Theme Week: The Golgari Swarm & Dredge

Last Saturday I posted the results of a new Theme Week on my patreon, which is a special set of content all centered on, you guessed it, a specific theme. This time the theme was the Guilds of Ravnica from Magic: the Gathering, an often popular choice for people who follow my content creation. After some poll voting last month, my paying patrons settled on wanting to see some cards from the Golgari Swarm, a faction in charge of the agriculture and waste disposal for the infamous city-spanning plane of Ravnica. And as with most Theme Weeks, I eventually settled on a combination of item-spell-monster for the full release:

 Golgari Cluestone, Moldervine Cloak, and Greater Mossdog

And as is often the case with Ravnica Theme Weeks, I decided to focus my attention on one of the "signature mechanics" of the Golgari. You see, each time Magic: the Gathering releases new cards centered around Ravnica, they give each of the city's ten guilds a mechanic unique to them, which helps cement the flavor of the cards. Being obsessed with death, life, rot, and rebirth, the Golgari's mechanics always involve returning creatures from the dead or using corpses as resources, which is always fertile ground (sorry) for some equally interesting RPG mechanics.

This time though, I wanted to take a deep-dive into one of the most infamous mechanics to ever appear in the card game: Dredge. 

For reference, this isn't even a good card with Dredge.

Dredge was both beloved and hated upon release, depending on which side of the table you were sitting on when it appeared. As a mechanic, it was designed to interact with two of Magic: the Gathering's most finicky and difficult-to-balance aspects, card draw and the graveyard. Card draw might be obvious, but if you're unaware, the graveyard is where spells go after they've been played and creatures after they've been killed or destroyed. So how does Dredge work? Well, Dredge gave cards a special property for as long as they were in your graveyard– if you would draw cards, you could instead place a certain number of cards from the top of your library into your graveyard directly, and place the card with Dredge straight into your hand. ...If you do game design, you might see the problem already.

Like most card games, MtG relies on randomly drawing from a card deck to help balance the game. Make it less random, and you create a game where the objective is to simply put the right cards in the right order to win, like competitive solitaire. Dredge circumvents the randomosity of a normal card deck, letting you place and keep key cards in hand, ostensibly at the cost of putting others into your graveyard.This is supposed to be balanced with the risk of accidentally tossing a card you need, or running out of cards to draw (meaning an immediate game loss). But Dredge's bigger issue is that it synergizes with itself; the more you Dredge, the greater the chance that you'll put another Dredge card into the graveyard, and then Dredge some more. Add in other graveyard-based abilities and a special card that lets you return resources from the graveyard, and well, you just have a gameplay engine. Needless to say, Dredge hasn't made any reappearances in the nearly 20 years since, aside from a single, underpowered card in an unrelated color. 

This is the card in question. It's still a must-play in lots of deck archetypes.

 

But while Dredge wasn't a good fit for a card game, how about a tabletop RPG? As it turns out, it works pretty well! With some obvious changes. Libraries and graveyards don't exist in D&D (yet) but the flavor of Dredge is easy to apply to spells and monsters. When looking at the designs of Dredge cards, I knew I wanted to keep the flavor of the mechanic for D&D more than the actual implementation. Dredge is supposed to replicate the idea of bringing something back from the dead over and over, but "over and over" is as dangerous a phrase in D&D as it is in Magic. Instead, I settled for a "bring it back once, maybe" philosophy.

 

 And the award for "Most Pettable Fungus" goes to...!

 

On each card with Dredge, the mechanic comes with a number attached. That number is how many cards you have to place into the graveyard from your library. It is also conveniently similar to the numbering of the Monstrosity mechanic I already made in D&D for the Theros block (more on that some other time). So whether it's on spells or monsters, Dredge forces you to roll a d8 when the spell or monster in questions "expires" (when you finish casting it, or kill the creature). If you roll equal to or below the Dredge number, one of two things happens. On a spell, you immediately get to duplicate the spell's effects, without needing to expend another spell slot. On a monster, it gets right back up with 1/2 its maximum hit points restored, and continues the fight. Voila! The essence of Dredge is captured, but by limiting either version to a "single use" then I can keep the balance without going overboard. Hopefully.

 

This mechanic, like everything I make and put on Patreon, is still technically "in beta." I think it's good enough for a wide release, and I've tested it by the numbers, but I haven't had a chance to actually playtest it with a real group yet. There's a chance things might need to be changed or re-balanced, but this feels good, and I think it works well with the flavor and spirit of the Golgari Swarm. And while there might not be many Dredge cards to convert, its a mechanic I would be more than happy to use in some other spell and monster designs in the future. As for when that might happen... well, that's anyone's guess.

Artifact Rumble (Jan '23)– Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty

 In it's original appearance, Kamigawa was meant to evoke the folklore and stylizations of historical Japan, focusing on a few less-than-stellar tropes such as ninja, samurai, and spirits. While it achieved some success, Kamigawa remained untouched for many years. However, in early 2022, we took another trip to the plane, where lore-wise several thousands of years had passed. Many of the unfortunate orientalist tropes of the plane were replaced with a new, cyberpunk aesthetic, meant to evoke other media like Blade Runner, Akira, and Ghost in the Shell, while retaining many of the plane's Japanese roots. While it wasn't perfect, it was much more successful than the first visit, and many of the actual game's themes and mechanics knocked it out of the park.  

 Ancestral Katana & Blade of the Oni

Today's magic items all come from the modern-day cyberpunk version of Kamigawa, and as you can see, includes everything from katanas to hoverbikes. Since there's so much variety here, I thought it might be fun to do an item-by-item breakdown of the design process for each one.

The ancestral katana was one of two items in last month's poll that actually received votes, and I can see why. For better or worse, katanas are the signature item of Japanese-adjacent media, and their role in Japanese history has inspired story after story. The actual card is a pretty basic equipment that grants a small boost to the creature that has it equipped, and becomes cheaper to equip if you put it on a samurai or warrior that happens to be attacking alone. I liked this part of the card much more than anything else about it, and used it as inspiration for the weapons "quick attunement" ability, as well as the extra d4 damage it grants if you go after an enemy solo.

The second card to actually get votes was the blade of the oni, which also happens to feature a new mechanic called Reconfigure, which allows you to turn an equipment into a creature and vice-versa. D&D has a long history of sentient magic items, which appeared very early in the game's history; but the equipment equipment creatures of Neon Dynasty give off vibes that are less "intelligent object" and more "lab-created creature in the shape of a weapon." For the most part, they seem to have been designed to function both as living creatures and weapons, which is a fun and appropriately cyberpunk concept. In keeping with that spirit of that, rather than simply make an intelligent item, I gave the blade of the oni its own stat block, though it isn't very tough on its own. But this also opens up a whole world of possibilities when it comes to actually introducing the item to your players– there's the obvious option of including it in a treasure hoard, or giving it to a big-bad to wield, but just imagine the look on a party's faces when the weapon they were so eager to take for themselves gets up and starts to skitter away. I'd definitely think twice about whether I want to be keeping that thing at my side all hours of the day.

 Dragonspark Reactor & Hoverbike

The next two items didn't actually win the poll, but when it came time to do these conversions, I decided I didn't want to stop with just two swords. There's a whole world of interesting magic items to be found in the Kamigawa setting, and I was eager to bring at least a couple more of them to life.

The first item I settled on was the dragonspark reactor, a pretty simple card compared to some of the others in this set. When it or another artifact enters play under your control, you put a charge counter on it; at any point, you can pay 4 mana and sacrifice it to deal damage equal to the charge counters you have on it to a player and a creature. While it isn't much, it is flavorful, and I could already see a perfect D&D design for the card from the moment I laid eyes on it. And honestly it didn't change much from original idea to execution, except for some deliberation on how to implement a system for powering the item with more charges. It's still maybe a little unwieldy, but it gets the point across, and I'm not sure there's a better way to phrase it.

Of course, when I started doing these conversions, I knew I wanted to make at least one new vehicle for D&D too. It's unfortunate that there aren't many in the game already, beyond ships, spelljammers, and the few made for the Descent Into Avernus campaign, but I guess that's the nature of a game whose standard setting is a fantasy pastiche of medieval Europe. But once again we have a new setting that proves fantasy and technology can coexist perfectly well, and you can't have a proper Akira homage without some sort of motorcycle for your character to drive. And if that motorcycle can be a hoverbike, well, all the better. The stats for the hoverbike use the same format as the machines in the aforementioned Descent campaign, because after some light research, I think they're probably just the best (existing) way to handle powered vehicles. I maybe could have design my own system, but that would take a lot more effort than I was willing to put in for a single week's release.

All in all, the new Kamigawa seems like it could be a good fit for a D&D setting, even in spite of (or because of?) the setting's focus on technology. There's some quote floating around on the internet about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic, and while I'm not quite sure how true that is, I think it's close enough when you're talking about a world where floating motorcycle, mech suits, and robots are all powered by hand-waved magic anyway.

Dangerous Lists: Gnolls

"Night falls at last on the grasslands, and you sit beside the fire with your allies, a meal heavy in your belly. The bard strums a small tune, while the artificer continues work on their pet project. Technically on guard duty, you are content to merely sit and listen to the sounds of the savannah. And then, from the distance, you hear a distinctive laughter, like the barking of dogs..."

An early gnoll

Gnolls have been present in the game of Dungeons & Dragons since the very first edition of the game, though there isn't much to speak of on that incarnation. However, their history technically stretches back even further than that, to the gnoles of Lord Dunsany. One of the major influences on modern fantasy literature, Dunsany was a great inspiration to many authors, including H.P. Lovecraft and even J.R.R. Tolkien himself. His gnoles, however, had very little in common with the gnolls of D&D.

 

The Evolution of the Gnoll

 

As D&D continued to evolve and grow, many of the original monsters designed for the first edition did too (although some have been, thankfully, left behind). The modern gnoll is a distinct, hyena-like species of humanoids with a variety of traits– few of which speak to their credit. Described in earlier products as savage, war-like, and even potentially related to demons, gnolls haven't yet been touched by Wizards of the Coast's recent attempts to rectify the issues with having an inherently "evil" species of humanoid in its game. Personally, I think having any species within your imaginary world inherently linked to a moral alignment is needlessly limiting. None of us think relegating angels to strict bastions of purity is good worldbuilding; why is forcing gnolls to be evil any less restrictive?

Even in their most recent 5th Edition incarnation in Mordenkainen Presents, gnolls get nothing more to their credit than a throw-away line about how they might not be all bad, just "dedicated to the survival of their kin"... Followed by statistics for a special type of gnoll that reanimates from the dead after suffering the crime of cannibalism.

The gnoll's issues can probably be chalked up to the image problems of its inspiration, the hyena. Even though hyenas play an incredibly important role in a number of ecosystems, their reputation as scavengers and negative role in many mythologies has left them with the short end of the stick compared to other feliforms. While that seems to slowly be changing, as more people realize there isn't such a thing as a "bad animal", gnolls are probably going to take a little bit longer to shed their reputation as murderous villains.

How could you not love a face like that?

Of course, being known as a villain isn't all bad. Some people like villains! And at it's heart, D&D is a game about combat, meaning that someone needs to do the attacking. And while I don't have time to get into any of the complicated moral underpinnings of D&D's expected "fight first, talk later" vision of heroes, suffice it to say that gnolls do still fill an important niche as low-CR mob enemy of choice in more arid adventure locales. But even if they remain ruthless, bloodthirsty raiders, gnolls do still deserve an opportunity to maraud beyond their typical horizons, so here's 8 fun and fresh ideas for gnoll encounters in your game:

1. With their ship listing badly after a storm, the party wants nothing more than to reach a friendly port where they can turn in and make the necessary repairs to get back on the seas. But the only port within a day's sailing is Dunsany Bay, a fertile crescent of land along the coast of an otherwise dry and barren land. Dunsany Bay is run by a group of gnoll privateers, who ruthlessly uphold the bay's only law, "Might Makes Right."
2. Somewhere deep within the Underdark, blades flash, glittering in the dim light of glowing mushrooms, and Yeenoghu, Demon Prince of Gnolls, howls his last. Across the Forgotten Realms, eyes dimmed by bloodlust turn bright, and a thousands spears are lowered. With Yeenoghu's death, the demon's violent grip on the minds of gnolls is broken. Their kind, once driven by unquenchable hunger, are given a freedom they have not known in millennia. Unfortunately, old grievances are not so quickly forgotten. While gnolls try to grow into a world where they are free once more to choose their own path, many of Toril's other residents are struggling to see beyond the reputation given to gnolls by centuries of fireside horror stories, and tensions always seem ready to bubble over at any moment.
   
3. After an exhausting day combing through the sands of the Anauroch desert, an ambush in the middle of the night spells defeat for the tired adventurers. But the party are surprised when they awake, still alive, but as captives in a vast arena hidden in a cavern beneath the desert sands. Ruled by a gnoll nearly twice the size of the others, who styles herself "Ruler of the Wastes", the PCs are promised their freedom if they can survive a brutal, non-stop series of challenges. Unfortunately, the final fight is a one-on-one combat with the Ruler of the Wastes herself, wielding a pair of lances as if they were little more than spears.
4. When a protoype spelljammer crashed just outside a village of gnolls somewhere in the Forgotten Realms, bureaucratic issues delayed the ship's retrieval. When a company finally arrived to salvage the helm, they found the entire ship missing, along with the abandoned remains of the village. How the gnolls repaired the ship remains unclear, but they've turned their lucky find into a certified meal-ticket, which has slowed spelljammer trade within the sphere to a crawl. Between raids, the gnolls hide somewhere in the shattered remains of Toril's moons, their prototype helm giving them the maneuverability necessary to dodge the dangerous debris.
5. In the middle of their travels, the party stumbles upon two groups of gnolls locked in vicious combat, which isn't entirely unusual in places where the territory of two clans overlaps. Upon a closer look however, it becomes clear that one side is entirely living gnolls, while the other is nothing but reanimated gnoll witherlings. When the undead successfully rout their living brethren, the pack retreats directly towards the party. If they are discovered, the gnolls recognize the party's strength, and are too exhausted to fight. Instead, they reluctantly ask for aid in defeating the necromancer who raided the clan's burial yard, turning the bones of the gnolls ancestors against them.
6. On the world of Theros, leonin and humans have been at each other's throats for centuries, but their violence has never quite spilled over into all-out war. But in recent weeks, the leonin have surged further than ever into the lands controlled by the city of Akros, and each encounter brings the death of more soldiers. Finally, a captured leonin prisoner brings surprising news of a new threat from beyond the grassy fields of Oreskos– strange, hyena-like creatures who are pushing the leonin from the homeland and into the realm of humans. Now the decision must be made on whether to continue the fight with the leonin and risk the eventual arrival of these new foes, or ally with ancient enemies against a dangerous and unknown threat.
7. Gnolls are nothing if not versatile, and can be found in just about any environment, including fetid swamps and the furthest arctic reaches. But when dwarven miners from the great city of Bumthiad breach a tunnel into an underground lake of acidic water, the last thing they expected to find were half-blind gnolls, adapted to life underground on a diet of caustic bugs. The gnolls, for their part, were only too eager to push their way into the mining tunnels. While the tunnels were barely sealed in time, large amounts of mining equipment were left behind, including powerful explosives, and the city's leaders worry that they have only temporarily stopped the problem.
8. Many years ago, Colonel Leopold Boone earned a reputation as a ruthless hunter, a brutish man with a mean-streak a mile wide, and a particular bone to pick with gnolls. The colonel's dark deeds earned him a one-way ticket just before his death through the Mists of Ravenloft, where he was deposited into a simulacrum of his home plains. Here he has taken to a monthly hunt of the innocent residents of his Domain, chosen by some inscrutable process of his own mind. But each time he sets foot on the fields, a wild hunting party made from the undead spirits of gnolls killed by Boone in life appears elsewhere, and ravages its way across the land. And each time, just before the colonel can claim his kill, this phantasmal hunting party finds him, and he is forced to flee.
   

The First Post

 In 2021, I started looking at TTRPG blogs in earnest, trying to soak up all the cool game information I could with my spongy little brain. In 2022, I realized I know a lot about things, and I'd like to share what I know. So I decided I'd start a blog of my own! In 2023, which is now, I have yet to start that blog (unless you count this post right here).

The truth is, starting a blog is hard... sort of. I mean, it should be easy, right? When you get down to brass tacks, starting a blog is something that I hazard most of us have experience with. Assuming that most of us also grew up in the internet era where things like tumblr and livejournal ruled the blog-o-sphere, and even Facebook was treated as a sort of informal blog where you shared what you felt was alright to say to people who knew you in real life. The point is, we've all done blogs before, right?

 

Depicted: A Thought Process

Well, the bigger issue is that I've never done a blog with a point before. This is my first attempt at making something whose purpose is to communicate specific information with the wider world, in a format dominated by the sound of my own mental voice as I type. It's intimidating, and it's hard to know where to go from here. So the obvious answer then is to get a little meta with it. Shake it up a bit.

Which is why my very first entry here is going to be a discussion on how to write the first post of your own blog. I know this might seem a little out of hand, given my lack of experience on the subject. But I'm sure it'll be fine. I've read a lot (and typed a lot too) so I'm sure I know what I'm doing. So let's break it down. What are the things you need to make a successful blog post? What's the formula for it; the recipe for success, as it were?

1. Pick a Topic

Okay, pretty obvious when you think about it, but a challenge nonetheless. Before you do anything, you have to decide what it is you're going to write about today. Maybe you want to talk about the new game you're making? Perhaps a discussion on how to make jousting rules for the rules-light OSR game that's all the rage right now? Or maybe you could write a post about how to write a blog post. That last one is a little derivative maybe, but sure, you do you. Once you have a topic of choice though, what's next?

2. Find a Hook

Okay, you have your topic. But now the question is, what about this topic is going to make someone want to click the link you post on twitter and come read about it? In other words, what's so special about the topic? This is what people traditionally call a hook.

 

The Parts of a Hook, for Reference

 

This is an even bigger challenge than the topic, because you have to stuff the hook into the very start of the post in some way, to drag people into reading further. My hook was talking about how something children did every day from the mid-2000's to the late 2010's is a Hard Thingᵀᴹ to do. It's good because it's funny, in a self-deprecating and too-close-to-the-truth sort of way.

3. Begin Writing About It

Okay, this is the hardest step, but from there it gets easier, I promise. Once you've got your topic, and you've found a hook to build around, you have to start writing. Hit the little keys on your keyboard, watch the letters appear, backspace a lot to fix typos, and voilá! You've got a blog post. You're not quite finished yet though.

4. Stick Some Images In There

Now for the tricky part (not the hard part, just the tricky part). Writing is all well and good, but no one wants to just read words. Dear god, could you imagine? All the boring monotony of just reading, none of it broken up by those nice little images where our brains can just relax and take a breather? No thank you. 

See? Here's a fun little image to break up this paragraph.

Finding images can be hard, but it's alright to just put whatever you want in there (just make sure you're allowed to use it, and that you give credit!) For example, I used a very basic emoji and a funny little picture of a fish hook. Easy!

5. Hit the Publish Button

Okay, you got this. Just hit the Publish button. It might also say something like "Post" or have a little arrow on it. Yep, that one. You got it, the mouse is hovering above it now. Go on, click it. You...you're not clicking it. Just click it. Click the button. The button. I know it's hard but you have to, if you ever want to get this stupid blog off the ground. It'll be easier once it's out there in the world, I promise. You're so close, you just have to hit the button. Okay, how about this? Hit the button that saves it as a draft, then come back later. Set a timer or something. Maybe just schedule it for posting, if that's an option. But post it later, when it feels like less of a challenge. (Don't re-read it though, because you'll be tempted to make all sort of changes).

Good job! You've now officially started a blog. Just do this over and over again, and hopefully you'll stumble into some moderate fame and success someday. Oh and also, don't forget to put links to all your posts on social media too! Gotta get that engagement from somewhere, after all.