Magic (MTG) and D&D: Games are Colliding

Wizards of the Coast quietly posted a PDF document over on their Magic: The Gathering site this week that has potential to eradicate barriers between the company's two flagship (fantasy) creative teams.

Here it is:  Planeshift: Zendikar

For the first time ever, we have a Magic guide to using one of Magic's premier settings a D&D milieu.

So what's the big deal?  Magic has been a 30+ year gaming juggernaut, steadily embracing more and more story elements to drive the gameplay.  The Magic card game features a series of powerful, magic-using characters called "Planeswalkers", whose  soap-opera intrigues and conflicts take them from plane to plane in the Magic multiverse.  In this way, every two or three sets of Magic cards shifts the action to an entirely different thematic world.  The Magic creative team works very hard to develop fully realized fantasy settings for each new set of cards - including settlements, civilizations, monsters, threats, culture, and character names.

Let's just look at the past few Magic settings:

• Ravnica:  the world is dominated by a massive metropolis, the city of Ravnica, where 12 competing guilds each seek to control the city - it's full of intrigue and urban noir fantasy
• Theros:  inspired by Greek Myth, the city-states of Theros are beset by a pantheon of jealous gods and titanic monsters
• Tarkir:  Tarkir is a war-torn plane where clans inspired by the cultures of South East Asia fight for dominance - it's seriously cool
• Zendikar:  - Magic's high fantasy "adventure world", where Cthulhoid monsters, the Eldrazi, rise from the ground and terrorize civilization
• Innistrad:  Magic's Gothic horror setting, full of vampires, demons, ghosts, and werewolves

There is a nice online gallery of the major planes in Magic:  MTG: Planes

What really drives Magic's storytelling is the amazing art for all of the cards. Magic's visit to one of these planes is embellished over a couple of card sets, meaning the creative team will commission several hundred pieces (400-700 paintings) of evocative fantasy art to convey  the story and themes of the world.  By contrast, a D&D book might have a few dozen pieces of art at best, and many of them are mini portraits or maps.

With Zendikar, Wizards of the Coast released a coffee table style book called The Art of Zendikar, which acts as both an art book and travel guide to the plane.  With the recent Planeshift: Zendikar, they've complimented the art book by providing guidelines on game stats and using D&D to run RPG games set in Zendikar.  Based on the survey attached to the article, this is also being looked at as a market test, to evaluate potential new products.

The test makes sense; the Magic product line invests in a massive portfolio of art, and leveraging that art and intellectual property for D&D game worlds gives them more opportunities to drive value from the art investment.  It's "low hanging fruit".  They can create more planar-guide coffee table books to sell the art, or shift these Zendikar-style game supplements into formal pay-to-own game supplements.  Plus, it might enhance both brands by getting some Magic players to try D&D, or getting D&D players to pick up a Magic deck.

Meanwhile, it's becoming clear what is the D&D 5E strategy and how it's working.  The core books are evergreen products, and the design team has been true to their word on keeping away from splat books and rules sprawl - no Player's Handbook 4, for instance.  (Thank you).  Instead, the product team seems focused on  releasing two "stories" per year, a large adventure campaign hardcover book, which is then cross-developed in novels, board games, and computer games.  Play the adventure, read the novel, buy the t-shirt, and then download the video game, that kind of stuff.  Something for everyone.  The quality of the stories seem to be improving as it goes along - Out of the Abyss was better than the previous two campaigns, and Curse of Strahd is absolutely full of win.  (I should get around to posting a review of Curse of Strahd, but it will gush with enthusiasm).

Overall, this foray into cross-promoting Magic and D&D is super interesting.  I'm guessing the Magic creative team is thinking like entrepreneurs and looking to harvest value from their creative work, with D&D fans getting a chance to benefit now that the iron curtain is falling.   5E seems to be doing well as a product line. The PHB is back in the Amazon top 100.  I greatly appreciate that the market isn't getting flooded with official splat books like DMG 2 and PHB 3, and this focus on multimedia stories is fairly benign; I can focus on the tabletop specific stuff and let folks enjoy the other media if that's their thing.  There's no downside.

I'll be watching the space closely.  The latest Magic set is Shadows over Innistrad, a visitation back to Magic's awesome Gothic horror setting.  The next set of cards for Innistrad will come out mid-summer, and that would be a good time to see if WOTC is going to publish a Zendikar-style art book and setting guide for D&D Innistrad.  I'd love for them to go back and do some recent worlds like Theros or Tarkir, but it seems more likely to be a forward-facing change.

Magic does nice trailers for each upcoming set, here's the recent trailer for Shadows Over Innistrad:

Shadows Over Innistrad Trailer

Catching Up With Supernatural

I blinked, and a week went by without blogging.  My eyeballs have been on the TV screen (or more frequently, the iPad) finishing the last couple of streaming episodes of the TV series Supernatural in a binge of media consumption.  Not once in the past 9-10 years did I bother to tune into that one while it was broadcasting; my wife, an ardent Dr Who fan, relentlessly implored me to commit to watching the first season of Supernatural a couple of months ago proclaiming it would strike a similar chord.  It's actually been great fun.

Let's say, like me, you're somewhat averse to the television and were equally oblivious about the show - here's the theme:  Supernatural is about a pair of brothers who hunt monsters as their life's mission.  The show postulates a world where there's a brotherhood of "hunters", urban fantasy warriors that roam the backwaters and by-streets of America, staking vampires and laying ghosts to rest, combing the papers for gruesome murders and bizarre deaths to find the next case.  There are overarching metaplots that invoke Judeo-Christian mythology, involving rogue angels, scheming demons, and sundry Biblical monsters.  Beyond the metaplot stories, each episode is basically a "monster of the week" showcase, and the writers have definitely looked far and wide to fill out 9 seasons with critters.

Supernatural isn't a horror show, but you can still get plenty of ideas from it for your horror or D&D gaming.  It's pretty much someone's "Hunter the Reckoning" campaign made into an ongoing saga, the way True Blood is a Masquerade campaign brought to HBO.  I've gotten some good ideas for staging a few obscure monsters, and it's shown me that there's quite a bit of monstrous material in the Bible - ideas for some upcoming posts, perhaps.

Meanwhile, the kiddos have discovered Naruto.  I've been hearing quotes from the show non-stop for the past two weeks:  Dad, I feel really good about my red deck for this week's FNM - I'm going undefeated this week, believe it!  Which reminds me, the latest core set for Magic the Gathering dropped last week, so we've also been busy sorting cards and updating our standard decks.  I'm a decent sealed player and took second at our prerelease; for standard, I've been on pack rats and demons all season, so black devotion was easy to update with M15.  I figure there's a small amount of overlap between readers who are just table top gamers and those that play the Magic; you've either been loving the past year of swamps and demons and black horrible things or you can't wait for October and no more black versus blue showdowns.  Anyway, I'm pretty excited to have "Urborg, the Tomb of Yawgmoth", back in standard, believe it!

Despite the distractions of television and the playing cards, we've had some great sessions with the gaming groups exploring Taenarum.  I have a few game reports to post this week.  I also picked up a copy of the 5th Edition Starter Box to peruse, and an author sent a few adventures over to review.   Plenty to catch up on.

Revisiting the Magic Shoppe

You've got a problem, DM.  Your players are going to earn a lot of gold over the course of their dungeoneering careers (somewhere around 4 million gp).  Unless that money goes somewhere, the quest for treasure is going to lose its motivating force.  On the other hand, draining the coffers through taxes or training costs is fairly irritating.

The campaign should encourage the players to shape the world - provide reasons to build things, hire people, use that wealth to exert force against the setting.  But don't discount the idea of buying magic items, either.  The popular imagination jumps to Crazy Eddie's franchise of Ye Olde Magic Shoppes, one in every city, where "the prices are so low they're practically insaaaaane!"

Let's step back and look at what happens in the real world with rare, unique, and precious items.  They’re typically bought and sold at auctions.  There's a fun Call of Cthulhu adventure (The Auction House) that takes place at a Vienna locale where various occult and mythos artifacts come up for sale - including the Brazen Head.  Half of the fun of that particular adventure is the roleplaying opportunity introduced by meeting all the weird visitors to the auction and trying to appraise and research the provenance of the items before the auction begins.

Apply some imagination and make the commercial side of it worth playing out at the table.  The campaign is already built upon interesting NPC's - perhaps the magic auction is something that happens a few times a year, invitation-only to characters of a certain reputation and wealth.  It's somewhere exotic and secret, attended by the agents of emperors and kings and wizards, and rivals of the adventurers, past and present.  Competition at the auction can easily spill over to the streets once the auction is done - the agents of the Warlord of Thar don't take it lying down when they've been outbid on that heirloom Atlantean sword coveted by his august presence, Thar of the Shining Horde.  Just learning about the auction house itself requires footwork and becomes its own adventure.  It sure sounds like a memorable way to let the players spend a few hundred thousand gold.

Commissioning items is the same - make it quest driven and advance the development of the campaign world.  For Taenarum, the campaign in development now, I'm planning on having the 'Forge Followers of Hephaestus' as a remote sect of dwarves and priests whose holy mission is to craft imbued items in homage to the forge god.  Traveling to their volcanic shrine and commissioning a suit of golden plate armor is an end in itself.  Or perhaps the wizard Darius the Proud refuses to be outdone by his rivals in distant Araby, and can be motivated to craft those Boots of Speed because of a story that a desert wizard did it first.  The key is to put the onus on the players to do their own research, travel plans, and role playing to find creative reasons to spend their money on the items they want or need.  As referee, you just need to leave the door open - none of this "No one ever buys or sells magic items in MY campaigns…"

People with too much money buy and sell rare and unique items every day in the real world.  It's going to happen in the fantasy world too - you just need to figure out how to make it interesting.

Your Path to Real Ultimate Magic

...Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,  
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full  
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;  
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,  
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between  
The effect and it!
--MacBeth

The spell system in Dungeons & Dragons works fairly well for the game.  The game is mostly about exploration, puzzle solving, and combat, and the spell system is loaded with utility effects to give players tools to solve game problems.  It's great for the game, it's just not very literary.

Example, the Light spell:  The torch of tomorrow, today!  Why carry a burning stick of wood, when you can have light that's safe, heatless, and brighter than a torch, all for the low cost of a 1st level spell?  If you act now, we'll upgrade you to a permanent heatless lamp at 3rd level, Continual Light!

You see the same thing with the Levitate, Fly, Dimension Door, and Teleport sequence of movement spells.  It's magic as technology.  Narrator:  Why physically walk up stairs with your own muscles when you can fly?  In the future, wizards everywhere will dazzle with feats that defy gravity and both time and space.  Grocery shopping will never be the same when you can teleport to the market!

(Apparently, magic as technology makes me view standard D&D magic effects as a 1950's expo for the world of tomorrow, since that's the voice in my head...)

Literary magic, on the other hand, usually features horrible choices and sacrifice.  There is a price to be paid for power.  Odin sacrifices an eye to learn wisdom at the well of wisdom (Mimir's spring) and in other stories is hung for nine days on Yggdrasil, the World Tree, in order to gain wisdom.  Alberich the Dwarf forswears love for his magic powers.  Faust sells his soul to the devil, one of many such literary dealers.  Even characters embedded in a setting where they have superhuman powers often make dark choices for more power - Saruman, Voldemort, Darth Vader.

Then there's the approach we see in writers like HP Lovecraft, where magic frequently has terrible (unforeseen) consequences.  Lovecraft's fiction is full of instances where a would-be sorcerer contacts beings from beyond or summons liminal entities, then gets blind-sided by the repercussions.  That's the twist.  Sure, the Deep Ones will give you gold and valuables dredged up from the ocean muck… just don't read the fine print.  And remember, a deal's a deal.

Earlier this year, one of the cooler OSR type game books that came out was the LOTFP Better Than Any Man for free RPG day.  While folks gritted their teeth about the salacious cover or the full page picture of the cannibal cultists, one piece that flew under the radar was the approach to low level spells in the book.

Consider such "overpowered" first level spells as A Spell to Grant One’s Heart’s Desire, Journey to the Past , De-Age, or Deflect Damage.  A Spell to Grant One’s Heart’s Desire is essentially a first level Wish spell, but the caster dies as part of casting the spell; it's the nearby folks that get their wishes granted!  Journey to the Past is a severely limited version of time travel; De-Age is a longevity effect that can force loss of levels and other unfortunate side effects; Deflect Damage provides a powerful combat effect, but the deflected damage lands on random nearby people - ideal for a power mad loner, not so great for an adventuring party looking for utility spells.

The bit that's so interesting about these overpowered first level spells is that it highlights an implied axis in the default D&D spell system: high level D&D spells are high level because they combine usefulness, a powerful effect, and a notorious lack of negative side effects.  Sure - you can have a powerful Wish effect at 1st level, but the short cut is going to cost you more than you can imagine.  If you want to do powerful magic the "safe way", it's going to take a lot of hard work and a ton of experience points.  See you again at level 18.

The benefit to DM's is clear.  If there is a powerful, whimsical, literary effect you want to achieve, there's very little harm making it a first level spell, as long as it's accompanied by terrible costs or awful side effects.  Think of it like a skill test.  Your player character magic users aren't going to be interested in effects that maim their characters; leave that to the NPC's who "fail their wisdom checks" to make short-sighted power grabs.  For instance, I love the idea of a first level Raise Dead spell to bring back a dead loved one, but then the caster has to deal with the Pet Sematary style consequences when the loved one isn't quite the same person on the return side.

This is all part of an underlying philosophy that eschews game balance and treats the campaign world with reckless disregard for the status quo.  My name is Beedo, and I approve this message.

Gencon 2103 Reflections

We're back from another annual sojourn to Indianapolis.  This year was a lot different for me; over the winter, my oldest son became strongly interested in Magic, and since  I was a card player "back in the day", we've been going to Friday Night Magic fairly religiously for the past 4-5 months.  We made playing in tournaments a big focus for this year's Gencon.  Nonetheless, we did wander around (a little bit).

D&D NEXT
I had drifted from downloading the WOTC playtest packets of D&D next, so our group was excited to get into one of the playtest sessions.  Overall, it was a fun playtest and the action moved along quickly - I was Spock the Elf, a few guys were named Red Shirt 1 and 2, and the star of the night was Sulu, the monk who embodied the drunken master style.  Combat was abstract and fast-moving, and had quite a bit to endear it to the old school crowd.  No need for minis or grids or excruciating tactical movement.  The action was fast and furious.  Thought the combat was great.

On the other hand, it still has clerics with searing laser-pointer-fingers and wizard characters that shoot fearsome magical blasts every single round like the Gauntlet video game.  I don't know enough about 5E to say whether only the player characters are the special unique snowflakes that walk around with such reality-bending powers of destruction at 1st level, or whether the entire implied setting is like an over-the-top high magic comic book.   I have a hard time envisioning a class-based world, with sensible demographics, where characters with such flashy powers rub shoulders with ordinary folks, but it could be an interesting thought exercise to imagine a place where a plurality of characters float around and can blast things at will.  To try and rationalize how society functions with such powerful individual characters,  I keep coming back to the Marvel or DC universes and the comics.

Anyway, it sounds like the multiple years of play testing is coming to an end this fall, so perhaps WOTC has it figured out.  I loathed 4E as a world-building system, and I'm strongly suspicious of 5E due to the character power levels (but I'm not writing it completely off, either).  We'll see.

There were multiple times we found ourselves wandering by the gigantic Pathfinder hall late at night on our way to the parking garage, and couldn't believe how packed it was around the clock.  There are no edition wars; Pathfinder has won, plain and simple.  It's all over but the crying - the anemic D&D Next crowd isn't any competition.  At least WOTC keeps doing one thing right (Magic, below).

HOBOMANCER
While four of us spent time in the Magic Hall grinding out games, a couple of the guys wandered the RPG areas trying to find pick-up games, and they came back from one such venture as devotees of the cult of Hobomancer.  Apparently, Hobomancer (an actual, real, I'm-not-kidding RPG) involves a secret society of 1930's era magic-wielding Hobos, fighting to save the American Dream while riding the rails, calling on such uncanny skills as Beard-Magic or Stinkomancy or the Shakes.  Despite the absurdity, a couple of the guys are all in on the Hobomancer now, particularly after playing through an intro scenario, "The Town That Loved Hobos".  One of the players kept wearing his "My Name is Harmonica Jones" name tag for the rest of the con.  I have a suspicion  that getting roped into a bizarre one-shot play test and embracing some silliness is now lurking in my future.

STUFF TO GET
Last month I wrote a review of Eternal Lies, the upcoming campaign for Trail of Cthulhu.  The book was on sale at Gencon and I picked up my pre-order copy - it's massive and spectacular.  This is probably next in the gaming queue unless we get back to some fantasy gaming as the season turns to autumn.  Either way, I'd like to start this one before the year is out - it looks challenging and fun.

MY MANA-SOAKED BRAIN
We've been "winning" (or at least going 3-0) at just about every FNM draft or constructed we attend, so I was looking forward to playing a diverse and competitive field at Gencon.  Plus, the kiddo wants to start attending some larger tournaments in the area, and needs seasoning (he's 11).  It's funny how many 'serious' players figure it's an auto-win when they sit down across from a goofy kid (in a Legend of Zelda Lync costume, no doubt) and get surprised when his Domri Naya beats down with the Thundermaws.

I was on Jund for the weekend and got knocked out of a top 8 on day one due to some really questionable opening hand keeps on my part.  That was my wake up call that you needed to make strong technical decisions and the margin for error was much lower than the local scene.  Sometimes you just need to get punished to learn.  On day two, the boy changed up his Naya deck for R/G Dragonmaster Aggro (after a dealer-hall quest for a 4th copy of Burning Earth in the board) and we played in a standard grinder to win a box.  He beat an American Flash deck before getting combo'ed out by the Black-White Humans deck (with Blood Artist triggers), while I beat that deck in the finals to win the box - it turns out Curse of Death's Hold and Olivia Voldaren are pretty good against tokens and humans.

The kid really shined in Sealed Deck, getting 4th place in a large 72-person sealed (I was merely 20th), and then winning a sealed grinder outright.  I played him in one of the games; he dropped his Kalonian Hydra, swung next turn for 8.  Swung on the following turn for 16 (the Kalonian doubles its power every turn).  Meanwhile, I was holding Act of Treason and chump blocking just enough to stay alive.  I stole his Hydra for a turn, swung for 32 damage lethal, and he calmly played his final card - a Fog spell - and took his hydra back with a slight smirk.  Funny stuff.  Needless to say, I didn't survive the 64 power crack back - Kalonian is a bomb.  On the last game of that match, there was no stopping his Vampire Warlord with Mark of the Vampire and an endless supply of sacrifices to keep regenerating it.  It just kept beating down.

Here's our booty:

I've been thinking about starting a Magic blog to catalog our quest to graduate from FNM heroes and join the spawning masses trying to land in the money of an SCG Open or top-8 a PTQ by navigating the ever-changing standard meta.  (Hah - If you're reading this and can even wade through that jargon, let me know if that's remotely interesting.)

Back to regular RPG posts this week.

Gatecrashing the Magics

This has been a poor week for blogging - I lost a key person on a critical project, I'm scrambling to replace them, and the boiler at the house died.  A few rough days and late nights at the office  = no energy for interesting RPG posts.  But it's almost the weekend!

On the other hand, the boy and I have been playing a bunch of Gatecrash sealed duels, time permitting. (Gatecrash is the latest Magic: the Gathering set).  We got a booster box and have been slowly cracking it, 6 packs at a time, building sealed decks, and using the same pool of cards for about a week or so by just tearing the decks apart and rebuilding them with different color combinations (or Guilds, if you follow MTG).  I figure it's a good way for us to learn the card pool and get comfortable with limited, before the kiddo tries his first draft.

Apologies for the jargon - I played a lot of Magic "back in the day", like back during Ice Age (an early Magic expansion) and it’s weird but fun the game is still going so strong with totally different generations of kids some 15 years after I moved on to other things.  The kiddo had picked up a few "event decks" with his own money after learning how to play via the iPad game; next thing you know, we had a handful of event decks, and it was only a matter of time before we were tearing into some boosters and conspiring to play a draft at Gencon.  (Event decks are 60 card preconstructed decks, with 15 card sideboards, ready for a play).  The goal is Gencon and slowly building a collection - if we play mostly sealed and draft between now and Gencon, we'll accrete enough good cards to make some nice constructed decks by the fall.  Since any packs we buy just go towards playing sealed at home, we're getting a lot of use out of the cards on their way into the long box.

The current sets are all themed after the world of Ravnica, with a gigantic metropolis and 10 competing fantasy guilds.  If only the boy had caught the Magic-bug a year earlier, we wouldn't have missed out on "Innistrad", a trio of Magic sets all themed on Gothic horror.  :Sigh:  I'm sure I'll draw ideas for new monsters for table top gaming from some of the Magic art; it's really great stuff.

Who else out there in RPG-blog-land is a Magic player on the side, casual or serious?  I know a lot of us mess around with miniatures, and the kiddo and I play some Heroclix and Dungeon Command.  But those games take a long time end-to-end, with setup and play easily clearing an hour or more.  A big thing I've noticed is how easy it is to fit a 10 or 15 minute Magic duel into a convenient time slot - really helpful when you're playing zone defense with three kids.