstalled the game.

    I chatted with a few friends, trying to parse out my exact feelings. I didn’t expect to bounce off of this game so hard, so completely. Oblivion and Skyrim are two of my favorite games ever; both utterly consumed my teenage years and early adulthood. While I never had the same fondness for Fallout 3 or 4, I still played and enjoyed them, though not nearly to the same extent as the Elder Scrolls games.

    I’ve thought about that experience a few times since. Frankly, I’m not sure if I can really make peace with it without writing about it, and, well, if I write about it, I might as well post it, eh? So, here’s what I’ve settled on as my reasons for bouncing off of the game: my own conclusions and some video essays for additional viewing.

    A Poorly Paced Introduction

    (Spoilers for the openings of several Bethesda games.)

    Bethesda’s gotten worse at opening their games as time has gone on.

    Now, I’ve only played from Oblivion forward, and it might just be that trajectory of experience that’s led me to that conclusion. Still, I think Oblivion’s got the best introduction of the five I’ve played. It does the least to muddle whatever thoughts you might want to bring to your character and gives you a great dungeon to explore within moments of its launch, which really shows off a major pillar of the game. Once it’s done, you have a quest, but it doesn’t feel like you need to sort that out and you can just go wherever you want. (I was one of the weirdos who enjoyed going through Oblivion gates, so I usually got to the point in the quest where they’d start opening up and then did whatever I was feeling like.)

    I think Skyrim takes second place despite there being another game between the two Elder Scrolls entries. Its major weakness is how long you’re waiting before you get to define anything about your character, watching the wagons trundle on down toward Helgen. Once you’ve got the character editor open, I think it’s super solid, but launching a fresh playthrough can feel like a slog if you don’t have a holdover save from the end of the wagon ride.

    Fallout 3 and 4 are some of the worst that Bethesda’s done. FO3 really drags with you playing through your character’s childhood in spurts, and it’s on firm rails. You can’t do anything about people coming at you with guns for the crime of being the child of your father at its end. Hbomberguy did an incredible takedown of the intro’s faults in this long essay from 8:30 to 15:50. (The whole video’s excellent.) And FO4 is that little bit punchier, but the game decides a lot about your character before you ever have a say – you’re married, you’ve got a kid, you’re from before the bombs dropped.

    To some degree, that’s a bit unavoidable. Bethesda wants to make games that let you feel like you can go anywhere, do anything, be anyone, but there’s inherent limitations with video games. Bethesda can’t let you start anywhere unless they drop a menu on you (and they’ve got more than enough of those already), and there’s no feasible way to make a hundred or a thousand different starting scenarios match up in their fidelity and playability and excitement. They’ve got to build this reverse-funnel, this narrow entry point that then opens up to the enormous berth of their games. (And on the point of menus to choose a starting point, there are literally mods for their games to create that functionality, because the people who play these games the most would rather have that option.)

    Starfield doesn’t fail in the same ways as its predecessors, but I’d call it the worst. You have these options in character creation that you can pick to really build an exciting history for your character. I think I’d chosen to be a bounty hunter, thinking it’d be a good all-round skill set for adventuring and exploring the galaxy and some traits I thought sounded interesting for that kind of hero. And the game starts with me … working in a mine? Like, I’m a good space pilot and a bounty hunter, but I’ve got to fire this laser on some iron for a bit while two NPCs chatter on and sound nothing like people as they do?

    It’s simultaneously long-in-the-tooth and too quick. You’re walking behind these slow NPCs until you touch the dumb rock and it drags on forever. It’s aggressively unexciting (outside of the dogfight–I liked the dogfight) and incoherent. You touched the rock those guys wanted and it knocked you our, now the stranger who flew a spaceship here is going to stay and … mine? Kill pirates if they keep showing up? Your boss is like, “I guess this is happening now. Bye.” Last paycheck in the mail? And then you’re in a (fun, though I died the first try) dogfight and it’s a menu button to fly to the moon that is right there like you can see it on the screen but you have to go into the menus–

    A Whole Lot of Loading

    I thought I’d get to fly in space.

    I know – technically, you do! When you’re in a dogfight. And I know, space is vast and mostly empty, but I’m not asking for a 1:1 scenario here. Let me zoom through the stars and discover derelict wrecks to explore; let me go from planet to planet; at least let me fly within a single star system. You feel more like you’re flying through space playing Mass Effect than Starfield, and in the former you’re just moving a tiny ship across ringed maps of different star systems. Hell, there are times where you have to hit a handful of loading screens to move from one region of a planet to another.

    Bethesda’s had fast travel in their games at least as long as I’ve been playing them. But before, you had to walk somewhere before you could teleport there. Now, it’s just teleporting, and that really, really took me out of the experience.

    Divergent Innovation

    I think it’s incorrect to say that Bethesda hasn’t iterated on their formula since Oblivion. There’s a lot of new features in their games that they’ve been building and improving with their other titles. Building settlements and outposts is a whole subsystem in these games, refine out, and with a mechanical benefit for engaging with them.

    Unfortunately, that’s the last thing I’m interested in when I play a Bethesda title. I’m not here to build a town, I want to go delve into caves; I want to have that awe-inspiring moment of finding Blackreach beneath Skyrim. Hell, maybe I would’ve been more invested in the system if it’d shown up in an Elder Scrolls game (that setting is just more my speed than Fallout), but I couldn’t say for sure. I certainly didn’t play Starfield long enough to engage with it there.

    For me, playing Starfield didn’t feel better than playing an earlier title from Bethesda. I think the combat’s more fluid and enjoyable in Skyrim than their newest release; their gunplay just doesn’t hold up to what I expect from the industry anymore. I’m not excited to shoot the guns in Starfield when I can launch RoboQuest or Deep Rock Galactic or the original Halo game and feel like I’m having a better FPS experience.

    Bethesda Shouldn’t Get a Free Pass

    People loved Bethesda games; I loved Bethesda games. They were once one of the best developers, pushing the cutting edge of the tech, making the biggest worlds we’d ever seen. All that nostalgia bought them a lot of leeway these last few years. Fallout 76 hoodwinked thousands of players, both underdelivering with a buggy, misfired mess of a game, and also shipping out a bag with the collector’s deluxe edition that was not even nearly what they’d advertised. People were on the edge of their seats, waiting for Starfield to be the next must play game from the studio that defined their childhoods.

    But we didn’t get it. We got another janky mess that didn’t deliver on the hype the studio kept promising.

    That’s just not good enough anymore. Bethesda used to make the best games we’d ever played. Now, they make games I wouldn’t want to play for free.

    And Thanks for all the Fish

    So that’s where it all landed for me. If you’d like to see more, here’s a video from NakeyJakey and another from Girlfriend Reviews about their experiences with the game. Here’s hoping that Bethesda can right the ship, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

    As always, thank you for reading. Good luck out there, space cowboy.