Dragonboobs

When WotC introduced Dragonborn to D&D in 4e (well, sort of - like so much else, it's complicated), they unleashed one of the fiercest but also the silliest arguments in D&D history. Because the illustrations of female Dragonborn were differentiated from the males by giving them boobs - and because they were clearly reptilian creatures, that was clearly absurd.

The reason it's an absurd argument is that these are fantastic creatures with a fantastic biology. Real-world reptiles are the way they are because they happened to evolve that way, but it's not hard to imagine that they could evolve along a different path in a different environment. And that's before we even get into the possibility of a creator deity declaring "let it be so."

Now, having said that, I do feel WotC missed an opportunity to do something different with the Dragonborn. Largely because I'm of the school of thought that non-human species should really be non-human, and that the more inhuman a species is, the more it should diverge from humanity. (And so, since elves and orcs can inter-breed with humans, that necessitates at least a physical compatibility, but there's no reason gnomes should, never mind Dragonborn, Shardminds, or Thri-kreen.)

So I would certainly have taken the Dragonborn in a different direction: rather than identify a female dragonborn by giving her boobs (and, in fairness, making her smaller than the males), I would instead have given the males a crest, much like we see in the animal world.

And, in a similar vein, I would vary the depictions for other species more significantly, also. Warforged and Shardminds would be entirely sexless, and not described as having "male or female personalities" (whatever that means). Elves, I think, would be matriarchal, with the females being larger and heavier than the males (this is already true of Drow, of course).

But there's no reason even to stop there. One could introduce a species where all PC members must be male or must be female (like the Khepri from "Perdido Street Station", where the males are all mindless drones, and so any PC would have to be female). Or, indeed, a species where sex remains undifferentiated until they enter a mating phase of their lifecycle, at which point part of the population each become temporarily male or female (and not necessarily the same each time). Or what have you.

Basically, as soon as you're talking about a non-human species, and especially once you're talking about fantasy biology, all bets are off.

Ultimately, my "non-humans should be non-human" position has a number of corollaries, some of which might be useful.

Firstly, because D&D is played by humans and therefore since even non-human D&D characters are played by human players, those D&D species should serve to highlight something about the human condition. Although there is a wide variety of human societies, by virtue of our biology we all have certain things in common - we all age and die relatively quickly; we're all driven to seek food, shelter, and sex; it's women who bear children; etc. But if we posit a non-human species with a different biology we can consider the "what if" for the case where one of these basics ceases to apply. What if elves are effectively immortal and so don't think about aging? What if plantmen have no need to seek food? What if shardminds have no interest in reproduction?

Secondly, I take the view that a choice of PC's race should be a matter of an instant - either the player comes to the process with a clear idea that "I want to play a {whatever}", or they should play a human. I particularly dislike the approach where the player chooses his class and then hunts about for the race that has the optimum ability score modifiers to suit that class.

(Crucially, though, I should note that I'm largely talking from a theoretical "white tower" point of view. In reality, players will choose their race by whatever means they wish, and I'd much rather they end up with a character they're happy with than some notion of 'pure' gaming.)

Thirdly, I'm inclined to think that the non-human species should be differentiated from humans in a handful of clear, and fairly significant, ways. An elf shouldn't just be a "human with funny ears", but neither is it a good idea to load them with a hundred tiny adjustments - better to give them four or five very clear differences.

And then, as a corrolary to that, pretty much all elven NPCs should therefore differ from human NPCs in those same ways, to build consistency in the world. An elven PC of course wouldn't be bound by those same things (since PCs are inevitably exceptional), but an elven PC probably should differ from the "human version" of the same character in a couple of ways, and those ways probably should bear some relation to the established facts - even if that relationship is to entirely subvert one of them.

(It probably goes without saying that I reject any claim that D&D is racist. It is, of course, entirely possible to play D&D in a racist manner by drawing lazy equivalences between certain species and real-world groups, but I don't accept that that is automatically the case, or even the case as-written. For the simple reason that I reject those equivalencies, and instead view the non-human species as being, well, non-human.)

Firefly: Bucking the Tiger

This month's "Lost Episode" was the final pre-gen adventure from the "Echoes of War" series - oddly, this one didn't make it into the compiled volume of adventures and so is only available as a PDF, which proved a major pain when I elected to print the damn thing prior to use. Oh well.

Anyway, the game had four players: Emma (Book), Josh (Jayne), Phil (Mal), and a newcomer to this game, Daniel (Inara). Which was certainly a decent set of characters, although at one point Phil did need to slip into Simon's skin for one of the scenes.

This is a fairly complex and meaty adventure, and so I was always a little concerned about our ability to fit it in to the allocated time. As it happened, we ran over, but only slightly - everything was wrapped up by about 10:45 instead of the projected 10:30. But I did have to cut out quite a lot of the subplots in order to make it work.

When reading through this adventure initially, I concluded that it was probably the best of the "Echoes of War" series, and I'm inclined to stick with this assessment. In particular, I like the way that it has a choice of subplots that can be resolved, meaning that the adventure will play out significantly differently for different groups.

That said, I'm not terribly happy with the way the adventure tried to resolve the mystery - in hindsight, I still think they'd be better going with the "Three Clue Rule" and leaving it as a player challenge, rather than using a special Complication to determine when a given NPC reveals their secrets. But it wasn't too bad, and did at least resolve quickly.

All in all, I was happy with this adventure, and happy also to come to the end of the "Echoes of War" series. Next month's adventure is "The Knitted Jumper Caper" which should be a nice slice-of-life episode to end the year - this will serve as something of an "end of season" show, albeit one of those end of season shows where the major plotlines have been resolved and so it's more denouement than climax. Which is fine.

And then next year we'll launch into the "Ghosts of the Black" adventures, interspersed with some homebrew and some of the other pre-gen episodes (for Firefly or, indeed, for Serenity). But that's all for the future...

Why Does D&D Not Have a Mageblade Class?

Way back in days of yore, the original version of D&D had an odd rule for elves - they advanced both as Fighters and Magic Users, somehow switching between the two at the start of adventures. In BECMI D&D, the Elf class was effectively what would be known as a Fighter/Mage in 1st and 2nd Edition... and, of course, 1st and 2nd edition had multiclass rules allowing demihuman PCs to advance in multiple classes at once - most notably the elven Fighter/Mage.

When the game moved on to 3e, though, the multiclass rules were changed so that a PC would at least start as a member of a single class. And although they could later pick up other classes, there was no equivalent of the classic Fighter/Mage, and so no real way to build the classic Elf of yore (at least not until you qualified for the Elritch Knight prestige class - or until the Duskblade was added very late in the edition). 4e, for its part, mostly got rid of multiclassing entirely, although it did later introduce hybrid classes which brought back that Fighter/Mage concept.

And now 5e has reverted to 3e-like multiclassing. It does, I should note, have an Eldritch Knight subclass for the Fighter, but...

(Oh, and Pathfinder is basically the same as 3e on this, except that it has the Magus in place of the Duskblade.)

What I've been wondering for a while is why WotC didn't introduce that 'missing' Mageblade class right at the start of 3e, thus plugging the gap left by that one tricky classic archetype.

(Indeed, I even wonder if adding that one class might have been enough to remove the need for multiclass rules entirely? It really was that one weird corner case that was left over from the legacy of the game, so adding a new class might have been enough to cover it.)

All that said, if I were now rebuilding D&D, I think I'd be going with a very different class line-up...

• Hero: A non-magical hero that combines the existing Fighter, Barbarian, Monk, Ranger, and Rogue.
• Wizard:: The practitioner of magic. Can be a prepared spellcaster (Wizard), a spontaneous caster (Sorcerer), or a 'channeller' (Warlock) depending on the player's preference.
• Witch Hunter: The Cleric rebuilt to be much more Van Helsing than currently. Forget the religious trappings of the Cleric, though - the character could be a priest like in the Exorcist, but doesn't have to be. Would still have access to magic, but it would be a learned magic rather than the gift of the gods, and certainly wouldn't trawl the Bible for suitable miracles to convert!
• Artificer: Or Alchemist or Mad Scientist, or... This is the character who draws his power from his gear, a la Iron Man.

In each case, the class should have builds available allowing them to dip into some of the lesser powers of other classes, allowing the Paladin to be built as a Hero (for example), but I don't think I would bother with multiclassing as such - the advantage of a class system is strong archetypes; if you want wholesale blending of archetypes, you probably want a point-buy system anyway.

Of course, that's just me. These days I don't really have any interest in building my own game. Much...

The Last Thing I'd Expect

When creating adventures, I genuinely try to cover a reasonable range of possible PC actions - maybe they'll fight the bad guys, maybe they'll negotiate, maybe they'll hide, maybe they'll try to trick them. If they do fight, maybe they'll go for a straight-up battle, maybe they'll try to arrange an ambush... Whatever, I try to cover the bases as well as I can.

Every so often, though, the PCs do something that takes me completely by surprise.

In the first session of "Eberron: Dust to Dust", the PCs had been dropped by a plot device into the foundations of Sharn. Off in one direction there were abandoned ruins of an old goblin settlement; from another they could hear (and indeed see) a patrol of Spider-eye Goblins coming in their direction.

So I'd considered various options: maybe they'd retreat into the ruins, maybe they'd hide, maybe they'd fight...

What I didn't expect was that they'd strike up a conversation with the goblins and agree to journey back with them into their lair. I mean, everything about that scenario positively screamed "It's a Trap!" (I think maybe I'll need to get an Ackbar mask for future cases like this.)

Anyway, the consequence of this was that rather than fighting the goblin patrol (which would have been a tough fight), they found themselves fighting a large part of the goblin tribe (which was an overwhelming fight). And so a TPK ensued...

... only it didn't. It turns out that the 5e encounter-building system is much more forgiving than I expected, especially when the party has a full complement of PCs. Consequently, they were (just barely) able to fight through well enough to buy themselves some time, and then they were able to retreat. Which is lucky, since it would have sucked for the first session of a campaign to result in a TPK!

Still, always fun when the PCs take you completely by surprise. And now I know I need to be better prepared for the next session...

Out of the Abyss

Disaster in the Last Chapter!

Okay, to review this I'm going to need to delve into spoilers. If you don't want to know, then here's the non-spoiler summary: this adventure starts spectacularly well, goes downhill a bit later on (but is still good), and then falls to pieces at the end. As such, I recommend it but with huge reservations.

From here on out, there are spoilers.

The adventure can broadly be split into three sections. Section one starts with the PCs as prisoners of the drow, and has them escaping and making their way to the surface. Section two starts with the PCs being recruited to venture back into the Underdark to find out what's going on, and gathering materials to help them fix it. And section three is a two-chapter climax of the campaign, consisting of the Fetid Wedding and the Rage of Demons.

Part One: Escape from the Underdark

As noted above, this section begins with the PCs as prisoners of the drow. They then escape, make their way through the Underdark, visiting many of the iconic sites in FR's version of that landscape, before finally escaping to the surface. Along the way, they encounter some significant signs that something is very, very wrong, and are chased throughout by drow intent on recapturing them. It covers about half of the book.

This section is absolutely brilliant from start to finish. It contains some of the best adventure material I've ever seen from WotC, ever, and features a lot of very alien settings and very strange creatures - exactly what I would expect from the Underdark, and especially an Underdark falling under the sway of the demon lords. This section also manages to present the PCs with many meaningful choices, rather than a simply railroad of scenes, and yet also manages to foreshadow events later in the campaign.

Basically, had I been reviewing this half of the campaign alone, I'd give it five stars without hesitation. I even rate it more highly than "Lost Mine of Phandelver" - although the adventure design is probably on a par with that adventure, it also gains points for novelty, while LMoP is deliberately quite mainstream in its content.

Part Two: Back Into the Depths

Unfortunately, the second half of the campaign isn't nearly so good. This section sees the PCs recuited by Bruenor Battlehammer to go back into the Underdark, find out what is going on down there, and hopefully put a stop to it. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, this section just doesn't have anything like the same flair to it as the first half. Off the top of my head, there are several weaknesses:

• Unlike the first half, this half's choices amount to "what order shall we do things"? The PCs basically have to go to the Zhentarim outpost, and from there they have to go to the Underdark library. There, they make contact with a duplicitious drow mage, and although they don't have to ally with him, the alternative is still that they need to perform the same ritual, just without his help. Then, they have to go get a bunch of ingredients, each of which is only really available in one place, so they more or less have to go to all of the locations detailed - as I said, they do get to choose what order to handle things.
• I found the level of detail in the second half fell short of what was needed. This was especially true of the incursion into Sorcere, which by rights should have had a full 32-page adventure (at least) to itself. But several other locations were similarly lacking - locations weren't mapped, events were presented in a very abstract manner, and so forth. I didn't notice this as a problem in the first half, which made it very noticable in the second.
• Following on from the above, I felt that the designers had clearly had a lot of good ideas, but I felt they weren't fleshed out enough. Basically, it felt like they were trying to fit too much adventure into too few pages. This wouldn't have been so noticable, but for the comparison with the first half.
• I believe this part of the adventure would prove very difficult to run. The adventure assumes here that the PCs would be accompanied by a great many NPC allies, none of whom were particularly fleshed out (again, unlike the NPCs in the first part). I'm really not sure what these allies really added to things, either - except perhaps warm bodies to soak up some of the incoming attacks. But with so many characters and so many factions to juggle... it really felt like it would be a chore, rather than a pleasure to run.
• The adventure provides a new downtime activity, establishing a way-station in the Underdark. This was actually a really great addition to the game... or it would have been. Unfortunately, there is absolutely no payoff for setting up way-stations - the adventure never talks about what happens to expedition morale if the supply lines get cut, or details what reinforcements PCs might get from their way-stations, or anything like that. It's a great idea that doesn't actually go anywhere.

But all of this pales next to...

Part Three: Disaster in the Last Chapter

The adventure has a two-part climax. The first part of this sees the PCs disrupting "The Fetid Wedding", a ritual by which one of the demon lords aimed to gain control over a huge fungal growth in the Underdark. Again, this is a really great idea, very atmospheric and exactly the sort of insanity an Underdark/demons adventure should feature.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work so well, for three reasons. Firstly, the demon lord in question is too powerful for the PCs to actually deal with. Therefore, the adventure introduces a neat deus ex machina to fix this - another demon lord appears out of nowhere to distract the first, allowing the PCs to deal with another part of the problem themselves. Ick.

Secondly, this episode takes place in an alternate plane, and any PC reduced to 0 hit points is therefore not killed, but instead wakes up unharmed back in their bodies. "It was all a dream" sucks in storytelling, and sucks no less in a published adventure.

And, thirdly, there's the question of what happens if the PCs fail? What happens if they are all reduced to 0 hit points? Well, the answer to that doesn't please either: if they fail, they've nonetheless done enough for that Underdark fungus to be able to throw off the demon lord itself. So, in effect, there are no stakes - the Players might as well go out for a coffee, let their PCs just soak up the damage until they all wake from their dream, and all will be well.

Lame.

And then comes the final chapter. The PCs conduct the long-promised ritual, they summon all of the demon lords to one place for the big finale...

and they then get to watch as these ultra-powerful NPCs battle things out amongst themselves. After all, one demon lord is too much for them to handle, so all of them together?

Now, in fairness, it's not quite like that - the adventure suggests instead that the PCs should instead face four 'lesser' combats while the demon lords fight it out, before facing a weakened Demogorgon at the end. But that still sucks: they're still effectively spectators.

There's also a sidebar that suggests the players should instead be given the demon lords to run, and the battle played out that way. This is much better, and the DM absolutely should do this. But it still sucks - at the climax of the campaign, our heroes who we have followed throughout the story are reduced to watching.

(Reading this, I actually wondered: is this adventure actually intended to be run? Or is it rather a 'storyline' presented more to be read and imagined? That would explain an awful lot - in addition to this problem, there's also the plethora of NPCs in the second section.)

But, fundamentally, I think the problem simply lies with the level range of the campaign - the demon lords are suitable opponents only for highest-level PCs (if even then), but the campaign was intended to run from 1st to 15th level, putting them well out of reach. So, really, what was wanted was instead a longer book to give it room to flesh out all these ideas, a longer level range, and therefore a delayed climax until 20th level. Alas, it was not to be.

Conclusion

I found it really hard to rate this one: the first half is outstanding, the second half merely good, and the climax terrible. So, where does that leave us?

In the end, I settled on recommending it, but...

It's worth the money for a read-through, and indeed for the first half. But as a complete campaign, it's flawed, probably fatally. Still, it's a step up even from "Princes of the Apocalypse", and so another improvement on "Tyranny of Dragons", so they're heading in the right direction.

An Initiative Variant

I've been noodling around a variant of the initiative rules that I'm considering for use. This one works best if there are multiple opponents to the PCs, ideally with as many monsters as there are PCs - it basically won't work with only one monster in play.

Anyway...

At the start of combat, each PC rolls initiative. The DM rolls initiative once, using the highest modifier from the applicable monsters.

If any PCs rolled a higher total than the monsters, those PCs each take their first turn, in the order in which they scored.

When the monster initiative total comes up, the DM takes a turn with any one of the monsters/NPCs.

Thereafter, the PCs and monsters alternate turns. If there's a mismatch in numbers, there may need to be a few turns where they "double up", but where possible these should be avoided.

(Note that if any PC or monster gets two turns in the round, these should be treated as two separate entities, one for each turn.)

So, for example, if the classic four-person party encounters four orcs, each PC rolls initiative while the DM rolls once. Let's assume the results are Rogue 15, Wizard 12, Orcs 11, Fighter 9, Cleric 2.

So, the Rogue goes first. Then the Wizard acts. Then the first orc acts. Then the Fighter, the second orc, the Cleric, and the third orc.

Then the Rogue acts again, as the first round is complete. Now the fourth orc takes his turn, followed by the Wizard, and so on. We now have a cycle going: PC, orc, PC, orc.

Eventually, one of the orcs gets taken out of play. At this point, the party "doubles up", so that the sequence becomes: Rogue, orc, Wizard, orc, Fighter, orc, Cleric, Rogue...

When the second orc falls, it's probably best if the order becomes Rogue, orc, Wizard, Fighter, orc, Cleric, Rogue... but that doesn't need to be the case - the point is that the PCs should have two "double turns" between orcish actions.

The big advantage of this approach is that it means that monster actions are staggered, even if there is a group of identical monsters. This means that you don't have the orcs acting once followed by four turns of the PCs responding to a static battlemat. The down-side is that it needs a bit more book-keeping, as it's important to make sure that the individual monsters each only act roughly as often as they should (this doesn't matter so much if the monsters are "four orcs", but it does if you have "orcish warboss, plus three minions").

One further caveat: in the case where the PCs gain surprise, I'd be inclined not to roll for the monsters at all. Instead, the PCs each act once, and then the top PC gets to act again... and then the monsters strike back. And likewise for the reverse case as well, of course - the monsters act once each and then the top PC acts.

I haven't tried this in actual play, though, so I'm not yet certain how it will work in practice. Hopefully, I'll find out fairly soon.