Arcadia 3 cover art by Justin Gerard from MCDM.
Jame Introcaso authors the editors note once again, discussing how this issue is the third in the MCDM experiment with Arcadia and the success it has seen by their measures and the buzz on social media channels. This issue has four articles, some touching on new areas like spells, new ancestries, and aerial combat.
The Dream Kin, by Justice Arman, details three new dream themed ancestry options for 5e. (Sidenote, it is crazy how many MCDM freelancers like Arman have been picked up for WOTC design and writing positions the last several years. I think it speaks to the high quality of Arcadia to see the impressive work it's author's have done both before and after their work for the magazine). Immediately my thoughts go to how to include these connected to the plane of dreams, or ways that they could be tied to Lovecraftian themed dream campaigns and cosmic horror (I’ll make sure to do some articles on my thoughts on Sandy Petersen’s Cthulhu Mythos for 5e which is sitting on my shelf and begging to be included in a Ravenloft Domain of Dread or Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign). These three new ancestries are the Lucidling, Sand Speakers, and the Somnians.
Lucidlings are basically the spawn from the dreams of aberrations, and the art by Ilse Gort definitely fits that. You wouldn’t want to run into one of these guys in the dark. Their abilities are largely boilerplate stuff except for Spontaneous Evolution; the ability to grow a new alien limb, gain the flying speed due to your psionic powers, or breath underwater for ten minutes once per long rest. This doesn’t scale with level, so it doesn’t have a huge impact on the game except providing some utility to dead with certain obstacles.
The Sand Speakers are dreamwalking people made out of glass. You can turn into sand for one minute while retaining your movement as an ancestry ability, providing some interesting exploration and utility options to slip through cracks. It also protects you from spells and non-magical damage, making it a very viable option if a fight goes sideways. It recharges on a long rest. On top of this ability, you gain the message cantrip, as well as the sleep spell at third and silence spell at fifth level. Finally you can enter the dreams of a creature within ten feet. This ancestry seems much more useful to me than the lucidling, with the exception of the dreamwalking ability, which mainly seems like an interesting flavor or narrative ability to me. Certainly, I could see a Sand Speaker character sneaking into an important NPC's dream to aid in a persuasion check later or convey important information to a ruler kept closeted by their advisors. Lots of potential story hooks, but only situationally useful.
The Somnian is an interesting ancestry, natives of the dream realm and they look like people with stars over them. Like if you got a picture from the Hubble or James Webb telescope screen printed on your skin. They can also take on nightmarish forms and cause the frightened condition. They also get some illusion spells. But most significantly, the Somnian gets a one time use of the resurrection spell. Once they use it the character dies, turning to stardust. Only a wish spell can bring them back. A very dramatic player death, and definitely the type of thing I'd expect and hope to see in an MCDM product.
Ten Spells You Need in 5e by Celeste Conowitch is the next article. Celeste has worked on a number of notable 5e products from MCDM and Kobold Press. Most notably and recently with the latter is their new 5e variant ruleset, Tales of the Valiant.
There's no real fluff to this article. The spells are all updated for 5e from previous editions. It provides the new spells in class lists and then gets straight into the mechanics. The first spell, Attract Metal, is a 2nd level concentration spell enabling you to move metal objects. Directions are provided to resolve various scenarios and it's obvious that the main utility of this spell is to pull enemies' weapons from their hands or push metal wearing foes around. Erase let's you remove writing on some definitely objects, and remove glyphs of warding. The next spell is Glitterdust, which can blind creatures on a failed CON save and makes invisible creatures visible (because they're coated in glitter). It's a third level spell, which makes sense because it's basically a better faerie fire that can also impose disadvantage on the targets.
Nature's Ladder creates a tree you can climb up. Makes sense as a druid and ranger spell. Permanency makes 5th level spells and lower that can target the caster permanent, but they can be dispelled. There's a pretty expensive material cost too, but this spell seems like it could cause some abuse depending on the player (if my player I'm thinking of ever reads this, you probably know who you are...).
Rainbow Recurve summons a magical bow allowing rainged spell attacks for various effects, mostly different kinds of damage. Sixth level spell for bards and sorcerer's. It basically gives them a powerful magic weapon for one minute for the price of a sixth level spell which seems quite powerful with a high opportunity cost. It is tempered by being a concentration spell. Shrink lets you shrink creatures and objects. It's a ranged spell, and seems to imply you can't cast it on yourself. It's an interesting utility spell and can be used against unwilling creatures if they fail a CON save. My one concern is there's no reroll and the spell is an hour duration so it could significantly nerf a boss fight. But it is concentration, so if you have minions they could break the spellcasters concentration.
Silver Wings is a 4th level spell that functions as a better version of flight that allows a melee spell and AOE attack. Also concentration though, unlike fly, so if you get smacked you're going to probably fall.
Stoneheart is low key like being a lich. You have a stoneheart but have to keep your real one within a mile of you. You auto succeed a death saves and after 1d10 days return to life with a stoneheart if you die. But you can't heal on long or short rests, instead only able to use magical healing. Seventh level necromancy. Strong, but I like the nerf to your healing. Like I said though. It's like the lite version of lichdom.
Finally, Walking Dead is a lower level and less effective version of Animate Dead. Interestingly it seems to suggest casting it on your fallen party mates if you don't have access toraise dead, effectively increasing your timer on raise dead. Like cryogenics, but it's necromancy!
Overall a good article with a number of spells I would probably allow at my table. It's obvious balance and other spells were considered when designing these new (but old) spells.
Aces High by Sam Mannell is what I didn't know I'd been missing for aerial combat. It is a concise, abstracted system to simulate high flying fights and the split second decisions that high speed flight creates. And the art by Jason Hasenauer and David Su is beautiful (and reveals the Top Gun inspiration). Not every adventure will use these rules, but I quickly realized that all three of the adventures I am running or plan to run soon could employ them. (Spoilers: Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen features an aerial encounter with dragonnels in chapter six tailor-made to employ these rules, Storm King's Thunder includes a flying ship with potential aerial encounters while traveling or approaching the cloud giant castle, and my upcoming Midgard game could include a griffon rider from the Midgard Heroes Handbook so these rules would be very helpful to shine the spotlight on the character and their mount).
The system is elegant in it's simplicity; the only modifier that needs to be added to rolls is your Flight Modifier, determined by a combination of the flight speed and size of either your mount or vehicle, or yourself if the fly spell (or Silver Wings too I suppose). There's a nifty table to look it up on. Basically it is supposed to represent in a numberic form the relationship of your size to your manueverability. In real life this is actually variable based on your expended energy in a given turn and would be represented with another nifty graphic called an EM diagram like this one:
My tangent aside, Aces High uses abstract positioning rather than requiring you to track position on a grid. The objective is partially to defeat the enemy as in a normal combat, but it states that ever more the goal is to force the enemy from the sky.
There are three stages in an encounter in this system: Scramble, Stunt, and Action. The latter two are repeated for each round, while the first is only done at the beginning of the encounter. Scrambling sets all the flyers' and pilots' initial starting altitudes and turn order, functioning much like initiative. In an interesting departure though, to simulate the adrenaline and need for split second decisions there is a ten second timer and the flyer can roll as many times as they want in those ten seconds. Altitude confers advantage or disadvantage on attack rolls against your target depending on whether they are higher or lower than you.
The stunt phase has you use a die pool which carries over to the next round that I think of almost as abstracting your kinetic energy which can then be expended as extra actions in the third phase, or used to alter your altitude. There are benefits to both climbing and diving as well as drawbacks to balance those decisions. There are also "Gut Moves," similar to reactions but requiring you to spend a stunt die in response to a specific trigger. They are all geared to make the fight more dynamic and cinematic.
This system is awesome and simple to implement. I plan to try it out as a mini-game if I don't have enough players to run a campaign session, unless I run into a situation in an adventure where they will be useful prior to that. My only real critiques would be that this system (like may more complex ones from MCDM) could use a simple step-by-step numbered list of how the game plays out. So that the GM and players can look at the list at a glance without hunting through the body of the text trying to put everything in order. Lastly, the article mentions needing to set DCs for evading terrain at low altitudes, and refers the reader to the short scenario at the end of the article as an example. A small chat of terrain types and DCs would have been a great addition here to just solve the problem. A GM can easily make their own, but it would have been trivial to provide one (particularly since they set their own page and space constraints and there’s plenty of blank page at the end of the article). But overall, this might be one of my favorite (and the most actionable) articles I’ve yet encountered in Arcadia.
Finally, this issue includes a fourth article, which is the adventure A Diamond in the Rough, by Alison Huang. It is designed for third level characters. This is a well written, and well presented adventure, from the dramatis personae section laying out all the NPCs and their motivations in two sentence bullet points, to the bullet pointed clues and information on what each NPC knows when they are found in their keyed room. The style is tight and provides exactly enough detail while remaining concise. This is great adventure presentation. Spoilers follow, so stop now if you’re interested in playing this one.
The two spot art pieces from Conceptopolis, and Nick De Spain are also beautiful. My personal favorite is De Spain’s vividly illustrated xorn gobbling up jewelry. The cartography by Miska Fredman is perhaps my favorite map we’ve seen in these first three issues. First, because there’s some diversity in colors. Second, the layout encourages non-linear exploration. I think the only addition I would want would be an additional servant’s staircase to provide another vertical path through the structure (and conveniently reinforcing the themes of the adventure by highlighting the prejudicial and self centered nature of the manor’s inhabitants towards those not noble born). This map could certainly be used for other adventures or scenarios, and the varied terrain and hedges in the gardens could set up a tower defense scenario quite well (think zombies or baddies trying to break in). I consider a map extremely successful if I could get multiple uses like this out of it, and even better if it inspires me to create something new.
The adventure itself is fairly simple in structure; it’s essentially a “dungeon” based investigation with clues and interactions in the various rooms. Players move through the structure to explore each of these rooms as separate nodes, building towards the adventure conclusion. The plot is fairly simple: the noble family in the manor are all a$$holes (for lack of a better term), except for their youngest daughter. The family ignores her, and she has summoned a xorn from the elemental planes. Now they are stealing her families’ jewelry to give them a comeuppance and feed the gem eating xorn. Once again, the clue lists are exceptionally well designed, making this an investigation that really can have multiple suspects.
The end of the adventure is left open ended, offering multiple scenarios that could occur. It’s very refreshing to see that it does allow the players to have choices and, while there are certainly more desirable outcomes, their choices do matter.
The last thing that I enjoyed about this adventure is how open it is to modification. You can drop it into pretty much any setting of your choice. It would work in Waterdeep or Baldurs Gate in the Forgotten Realms, Zobeck or Dornig in Midgard, a noble house in Ptolus, or pretty much any generic fantasy setting with landed nobility. But the setting that occurred to me and excited me most was Eberron. The investigation and intrigue components play directly into the noir theming included in Eberron. And you can change up the noble family to fit your area. Perhaps they are all gnomes in Zilargo. Or nobility in any of the remaining human nations. Or they are scions of one of the dragon-marked houses. The possibilities are endless. The only real potential longterm consequences on your game for this adventure is that your players could learn a ritual spell that allows them to summon a xorn once a year (but it retains its free will, so you can still control it, the spell requires 1,000 gp in precious gems, and you have to feed it 200 gp in gemstones per week to keep it happy). So they potentially get a fairly powerful sidekick, with some good balancing features.
All of that summed up makes this perhaps my favorite self-contained adventure that can be dropped into any campaign so far. You can easily level it up too by swapping the NPC stat blocks for more powerful ones, and increasing the xorn’s stats and damage output.
That sums it up for Arcadia 3! Onto the next!
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