Conceptually, there was a lot to look forward to in Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall. It's the first campaign released under the D&D 2024 rules, a rare example of a high-level adventure that takes characters all the way to 20th level, and an extended look at the land of Thay that pits the heroes against the undead tyrant Szass Tam.

The campaign is presented in the minimal detail that has become typical of D&D products in the 5.5e era, with smaller dungeons, shorter encounters, and scant setting information. The entire level 11-20 campaign is expected to be completed in about 15 to 20 sessions, a skeletal outline that offers plenty of room for expansion but no support for DMs who want to do so.

But this review is not about the campaign's mechanics or lack of DM support. Instead, I want to address some deeper problems with the basic premise that would pose challenges even if the adventure were fully developed.

Setting and lore

Traditionally, Thay has been an aggressive, expansionist power that threatens not just its neighbors but all of Faerûn. It has also been an oligarchy in which the population, much of which is enslaved, lives under constant oppression, first by the Red Wizards and now by the lich Szass Tam. The people may be as varied as any other nation but their rulers are thoroughly, unambiguously evil.

This fulfills an important niche in RPGs: you need some enemies for the player characters to beat up on guilt-free. The Thayans occupy that role in the Forgotten Realms, just as the Order of the Emerald Claw does in Eberron or Iuz and his followers do in Greyhawk.

Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall goes in a different direction, sanitizing the land of Thay. The gazetteer describes the Red Wizards as fascists and Thay as hostile to its neighbors, but it does not mention slaves or slavery. Presumably this was done to avoid offending player sensitivities (or perhaps to avoid giving creepy DMs a tool to harass their players, though there is only so much any adventure can do in this regard), but I find it has the opposite effect. The issue is not just that the adventure avoids acknowledging the very existence of certain kinds of evil (although this does not bode well for the Dark Sun release next year) but that it does so as a prerequisite for realigning the characters' goals. The campaign doesn't ask the player characters to vanquish a threat from Thay, but one to Thay.

Szass Tam, who has somehow been demoted from supreme ruler to just one zulkir among many, plans to conduct a magical ritual that will summon an army of undead--how this is any different from the undead army he already has is unclear--which he will use to conquer Thay. In other words, his master plan is to restore the status quo that existed right up until this adventure was published. Another zulkir enlists the player characters to protect Thay from his schemes. While neighboring nations will ultimately be endangered by Szass Tam's designs, they don't factor into this adventure at all. The problems are entirely internal to Thay, and the solution is presented as removing one problematic figure from power while leaving the basic system of governance in place.

Imagine if Raiders of the Lost Ark featured Indiana Jones running around Nazi Germany, raiding various historical sites and uncovering various artifacts so he could stop Adolf Hitler on behalf of a Nazi general and you will begin to see what's wrong with Deadfall.

There's one detail that provides a perfect (if probably unintended) demonstration of this problem. One of the illustrations is captioned "Thay's conflicts with its neighbors cause substantial suffering to all involved." The picture shows a cell of Red Wizards in magical battle, with one grief-stricken wizard cradling the body of a fallen comrade. Yes, Thay's conflicts cause suffering to all involved, but the picture asks us to feel sympathy only for the fascists who started the trouble.

Genre and tone

Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall bills itself as a "magical spy thriller" in which characters conduct secret missions with high stakes and the constant threat of discovery. In practice, though, the spy elements of the adventure mostly boil down to the characters giving each other code names and tossing around a smattering of contemporary terms like "intel."

This is purely a matter of personal taste, but I'm always disappointed when designers use contemporary frames like this without any regard for whether it fits the setting. This language wouldn't be out of place in a world like Eberron, which is much farther down the road to modernity and the bureaucratic state that spawns this kind of jargon, but in the Forgotten Realms--and the magocracy of Thay in particular, a place that has rejected modernity in favor of magic and necromancy--it feels out of place. Each group's mileage will vary, obviously, but the language used here tells me that the adventure does not understand its own setting.

A much bigger problem, one that is much less subject to personal taste, is that these spy trappings have almost no impact on the adventure. The first couple of missions make a few halfhearted attempts at fulfilling genre conventions (playing cards with an enemy in a gambling den, collecting blackmail material to turn a merchant into a pawn) but these will be over in a few sessions. Soon the PCs will be going on standard dungeon crawls, such as exploring an ancient temple to retrieve a magical Maguffin. (This Maguffin never changes hands once the party finds it and no one else is looking for it, which removes the whole point of putting a Maguffin in a spy story.)

The campaign continually swerves away from more interesting material to give us standard fare. At one point, the party is tasked with recruiting a band of pirates and persuading them to raid Thayan shipping. Could be a fun opportunity for some swashbuckling high seas adventure or a cool nautical heist, right? Wrong--the pirates ask the party to explore a dungeon (which is in their own cove and which they have not breached). The dungeon is all of four rooms long. The last room contains a map to a second dungeon, which is not included in this adventure. Hand it over to the pirates and they will raid the Red Wizards' ships, doing all the fun stuff for the party.

This happens over and over as the campaign continually reverts to dungeon crawls. Dungeons are all well and good--it's in the name of the game!--but these dungeons are not particularly suited to spy adventures as they lack the mechanical support you would expect for the genre (guard rotations, alert levels, and so on). The prevalence of so many minimal, bog-standard dungeons raises the question of why the designers bothered with the spy thriller trappings if they were never going to commit to the genre.

Morality and player agency

The campaign's refusal to commit to its setting or its genre also affects the way it manages the moral and political dilemmas that it raises.

Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall gives the party a patron, a Red Wizard named Xelnene Thrul who is both the tharchion of Priador, one of Thay's richest provinces, and one of the eight zulkirs who rule supreme over Thay. In other words, the party's patron is one of the most powerful people in Thay, an obvious rival to Szass Tam. That's not the problem.

The problem is that she's neutral good.

This shouldn't be possible in Thay--you don't get to be one of the eight most powerful people in a militaristic slave state by staying a good person--but of course, Deadfall has sanitized the Thayans so they're not as bad as all that. Still, it contradicts everything that has previously been established about Thay to suggest that any of the zulkirs could be good-aligned (and in fact all but one of the other zulkirs are evil, suggesting the designers know the Thayan government is a tyranny but, once again, they are unwilling to commit to the premise).

Interestingly enough, Thay: Land of the Red Wizards by Ed Greenwood, Alex Kammer, and Adam Patrick includes a very similar character. In that sourcebook, the tharchion of Priador is a wizard (though not a Red Wizard) who built a private network of spies, wants to improve the lives of ordinary Thayans through commercial prosperity, and is willing to work with outlander adventurers. But that tharchion is lawful evil, because Greenwood and his collaborators understand that Thay is still a corrupt oligarchy. Its reformers just want to wrap the iron fist in a velvet glove--and they want to make sure they control the fist.

This could have been a tremendous opportunity for Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall. What if Xelnene Thrul were lawful evil? What if her ultimate goal was not simply to prevent Szass Tam from completing his ritual but to overthrow him and claim Thay for herself? She would still be a massive improvement over Szass Tam in many ways--she's not looking to summon an undead army, and Thay's neighbors would be safer in the short term--but her attempt to enlist the player characters in her ascent would force the party to confront certain ethical choices. A good-aligned party would have to decide if they are comfortable replacing one dictator with another. An evil-aligned party might decide they want to replace Szass Tam themselves. These dilemmas would open up exactly the sort of realm-building play that high-level campaigns are supposed to explore.

But Deadfall doesn't trust players to make these decisions. Every possible point of moral friction--every place where the players might have to make a tough choice--has been sanded down. The early chapters are careful to provide nonlethal means of resolving the spy missions, which might be a thoughtful consideration for some groups but also takes the sting out of the genre. Sometimes the guardrails are so thick as to remove any stakes from the adventure: If you can convince one of Szass Tam's agents to stop spying for him with a DC 15 Persuasion check, why does Xelnene Thrul need the player characters at all? And what sort of spy adventure assumes all these agents are just going to keep their word once the PCs leave? Everything is absurdly easy, especially for high-level play.

The later chapters don't even have this rudimentary level of moral challenge; once you're crawling through a dungeon filled with evil undead, you have left the world of moral choices behind. Half the fun of the spy genre is the compromises it forces on the characters, the murky atmosphere in which noble goals are not enough and outcomes are never certain. Deadfall's unwillingness to embrace the genre's conventions once again raises the question of why the designers decided to bill this as a spy thriller in the first place.

Missed opportunities

Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall could have been a gritty spy story filled with ambiguity and betrayal and tough moral questions that offer no easy answers. It also could have been a rollicking heroic fantasy in which a band of unlikely heroes brave hordes of undead soldiers to overthrow the most obviously evil villain in the entire Forgotten Realms. Either approach could have worked, but Deadfall tries to straddle both genres and satisfies neither.

This speaks to a larger problem not just in Deadfall but in D&D 2024 as a whole. From class features that can be changed on a short or long rest to adventures that flinch from the implications of their own genres, the game does not want players to make a difficult choice. That would limit the potential for any campaign, but it's fatal to this one.

The Hiding mechanics have been talked about to death since 2024 came out, but imo they themselves are fine. The bigger problem is the ambiguity on whether or not being Invisible conceals your location.

On the one hand, the Invisible condition doesn't state that it conceals your location, so it seems the default assumption would be that it doesn't. (Especially because that's explicitly how it worked in 2014).

However, the Hide action doesn't do anything other than give you the Invisible condition, so it doesn't make sense for you to try and Hide when you're already Invisible. There would be no benefit.

The conclusion you might draw from that is that it's impossible to conceal your location in 2024, but that seems ridiculous when you consider Hide out of combat, it would have basically no use.

So how do you rule on it?

Is it good & fun or bad & boring?

Hey everyone!

I've just released The Red Tithe, a folk-horror one-shot I've been working on, and I thought I'd share it here, especially with Halloween coming up.

The adventure takes place around Hollowmere, an isolated village with a rather grim tradition. For generations, whenever nightmares and strange disturbances begin to plague the village, one of its inhabitants is sacrificed to keep an ancient horror imprisoned beneath the local church.

But this time, something has gone wrong. A blood-covered survivor has fled the village, claiming that everyone is dead, and the characters are sent to investigate.

The adventure focuses on investigation, exploration, some unsettling discoveries, moral choices, and, of course, combat.

One of the main things I wanted to do with this adventure was make it playable at three very different level ranges: 3-4, 10-11, and 17-20. The story remains the same, but encounters, DCs, and enemies are adjusted for each tier, including three different manifestations of the final boss, the Blood Moon Beast.

It's a 75-page adventure, compatible with both 2014 and 2024 (5E and 5.5E), designed for 3-6 characters and roughly 4-6 hours of play. I've also included 6 custom monster stat blocks, 3 battle maps (8 versions in total), and 4 tokens.

It's available on DriveThruRPG if anyone's interested:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/589448

No generative AI was used in the creation of this adventure.

I've also posted several preview pages, including some maps and monster stat blocks, over at r/JonnyDM if you'd like to take a look before deciding.

Hope some of you find it useful for a Halloween session or your ongoing campaigns!

Anything from 5.5e is fair game, including third-party content. My character is a Khoravar (Half-Elf) Fighter with the Battle Master subclass. We'll be starting at level 3. I was thinking of taking the Farmer background as he did grow up on a farm and the Tough feat is useful for staying alive, but I was wondering if there's a better Origin feat for a character who was the personal bodyguard for the kingdom's princess?

The campaign will start with the princess being abducted to another realm and the party is brought together to try and find and retrieve her if that helps? DM said it won't be a long campaign, with it starting at level 3 and ending at level 8.

EDIT: Backgrounds can be custom, so we can choose any Origin feat for our Background.

Let me preface this by saying this is just white room stuff. These mechanics should never see the light of day, let alone a D&D table. I'm just posting this for folks who find this kind of stuff fun to think about.

This post is about unlimited Wishes. Specifically, Wishes that are not just unlimited in number, but also in scope. Meaning we want to cast an unlimited number of Wishes but not be restricted to duplicating 8th level or lower spells lest we risk losing our ability to cast wish ever again. Let's call these uWishes (as opposed to a restricted or rWishes).

To get unlimited uWishes, we need access to Simulacrum. The Simulacrum spell allows you to create a copy of yourself that's considered a separate creature. So if it casts uWish, it may forever lose its ability to cast wish again, but that's irrelevant because it wouldn't be able to get that spell slot back anyway. The important thing is that the original caster doesn't risk losing Wish. That's the common wisdom anyway.

In 5e, the only way to get unlimited uWishes was using what I call a slow simulacrum chain. Here's a primer on simulacrum chains. If you know this stuff already, you can skip past the bullet points.

• Fast Simulacrum Chain - Wizard casts Simulacrum on self (let's assume using a spell scroll). This creates a duplicate of the wizard, which we'll call S1. S1 has all of Wizard's spell slots. Wizard commands S1 to cast Wish to duplicate the effects of Simulacrum to create a copy of Wizard. We'll call this one S2. S1 has now spent its 9th level slot, but S2 has all spell slots (because it's a copy of Wizard, who had all spell slots). S2 then casts Wish to create a new copy of Wizard. This is S3, who again has all spell slots. S1 and S2 are missing 9th level. This continues to infinity but every new copy has used its 9th level spell slot (except the last copy) and can never get that slot back because copies can't regain expended spell slots.

• Slow Simulacrum Chain - Same start as before. This time, however, S1 casts Simulacrum directly (not through Wish). S1 retains 9th level slot and is missing 7th level slot. S2 does the same. S3 does the same. This time, the copies each are missing their 7th level spell slots but have their 9th level spell slots that they can use to cast Wish. But unlike the Fast method, where each new copy took 6 seconds to create, the slow method takes 12 hours to create a new copy (and the component costs, which we can ignore because every 15th copy can cast Wish to create a 25k gp ruby to fuel the next batch of copies).

In 5.5, they nerfed Simulacrum. Now, a copy that was created using Simulacrum cannot itself cast Simulacrum. It can cast Wish to duplicate the effects of Simulacrum, so the Fast Simulacrum Chain is still viable in 5.5e. But wizards can no longer have infinite uWishes. Because in order to have infinite uWishes, essentially need to be to cast two wishes, you could cast Simulacrum on yourself, and S1 could cast Wish to duplicate you while having a Wish left over. Then S2 could use one of its Wishes to duplicate you and keep the second. And so on.

There's only one subclass in the game that can do that, and it's not a Wizard. The Arcana Cleric gets access to Simulacrum and Wish at 17th level. Then, it gets access to greater divine intervention at 20th level, which grants the power to cast Wish. So we can do the Fast Simulacrum Chain but with each new copy retaining a 9th level spell slot. Infinite wishes baby!

Technically, this came online the moment 5.5e was released. At that time, 20th level clerics got access to greater divine intervention and you could play a legacy arcane cleric, who got access to 6-9 wizard spells at 17th level. But I only realized this was a thing while flipping through Arcana Unleashed the other day, hence this post. I haven't seen anyone talk about this, but it may be common knowledge by now.

Now a natural response to this mechanic might be "You really think Mystra is going to tolerate a million copies of you spam calling her for divine intervention every six seconds?" My response to that would be "If she didn't want me to have this power, why'd she give it to me?!" That's a bad answer of course, because the gods are fickle. Surely she'd smite me down anyway. But if I don't worship a god, then there's no one to stop me! So I'll just worship "philosophy" as per the rules in Xanathar's. Now I'm no different than all the other wizards out there using the weave to create a million copies of themselves.

TL;DR - because level 20 arcana clerics get access to two Wishes at the same time, they can cast Simulacrum on themselves, and each new duplicated copy of the cleric can use one Wish to duplicate the effects of Simulacrum while retaining the second Wish. An arcana cleric is thus the only subclass (I think?) that has access to infinite wishes without the 33% risk that they'll lose the ability to cast wish ever again.

Going to play an Eldritch Knight this campaign and wanted to start her off with magic from the beginning was going to take Magic Initiate:Wizard and a couple of wizard cantrips. One of the blade cantrips and then Ray of Frost. My question is will those cantrips work with War Magic at 7th level? I'm read it as any Magic Initiate:Cleric or Druid cantrips I would have picked would not work based on wording of War Magic, but if I'm picking Magic Initiate: Wizard they should work, but I just want to make sure.

Magic Initiate:Two Cantrips. You learn two cantrips of your choice from the Cleric, Druid, or Wizard spell list. Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma is your spellcasting ability for this feat’s spells (choose when you select this feat).

Level 7: War Magic When you take the Attack action on your turn, you can replace one of the attacks with a casting of one of your Wizard cantrips that has a casting time of an action.

Hello! Long story short, I have a question about how a certain interaction would work when it comes to the Genie Oath's Channel Divinity.

This specifically isn't asking about narrative or balance suggestions or opinions - if it is supported by the rules than it is fair game no matter what in the question I'm asking. What I'm curious about is if there are any rules or text interactions that I'm missing when I'm thinking about this whole affair.

'Dao’s Crush - Earth rises up around the target of your Divine Smite. The target has the Grappled condition (escape DC equal to your spell save DC). While Grappled, the target has the Restrained condition.'

And

'Escaping a Grapple - A Grappled creature can use its action to make a Strength (Athletics) or Dexterity (Acrobatics) check against the grapple’s escape DC, ending the condition on itself on a success. The condition also ends if the grappler has the Incapacitated condition -

- or if the distance between the Grappled target and the grappler exceeds the grapple’s range'.

Does the last part interact with the effect created by Dao's Crush at all? If yes, then in what way?

We know that apparently the 'earth' is considered the one doing the grapple according to https://www.reddit.com/r/onednd/s/30M7wkDgzD - (no clue how to embed a link in text).

But what is the range of this 'earth'? Assuming one enemy of the Paladin tries to end the effect on another enemy of the Paladin by using Shove on the trapped enemy, the same way it would do to end a regular grapple done with a hand.

How much would the distance need to be to break the effect? Just 5 feet away from the spot the Smite happened? Is the 'earth's' range only affecting the space the effect was originally applied in and any distance from it ends the effect?

What if the enemy creature being Shoved away is of Large size? Does it need to leave all 4 on the initial squares it occupied when the Smite happened? Is leaving only some of them sufficient to break the effect?

Like, we already know that the 'earth that rises' doesn't need to physically connect at all times to the literal ground, as there is no text restricting you from conjuring the needed earth around the target 100 feet or more in the air to apply the effect after you Smite.

Alternatively

The other option that makes sense to me. The 'earth' isn't similar to a Bigby's Hand or the vine of Grasping Vine, as in - it doesn't create an entity that grapples - but it is instead similar to the 'vines' of Ensnaring Strike, or the Manacles or Net from the Adventuring Gear.

That is to say, the earth is simply a continuous phenomenon/non-entity that is attached to the target (like some sort of blanket wrapped around it) after the Smite, and would move with it if Shoved, applying the effect until the DC is beat.

This is my other interpretation, and in essence the one that is far simpler since the Channel Divinity doesn't mention it interacts with a space, so I don't need to assume anything else about its properties.

So, any concrete rules or text supporting or not supporting any one of the two interpretations that anyone can think of from the top of their head?

Or even another interpretation that I didn't think of?