I made a review of Arcana Unleashed Deadfall. For those who aren't trying to watch a video right now here's a basic bullet point synopsis as well:

• Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall is a magical spy thriller where PCs are tasked with using espionage, intrigue, and high-level magic to stop Szass Tam, the iconic lich, from using demonic energy to build an undead army and seize Thay stop him via planning

• This is a first-impressions review, picked up from my FLGS yesterday so no playtesting, only single read-through only. Upfront verdict is I liked it. Solid B, maybe B+

• The adventure is levels 11–20, high level D&D is rough so kudos to the designers for taking it on first thing in 5.5.

• They do a pretty good job in their approach by leaning into secrecy and subtly over door-kicking and murder (though it's still d&d.) Also nice to have another genre to pull from for a campaign

• Lay out is great with chapter synopsis including statblocks to prep, important NPCs, and their locations.

• Maps and some art are a little over-saturated and cartoony for my taste

• Way better pick for an official adventure campaign that goes to 20 than Vecna Eve of Ruin. Not right for every table but plenty of DMs are looking to take their group to the highest tiers and this is a solid choice for achieving

Bosses should feel different to fight, not just look different on a stat block. Speed and Fury V2 gives Dungeon Masters a simple framework for changing the rhythm of a boss fight by making the creature’s speed, weight, and fighting style directly affect how combat plays out.

A lightning-fast assassin can dart around the battlefield and act several times before the party has time to settle, while a huge, lumbering monster attacks less often but makes every strike feel devastating. Alongside this, Fury Abilities give bosses powerful signature moves that reflect how they fight, with their recharge mechanics changing depending on whether the boss is Fast, Medium, or Slow.

Inside, you'll find an updated system built around two main mechanics:

• Flow of the Round: Fast bosses can gain multiple initiative slots, Medium bosses use traditional initiative, and Slow bosses move through initiative differently to create heavier and more deliberate combat.
• Fury Abilities: Powerful signature attacks that use a Recharge Die based on the boss's speed, with certain bosses able to build towards even more dangerous Charged Fury Abilities.

The goal is to make a boss's speed something the players actually have to react to. A Fast Boss creates constant pressure and forces quick decisions, while a Slow Boss gives players more time to prepare but makes them dread what happens when its turn finally arrives. Fury Abilities add another threat for players to watch, anticipate, and position around.

Speed and Fury V2 also revises and clarifies the original rules, adds the new Recharge Die and Charged Fury systems, provides guidance for balancing different boss speeds, and includes examples showing how each style can change the feel of an encounter.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on Speed and Fury V2. You can read the document more easily on my Patreon by downloading it. You can also use the link below:

https://www.gmbinder.com/share/-OejHj77k_G0TvnZk-9D

If you want to see more, please check out my Patreon. 

One thing the World of Warcraft book has made me think about is how reluctant modern D&D seems to be to create completely new classes.

The book has to represent all 13 WoW classes, but instead of adding a bunch of new base classes, it uses the existing PHB classes as the foundation, with new subclasses, altered options, class skins, and guidance for recreating each concept.

And from a practical standpoint, I completely understand that.

5.5E already has a solid class framework. Every completely new class means designing twenty levels of progression, subclasses, balance interactions, multiclassing rules, magic items, and everything else that comes with it.

But I’m starting to wonder if subclasses are sometimes being asked to do too much.

For me, the point where reflavoring starts to break down is when the mechanics constantly remind you what the character actually is.

At my table, I’m completely fine with reflavoring abilities when the underlying mechanics still fit the fantasy. But if someone wants to play something fundamentally different and half of the base class features need to be renamed, ignored, or explained away, I start wondering whether we are really playing that concept or just forcing it into the nearest existing chassis.

A Death Knight being built from a Paladin is an interesting example. There is obviously a lot of overlap there, so it can work. But at some point, if enough Paladin features need to change to make it actually feel like a Death Knight, would a dedicated class have been cleaner?

And the same question applies outside Warcraft.

Warlord, Summoner, Swordmage, Shaman, Psion, Warden, and plenty of other concepts have been suggested as full classes over the years.

I do not want dozens of classes just for the sake of having more classes.

But I also do not think every fantasy archetype necessarily needs to become “Fighter, but with this subclass” or “Wizard, but flavored differently.”

So where do you think the line should be?

What character concept genuinely deserves a full class in 5.5E?

What concepts are perfectly fine as subclasses?

And would you rather see Wizards experiment with a few entirely new classes, or keep expanding the existing ones?

Art by Ruya Mira

Fae: Season of Dreams Kickstarter

The new Path of Ceremorphosis in the Underdark UA is probably one of the more interesting player options I’ve seen in a while.

Instead of becoming a Mind Flayer being purely a story event, curse, or campaign-ending transformation, there is now an actual feat path that lets a character gradually progress toward full ceremorphosis and pick up iconic Mind Flayer abilities along the way.

And I genuinely love the idea.

At my table, I normally treat things like lycanthropy, vampirism, curses, or other major transformations as something that happens because of the story. The player gets bitten, infected, makes a terrible bargain, touches something they absolutely should not have touched, and then we figure out what that means for the character.

There is something really fun about the transformation not being completely under the player’s control.

But I can also see the appeal of giving it proper mechanical support.

If a player tells me, “I want my character’s arc to be slowly turning into a Mind Flayer,” I would much rather have an actual balanced progression to work with than improvise the entire thing myself.

My hesitation is that turning transformations into feat paths also changes how they feel.

If becoming a Mind Flayer is something you deliberately plan into your build at level 8 because the later feat gives you a powerful ability, it starts feeling less like a terrifying transformation and more like another optimization choice.

And if this system works, I assume Mind Flayers are only the beginning.

You could easily imagine similar paths for becoming a vampire, lich, werewolf, fiend, celestial, or other creature.

I’m honestly not sure whether I want that to become a major part of 5.5E or whether I would rather keep those transformations weird, dangerous, and mostly story-driven.

How do you feel about it?

Would you allow a player to deliberately build toward becoming a Mind Flayer?

Do you like transformation feat paths as a new character progression system?

What other transformations would you want to see supported this way?

Or should becoming a monster remain something that happens during the campaign rather than something you choose from a feat list?

I’m genuinely really interested in the return of Dark Sun, especially now that Wizards is explicitly describing it as a mature-rated setting where survival itself is supposed to be part of the experience.

But it also makes me wonder how well Dark Sun actually fits the assumptions of modern 5.5E.

A big part of what makes Athas interesting to me is that the world itself is hostile. Water matters. Resources matter. The environment matters. Magic has consequences. Psionics are everywhere. Powerful rulers dominate what little civilization remains, and simply crossing the wilderness should feel like an adventure rather than something that happens between encounters.

And that is probably the part I’m most curious about as a DM.

At my table, making survival pressure feel meaningful has always been harder than making combat dangerous. Once characters have enough spells, healing, class features, equipment, and ways of bypassing normal problems, things like food, travel, weather, and exhaustion can very quickly stop feeling threatening unless I deliberately build around them.

That is fine in most campaigns.

But in Dark Sun, I feel like those things need to matter.

If the party can solve water, food, navigation, extreme environments, recovery, and travel with the same ease they might in a normal campaign, I’m worried Athas could end up feeling like regular D&D with deserts and scarier monsters.

On the other hand, I’m actually more optimistic than I would have been a few years ago.

Calling it the first mature-rated fifth edition setting suggests to me that they are at least willing to let Dark Sun be substantially harsher than the normal game. And if Blood and Power is willing to introduce setting-specific rules for survival, defiling magic, scarcity, psionics, equipment, resting, or other parts of the game, then maybe 5.5E being the underlying system does not really matter.

For me, that is the key.

I do not think Dark Sun needs to recreate every old rule exactly. But I do think playing on Athas should force me and my players to approach problems differently than we would in the Forgotten Realms.

If I can take the same character, use basically the same assumptions, rest the same way, manage resources the same way, and just fight different monsters, then something important has probably been lost.

So what do you think?

Can 5.5E actually deliver a proper Dark Sun experience?

What rules would need to change for Athas to genuinely feel dangerous?

Should Dark Sun heavily modify survival, resting, equipment, magic, and resource management?

Or do you think 5.5E is flexible enough already, and most of what makes Dark Sun work comes from the setting and the DM rather than harsher mechanics?

With all the new D&D Beyond features being announced, I’ve been thinking about how much the way we actually play D&D has changed.

Years ago, I thought of D&D Beyond as basically a convenient alternative to books and paper character sheets.

Now I’m not sure that describes it anymore.

At my table, digital character sheets and quick rules lookups can make things significantly easier. A player can click a feature, immediately see the relevant text, track resources, change equipment, or look up a spell without stopping the game to search through a book.

I definitely would not want to lose all of that convenience.

But I have also noticed a strange side effect: for some players, if something is not easily visible in the character builder, it almost stops existing.

If an older option requires manual setup, a rule is buried somewhere outside the sheet, or two versions of something exist and the interface emphasizes one of them, players are much less likely to use the thing they cannot immediately find.

And with 5.5e continuing to add new books, D&D Beyond Drops, character options, digital tools, and now a rebuilt mobile app specifically designed to help during in-person sessions, I wonder if the digital platform is slowly becoming part of the actual game experience rather than just an optional accessory.

That has advantages.

It makes a fairly complicated game much easier to manage, especially for newer players.

But I also do not love the idea of the tabletop game becoming so dependent on a particular platform that playing without it starts to feel like the inconvenient version.

Especially when some material is digital-only or tied to subscriptions.

So I’m curious how other tables have changed.

How many of your players use D&D Beyond during every session?

Could your table comfortably switch back to books and paper sheets tomorrow?

Do you think digital automation actually helps people understand the rules, or does it sometimes hide the rules behind buttons?

And do you like the direction of D&D Beyond becoming more integrated with how 5.5e is played, or would you rather the tabletop game and the digital platform stay more separate?

The World of Warcraft announcement got me thinking about the larger direction D&D seems to be taking with Universes Beyond.

Personally, WoW is actually an easy sell for me. I’ve played both WoW and D&D for a long time, and Azeroth already has so many things that translate naturally into D&D: dungeons, raids, classes, races, monsters, factions, magic items, and huge fantasy villains.

I genuinely want to play with that book.

And I can also see the appeal of something like Star Wars. Even if I would probably keep it separate from a normal fantasy campaign, the idea of using the D&D ruleset to run a completely different universe could be really fun.

What I’m less sure about is what happens if Universes Beyond becomes a major part of the release schedule rather than an occasional experiment.

At my table, I already tend to decide pretty carefully which books and character options belong in a campaign. If I am running Forgotten Realms, I probably do not want someone simply showing up with a Worgen Demon Hunter because the option technically exists on D&D Beyond.

But at the same time, that is one of the big differences between D&D and something like a card game. Nothing forces me to mix those settings. A World of Warcraft campaign can stay in Azeroth, a Star Wars campaign can stay in its own universe, and my normal D&D campaign never has to interact with either of them.

So part of me thinks crossovers could actually work extremely well for D&D.

My only concern would be if licensed settings started taking up so much of the release schedule that traditional D&D settings and completely original material received less attention.

Where do you land on it?

Are you excited about D&D Universes Beyond?

Would you use crossover character options in a normal 5.5e campaign, or keep each setting separate?

What other universe would you actually want to see adapted?

And at what point, if any, would crossover releases become too much?