(If you think I’m like a million wrong about this, it’s cool, I haven’t read all of the Innistrad lore. It’s just… that word is about as specifically wrong as using the word “witch” for someone who hunts and brutally executes those suspected of witchcraft, their families, and their pets. I have some historical quibbles with the use of “cathars” for the Church’s crusading soldiers, but I’m going to bet this topic got debated to death when Innistrad launched, and I just wasn’t paying attention. Not many settings delve into internal ecclesiastical conflict as this does, and I seriously dig it. James positions the PCs as faithful members of the church hierarchy, in a church where the object of veneration has just lost her damn mind. This section frames the kind of campaign you’re likely to play in Innistrad, and the section following it goes a lot deeper into that. The breakdown of 5e’s character classes for Innistrad is solidly useful, particularly for those of us who played a little of the first Innistrad-based block, but didn’t go deep on absorbing its lore. Now, James doesn’t care about balancing Stensians against half-orcs, because Innistrad doesn’t have half-orcs, but the average reader looking for lootable game content might want to keep it in mind. (Also +1 Str, +1 Con, and Intimidation.) Probably a net loss compared to the half-orc – Relentless Endurance stacks up reasonably well against +2 hit points per level, Savage Attacks is solid for any weapon-user (and amazing for Champion fighters, of course) to make up any shortfall there, and the half-orc has an unanswered point of Strength, and Darkvision. As a racial feature, though, that kind of pure survivability is hard to beat. Specifically, Constitution saving throws (including Concentration!), hit point recovery from hit dice, and a point of AC if you’re a barbarian using Unarmored Defense. Now, Tough takes a certain amount of flak in ranking feats, because while it does add up to a lot of hit points, getting half that bonus by boosting your Con is probably better because of all the other things Con gets you. If the campaign is a pure meat grinder… well, play a Stensian. A character with four extra skill proficiencies is exceptionally potent if the DM makes exploration and interaction the robust areas of gameplay that they’re supposed to be. The Nephalians retain some breadth of choice – their feat is Skilled and their bonus skill is undefined. Compare it to the Variant Human: Dex and Wisdom are your two floating +1s, Survival is your free skill, and Fleet of Foot, Sure-Footed, and Spring Attack are the three features of the Mobile feat. Kessigers are natural rangers – and the ranger class has enough problems that you could really just have a Kessiger fighter and be happy. James has taken the Variant Human and turned its many options into firmly defined things. The other three provincial origins are a lot more interesting, because their mechanics tell a story. Not when a feat, a skill, and two of those six +1s to a stat are the alternative! Almost no one deliberately chooses the Player’s Handbook’s default human over the Variant Human, if the DM allows that option, because +1 to all ability scores sounds sort of good, but it just isn’t. This drives me nuts.įolks, we can do better at describing humans as something interesting than +1 to all ability scores. Even in a setting that is all humans, there’s still one type of human that has being the most average as their special feature. ![]() The “core” human has strictly baseline features – age, alignment, size, speed, and languages, all as you’d expect. Forty pages, not bad – really dense on high-quality M:tG art, sure – okay, four new human “subraces,” using a different set of rules for human subraces than Mearls showed us in the Gothic Heroes UA article. Let’s see what James has given us with Innistrad. ![]() I should write about it sometime, because it makes sense to me, but seems to really bedevil the folks expecting WotC to drift back toward the product density of every earlier edition.Īnyway. I see a lot of conversation about WotC’s publication strategy online. WotC has been fairly explicit about relying on the DM’s Guild to fill in gaps to support non-CoS Ravenloft campaigns. I take the view that this is a particular blessing because we can’t expect to see another official release for the Domain of Dread anytime soon. If you’re not familiar with Innistrad, it’s a plane of Gothic horror, and it got priority over other planes because Curse of Strahd is the most recent release from the D&D side of WotC. This was announced, um, Monday I think, and released yesterday. There’s no new Unearthed Arcana yet this month, and maybe we’re not getting one – but we have something at least as good, and that’s James Wyatt’s new adaptation of a Magic: the Gathering plane to D&D 5e.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |