I finished my second play-through of Fire Emblem: Three Houses this weekend, the Verdant Wind route. My first play-through was through the Crimson Flower route (e.g. the Black Eagles) and it was a beautiful story, but seeing Edelgard from another perspective, and especially her demise, really hit me hard.
Seeing the many sides of Lady Edelgard truly made me appreciate her the way I might appreciate a figure from a Greek tragedy.
Warning: further spoilers ahead.
Of the three lords in Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Edelgard was the most ambitious, but also incredibly charming. Even her most trusted retainer, Hubert, had a love/hate relationship with her: deeply devoted but also afraid of her power, and her willingness to make morally questionable choices. Most routes through the game don’t really delve into why she is like this until you get to the Crimson Flower route.
There, over time, you learn of her manipulation by powerful relatives (and their dark allies), or her suffering by their experiments,1 and also the loss of her siblings. In the end, she decides to take control of her fate, and the fate of all of Fódlan, in her hands.
The game designers wisely avoided making her a Mary Sue type character. Instead, she makes some very tough and cruel decisions when necessary.
Further, there’s no denying that through her leadership, she unleashes terrible destruction and death to achieve her aims. She knows that her path will be a dark and bloody one, and decides to walk it anyway, believing that the ends justify the means.
“No. The Edelgard who shed tears died years ago.”
And yet, despite her tough exterior, she also never completely loses her humanity.
She is devoted to her fellow students, and to Byleth, and devoted to a future where the old aristocracy and the Church are overthrown and everyone can be equal. In spite of her cold exterior, when Byleth falls in the Crimson Flower route, she sheds many tears.
She even grieves for Dmitri, even if she tries to hide it.
Edelgard was the ardent revolutionary of the game,2 and whether you liked her or not, she drove the story, and she commanded genuine admiration and respect from her peers, and from players like myself. It is sad that in most game routes she suffers a tragic ending one way or another, when all she wanted to do was prevent others from suffering the same fate that she did. Her choice in methods of course is where people might disagree (and do), but in the end she was still a human being, not a two-dimensional villain, and her humanity, flaws and all, is what makes her such a compelling character.
If that doesn’t feel like a Greek tragedy, I don’t know what is.
P.S. Amazing voice acting by Tara Platt, by the way. She really brought Edelgard to life.
P.P.S. I still have two more routes to go.
1 In the Verdant Wind route, Lysithea implies that Edelgard suffered much as she did through those experiments. That explains their similar hair color, and it makes me wonder if Edelgard similarly suffers from a shorter lifespan, though this is never explored.
2 Arguably, Claude is also a revolutionary, but he also had the luxury of being able to wash his hands of the messier aspects whenever he wanted to. That said, Claude is the “bro” that everyone needs in their life, and I really liked his story route ending too, especially since in my play-through he ended up marrying Leonie which was a pleasant surprise.
I loved this song back in the day, but the music video sure hasn’t aged well…
Last night I finally got to play Adventurer’s League at the local gaming store for the first time in maybe a year, patiently waiting since for my kids’ school activities to end for the school term, and getting my character dusted off and ready to go.
But it was a terrible night. The adventure module we played, something from Season 7 Tomb of Annihilation, was poorly designed, and our DM was just an inexperienced kid who tried his best but hadn’t prepared enough.
The worst part though were some of the other players. I sat in the farthest back, surrounded by a number of “power players” (including one dad who brought his teenage daughter), who kept talking over me and one another. They kept pushing the rules envelope, and the DM didn’t really have the confidence or experience to make decisive choices about allowing this, or saying no to that, so the power players ran roughshod over the game. Within the first hour, I checked out, and spent the evening on the phone, venting on Twitter (rant since deleted) and hardly said anything for the rest of the night. I was all too glad to leave when it was over. The module had been scheduled for 2 hours, but we stayed almost for 5.
And yet it was more than that. The gaming store, which thankfully weathered the pandemic, still felt very different. Overly-complicated food menu, unfamiliar staff, flashier “gamer” vibe, etc. The large community of AL players I used to know back before the pandemic has almost entirely disappeared, or play their own table exclusively leaving occasional players like me at the “little kids table”. Where before we usually had 4-5 tables a night, and I knew all the senior DMs, I recognize almost no one now. That goes double for the other players.
In short, the local AL community really sucks now, and the gaming store isn’t what it used to be. When I last played during the pandemic, it had also been a bad experience, though not quite as bad. So, I just chalked it up to the occasional bad night. They happen, and you move on.
However, it’s clearly become a pattern and I finally had to face the fact that the local gaming community that I once knew is over. The pandemic and WotC’s tinkering with AL rules drove off a lot of committed players, and in a sense gutted my local community. Further, I’ve lost interest in newer D&D rule books,1 and our local regional Discord channel is very quiet now.
As I wrote back in the day, sometimes it’s better to just not play D&D than subject yourself to a frustrating and disappointing experience, but I kept trying through the pandemic hoping things would eventually recover. They haven’t. And as with Magic, I have to face that sunk-cost of investing any further in it, and give it up.
Never say never, of course. Even if I don’t like the community now, who know how things will look say five years from now. Maybe I’ll find another, healthier AL community someday. But for now, I’m putting that hobby on a shelf for the foreseeable future.
Contrarily, playing at home with my kids has been a lot of fun, and my daughter’s friends want to play with us too, so while my local gaming community has faded away, I suppose a new one is being formed right under my nose.
1 The new Mordenkainen’s book somehow just feels flat, homogenized, and takes a lot of fun out of playing certain character builds. I did get Witchlight and Candlekeep Mysteries, but have hardly cracked open either book since.
My kids and I have been playing a longer D&D campaign in the world of Eberron, a noir steam-punk magic setting for almost a year now, and the kids consistently seem to enjoy this setting more than other D&D campaigns we’ve run. Since we have only two players (my daughter and my son), the party consists of:
I run the sidekick characters myself, and some have come in and others rotated out.2 The hobgoblin and warforged sidekicks have been with the party since the beginning and have been a pretty integral part of the story.
Our hobgoblin cleric’s backstory is that he secretly wanted to be a wizard instead and only did the cleric role out of familial obligation. However, since Borsheg was rejected by the wizards guild, he has since gotten private tutorship on the side with a shady teacher named “Dak” who, currently unknown to the party, is a Rakshasa.
Our Warforged has become the most central character to the party though. Originally, Malbus 414’s backstory was that he had, like all Warforged, fought in the Last War, particularly as part of the 523rd Battalion in East Breland. However, it became clear that his entire platoon had been secretly conditioned by their gnomish creator, Dr Vilnius Volrani Vishkik, to attack any gnomes from a certain rival house on sight. Eventually, the kids were able to find an artificer who could remove Malbus’s conditioning, and scrape up enough money to pay for it, but at the cost of partial memory loss. The kids really got choked up when they realized that Malbus wasn’t going to be quite the same.
Out of all the stories that I’ve teased in front of kids, including demonic cults, Borsheg’s evil tutor, smuggling jobs, etc, the kids have really attached themselves to Malbus’s and have since pursued Dr Vishkik (who unknown to the kids, is now a glorified brain-in-a-jar) across continent only to discover that he has reconstituted most of the old 523rd platoon, and means to take on the Lord of Blades in Cyre in order to become a new ruler there, assert dominance over all Warforged at large. Malbus is torn between his loyalties to his old platoon, but also his new purpose in stopping Dr Vishkik, especially where violence is required.
Mechanically speaking, a Warforged is an interesting character race since it’s fully artificial, yet is also a living being. According to the 5e guide, if you play a Warforged, you (among other things):
Gain a +1 bonus to Armor Class.
Have advantage on saving throws against being poisoned, and you have resistance to poison damage, and are immune to disease
Do not require sleep, but when you take a long rest, you must spend at least six hours in an inactive, motionless state, rather than sleeping. In this state, you appear inert, but it doesn’t render you unconscious, and you can see and hear as normal. Further, you don’t need to sleep, and magic can’t put you to sleep.
These things all come from the Warforged’s artificial nature. However, as a living sentient being, you can still benefit from things like healing magic, potions, etc., so you are not a construct either. It’s not entirely clear to what degree a Warforged is a machine vs. a living being, but I’ve mostly leaned toward the artificial, and focused on the “power core” as a source of their sentience and humanity.
The mechanics of a Warforged are fun, but the role-playing side of the Warforged is what I find most compelling. Because the Last War is over, Warforged are kind of superfluous now. Society doesn’t need them anymore, and they are no longer manufactured (at least in mass-production), so they have been tossed out on the street with no clear picture of what to do with themselves. This leaves plenty of room to decide how you would want to play a Warforged. Malbus 414 initially took mercenary jobs because war was the only thing he knew, but once he met the party during the initial session, he gradually took his life in a new direction with them.
The official interview with creator Keith Baker helps clarify this and is worth a watch:
I tend to roleplay Malbus 414 similar to Commander Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, in that he is searching for his humanity, and trying to forge a new identity for himself bit by bit as something more than just a war machine. One could conceivably do the opposite and play a Warforged who never really left the Last War. The noir, brooding atmosphere of Eberron really lends itself to this, because of the heavier emphasis on character backstory, personal challenges, etc, but if you play a Warforged within the larger universe, such as Planescape or even the Forgotten Realms somehow, the brooding war backstory can still come into play and create a good starting point for the character.
Or you could just make a character like this one:
Comment posted in linked video above
I wish Warforged were more available in other settings, not just for its useful mechanical reasons, especially in Adventurer’s League, but I am happy to play one when the opportunity comes up. Its nature lends itself to good role-playing, and its mechanics allow for all kinds of interesting character / class options.
1 My son is a huge Kirby fan.
2 Our half-orc rouge-scout sidekick died a few weeks back in a random encounter, and the elf fighter replaced him since the party was near Valenar anyway. I keep a pool of sidekicks in the backlog in case I need to replace one. Still, the half-orc scout was a good character in his own right, and the kid and I kind of miss him already, even as we enjoy the new character.
For some time now, I’ve been actively playing a high-elf cleric of the forge domain named Fenmaer Wasanthi in a small play-by-post community for Dungeons and Dragons’s Adventurer’s League. It’s been great fun, and one of the few consistent bright spots in the last two years for me. Fenmaer had initially been something of a throw-away character that I had intended to use for the new season 10 rules of Adventurer’s League (and never did), but when the season 11 rules came out, fixing a lot of issues, I decided to bring back Fenmaer and try things out.
My characters home is Elventree, near the city of Mulmaster, where a small, dwindling community of high-elf forge masters still maintains an obscure cult to Darahl Firecloak. Fenmaer being (comparatively) the youngest has been tasked to rekindle the community through acquired knowledge and experience. When our PbP group started doing adventure season 7 modules (“Tomb of Annihilation”) in Chult, I also had a small side-story where Fenamer got in touch with a scattering of Darahl worshippers in Port Nyanzaru as well.
Darahl’s sketchy history makes him an interesting “anti-hero” elven deity, who is not affiliated with evil, but also sundered from the rest of Elven pantheon too and forced to “go it alone”. That said, when trying to flesh out Fenmaer’s backstory and role-playing, I realized that there is not a lot of information about his deity, Darahl Firecloak.
The main source of information comes from one issue of Dragon Magazine, issue 251, which can be found online in PDF form. Fifth Edition material on Darahl (i.e. Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes) largely preserves this without adding much too it. Below, I’ve included basic information both canonical (Dragon Magazine + Mordenkainen’s) followed by additions that I’ve added for Fenmaer specifically. If you like, feel free to use it, adapt, etc. Spread the faith of Darahl to player characters far and wide. He’s not a picky deity, as you’ll see. 😋
Canonical Information
Starting with the basic stats:
Name: Darahl Firecloak, originally Tilvenar
Nicknames: The Even-Tempered, Lord of the Green Flame
Alignment: Lawful Neutral, leaning toward good
Follower Alignments (optional): typically LN, LG or NG
Symbol: A greenflame between two outstretched hands
Domain: Forge (5th edition), Earth and Fire (3rd edition?)
Symbolic Weapon: longsword
Darahl Firecloak was originally part of the elven panthan, the Seldarine, and served under Rillifane Rallathil, but after being offered a cursed artifact by Lloth and the Unseelie Queen of Air, his avatars went beserk and caused a great deal of destruction before being pacified again. However, the damage had been done and Darahl lost many followers, while also being shunned by the other elven deities. Darahl left the plane of Arvandor and made his home in the 1st layer of Arcadia where he first took the name “Darahl Firecloak” and began to reinvent himself. Darahl is now much more open to non-elvish followers, and alliances with non-elven deities such as Dumathoin of the Dwarves, Urogalan of the Halflings, and Flandal Steelskin of the Gnomes for example.
Because Darahl is so open to other followers, he has even some followers from the Underdark, particularly Duergar. For this reason, both Lloth and Laduguer oppose him. Darahl, according to Dragon magazine, is often invoked by followers at the start of a new undertaking such as digging a new mine, or crafting a magical artifact, or to help avert disasters such as earthquakes and forest fires. Offerings by the faithful include precious minerals or minor magical items. Priests are also called firecloaks and often dress in motifs of yellow, red and brown with a green flame somewhere.
That’s the canonical stuff. Let’s move on to Fenmaer’s religion in particular.
The Molten Path
Fenmaer’s high-elf community in Elventree were more prosperous in the past and their craft earned the respect of their neighbors as well as other traders from afar. I was heavily inspired by the Noldor of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion who also had unparalleled crafting skills in comparison to other elves and races. The Elventree high elves remained somewhat apart from their more numerous wood elf neighbors and fellow residents in Elventree, yet as the human community of Mulmaster later flourished, the elves diminished. Thus, the high elf community did what elves do best: retreat further in isolation, only to their detriment.
The elders of Fenmaer’s community teach an offshoot of Darahl’s religion called the Molten Path. Contemplatives, priests and some mages as well, seek to burn away their own “impurities” (just as metal is purified by fire) through a hard work ethic, devotion to their craft, and community. Through this they believe they see the handiwork of Darahl in all things, and in themselves.
According to the high elves of Elventree, Darahl dwells in Arcadia at a place called Maldinnon, the Peerless Forge, where he guards the Eternal Flame,1 and uses it to mold and craft the many things of the world. In Platonic philosophical style, that which He crafts is said to be the peerless example of that object to which all others seek to emulate in their craft. By contrast the elemental evil represents attempts to corrupt the peerless works of Darahl and profane his craft, and must therefore be opposed by all followers.
Through the PbP adventures, I’ve had Fenmaer recite a few prayers and liturgy, sometimes more serious, sometimes more joking:
“Hail Tilvenar full of fiery grace…deliver us from elemental evil… and lead us not down the path of rust and ruin…”
and a benediction like so:
I call upon Darahl Tilvenar, the blessed Firecloak, who keeps the Sacred Flame free from impurities, and molds metal as he molds souls into fine vessels for the good of others. Be ye most kindly disposed to us, let your warmth and radiance fill the hearts of this family and guide them through the darkness with your light. Let not the elemental evil obstruct their path. May their coffers be bountiful and their worries few. (then in Elvish…) Vardo nu luini yassen Tilvenárii eleni ómaryo airetári-lírinen.
or:
Tilvinarë na-molonen! (Tilvenar don’t fail me)
Fake elvish
or:
Tilvenar, may your fiery Cloak descend upon us!
and:
In the Name of the Firecloak
When Fenmaer reached 7th level, he acquired the Divination spell, and used it to contact Darahl for some questions concerning their next adventure. I described the ritual like so:
Using the ground iron, copper, silver, gold and copious coal dust, Fenmaer draws a large, intricate “sand mandala” on the ground between him and a small lit brazier. The different ground materials form different colors in the mandala. Once that’s done, his chanting continues on in Old Elvish for a while until observers notice that the filings have somehow heated up and are glowing red hot. Not melting, just red hot. Finally, he poses his question…
So, those are some non-canonical examples of how I applied Darahl’s religion in role-playing Fenmaer. Like any religion, one can imagine many regional differences, or even liturgical differences among communities, so in role-playing a follower of Darahl, feel free to adapt, adjust or innovate your own liturgy or community teachings. Or feel free to use what’s here and help spread the Word.
P.S. a big thanks to my DM and my fellow players who put up with Fenmaer’s religious antics. 😄
1 I had envisioned it as a white-hot flame until I saw the Dragon Magazine article later. You are welcome to decide what the actual color is, dear readers.
Lately, I’ve been re-watching The Mandalorian and while I enjoyed it the first time through, I enjoy it a lot more the second time around. I’ve been thinking about how I might make a Dungeons and Dragons character for Adventurer’s League that mirrors the Mandalorian, Din Djarin.
I wrote recently about hobgoblins in D&D and how they mirrored Klingons in some way, and at that time I made a character named Kargoth toward that end. I played a couple tier-1 sessions, and it was fun, but the character wasn’t as interesting as I would have liked.
Then, after re-watching The Mandalorian, I got an idea. Since the new, season 11 rules allow for much easier rebuilding of characters, I decided to use the opportunity to rebuild Kargoth as a Mandalorian-style hobgoblin fighter, eldritch knight:
Kargoth’s backstory is that he was adopted after being a child on the losing side of a war by a fanatical cult of warriors (e.g. Children of the Watch), but hides his hobgoblin identity in public using a helmet, as well as following the religious ethos he was raised with. Helmet is cosmetic only and provides no additional armor class. Kargoth also has the hermit character background unsurprisingly.
Eldritch Knight as a subclass made surprising sense because first and foremost he would have to be a warrior anyway, but as an Eldritch Knight he would have many additional tricks up his sleeves that can be approximated as magic spells:
It’s fun to be a little creative here since every Mandalorian will be a little different anyway.
The real challenge is the hobgoblin racial character stats. A bonus to Intelligence helps with playing an Eldritch Knight, but the bonus to Constitution doesn’t have an overt benefit beyond more hit points.
I debated back and forth and opted to make Kargoth mostly a ranged fighter, to match the Mandalorian as a crack-shot. I gave him the Archery fighting style, equipped him with both a hand-crossbow (for later Crossbow feat) and a heavy crossbow. But, I also gave Kargoth enough Strength to handle melee combat too.
For armor I settled on Medium armor with the goal of getting good half-plate someday. The Mandalorian seems to wear half-plate rather than full-body armor and this allows me to continue focusing on Kargoth’s Dexterity based build.
Lastly, the kid. I debated using my “free spell choice” as an Eldritch Knight to cast _Find Familiar_ but a pet raven is a lousy substitute for Grogu (a.k.a. baby Yoda). So, for now Kargoth doesn’t have a sidekick … yet. Then again if I want to rebuild I can certainly do that too.
Late last year, I picked up a copy of Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, but with so much going on, I never got a chance to properly read through the book until last month (one year later 🤦🏽), which I now regret. What an excellent addition to the D&D canon.
Tasha, also known as Iggwilv, is a famous “witch” (more correctly an archmage) known as the Witch Queen in some sources. She is more of a chaotic character than the somewhat stodgy Mordenkainen, both her colleague and rival, and she has been known to consort with some demonic characters, but is not portrayed as evil either. One could draw some parallels with Liliana the planeswalker character from the Magic The Gathering series, but Tasha has a much longer history in the gaming world.1
The book is written from her perspective, and has some witty anecdotes from Tasha, and terrific artwork of Tasha herself. Mordenkainen never looked that good in heels. 😋
When I first bought the book, I wasn’t sure what to expect, apart from it seeming like a kind of “rules update” or reboot of some aspects of original Player’s Handbook. The book states off the bat that all the rules contained therein are entirely optional and meant to enhance the 5th-edition D&D experience, while also addressing some shortcomings with certain classes (rangers for example) or outmoded racial-character designs. But again, they are all optional.
Tasha’s focuses on four main areas, I feel:
Optional class options.
Spells and Magic items.
Additional tips and tools for world-building, including group patron options.
Custom background and character creation options
The first section struck me as the most immediately useful. My daughter, when she first played with me years ago, had a half-elf ranger with a beast master archetype. She loved that character, and her cougar companion, but as the adventures became more and more difficult, it was hard for her companion to keep up. This happened back before I (as the DM) knew about alternate house rules and such, so we played pretty closely to the book. Although she loved her animal companion, she couldn’t risk bringing it on adventures anymore, so she would often leave it in the care of NPCs and go off by herself.
But, using the new Tasha’s optional class features, the same animal companion gets a much needed improvement (as well as the rules for how to use it), and it properly scales with the character class.
In separate example, my elven forge cleric has Channel Divinity options that are seldom used in Adventurer’s League settings. Now, with the new Tasha’s options, I can choose to exercise that Channel Divinity option and regain spell slots (something clerics couldn’t previously do). Thus, he can stay on par with his wizard and druid party companions.
I also went back and made similar updates for my son’s Eberron halfling bard character, by allowing him to take some spell options he didn’t have previously through the Player’s Handbook. He enjoys his new Enlarge/Reduce spell.
For each character class, the optional updates from Tasha’s fall into two general types:
Options that replace older, less desirable class features.
Expanded options that you can chose to add alongside whatever you’re already playing.
The flexibility here is great, and works with D&D Beyond if you have purchased your book that way. Simply enable one or both of these options on the first page of your character creation:
I haven’t delved much into the magic items and spells, but I have seen a number of colleagues use them in Adventurer’s League games and my play-by-post group, and they seem pretty useful. The “summon” spells for each type of monster: celestial, fey, fiend, undead, etc. all seem pretty intriguing, and address some of the existing challenges of the classic summon spells. Other spells, like Tasha’s Mind Whip help fill a gap by allow more psychic magic options while staying roughly on par with other similar spells.
The custom background options in Tasha’s are also surprisingly useful in that they allow you to convert features of one background into another one using a simple conversion chart. This helps, for example, with my aforementioned elven forge cleric he may not necessarily spend his time in the woods, but perhaps in a more urbanized setting, so using a longbow seems a bit out of place for him, but perhaps a crossbow might. This gives plenty of options to customize the character the way you want, without negatively impacting the mechanics of the game or affecting character balancing.
All in all, Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, just like the re-introduction of Tasha herself, gives 5th-edition Dungeons and Dragons a much needed breath of fresh air. I would be hesitant to call this 5.5th edition, but if heavily adopted, it does provide some far-reaching changes to a particular table. The flexibility of allowing DMs and players to adopt and implement the rules on an a la cart basis is an effective way to keep the classic look-and-feel of 5th edition, but also make updates where groups would like to see them. One can think of Tasha’s as an officially sanctioned set of house rules.
Having tried out the new rules, rather belatedly, my kids and I found some of them pretty handy, and look forward to trying other ones as the opportunities come up. Tasha is a welcome addition to the Dungeons and Dragons “Core Rulebooks”.
1 The trope of the independent, confident woman as a “bad girl” is kind of annoying in a way, and not limited to class TTRPG fantasy settings. You see it a lot in anime too. I won’t go into why I think it’s so prevalent, but suffice to say it’s nice to see women in fantasy settings standing on their own two feet, deciding their own fates and getting some representation. Tasha as a character still has a lot of baggage from older D&D versions and tropes, but it’s cool to see her get some updates as well.
A while back, I posted about an elf-samurai character concept I created for Dungeons and Dragons, and from this character concept I created a character for Adventurer’s League named Heian Amakiiro (character sheet here). His backstory was based on my own Hamato Island series of adventures. After playing several adventures in Adventurer’s League, I wanted to share some experiences.
As of writing, Heian has reached level 8, and participated in 6 modules, plus 2 DM rewards I got from running adventures for others.
Not surprisingly, the way I expected to play Heian and the way I actually played Heian turned out to be different. I originally wanted a samurai who was more or less capable of both strength-based melee combat (with a katana longsword) and archery. To help with this, I did a magic item trade in Adventurers League to get Gauntlets of Ogre Strength. That way, I was free to focus on developing his dexterity.
But in reality, Heian rarely ever used melee combat. That’s because I kind of stumbled upon a neat trick that made his archery pretty powerful.
At fourth level I took the feat Elven Accuracy. When paired with the samurai sub-archetype and its Fighting Spirit ability this gave me a handy combination. I use Fighting Spirit to give myself advantage on attacks, and with Elven Accuracy, I can re-roll one of those attack dice. This means when I use the two together, I am effectively rolling 3d20.
Further, at level 6, I took another feat, Sharpshooter, since with an effective attack roll of 3d20, I can safely risk taking a -5 attack bonus to hit for +10 damage.
In a recent tier-2 adventure fighting a Hezrou demon, Heian had a round where he attacked 4 times (two attacks + Fighter’s Second Wind ability) and with the combination above hit 3 out of 4 times causing 50+ damage that round!
First Archery of the New Year (Yumi hajime) by Torii Kiyonaga (1787), courtesy of Wikipedia
Heian has become something of a kyūdō master between his Elvish heritage and samurai training.
Further, at level 5, per Adventurer’s League rules, he picked up a +1 longbow, which for flavor reasons I made as a Japanese-style daikyū (大弓) bow.
As a character he has been surprising fun. His samurai benefits as a courtier have been occasionally helpful in role-playing situations and in combat he clears the house.
Part of the fun of playing an unconventional character is discovering combinations and abilities you didn’t foresee. Plus, it makes the character more memorable in the long run.
So here’s to Heian Amakiiro, the best dang (imaginary) elf samurai archer I know! 🧝🏼♂️🍂🌸
You can also read here for a detailed explanation as to why.
This a pretty exciting change after Season 10 introduced some pretty controversial changes (which have effectively been reversed) in 2020, which led to a lot of grumbling among D&D players on Discord. I remember some people talking about taking their business over to Pathfinder official play instead.1
The AL admin community evidentially did some serious thinking and finally, finally gave us an updated, compact, easy to understand set of player rules. I for one am genuinely excited to play again.
However, I also have a problem. When the transition from Season 9 to Season 10 began, a number of rules were introduced for character conversions, and such, and now with another move to a standard set of rules for the Forgotten Realms, some of my old characters are converting twice. Technically, no conversion is strictly required, but with the end of Season 9 players were encouraged to rebuild for either “historic” or “seasonal” and I did that for at least some of my old characters. Other old characters just got forgotten.
Breathing life back into some of my old AL characters, thanks to the new rules. Binder above purchased at the Rook and the Raven
With the new rules, a lot of options opened up and rebuilding again is an option:
Whenever you could gain a level (even if you decline), you may rebuild any aspect of your character.
Adventure’s League Player’s Guide for the Forgotten Realms
With this in mind, I’ve been looking at all my AL characters up to this point, old and new. Some were too old and haven’t been played in so long that I decided retire2 them. I decided to keep my oldest character, Qisandoral, after dragging him out of retirement in season 10 during a brief window when they allowed a one-time rebuild. Using the rule above, I tweaked him a bit more but adjusting his feats a bit (he uses ice magic a lot, so I gave him Elemental Adept). In one case, I decided to rebuild my favorite Nature cleric from scratch, new name, level one, etc.
For newer characters, I have also taken advantage of the rules above, plus new options for character backgrounds and such to rebuild them as well. My elf-samuraiHeian Amakiiro got the Far Traveller background now, which fits his character better. In the end, I wanted to have at least 1-3 characters per tier (I have no tier-4 characters as of writing), and it has been nice to finally “clean house”.
I, like many other players, are excited by the new ruleset, which will hopefully stay somewhat stable going forward. I have seen the rules change a number of times since I started in Season 8, and keeping up with the changing rules has been exhausting. However, my sense is the the AL admins want to come up with a simpler, more flexible set of rules that can run on auto-pilot going forward. And I for one fully support that. 😄
1 Needless to say, I did Pathfinder once and don’t plan on doing it again. To some degree, I blame that particular DM, who just wanted cool combat campaigns without any real plot. But I also got tired of the complicated character creation, tracking feats, and pressure to min/max.
2 “Retirement” here isn’t as dramatic as it sounds. I just exported and backed up their character sheets from DnD Beyond, and saved their logs into a different folder. If I really wanted to, I could still bring them back. Unlikely, though. I would more likely build a fresh, new version of that character instead.
Update: there is a follow-up review posted 6 months later.
For those of us older than 14,1 this post is about a concept I only learned about recently, and that is playing Dungeons and Dragons via “play by post” (pbp).
Dungeons and Dragons, as a fantasy role-playing game has always been about playing as a group, preferably a group you already know and have a good rapport with (friends, co-workers, family, etc).2 When I first played in high-school in the mid-1990’s, 2nd-edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons was all the rage, and I fondly remember playing the Darksun setting for many weekend hours at my friend’s house. Sometimes we’d play for almost an entire day at a time. We’d even stay late, cook some of that awful pan-popped popcorn (more like pan-seared), and play some more.
This is D&D at its best, in my opinion.
The perennial issue with D&D, however, is getting people to coordinate on a schedule.
For some groups who already hang out anyway, this is super easy, but for everyone else, it isn’t. Playing a single “one-shot” adventure is often doable, as is Adventurer’s League (which I wholeheartedly support), but for everything else, you run into the perennial risk of D&D campaign running out of steam because someone’s schedule changes, or it just gets too hard to sustain.
This is where Play by Post comes in.
I had to stop playing Adventurer’s League late last year after the family schedule changed and conflicted with my Monday nights, and to be honest I was pretty bummed about it. I loved my local AL community. I spent most of that time focusing on personal modulewritingprojects, which I do enjoy, but it is no substitute for just playing with friends.
Recently, one of the other AL guys had to drop out of as well due to a new baby, so he organized a private Discord channel for doing Adventurer’s League via Play By Post. The module we currently play, the venerable Bounty in the Bog, is a normally 4-hour module, but we’ve been playing for a week because we post replies and comments throughout the day, like any Internet forum you might find:
Me (ElfNut) posting an update on Discord about what my character is doing while the caravan travels from A to B.
In this channel I play a new character, Fenmaer Wasanthi, a high elf cleric (forge domain) who I had originally planned to use for Season 10 AL and never got to use. Problems with Season 10 are for another day. Anyhow, I liked this character and was happy to finally dust him off and use him in Adventurer’s League, and with the PBP format, I don’t have to block out 4 hours a week away from wife and kids (always an awkward experience). It’s as easy as anything else you do on social-media so it fits into existing schedules.
Further, it allows more time to go in-depth on the role-playing side of things, which is normally hard to do in Adventurer’s League because you drop into adventures, and play under a time constraint (no time for 18-page backstories). I can think about what I want Fenmaer to do, why, and flesh out his personality a bit more.
The one challenge is getting used to the pace. Normally when you’re playing D&D, it’s an interactive, conversational experience, and now I have to get used to no updates for hours, or even as long as a day. Our DM has commitments outside of this, and may be gone a day or more, so it’s weird not keeping a consistent pace, but on the other side, knowing that I can work in my D&D game in the rest of my life seamlessly (5-10 minutes a day so far) has been really nice.
Plus, for us old timers, it kind of harks back to good old text-based games anyway. 😉
1 I have definitely reached the point in my life where my teenage daughter (known in older blogs as “princess”) has surprised my “web saavy”.
2 A friendly reminder that sometimes no D&D is sometimes better than bad D&D. Having a group of people you get along with well before you start, and regardless of whether you play D&D or not, makes a huge difference. Coming together with strangers just for the sake of D&D is a risky endeavor, unless it’s in a structured environment such as Adventurer’s League.
Let me tell you a story about a warrior who never actually existed, named Brock Stonefist. One night recently, I was playing Dungeons and Dragons Adventurers League online, after months of not playing (scheduling conflicts). It was a relief to finally play again. The character I used was a High Elf wizard, similar to the one I retired recently, but more in the Conjuration school than Abjuration (plus the character was designed better with the benefit of hindsight). Meet Sael Teinithra.
Anyhow, Sael had one spell called Silent Image which conjures up an illusion that is visual only, but can be controlled to mimic human movement and action. It doesn’t do or say anything, but it looks cool.
During a fight against some fire monsters, I decided that my party members needed help, so I had Sael cast Silent Image to conjure up the image of a warrior in hopes that it could draw some of the monsters away. To make the effect more convincing, I decided to make the illusion look like a beefy combatant, and I tentatively named him “Brock Stonefist” for no good reason.
Needless to say, Brock Stonefist did nothing useful during the fight. The monsters were not drawn away, and I couldn’t maneuver Brock Stonefist anywhere fast enough to get ahead of the battle. So, it was a bust.
After the night’s adventuring was over, we joked about it the following day on the local Discord channel. One player quipped “you got problems? We got Brock Stonefist.”
To which I replied …
Turns out that someone else on the Discord channel was following Discord on their work laptop and right when they gave a presentation at work (i.e, in the meat world), their screen popped up a message during the presentation that said:
Brock Stonefist is a one-man solution to every problem.
I have been told that the other people in the meeting were confused but had a good chuckle.
For an adventurer that didn’t actually exist in any sense, let alone make any meaningful contribution, he made his mark…. Stonefist Style!! 💪🏼💥🎸🎶
Gleanings in Buddha-Fields 
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