The Monsters Know What They’re Doing

Tyranny of Dragons (Hoard of the Dragon Queen plus The Rise of Tiamat) was the first full-length campaign I ran for my fifth-edition Dungeons & Dragons group, after putting them through The Lost Mine of Phandelver. It was the right campaign for the moment, and its linear nature and geographic jumping around made it easy to insert character-specific side quests, which I appreciated. It also had many flaws, though, and a big one is that the dragon cultists just weren’t that interesting or memorable as opponents. (There’s also all of “Mission to Thay,” chapter 8 of Rise of Tiamat, which … whoo, boy, don’t get me started on that.)

Might the insertion of some dragon followers or dragonborn champions from Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons have livened up Tyranny? Maybe, but not without some fiddling.

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It’s been a bountiful year of Dungeons & Dragons releases. Van Richten’s Ezmerelda’s Guide to Ravenloft! Fizban’s Guide to Dragons! Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos! Before I dive into any of those, though, I’ve got 13 months’ worth of catching up to do, and so I’m going to pick up where I left off: with Eberron: Rising From the Last War, probably followed by Mythic Odysseys of Theros, although the post-Eberron sequence remains up for discussion.

The top item on my Eberron to-do list is the inspired, humanoids whose consciousness is ridden by the alien minds known as quori.

Possession by quori grants psionic power to the inspired, which have high Dexterity and very high Intelligence and Charisma, positioning them as casters that aren’t looking to get into a mano a mano fight. They have proficiency in Insight and expertise in Deception and Persuasion, and they can’t be charmed or frightened, which tells us that they’re just as puissant in the social arena. In fact, they’re good enough at both talking and fighting (at least at their challenge level) that they can probably gain a bit of synergy by combining the two. Since talk is not merely cheap but free from an action economy perspective, we can easily imagine an inspired keeping a running patter going throughout a fight, angling to achieve their goal—whatever that is—by whichever means gets the job done first.

As spellslingers, they’re limited by the ranges of their spells, but this isn’t much of a limit for the inspired: Hex is good out to 90 feet, and dissonant whispers, hold person and vicious mockery reach up to 60 feet, although charm person is good only within 30. Let’s take a closer look at these spells, because their mechanics allow some tactical combinations but prohibit others. (more…)

I’ve been excited to dig into the Eberron setting for a long time, and I’m kicking things off with the bone knight—not an undead, as one might guess from the name, but a humanoid non-player character who can be of any folk. Champions of the Order of the Emerald Claw, a group of fanatical lost-cause nationalists led by a lich, bone knights get their name from their practice of forging armor from the bones of fallen foes. (Judging from the illustration in Eberron: Rising From the Last War, I think they like to sneak a little Punisher imagery in there, too.)

The ability contour of the bone knight isn’t cut-and-dried, since their two outstanding ability scores are Strength and Charisma. Their Constitution edges out their Dexterity, but just barely, and neither is unusually high. What this reminds me of more than anything else is a paladin whose player didn’t get the third high die roll he was hoping for and decided to go all in on offense. I conclude that bone knights fight like brutes, cast self-buffing and control spells from the front line, and compensate for their slightly lackluster Constitution with their bonecraft armor, which gives them a formidable AC 20. They have the Intelligence to plan and adapt, and the Wisdom to choose their targets and their battles.

Their Charisma is high enough that an encounter will probably involve some measure of parley, and maybe only parley—they understand, after all, that it’s better to get what you want without fighting if you can—but their social skill proficiencies are in Intimidation and Deception, so we’re not talking about good-faith negotiation here. Instead, this combination suggests to me that they’re about trying to get their opponents to capitulate, through a combination of outright bullying and more subtle manipulation. Any rhetorical maneuver an abuser might use is right up the bone knight’s alley: direct and indirect threats; negative reinforcement; false accusations; gaslighting; DARVO; demonstrations of explosive anger and sudden, unpredictable violence; dividing enemies by singling out individuals among them for particular blame; and so on. (more…)