Baldur's Gate 3 might be the greatest D&D videogame out there, but Planescape: Torment—with its potent mix of exceptional writing and fever-dream setting—is a close second. And we almost got a sequel, Planescape: Unraveled, but nobody had the courage to fund it.

Unsurprisingly, Beamdog—which has become something of a custodian for BioWare and Black Isle's classic RPGs—was involved. Beamdog boss Trent Oster, along with former BioWare scribe David Gaider, pitched his vision of a sequel to Wizards of the Coast, and initially it went well.

"We actually had some great meetings with their creative team," Oster tells us. "We were down talking with Chris Perkins and Mike Mearls about it, and they were really into what we were doing. We were talking about how we could tie it in with a source book and everything. It was an exciting concept."

Despite the concept being well received, says Oster, Wizards wanted someone else to foot the bill and take on all of the risk.

"When we pitched it to Wizards, they were like, 'We don't have money for external development, we're not doing that right now.' Over time, Wizards has kind of gone through these cycles where they’re like, 'Oh, we'll do all the internal development.' And then, 'Oh my God, internal development's so expensive, we'll just licence it all out. We'll let partners take all the risk.' [And then] 'Hey, wait, these guys made a ton of money, let's bring it internal again.'"

Unfortunately, nobody else fancied taking the risk, either. "We searched around for funding, and nobody would fund it," says Oster. "Everybody we pitched at that time was like, 'Well, why would we spend our money making their IP worth more money?'"

Gaider shared his own perspective on the saga last year, saying, "Whatever the problem, we couldn't sell it... and by the end of 2016, we had to put Planescape: Unraveled on the shelf and start something new. Which killed me, and I almost moved on right then."

It's tragic but par for the course: we keep being robbed by risk-averse publishers. And Planescape: Torment deserves a sequel more than most. Sure, it wasn't a money-maker. Despite ultimately being profitable, it was considered a commercial disappointment at the time. But it's one we're still talking about, one we're still craving more of.

And it's a setting of near limitless potential—a creative dream. A modern sequel could better realise this intensely weird multiverse with the ever-shifting city, Sigil, at its heart. If it was given the BG3 treatment, with a stronger combat system and more tabletop-inspired roleplaying, I think we'd have a new top dog.

Maybe one day. And if you can't wait, Torment: Tides of Numenera, which serves as a spiritual successor, is more than worth your time. The likes of Disco Elysium and Esoteric Ebb also share a lot with Planescape: Torment, especially the latter, and are just exceptional RPGs as well.

Mark Rosewater sure does wear a lot of superhero T-shirts. Magic: The Gathering's head designer and lead on its Marvel Super Heroes expansion specifically is usually seen in interviews and on stage with a comic-book T under his flannel, and apparently called dibs on a Marvel set back when the Universes Beyond concept was first floated.

That level of love is apparent in this "Avengers and friends" set in a way it wasn't in Spider-Man. Where that set had some individual cards that were fun to play if you were into the characters, it didn't have the synergies or new mechanics that make a set really shine. Marvel Super Heroes does.

One of those new mechanics is Plan, a kind of enchantment that needs to be advanced by stacking plan counters until it's completed and you earn a reward. Doom Reigns Supreme, for example, is a plan that advances whenever you play a Villain card and eventually makes your opponent exile the top five cards on their deck, which you can then play two of for free. Every time one of those Villains enters under your control, you also take a life point from each opponent and gain one yourself.

That synergizes with the Doctor Doom card, who is not only a Villain himself, but summons two Doombot tokens when played, each of which also counts as a Villain. That's three life points from each opponent, three for yourself, and three counters advancing your Plan. This is how he got to be President of the United States that one time. (In Doom 2099 admittedly, but it still counts.)

While Plans are limited to Villains, everyone has access to the Teamwork ability, which is all about synergy. Teamwork, found on instants and sorcery cards, lets you tap creatures in addition to paying the regular cost for bonus effects. The HULK SMASH! card normally lets you either destroy an artifact or have one of your creatures deal damage equal to its power. Cast it with Teamwork and you can do both. Hulks stronger together.

The other new mechanic available to everyone is Power-Up, which represents abilities that can only be used once. Nick Fury's is the ability to recruit someone just like he used to do at the end of almost every Marvel movie. He gets two +1/+1 counters, then you look through the top seven cards of your deck for a Hero, Vehicle, or Equipment card, and play it for free. If it's a double-faced card, you can play either face.

Which is useful because Marvel Super Heroes has a bunch of double-faced cards representing superheroes and their secret identities. Normally you'd play the weaker version first then flip them for an additional cost later. Using Nick Fury's Power-Up, you can bring out Bruce Banner and flip him to the Hulk immediately.

And while Power-Ups can normally be used only once, if you flash a card out and then in again it recharges. Which is exactly what The Mind Stone, this set's infinity stone, lets you do.

Even if you aren't building a deck themed around superheroes, this set will provide a bunch of useful cards for existing decks. If you've got a merfolk deck you'll want to add Namor to it, because his power is equal to the number of merfolk you've got on the board. Fin Fang Foom lets you copy instants and sorceries that target artifacts and land, perfect for those annoying blue/red decks.

Magic: The Gathering Marvel Super Heroes is out now both in tabletop magic, and digitally in Magic: The Gathering Arena.

Vampire: The Masquerade is getting a Dungeons & Dragons rulebook—titled Bound by Blood, this tome'll contain a Kindred class (with six subclasses), a 4th-level adventure, some extra systems to make being a vampire in D&D make any sort of sense, and a bunch of new feats.

I will start off with something kind before I unleash the ravening beast inside my TTRPG-loving heart: It's probably neat for D&D players to have a supplementary book that lets players fully commit to being a vampire, especially given Baldur's Gate 3 put spawn in vogue (and with good reason, Astarion's a great character). I also like new feats because I'm a character-building little munchkin. Also, the art is very pretty.

Now I'm breaking the lock on the cage and setting my inner feral beast of the night free: Are you goddamn serious? What are we doing here?

God damn these vampires

My irritation, to be clear, isn't with White Wolf for this move—it's rough out there if you aren't big old Hasbro, and I hardly blame the TTRPG publisher for cobbling together some homebrew so it can cross-pollinate with the bigger boys. It's a profitable move, one can hardly blame the business practice. They've got an eye-roll out of me, but not much more.

Instead, I'm exacerbated with the entire industry as a whole because, look—I think D&D is a fine game. I've played a ton of 5e and I'm currently in a D&D 2024 ruleset campaign with my cousins. I'm playing a Stars druid and having a lovely time. I'm an avid watcher of Critical Role.

But the overarching prison of one system that is halfway decent at doing dungeon-crawling turn-based combat and not much else isn't great. The main advantage of D&D is that it's just crunchy enough to satisfy numbers dorks like me and just rules-lite enough to please less optimisation-hungry players.

But if you want the best version of what it's offering, Pathfinder 2e exists. If you want satisfying turn-based combat, there's LANCER. If you want to tell a story, there are PBtA systems like Masks. If you want to do horror, there's Mothership. And if you want to do vampires—guess what! There's already Vampire: The Masquerade 5th edition! It's right there!

D&D is the "let's just have pizza" of systems, but there are so many different, wonderful, and interesting rulesets out there and I don't think we should be propping up Hasbro's efforts to get its grubby little fingers into everything. Not just because of how the company operates, but for the sake of the hobby itself.

If you wanna buy this thing to tack on some character options for, say, a Curse of Strahd campaign—or even just your own homebrew D&D thing with vampires? Go ahead, you'll probably get a lot of use out of it. But if you want to play a game with a bunch of vampires, I implore you to play some Vampire: The Masquerade. You're not gonna burn up like a vampire exposed to the sun by learning some new rules once in a while.

This article contains spoilers for Critical Role Campaign 4, episode 30.

I've been rather enjoying Campaign 4 of Critical Role—a 13-player, three-table epic that plans to reinvent the West Marches type of game for a modern actual play show. It's almost daedalian in scope, pure and utter hubris. It shouldn't work. And yet, 30 episodes in, it absolutely has.

The first four-episode overture was impressive. As I wrote back then, Brennan Lee Mulligan set up and spun 13 individual plates with the ease of someone who has been doing this his whole life—because he has, wielding a documented history with LARP, TTRPGs, and improv comedy with experience and ease.

But the recent arc, where all three parties have come back to the main city of Dol-Makjar, seemed to me a higher task. It's one thing to juggle three tables of players when the story's just finding its feet, it's another to bring those three groups back together and tie off their stories in what essentially constitutes the actual-play equivalent of a first-season finale.

The Hallowed Round; playing host to the history of the rungjani and their failed, but inspiring rebellion, turned into a ritual to heal a scar on the face of the world. Wicander Halovar somehow duping the shrewd matriarch of her house, a prodigal son returning with his fingers crossed behind his back, bearing witness to the judgement of the Tachonis patriarch in front of his equally power-hungry peers.

And, most importantly, an ill-fated expedition into the house of Tachonis itself while papa's away—the focal point of my effusive praise, and something I'm going to spoil, including the ending of episode 30. You have been warned.

No pulled punches

One promise of the 13-player campaign that hadn't (until this point) really taken flight was the idea that any character could die, something oft-repeated by Mulligan but never really practised.

The idea is this: With a thicker-set cast comes more opportunities to be lethal and uncompromising in character design. It also fits with the Game of Thrones-esque plot afoot, the revving-up narratives of institutions grasping tight to their power. Sometimes the hammer comes down.

But 30 episodes in, and not a dropped body in sight (well, apart from Occtis, but he got better). Not for lack of trying, mind—there have been plenty of close calls, including one at the very tip-top of episode 30 itself. But the doom of one Teor Pridesire within the Tachonis Manor finally scratches the very last itch I had: Legitimate consequences for poor play.

Up until this point, a winning streak of good luck had protected the cast against destruction, and there have been some truly miraculous turnarounds. Not just Bolaire narrowly dodging a disintegrate spell that would've certainly killed them, but also—well, pick any one of Azune Nayar's natural 20s.

While I've never assumed Mulligan would pull his punches when the time came, he has been absolutely given a lot of good dice-rolls to justify softening his blows. It's one thing to know, in theory, that anybody can die and that encounters are not tailor-balanced to the party—it's another to throw that lever yourself.

The tragedy of Teor's wrong turn, and the dice rolls that led to it, ran the show's erstwhile paladin headfirst into an encounter which, as Mulligan outright states, was designed for the possibility of six fully-healed party members.

And to his credit, Mr. Mulligan wound up that haymaker and threw it as hard as he could. Both justifying the existence of the Desperate Measures mechanic—which lets players mark off death saving throw failures for powerful boons, and nearly had Teor vanquish a great evil before he went down—and establishing, properly, the stakes for the campaign going forward.

I'll miss the Pridesire brothers, but this fate was an important vital brick in the construction of this campaign. Without the looming threat of death—resulting from bad choices, inopportune rolls, or a mixture of both—nothing about the oppressive weight of the Sundered Houses works. You can't have a world flooded with institutional big bads if none of them are actually scary.

Episode 30, even more so than the frankly impressive full-house episodes that came before it, confirms for me that this whole campaign could be a masterpiece. I ended the Overture overstimulated, but frankly grateful its cast would be splitting into three more manageable groups—now I'll be counting down the days until the parties converge again.

Exodus might have an uphill struggle escaping the shadow of Mass Effect. Archetype Entertainment's sci-fi RPG immediately invited Mass Effect comparisons when it was first shown off, and those comparisons have continued and, if anything, become more obvious.

It's understandable, of course. Archetype was founded by BioWare veteran James Ohlen and the team includes other former BioWare devs. And Ohlen isn't shy about acknowledging the impact Mass Effect has had on the upcoming game.

"Mass Effect had a big influence," he tells us. But now that Ohlen has left Archetype, and for the time being the games industry entirely, he's better able to voice his regrets. Specifically, that visually he "failed to get us to go further away from [Mass Effect]".

There really is an uncanny similarity, right down to the armour design. But Ohlen still has faith that the team can make Exodus stand out. "The team is still doing a good job at moving it away so that it has its own look," he says.

He did at least manage to "successfully [fight] against Star Wars", specifically aping the look of Disney's all-consuming sci-fi property. "We can't look like Star Wars," he says.

"I shouldn't really talk much about Exodus," he jokes, "I'm not supposed to. I'll be murdered." Despite this fear of assassination, he does want to emphasise Exodus's more unique properties, which he believes will set it apart from Mass Effect and other sci-fi games.

One of those elements is the concept of the Awakened—"the animals who have been bred to have intellectual capability"---which arose out of the challenges inherent in designing a unique alien species.

"The thing about science fiction I've always felt is that it's so hard to do a unique alien," Ohlen says. "They've all been done before." The Awakened were the solution to this conundrum. "When have you seen a science fiction game where you have intelligent wolves and tigers and frogs and all that? It gives it a different feel and look."

Granted, science fiction has given us intelligent or genetically altered critters before, and in games this goes as far back as Star Fox. But it's certainly not as overdone—not even close—as aliens.

Then there's the time dilation concept, which Ohlen had actually wanted to include in Mass Effect—though it never made the cut. Interestingly, time dilation doesn't just set it apart from Mass Effect, it also complements the BioWare-inspired elements that the team wanted to keep.

"Time dilation is just the big defining feature of the whole universe," Ohlen says. "Because you can't break the speed of light, every time you go on a journey, years or decades pass. And that's really good when you combine that with BioWare-style choices, where you have to see the [impact of your choices]."

It's actually a pretty brilliant solution to a problem that a lot of BioWare and other choice-laden games have—where the long tail of your choices isn't really felt until the game's epilogue, or even a sequel. In Exodus, the impact of time dilation as the game unfolds means you'll see how your choices echo across the years, without ending the game as a geriatric in an assisted living facility.

Exodus is due out in 2027.

Well alright, alright, alright, highlights from Future Games Show's extended Exodus gameplay video just aired during the PC Gaming Show. What is this, a crossover episode? Okay, I'll stop with the catchphrases—for now.

For those of you not in the know, Exodus is the time-hopping space exploration RPG from Archetype Entertainment. In it, you step into the shoes of the Traveler and fight against an ancient race of Celestials. There's also space-y wace-y, time-y wime-y stuff going on. Every time you embark on a mission, relativity means time passes way faster on your homebase planet than it does for you and your crew up in space. Game director Chris King teases the effect this will have on the game in the trailer.

As an RPG, a lot of choices are in your hands. "Along the way, you'll decide who stands with you, what risks you take, and what you bring back, shaping your path and the future you return to, where time has moved on without you," King explains. We also get another look at Persepolis, the sprawling city that will change as you're gone. Every time I go back to the part of London I grew up in, it feels different, so I hope this will amplify that sensation by quite a magnitude.

Alongside some pretty cinematics, we get a look at Exodus' meaty combat. There's an aerial takedown that would make Ezio weep with joy, a healthy dose of cover-based shooting, and some explosive gadgets, as well as a cloaking device that lets you run right up to an enemy and stab them right between their tentacles—ouch.

If you're a fan of Mass Effect, or sci-fi like The Expanse or Interstellar, Exodus is looking like a treat. Especially for me, because I've been a big fan of Matthew McConaughey since the McConnaisance, and I'm excited to see how his character helps shape the world of the game.

If you want to see the full extended gameplay reveal, head over to the Future Games Show YouTube channel. You can also wishlist Exodus on Steam.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Exodus, the sci-fi action RPG in development at Archetype Entertainment, dropped an extended gameplay video today at the Future Games Show. It delivers the most up-close look at the game yet—and for better or worse, it's not shaking the allegations that it looks a lot like Mass Effect.

The hero in Exodus is Jun Aslan, who, unlike the highly trained and experienced military operative Commander Shepard, is a deep space salvager and all-around nobody. Kind of a loser, really—but they also just so happen to possess a genetic trait that allows them to wield uniquely powerful technology, including an upgradeable gauntlet that enables all sorts of special abilities.

As Jun progresses along their adventure, they'll be confronted with various moral choices, like 'fight through enemy forces and spare the lives of innocent bystanders, or blow the airlock, get it over with quickly and safely, and kill everyone'—decisions which will put them on the path of the Paladin (good) or the Immortal (somewhat more self-interested, let's say). Character progression and abilities will be impacted by the character's alignment, as will interactions with the world and the characters in it.

If all that sounds familiar, so will the companions introduced in the trailer. Renowned xeno-archaeologist Phaedra Nath looks to be set up as Exodus' take on Liara T'Soni but with far more nervous energy, which I assume will smooth out as the character grows and matures over the course of the game and possible romantic entanglement. Tom Vargas is a steady, mature hand with a tendency to caution, who strikes me very much as a Kaidan Alenko type; the mech pilot Elise Charrous is basically Jack with hair; Salt, the Awakened octopus, is Mordin Solus with a quick detour into KotOR for a dash of HK-47; and Houston, the Awakened wolf, is Wrex. Your mileage may vary on these comparisons, but that's how I see them line up.

The one wild card is CC Orlev, "the mysterious space cowboy" voiced by Matthew McConaughey. I'm not sure how he fits into the supporting cast puzzle—he looks like kind of a Ben Kenobi type, but that's the wrong space opera. Maybe he's your Garrus?

The video also shows a bit of the hub city of Persepolis, where humans and Awakened hang out during their downtime, and touches on the concept of time dilation—a few hours here is a few years (or decades) there—which will apparently play a significant role in the game's narrative.

It all looks perfectly fine, and as much as a call on it can be made at this still-early point, I'm sure Exodus will work out to be a good third-person sci-fi action game. I just can't shake the feeling that I've seen this all before, and not just as a distant, indistinct sense of familiarity: Some of this stuff is pretty spot-on.

In a slightly altered timeline, this could be a Mass Effect: Andromeda screenshot:

A few more new screens:

One of the big points of frustration I'm feeling is that Exodus has gone from the 2024 Mara Yama teaser, which was great, to this fairly generic-looking third-person ARPG. I said the same thing a few months ago, when snippets of Exodus gameplay first started to drop: They look fine, but not nearly as good as those early teasers about alien horrors who want to eat our minds, or humanity's eagerness to exploit the weak when the going gets tough.

That's interesting and meaty; this is, well, a lot like Mass Effect, isn't it?

This of course is not the final word on the whole thing: Exodus isn't set to arrive until early 2027, which leaves plenty of time to show us how it will stand apart from the crowd. Hopefully it will.

Spider-Man has starred in plenty of classic and a few not-so-classic story arcs, and Magic's Spider-Man set used a bunch of those as the basis for its saga cards. You drop a card like The Death of Gwen Stacy, Kraven's Last Hunt, or The Clone Saga (I did say some of them were not-so-classic) and every comic-book reader at the table knows what the deal is.

The upcoming Marvel Super Heroes set gets to draw from an even broader run of event comics, with saga cards like World War Hulk, The Coming of Galactus, and this one: The Super Hero Civil War.

I love that this card lets you take over other player's characters and then you can make them fight for absolutely no reason. Basically, when you play this card, for the next three turns you get to be Mark Millar in 2006.

Meanwhile, the World War Hulk saga card lets you play a red or green creature for free, then put three +1/+1 counters on a creature, and on the final turn double a creature's power and toughness, and give it trample. It's an easy way to bring out your Hulk, then make him as mad as he's ever been.

The Coming of Galactus ends even more apocalyptically. If your opponent doesn't stop it by turn three, it brings out Galactus as a legendary 16/16 with flying and trample who destroys a land every time he attacks. He does eat planets, after all.

As more cards are revealed, it'll be interesting to see how they handle other big Marvel events. Secret Wars and One World Under Doom, maybe? Doctor Doom is getting his own Commander pre-con. We'll see when the Marvel Super Heroes set comes out on June 26.

Wizards of the Coast is returning to the Sword Coast, PC Gamer has learned. While Baldur's Gate 4 is inevitable, ahead of that it looks like we'll see the resurrection of BioWare's original games—specifically Baldur's Gate 2, though from what we've heard it's likely both games are getting the ol' remake treatment.

Former BioWare developer and Baldur's Gate 2 co-lead designer Kevin Martens has also returned for the project. Martens has an impressive CV, which includes lead design roles on Jade Empire and Throne of Bhaal, as well as BG2. He also worked on Neverwinter Nights and Mass Effect, before leaving BioWare to join Blizzard in 2009, where he served as lead content designer on Diablo 3.

Conveniently, Martens was already working with WotC again. He's been contributing to Exodus—the Mass Effect-like RPG—at Archetype Entertainment, which is a subsidiary of WotC.

According to a source familiar with the project, Martens is already working on the Baldur's Gate 2 remake. If both games are making a comeback—which makes a lot more sense than just the second game, given that it's a direct continuation of BG1—this suggests that the remakes are being developed concurrently. If that's the case, and they launch together, that's an incredible amount of roleplaying on offer.

These are vast, elaborate adventures with hundreds of hours of D&D shenanigans each—taking you on a grand adventure of the Sword Coast and beyond, to the city of Athkatla, the drow-infested Underdark and even other planes. You might need to take some time off work.

This isn't the first time Baldur's Gate has been dusted off. Long before Larian started work on Baldur's Gate 3, Beamdog gave us another excuse to traipse around the Forgotten Realms in the Baldur's Gate enhanced editions—an impressive pair of remasters.

A remake, though, leaves more room for more dramatic changes. It's not clear what the extent of the changes will be, but it's an exciting prospect. If you're hoping that the OG BGs will suddenly play just like BG3, though, I wouldn't put all my money on that bet.

BG3 was built in Larian's proprietary engine, for one. Also, it would be a significant risk to make the classic games pure turn-based affairs—though I'd be perfectly happy with that. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for something that will keep everyone happy: real-time-with-pause battles, with an optional turn-based mode.

I don't think anyone's going to be surprised that WotC's parent company Hasbro is diving back into this well. It's struggled to capitalise on BG3's success, not helped by the fact that it laid off almost everyone at the company who worked with Larian on the incredibly successful RPG.

Hasbro also recently cancelled a D&D game from Giant Skull—Stig Asmussen's studio—after announcing the partnership only last summer. That leaves us with Warlock, an action romp that sounds nothing like Baldur's Gate.

I think it's safe to say that we'll get Baldur's Gate 4 eventually, but it's going to take a long time, with any team taking on the mantle needing to start from scratch. Meanwhile, the OG games are just sitting there—stories, characters, quest design, all just waiting to be adapted.

This is not to say that remaking Baldur's Gate is a simple affair. But it's certainly simpler—at least on paper—than building an entirely new game.

Unfortunately there's no word on when we might be able to expect to return to the Forgotten Realms for our repeat adventure. It could still be years away. To use another RPG remake as an example, Virtuos took four years to create Oblivion Remastered (which is more a remake than a remaster).

Hasbro says it won't comment on rumours, and Kevin Martens did not respond in time for publication. If you have any knowledge of the remakes, feel free to give me a holler at fraser.brown@futurenet.com.

Wizards of the Coast, the company that makes Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, has a problem—no, not its cancelled video games. Its workers would like to unionise, and I'm just starting to get the sense that it really doesn't want that to happen. Just a smidge. A tiny inkling.

Late last month, WoTC employees from the Magic: The Gathering Arena team announced their intention to form a union, giving the company until May 1 to recognise it voluntarily. Neither Hasbro nor Wizards of the Coast did so.

The motion to form a union now proceeds to a vote via the National Labor Relations Board, which would allow the union to form whether Hasbro/WoTC like it or not. In order to dissuade the union from forming, Wizards of the Coast has, workers claim, resorted to daily emails and scare tactics.

"Since the announcement of our union," reads the site linked above, "Wizards of the Coast has hired Fisher Phillips (a union avoidance firm), and chosen to engage in a daily union-avoidance campaign with emails sent to the Arena team intent on spreading misinformation and sowing fear among employees."

Those daily emails have now escalated to physical letters, per several WoTC employees on Bluesky: "For two weeks, arena folks have been getting daily anti-union emails from the company fearmongering about how scary unions are," writes Xib Vaine, a producer on MTG Arena. "Now, they're sending letters to our homes."

The National Labor Relations Act states that employers are not allowed to "threaten employees with adverse consequences" for union action, nor are they allowed to "promise employees benefits if they reject the union". The letter is somewhat neutrally worded to skirt around these guidelines.

"If employees choose union representation, the CWA will serve as the employees' representative in collective bargaining with the Company," reads the letter. "That process typically involves negotiating over wages, benefits, scheduling, and other terms and conditions of employment.

"All the benefits and perks you currently enjoy would be on the bargaining table for both parties to negotiate, based on what's most important to them. That means you could end up with more, the same or less than you have now."

The letter continues to, per its legal obligations, state that "Wizards of the Coast would continue to work directly with employees on workplace matters, just as it does today, with a much greater degree of flexibility than a typically rigid union contract," before following that up with the whammy of:

"There is no single right answer for everyone—this is a personal decision that each of you will make. Our future is stronger when we work together. We believe your voice is strongest when it is heard directly. Not through a third party."

While Wizards of the Coast isn't legally allowed to dangle a Sword of Damocles over employees' heads, the company's choice to not formally recognise the union, send daily emails to unionising employees—and escalate to physical letters—gives me just the slightest suspicion they don't want it to happen.

"The union isn't a third party, WE ARE THE UNION. This doesn't scare me. I am voting YES for #uwotc-cwa!," writes Vaine. Other prospective union members have chimed in to voice their ambivalence to the letter's implied promises: "I am voting Yes, and it’s laughable they thought this was going to convince me otherwise," adds another.

What's interesting to me is the idea that Wizards of the Coast might still be feeling the ramifications of laying off 1,000 people back in 2023. Not only in the fact that it seemingly soured their relationships with Larian, but also in that it spurred this entire union in the first place.

In an interview with Polygon earlier this month, Vaine told the site that "the thing that really kicked off the union conversations were the 2023 layoffs, where Hasbro laid off about a thousand people. Everybody I talked to couldn’t understand why Arena was hit by those layoffs. By every metric, we were succeeding."

I'm not an expert in business management, but if I were a bigwig at Hasbro right now, I'd be wondering if the best way to avoid unions is indeed to lay off over 1,000 people—some of whom were responsible for your latest successes. But at least nobody's had the Pinkertons called on them yet (the bar's on the floor).

I'm finally all caught up on Critical Role's fourth campaign after an extended break—and I've been very much enjoying the "Schemer's Table", one of three central groups (the others being Soldiers and Seekers) that comprise the actual play show's ambitious group of 13 players.

As opposed to the Soldiers, who've been hunting down the bugger that ratted Thjazi Fang out, and the Seekers, who've been trying to find Thaisha Lloy's son, the Schemer's Table has been concerned with political intrigue. As such they've stayed put in Dol-Makjar, the central city of the campaign, to do their underhanded work.

But it's always hard to convey a city to your players, given city maps are some of the hardest to draw and design—personally, I just create landmark nodes and link them like a mindmap. But if you're the kind of production company/media empire that Critical Role's become, you'll be able to handsomely pay some incredibly talented artists to do this.

Behold! Dol-Makjar in all its glory, as posted to the Critical Role Instagram this week. Penned by staff cartographer Andy Law, it's a doozy. You can see the full render on Critical Role's website, though I've also shared it below.

Even as someone who has locked into the lore of Brennan Lee Mulligan's new setting, it's been nice to clean up some mental images that just weren't quite there. For example, I'd somehow missed that the Hallowed Round, theatre of one Halandil Fang, was outside the city walls.

That puts the Rookery, where the Schemers have been meeting almost every night to discuss their plans, halfway across the city and up a steep hill besides. Halandil's calves must be insane from all that walking—that, or Dol-Makjar just has a really solid public transportation system Brennan's yet to mention.

I highly recommend zooming in on this thing, though, because the artwork's freaking gorgeous. There's been a ton of work put into properly selling the city's rugged verticality—which makes sense, given Dol-Makjar was originally a defensive fortress town before the orcs rose up and slew their tyrannical god, making it a centerpiece of the Shaper's War.

Mostly, I'm just good-naturedly jealous. My tables will have to continue enduring my collages of JPEGs because, unlike Critical Role, I do not have a personal cartographer. Not that you need one to run a campaign, mind.

Exodus, the space opera RPG in development at Archetype Studios, looks very much like Mass Effect—in fact, we declared in April that "it couldn't look more like Mass Effect," based on the teasers we've seen so far. In a new interview with The Game Business, though, Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks described it somewhat differently.

"It's a new IP, but it’s not unfamiliar ground to us. Exodus is effectively D&D in space," Cocks said. "We're familiar with role-playing games, and familiar with how to make good ones. It's a genre we understand."

I was initially inclined to be dismissive of that description: Exodus really looks a lot like Mass Effect, and I sure wouldn't call that D&D in space. But I suppose, taking the idea in a very broad context, it's an argument you might make: You and the crew roam around, go exploring, pick fights, hoover up loot, and eventually save the kingdom from the dragon. So, sure, D&D. Right?

Cocks is aware of Mass Effect, to be clear, and he also acknowledged that it's a specifically-shaped hole Exodus is looking to fill. "In 2018 this was true, but I think it's even more true in 2026… it's a space that hasn't had a good game in a long time," he said.

"It's been a while since Mass Effect 2 and 3. I think there's a big need in the marketplace for that, and we're certainly seeing that with the fan response. So, while it's kind of a bold and maybe a risky bet, my hope is that it'll be a good one."

Every videogame is a risky proposition, but I'm not sure "bold" applies to one that's taking such clear aim at a subgenre that was very successful not all that long ago, particularly when the studio that started the whole thing (its parent company, I suppose) seems largely uninterested in it: A new Mass Effect is nominally in development at BioWare but with each passing year it seems more distant and less likely—and maybe that would be for the best anyway.

It's arguable that BioWare's inability to kick the tires and light the fires illustrates that this is in fact a risky move for Archetype and Hasbro, but the audience is there—it's just waiting for someone to put on a good show.

But even taking the inherent risks of game development into account, Hasbro's track record hasn't been great. Baldur's Gate 3 was a massive hit but Hasbro's role in it was pretty much limited to handing it over to Larian, and it's shown little ability to capitalize on that success in the years since. In 2025 it laid off most of the dev team behind the Sigil virtual tabletop because it failed to establish a "distinct monetization path," and earlier this week it was reported that a D&D game being developed by Giant Skull, a studio founded in 2024 by Star Wars Jedi: Survivor director Stig Asmussen, was cancelled by Hasbro earlier this year.

Exodus isn't slated to come out until sometime in 2027, but we'll be getting a closer look at it during this year's big Summer Game Fest weekend, on June 6 at the Future Games Show, and then on June 7 at the PC Gaming Show.

Hasbro has cancelled a Dungeons & Dragons videogame that was in early development at Giant Skull, the studio run by Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order director Stig Asmussen, also known for his work on the God of War series.

Hasbro announced the partnership between D&D stewards Wizards of the Coast and Giant Skull just last summer, but the publishing agreement was terminated earlier this year, reports Bloomberg's Jason Schreier.

Wizards of the Coast told Bloomberg that it decided not to "pursue an early concept" from Giant Skull, but that it's still taking pitches from the developer. Asmussen indicated that there are no hard feelings, and that "things are good" at the studio.

When the partnership was announced last year, Wizards of the Coast president John Hight said that Giant Skull was "the perfect fit" for the project. Asmussen said that the game would feature "immersive storytelling, heroic combat and exhilarating traversal that players will fully embrace." Sounds like it would've been an action-adventure game in the vein of Asmussen's previous work.

Another D&D game appears to still be a go: Warlock, announced last year, is a third-person action adventure game from Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance developer Invoke Studios. That's due for release in 2027.

I'd be surprised if WotC has no secret plans for a new D&D CRPG as well, though—surely they'll try to repeat at least a portion of BG3's success, even though Larian has returned to its own original setting for Divinity.

The company is definitely trying to capitalize on BG3 in other ways: There's a Baldur's Gate HBO show and Astarion prequel novel in the works. In games, though, WotC's marketing attention is currently focused on Mass Effect-like RPG Exodus.

Magic's mini-sets called Secret Lairs, which are usually short-run reprints of old cards with new art aimed at collectors, have really been leaning into the joke over the last couple of years. The cards starring Dwight from The Office were a perfect example, and the upcoming Secret Lair called Cats are the Best seems like another, including as it does 15 Garfield cards to slide into your Commander decks to the bafflement of your friends.

The cards come in three "drops" of five, with the first based on the question: What if some of the original Magic: The Gathering cards created by Richard Garfield were reinterpreted with panels from the other famous Garfield instead? And so classics like Swords to Plowshares and Counterspell are no accompanied by panels where Garfield pushes Odie off a table or slaps Jon in the face.

The Motivationally Challenged drop takes workplace motivational posters as the other half of its inspiration, reskinning Ponder as Hang in There and Beast Within as I Hate Mondays. Things get real weird in the third drop, called Our Only Thought is to Entertain You, which lets the artists cut loose and reinterpret Garfield in more psychedelic styles for cards like Molten Collapse and Maddening Hex.

Given how often games of Magic involve people bringing their homemade alters that swap the official card images for horny manga art or whatever, I'm all for giving people an official way to rock up to a Tuesday night game with a card where everyone's favorite lasagna freak is an Eldrazi.

Garfield comes to Secret Lair as part of the Cats are the Best superdrop, which goes live at 9am PT on June 15. You can sign up for an alert at the Secret Lair website to try to get in before they sell out.

Baldur's Gate 3 is a phenomenal game—noteworthy not just for being a very good RPG, but also several brilliant performances and a heck of a lot of mocapping. Having spoken to some of its cast myself in the past, I can speak to the thought and weight they've put behind their work.

As can Alix Wilton Regan, voice of the female inquisitor in Dragon Age: Inquisition, who recently spoke with GamesRadar+ at the BAFTA game awards: "Video game acting is, at times, hard, demanding, and also challenging, and it's also joyous, and it's filled with, literally, blood and sweat and tears, especially if you're on the [performance capture] stage."

That can be hard for certain videogame companies (cough cough, Amazon Games) to remember, especially during the industry's current obsession with AI, which could cut out all sorts of creative "middlemen" such as writers, actors, artists, and QA testers. Heck, let's get rid of developers while we're at it—you get the picture.

"Video game actors, they deserve their flowers, because we help pull the audience in to elevate the writing, the animation, the direction, the tone," Regan continues. "I give a massive shout-out here to the Baldur's Gate 3 crew, because they were the ones who made all the other video game actors sit up and take note and realize, 'Yeah, actually, we are loved, our work does have value, and we too deserve to stand up and be counted.'

"I've literally said this to, like, Jennifer English's face, or Neil Newbon. I've been up to Ben Starr, and I'm like, 'You changed the game.'"

The unwarranted disrespect towards videogame actors isn't anything new, mind. Take this quote—fittingly, from BG3 star Neil Newbon himself—speaking to Entertainment Weekly last year: "I had conversations about, 'That's going to look really good when we get the real actors in.' I was like, 'What do you mean real actors?' I'm a real actor. I went to the f*cking Edinburgh Festival, man!"

And while I don't think actors aren't appreciated by people who are into videogames—if you've played enough, you almost certainly have favourites—I will admit, it's nice to see Baldur's Gate 3 doing well enough for Neil Newbon to snap up an award while competing in the same category as movie star Idris Elba.

You say "Astarion backstory" and I'll show you a very long list of fanfics, but for anyone who's already exhausted that catalog: today's a big day. There's going to be an official prequel novel for your sad, sexy Baldur's Gate 3 boyfriend this September. Oh and yes, Neil Newbon's recording the audiobook version, obviously.

As reported by Polygon, Wizards of the Coast and Random House Worlds have announced a partnership to publish four projects "centered around [Baldur's Gate 3's] immersive lore and unforgettable characters" this year beginning with Baldur’s Gate 3: Astarion—though the other three are a cookbook, coloring book, and journal—and plans for more collaboration to be revealed "for 2027 and beyond."

"This prequel novel, published by Random House Worlds, takes place prior to the events of the 2023 game, and follows the fan-favorite High Elf during his years of servitude under the vampire lord Cazador Szarr," Polygon reports. "Baldur's Gate 3 senior writer Stephen Rooney consulted on the project in order to ensure consistency with the game's lore and world-building."

My first thought on hearing that a massively popular cultural phenomenon RPG is getting a prequel tie-in novel might have been "oh no, we've reached the WotC cash grab part of the popularity cycle." I was immediately reassured, though, because this thing is being written by T. Kingfisher. She's the wildly prolific and deservedly popular author of horror series What Moves The Dead, twisted fairytales like Thornhedge, and romances like the Paladin series.

If I had asked a bunch of BG3-loving fantasy readers (a nigh circle-shaped Venn diagram) who would be their fancast to write about their beloved vampire, I can say with full confidence that Kingfisher would have topped the list, Family Feud style. Not just because she publishes with eye-watering frequency, but because she's tackled themes like abuse, trauma, and autonomy in her work, all of which are relevant to Astarion's story.

Exploitation of the runaway popularity of Wizards IP though it may be, our guy's in about as good of hands as I could have asked for. Also, she's been romancing Astarion basically since launch.

As for whether or not you need to have played BG3 before reading Astarion's story, well, I think you should play it anyway if you haven't. You've got till September which is plenty of time for that Honour Mode run. In Kingfisher's opinion:

"The problem here is that if you play BG3, this book is 'wow, it’s the tragic backstory!' If you don’t play it, the book is 'wtf, why did Kingfisher write a book about this vampire being tormented that has such a downer ending?!?'"

Here's what else Random House and Wizards announced for this year:

• (July 21) Baldur’s Gate 3: The Necromancy of Thay - A blank notebook recreation of the in-game item
• (Summer) The Official Baldur's Gate 3 Coloring Book - 40 black & white illustrations by Jaki King
• (November 3) A Feast for a Tenday: The Official Baldur’s Gate Cookbook - 65 recipes by Andrew Wheeler

In the month since Archetype Entertainment gave us our first look at its sci-fi RPG Exodus, there's been a drip-feed of teasers showcasing gunfights, the exploration of alien worlds, stealth and a man looking out of his balcony. The main takeaway from these teasers is that, yep, this sure looks like Mass Effect.

Which isn't surprising—Archetype describes itself as being "led by industry veterans from BioWare, 343, Electronic Arts, Naughty Dog, and other leading AAA studios" (emphasis mine), with a cohort that included former BioWare design director James Ohlen. I'm using the past tense here because Ohlen left his role as the head of Archetype late last year.

"At this stage, James felt his work on the game was complete and that the polishing and tuning were in great hands with the team," Hasbro vice president of corporate communications Abby Hodes told Bloomberg at the time. Exodus is being published by Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro.

This is pretty weird! Exodus isn't due out until next year. There's clearly a lot of work still to be done. A studio boss's work isn't complete when the game isn't remotely finished.

But whatever is going on at Archetype, it's still acting as if it's business as usual. On top of the teasers we've been seeing over the last month, an extended look at the RPG is expected this summer.

It's uncanny just how much it looks like Mass Effect though. Not just "inspired" by Mass Effect. Aesthetically and mechanically, from what we've seen so far, it looks like it could be Mass Effect 5. Though it's clearly not just copying Mass Effect and calling it a day. The stealth system showcased last week is new, for instance.

Granted, it doesn't look especially novel or any different from the shoe-horned stealth that so many action games deploy. But it's not something Shepard ever did.

This week's teaser is not particularly thrilling. It's just a dude looking at a generic sci-fi cityscape on a balcony, accompanied by ambient music that you'll swear you heard in Mass Effect's Citadel.

Mass Effect codex fans might be excited by one of the advances on display, though—you can look at things and get on-screen codex pop-ups instead of needing to view them in a separate menu. This is the future, folks!

I probably sound more cynical than you'd expect from someone who genuinely loves Mass Effect and is keen for more big budget sci-fi RPGs, but nothing we've seen so far has set my heart pounding. It all looks OK. A bit stiff, a bit too much like some games I played years and years ago, but certainly not dreadful. But I'm still waiting for the reveal of something that could actually get me excited.

Fingers crossed for the extended showcase this summer, I guess! And hey, if this doesn't work out, we've also got The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, along with the latest official Mass Effect entry. Though regarding the latter, I still think it's a terrible idea.

There's a quiz on the Secrets of Strixhaven site to figure out which of the magical university's colleges you belong to. Ignore that traumatic memory of the time every millennial was telling us they were Hufflepuff. It's a heads-up that this set's focus is on differentiating those colleges, making the factions even more important than they were in the first Strixhaven set. I'm Silverquill, apparently.

Each college isn't just a pair of colors, it's also a signature mechanic. Witherbloom (green/black) is the college where they study life and death—they're half hippy, half goth—and so Infusion is triggered whenever you gain life. It can have a variety of effects, like Poisoner's Apprentice giving someone unlucky -4/-4 when it enters. But again, only if you already gained life that turn, making it a fun play for your second main phase after weakening someone in combat.

The artsy theatre kids of Prismari college (red/blue) have a mechanic called Opus that likewise has different effects, but always the same trigger. In this case it's casting an instant or sorcery spell, with the twist that the effect is more powerful if you set it off by casting something worth five or more mana. The more dramatic your performance, the more powerful your magic.

Their studious opposites are the math geeks of Quandrix college (blue/green), whose keyword is Increment. It appears on creatures and means any time you cast a spell with a mana cost higher than that creature's power or toughness, it gets a +1/+1 counter. If you're the kind of person who wants Magic to have even more math than it already does, Quandrix is the college for you.

Lorehold (red/white) is the history college, and so their mechanic isn't new, but rather dug up from Magic's past. Flashback goes all the way back to Odyssey from 2001, though it's reappeared several times since. Cards with Flashback can be cast from the graveyard, though usually at a higher cost, as if being unearthed with arcane archaeology. Which is Lorehold's whole deal.

The word wizards of Silverquill (white/black) have abilities labeled Repartee, and it's another one with varied effects but the same trigger. In this case, it's casting an instant or sorcery spell that targets a creature. (Like the original Strixhaven, this set is one where instants and sorceries matter, to play up that real "we're casting spells" vibe rather than the "we're controlling armies of little guys" vibe Magic often becomes.) Multiple Repartee effects might go off at once, giving that authentic feeling of being swarmed by a mob of keyboard warriors because you misspoke.

Huh, maybe I don't want to be Silverquill after all. Is Witherbloom still accepting applicants? Secrets of Strixhaven arrives in Arena on April 21, and in tabletop Magic on April 24.

While Critical Role has partnered with Wizard of the Coast on collaborations like The Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, most actual-play series where you can watch people play D&D are unofficial. Though there have been several produced by WotC over the years (I used to watch the Spelljammer campaign Legends of the Multiverse religiously), it seems they're about to get back into them in a big way with the announcement of Dungeon Masters.

As D&D Beyond explains, this will be an anthology series, which suggests they'll rotate through different campaigns and potentially cast members. It begins in Ravenloft, with a gothic-horror game run by Jasmine Bhullar (who ran one of my favorite Dimension 20 sidequests, Coffin Run, as well as DesiQuest). The players are Devora Wilde (Lae'zel from Baldur's Gate 3), Neil Newbon (Astarion from Baldur's Gate 3), Mayanna Berrin (Coupé from Dispatch), and Christian Navarro (Tony Padilla from 13 Reasons Why).

What marks Dungeon Masters out from unofficial actual-plays is that it'll tie directly into upcoming D&D releases. In this case that's Ravenloft: The Horrors Within, a supplement full of dark domains, monster stats, and subclasses, several of which will be shown off by the players in Dungeon Masters. Looks like Neil Newbon's playing a gnome reanimator artificer, which I guess means a three-foot tall Doctor Frankenstein.

Each episode will be accompanied by a "play-along pack" that includes an encounter based on one Jasmine Bhullar had planned, though "as with every D&D campaign, characters can take unexpected paths or make choices that send the story in a different direction." It'll also have stats for a monster from the supplement and a quickplay map you can use in D&D Beyond's virtual tabletop.

The first play-along pack will be free, and will be released the day after the first two episodes of Dungeon Masters debut on April 22 at 6.30pm PT.

As if I needed more excuses to waste my time on YouTube when I could be doing literally anything else, Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast has been uploading episodes of the old D&D cartoon from the 1980s. Every Friday they show two or three episodes in a block, and they're 11 episodes into its 27-episode run so far.

The D&D cartoon's a real artifact of its time, of course. It was co-produced by Marvel Productions and animated by Toei, just like Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends and The Transformers, with which it shares a house style and cast. Peter Cullen, voice of Optimus Prime, plays the villainous Venger, while his rival Tiamat—and the heroes' pet unicorn, Uni—are both voiced by Frank Welker of Megatron fame.

Expect a certain cheapness in the sound and animation, along with low expectations of the audience's ability to keep up. Basically, it's perfect stoner fodder, though oldschool D&D heads will also enjoy spotting refugees from the Monster Manual like a dragon turtle, a beholder, and a frost giant.

Then there's the episode where the evil Venger decides, since his plans keep being foiled by a band of meddling kids from Earth, the only way to stop them is to travel to their world's past and prevent them from being born. Which he does by trying to help Germany win World War II. The 1980s were a wild time for kid's TV.

Rabea Rogge, the first German woman in space, recently posted a video demonstrating how to roll a twenty-sided die in zero gravity. It's easy to throw dice when you're in polar orbit, as Rogge was, but how do you land one? Magnetized dice trays, maybe?

"We experimented a little," Rogge says, before demonstrating that actually the best solution is the least complicated one. She flicks the D20 upward, putting a little English on it so it spins, catches it in her fist, and peers through the gap in the top of her hand to check the result. It's a seven, so unfortunately she's failed her Wisdom saving throw and contracted space madness.

"So rejoice," Rogge concludes. "Roleplaying in space is absolutely possible." Which is true, so long as you're not playing Shadowrun or casting a leveled-up fireball or anything that demands you roll a big wodge of dice all at once—unless you don't mind slowly rolling them one at a time.

Rogge was part of SpaceX's Fram2 mission, a polar orbit flight funded by cryptocurrency billionaire Chun Wang. Dr. Christopher Combs, associate dean of research, mechanical engineering, at the University of Texas at San Antonio told CNN that a private space flight around the poles was "a notch above gimmick, but not exactly a groundbreaking milestone." Still, she's been to space more than I have.

Meanwhile, NASA's Artemis 2 flight around the moon has helped boost Kerbal Space Program's concurrent player count to a record high, despite the issue they had with Microsoft Outlook running two instances at the same time, neither of which worked.

Five years ago, Strixhaven: School of Mages showed us Magic: The Gathering's original take on the wizard school genre, which covers everything from Discworld's Unseen University to A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin—though obviously Harry Potter is the elephant in the room.

Back then, Wizards of the Coast hadn't gone all-in on the crossovers. Now we've had everything from a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles set to a limited run featuring Dwight from The Office. It was reasonable to wonder, after Wizards of the Coast's corporate owner Hasbro announced a partnership with Warner Bros to "bring the Harry Potter universe to life through licensed toys and games," whether that meant Magic would be one of the vehicles for that exercise in cross-branding synergy, or whatever the executives call it these days.

But no. Instead, Magic is returning to its own setting for Secrets of Strixhaven, a sequel set that checks in on the students and faculty several years and one multiversal war later to see how they're doing. And, though I've enjoyed Magic's crossovers like Middle-earth and Warhammer 40,000, I'm glad they're taking a break from them this time.

Strixhaven has a lot to recommend it over Hogwarts. For starters, it teaches subjects other than magic. While your history professor might summon a ghost to deliver a guest lecture on events they lived through and your biology teacher might be an actual druid, Strixhaven's classes include mundane subjects from art to zoology. You're going to come out more rounded than someone who has expertise in Defense Against the Dark Arts and Potions but has never taken a math class in their life.

It's also a university rather than a high school. The student wizards are all young adults rather than mostly children, which makes the fact they end up in exciting magical peril on the regular a bit more OK. After book after book of the Hogwarts staff pushing their students into life-or-death situations, it's difficult to see Dumbledore as a kindly old avuncular fuddy-duddy, rather than an incompetent liability who should have been fired years ago.

The age difference also makes the five colleges, Strixhaven's equivalent of Harry Potter's houses, seem less cruel. Each college represents a broad field of study, like Prismari's focus on using elemental magic to enhance the visual and performing arts, and importantly they're chosen by the students themselves at the start of their second year rather than being personality designations arbitrarily assigned by one magical bonnet.

There's no quidditch either, and the equivalent sport of mage tower, which is about playing keepaway with your opponent's mascot, has a scoring system that isn't paper-thin absurdity. But at this point I'm nitpicking. Really, the reason Strixhaven is a more fun take on magical school tropes is that it's self-aware enough to make fun of the whole idea.

When you start reading Harry Potter it feels like a parody of the British boarding school system, something close in spirit to the brilliant assassin school bit in Terry Pratchett's Pyramids, but the longer the series goes on the more obvious it becomes that Harry Potter is actually a celebration of boarding school nonsense—it just read like parody because it seems unthinkable someone could be in favor of separating children from their families to make them undergo an authoritarian proving ground to prepare them for the class system.

The fact Strixhaven wasn't created by a transphobic nutbar is really just a bonus. Secrets of Strixhaven will be available in Arena from April 21, and on tabletops from April 24.

Astarion from Baldur's Gate 3 is certainly up there in the hall of fame of killer RPG companions—not just because he's literally a killer as a vampire, but because he's a nuanced, complicated character performed by a very talented actor. It's no shock that Neil Newbon, who played him in Larian's finest, received awards for his work.

But he's not really interested in retreading the same ground. That's per a recent interview with FRVR, where the actor explained his reasoning while discussing David Bowie: "I think he understood that extreme repetition breeds stagnation as an artist … I always liked that about him as an artist, that he was constantly trying out new things."

As a matter of fact, it's Bowie's influence on Newbon that's encouraged him to mix things up: "I've definitely avoided a few roles recently not because they were bad projects or anything, just because they, for me, the character—they kinda want the Astarion thing.

"It was just like, 'Well, I don't really want to do that again. It's too close to the character I've already done, I don't think I could offer anything necessarily that's interesting to this particular character'." In the specifics, it's more about the role itself than the actual timbre of his voice, though: "That’s a different thing, I’m talking about when people say: 'This character’s just like Astarion!'"

This is actually something Newbon's expressed before, speaking in a separate interview last year with YouTuber Luality. Back then, he said that "I'd love to play Astarion again, but I wouldn't necessarily enjoy playing an Astarion-like character."

It all makes sense—after all, Newbon really seems like he adores the craft, and I cannot imagine a worse torture than being stuck in the same type-cast venn diagram of flamboyant and tragic for the rest of your acting career. Torture for him, mind—dulcet tones for us, but I'm certainly glad he's able to stretch his legs. For instance, as a religious space insect in Starfinder: Afterlight.

The CEO of Hasbro (the company that owns Wizards of the Coast, which in itself makes D&D and Magic: The Gathering) has been effusive and cheery about AI in the past, saying that the fact all his mates are using it in his home games is a signal "we need to be embracing it" back in 2024.

It is now 2026, and Chris Cocks—speaking to The Verge's Nilay Patel—still uses a ton of it in his own personal games, but has slightly changed his tune as to how welcome it might be in D&D writ large.

"I [use AI] all the time for just personal passion projects. [D&D] is kind of my jam, and I DM probably three or four groups. There is so much AI-based animation, images, text, sound effects, and voice cloning on my PC, it would floor you."

I'm not going to get too high on my horse about what Mr Cocks does in his free time—while every single TTRPG group I'm in is deeply averse to using the tech, it's not like I haven't plucked a PNG from an artist's profile (with credit, mind) for use in my personal game from time to time.

But as I mentioned back in 2024 ("AI can't replicate the deep joy in seeing a twist you devised to shock your players land, or in seeing your table grow attached to your NPCs") the whole joy of D&D for me is playing a story that my mate wrote—if they didn't bother writing it? I'm not really bothered about playing it.

Also, more cynically—I would wonder whether a CEO salary for one of the biggest toymakers in the world could very easily pay for commissioned artwork. I suspect it would be a drop in the bucket for Cocks, if slower.

Either way, this aversion is something Cocks seems to recognise from the fanbase as a whole, and while many other segments of Hasbro are using AI for concepting toys, which Cocks claims are trained on their own IP to make "pretty sophisticated renderings pretty fast of products and ideas", the gamers? The gamers aren't interested.

"From a creative context, I think you have to think about it very carefully. There are some brands that the audience, the creators, just don't want it, so we don't even have it in our pipelines for our video games or for Magic: The Gathering, or D&D."

He's still mostly bright-eyed and a little naive about the tech, though: "If Joe or Sally Sixpack feels like they're suddenly like an avant-garde creative with these powerful tools, take a legitimate avant-garde creative and give them these tools, and they just level it up way more."

Aside from the obvious corporate ick of placing the phrase "level up" next to "avant-garde", Cocks' assertion here just hasn't really played out. In the world of capitalist grinding, where you need to 'deliver leveled up products for a smoother more agile pipeline' or whatever, sure. Using AI in the very early stages might save you a couple of hours.

Speaking anecdotally, every actual creative person who knows how to make the kind of art AI mercilessly rips from has responded to the tech with revulsion—and even those neutral on it have soured over time.

But hey, Cocks is a CEO and I guess it's his job to be speculative for shareholders or what-have-you: "You can't ignore it, you can't stick your head in the sand … And is it going to be disruptive? Yeah. Have people figured out the business model yet? No.

"But people were writing about the demise of the music industry back in 2000 with the rise of Napster. And I think, last I heard, the music industry is more profitable than ever because they figured out a way through it."

When Patel very astutely points out that the music industry is more profitable than ever for a few specific companies and not, you know, most of the people who make music, Cocks lists off a spiel about the genie being out of the bottle, and adds: "You either accept that and you figure out how you work with it, or you don't accept that, and I think it's probably going to be an even bigger negative for you."

Anyway—I'm glad to see that, similar to how the internet bullied people out of NFTs in mainstream games, the D&D and Magic: The Gathering fan bases are so thoroughly against AI-generated slop that even Cocks, who uses heaps of it in his own D&D games, doesn't think it's worth placing in a book. Small victories.

I used to play a lot of co-operative board games like Arkham Horror, Pandemic, and Space Alert, where it's you and your friends against the board. They're great, because instead of playing a board game for an hour or more and then having your friends be cross at you for thrashing them, the board wins and you all get to feel equally bad instead.

The board would usually win because we don't allow backseat driving, or quarterbacking—that's when the player with the most experience takes over for newbies, basically puppeteering them instead of letting them make their own mistakes. It's always a problem with co-op games, which can be super easy if you play at maximum efficiency but super hard if you just muddle through and react to situations as they happen.

Turtle Team-Up turns Magic: The Gathering's TMNT crossover into a co-op game. It's a box with four 60-card decks, one themed around each Ninja Teen, as well as a set of cards for bosses and events those two-to-four players using the Turtle decks will have to deal with. (While you can expand the Turtle decks with random cards you get from booster packs, the ones in the box will always be the same, designed for balance and synergy.)

It starts easy. As in a normal game of Magic, the players bring out land—the broccoli-pizza forest card was an instant favorite—and tap it to play cards representing a growing army of creatures. After one peaceful turn you flip the top boss of the boss deck and find out if you're up against Bebop or Leatherhead or whoever, each with their own debuff or special ability, then flip some event cards (the amount differs depending how many players you have). Those event cards might debuff players or make them discard, or they might bring out a Foot Clan ninja who will defend the boss on player turns.

The Turtles share a life total you track on shell-shaped tokens with pizza-slice counters, and the bosses have a life total as well. Deplete that by getting past the Foot Clan to defeat one boss and the next boss comes out—but this time you flip two of them, and then after that three at once. It's a natural ramping-up of difficulty, a videogame-feeling way of making subsequent levels harder. You thought it was easy fighting Rocksteady on his own? Here's Shredder and Krang.

Which is not to say Turtle Team-Up is particularly difficult. We were hit hard by an event that caused damage for each creature we had in play just after I'd brought out a small army of robotic mousers, but we bounced back by working together.

April O'Neil, Human Element was our MVP. She's part of Michelangelo's deck, which is heavy on using Mutagen to power up creatures. April gives out a free Mutagen token when any player brings out an artifact, instant, or sorcery card, and then those Mutagens can be spent on +1/+1 counters to power up creatures. Each one costs mana to play, which I contributed to by playing Casey & Raph, Hotheads to give Mikey a couple of extra points.

In return, other players helped me by paying the four mana it cost to double the power of Casey Jones, Asphalt Hooligan. While calculating his combat damage, I forgot to factor in his double-strike ability until someone else pointed it out. The obscene amount of damage he caused ended up obliterating our final round of bosses, a beautiful victory for teamwork.

Unlike other co-op games, Turtle Team-Up seems easy to win with only a little bit of backseat driving, but the real challenge is in finding out how fast you can win. The rule booklet has a series of titles you earn by clearing it in fewer turns, but it's clearly pitched at first-timers and younger players who'd rather not lose over and over until you figure out the best way to win at Arkham Horror and then bully your friends into playing correctly.

Though I'm not planning to add cards from this TMNT set to my regular decks, and have forgotten half the characters from the show and comics (the Mighty Mutanimals I recognized, the Neutrinos not so much), the Turtle Team-Up box seems particularly useful as a parents-and-kids experience—though one that's also suited for nostalgic adults who are two pints deep, he says from practical experience.

Magic: The Gathering's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles set will be on tabletops from March 6, and is available in Arena now.

Dungeons & Dragons, judging by the D&D Beyond site (which is owned by Wizards), is going through a bit of a revamp with its 2024 ruleset—in that it's finally giving in to semantic ease and normal naming convention and just calling itself 5.5th edition, or 5.5e. Well, on one specific website.

The system, originally dubbed OneD&D, is still 5e when you look at the bones—mind, there are some major and very important changes, such as tweaks to grappling rules, class redesigns, weapon masteries, and the like. But the core bread and butter of the ruleset wasn't enough to mandate a change to the big number by that little "e".

Which is why it was a little confusing when OneD&D, a working title, became the D&D 2024 ruleset—drawing a distinguishing line between D&D 2014 (also known as 5e) and D&D 2024 (not known as 5e, but backwards compatible with it, technically). Almost everyone on the internet just basically called it 5.5e, and it seems like Wizards of the Coast is slowly catching on.

You can read D&D Beyond full FAQ for yourself, though the site is quick to dispel ideas that this is part of a larger rebrand: "No. This update is limited to rules labeling on D&D Beyond to improve clarity and usability."

However, the reasoning itself mostly vindicates the raw and unfiltered power of community vocabulary: "Earlier on, they were referred to differently. As D&D Beyond evolved and more players used both versions side by side, it became clear that '5.5e' matched how the community already talks about the game and made things easier to understand.

"Years were harder to scan and didn’t clearly signal rules compatibility. '5e' and '5.5e' are faster and clearer when you’re browsing, building characters, or running a campaign."

It's unclear whether Wizards will be adopting this rebranding in a wider sense in the future—and as someone who has to write about D&D for a living on occasion, by Vecna's shrivelled hand I sure bloody hope so. Just to recap, the 5th edition framework has now had the following names:

• D&D 5th edition (sometimes called 5e).
• D&D 5th edition (2014 ruleset).
• OneD&D (deprecated, working title).
• D&D 5th edition (2024 ruleset).
• D&D 5.5e (currently only on D&D Beyond).

I don't mean to be that guy, but this doesn't exactly strike me as clear and concise branding. That being said, it's apt given Wizards' past decade of executive fumbling—which is a shame, because I've warmed up to OneD&D/D&D 2024/D&D 5.5e. I think a lot of the choices made in the Dungeon Master's Guide and Player's Handbook are good ones and, quite frankly, deserved better branding.

I finally got around to playing throwback sidescroller Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge and, yeah, everyone was right about how good it is. Where can I go for more TMNT goodness? Oh right, they're the next Magic: The Gathering crossover set.

We're returning to everyone's favorite plane in the multiverse, New York City. Unlike the last Universes Beyond expansion, Avatar: The Last Airbender, the Ninja Turtles are getting a pre-constructed Commander deck—a five-color deck inspired by TMNT videogames with cards like Game Over, Level Up, High Score, and Arcade Cabinet. Some of the cards have pixel art by Kirokaze, to enhance your arcade nostalgia.

The set will also include a Turtle Team-Up box designed for co-op play. Up to four players choose a deck themed around an individual Turtle and work together to take down bosses, which seems like an ideal way to teach Magic to new players. It even has difficulty levels you can work your way through to build up to the full rules.

New mechanics in this set include Sneak, a keyword for cards that can be played when your opponent is selecting blockers, letting you substitute the new card for an attacker you bounce back into your hand. It's like the Ninjutsu mechanic from Kamigawa, only it covers instants and sorcery cards as well as creatures.

There's also Disappear, the "ninja vanish" complement to Sneak's "ninja suddenly appear out of nowhere". Cards with Disappear have effects that trigger at the end of your turn if one of your cards left the battlefield earlier—even if they vanished before you played the card with Disappear on it. And yeah, cards you bounce with Sneak count can set off Disappear effects. As an example, Krang & Shredder force your opponent to exile cards, and if you Disappear something, let you play one of those exiled cards yourself.

The TMNT set also sees the return of the Alliance mechanic from Avatar: The Last Airbender, which lets cards that share the Alliance keyword set off their effects whenever a new card with Alliance is played. It's just as fitting here, given that whole Saturday morning cartoon emphasis on teamwork.

If you just gritted your teeth and muttered something about how the Ninja Turtles were a comic before they were a cartoon, you'll be mollified by the cards with new artwork by TMNT co-creator Kevin Eastman in his traditional style. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Magic set will be available in Arena on March 3 and in paper form on March 6, with prerelease events beginning on February 27.

Ever sat down with your TTRPG group and gone "alright, so what do we want to play for our next campaign?" What if the answer was "four systems at once?" Well, you'd have an excruciatingly bad time. Here's where I'd usually say "unless you're doing a wizard battle", but a royale put together by YouTuber Deficient Master doesn't, uh, disprove anything.

The task is to get the most amount of points before the round ends—either by killing people, or by retrieving chests from interestingly-placed tactical areas around the map, defended by goblins. In any other TTRPG session, this map would lead to an interesting, multifaceted combat. In a multi-ruleset wizard royale, however, about 8% of the map gets used before everyone obliterates each other from 500 feet away.

This is because wizards, regardless of the system, are notoriously squishy, and Deficient Master has placed all of these wizards at level one (or '1st level', depending on the rulebook). The chunkiest of them all, the PF2e wizard played by YouTuber Nonat1s, has 14 hitpoints.

This does not save him from instant death.

The royale begins simply enough—Vagabond creator Indestructoboy, playing the Vagabond wizard (naturally), creates a giant leech to go get one of those aforementioned chests. This is about as much as anybody gets to interact with terrain or secondary objectives before it all goes to crap.

Nonat1s, flexing his PF2e rules knowledge, taps into a focus spell to cast Hand of the Apprentice, which has a range of 500 feet, and telepathically hurls his battleaxe at the Dungeon Crawl Classics player, Bobworldbuilder. This deals enough damage to instantly kill him.

However, Bobworldbuilder is playing Dungeon Crawl Classics—meaning he isn't technically dead at 1st level, but instead needs to be "rolled over" by an ally or, in this case, a curious goblin searching him for loot. Surprise! Bobworldbuilder isn't dead. He then goes and stands in some coals, "spellburns" away most of his stats to gain a plus 33 to his spellcasting check.

This produces a roll of 44 on a casting of Choking Cloud, which both sets the DC Nonat1s needs to beat and produces the failure effect: Instant death. In PF2e, Nonat1s literally cannot beat this save, because even a natural 20 would simply upgrade his critical failure to a failure.

This kills the Wizard. For emphasis: Neither of these people have moved more than 10 feet, yet. Bobworlduilder then immediately dies to the burning coals he stepped in.

On the other side of the map, Indestructoboy casts Disintegrate on the poor D&D 2024 ruleset player, TheADHDM, who so far has cast Magic Missile at a goblin and done nothing else. He can do this because in Vagabond, a "far" range for a spell target is just simply anything within sightlines.

He takes 14 points of damage and spends the rest of the short-lived combat bleeding out. It's over. I don't think much wisdom was gleaned from this experiment, and I do not recommend using it to settle rules system disputes for your next campaign. Cross-map instant death wizard tag does, however, make for some pretty great entertainment.

Hasbro recently announced a multi-year licensing partnership with Warner Bros. to bring the world even more Harry Potter merch than it already has, a thing I struggle to believe is actually possible. The announcement promises "products featuring dolls, role play, action figures & collectibles, interactive plush, board games and more to be revealed later this year."

This made Magic: The Gathering players a little concerned. We just had an Avatar: The Last Airbender set, and we're three weeks out from a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles set. But while some of the crossovers called Universes Beyond have been embraced by players—almost every middle-aged Magic player I know bought a bunch of Avatar cards "for my kids," no really—those aren't ones created by a leading voice in anti-trans panic.

Responding to these concerns on Reddit, the Wizards of the Coast community team posted, "The Magic Multiverse has its own school of Magic at Strixhaven with plenty of secrets still to explore. Our Universes Beyond roadmap currently doesn't have us visiting any others."

Which is comforting to hear. Strixhaven is a magical university that was the subject of a Magic set released in 2021, as well as a Dungeons & Dragons supplement, an upcoming Magic set called Secrets of Strixhaven scheduled for April, and an upcoming YA novel called Strixhaven: Omens of Chaos by Seanan McGuire. As well as not being created by a figurehead of hate speech, the fact it's a university rather than a high school means Strixhaven also dodges all that sketchy child endangerment stuff that makes Harry Potter seem like a satire of British boarding schools until you get about four books in and realize it's actually a weird celebration of them instead.

As well as Secrets of Strixhaven, there's another set that takes place in the Magic multiverse coming in October called Reality Fracture. On either side of it are sets based on The Hobbit and Star Trek, of course. Meanwhile, the licence for Harry Potter trading cards was recently acquired by Upper Deck, though that's purely for collectibles rather than a game.

Folks, I have been a little harsh on Dungeons & Dragons creators Wizards of the Coast—and its owner, Hasbro—for its many fusses and foibles over the past decade. And not for terrible reasons: Weird pre-order bonuses that reek of the worst of videogame DLC, the slow-motion trainwreck that was Sigil, the troubles with getting anything BG3-related off the ground (and also laying off most of the folks who made BG3 responsible).

I am delighted to report, however, that D&D Beyond is doing something unequivocally neat in its partnered content program, and looks set to continue doing neat things with it without screwing up.

In case you're unfamiliar, D&D Beyond is a digital tabletop version of the TTRPG that Wizards of the Coast bought in 2022. The content partner program, which has been in effect since 2024, allows folks to integrate their work into D&D Beyond while being compensated for their craft.

While my little independent-loving heart thinks sweeping everything into one WoTC-owned platform probably isn't healthy for the hobby as a whole, this kind of cooperation is still a major improvement over… well, the entire OGL thing. You know, where WoTC put a metaphorical gun to the head of its entire creator ecosystem for basically no reason, while making headlines because Hasbro CEOs said it was under-monetised.

It's proven enough of a success now that D&D Beyond has started releasing roadmaps for it, and this year will include one of the more popular homebrew classes out there: The Pugilist, by Benjamin Huffman.

The Pugilist is similar to the monk, in that you spend a lot of time beating things to death with your fists, except it's drenched in flavour that's completely independent of the Monk's shtick. Also, you get to use 'moxie' points instead of 'ki', which is fun.

It's so popular, in fact, that it actually made it to an episode of Dimension 20—one of the most popular D&D actual plays out there, second only to Critical Role (and in fact so good that Critical Role got its DM to run its new campaign).

The class is played by Brian Murphy of NaddPod fame for the steampunk-oriented series Cloudward Ho! (their exclamation mark, not mine, although I am occasionally possessed by the spirit of steampunk so I wouldn't put it past me). He spends most of his time using it to throw people off airships and into genre-conflicting propellor blades. Like some kind of rowdy.

The rest of the roadmap includes an Eberron supplement by its original designer Keith Baker, a collection of first level one-shots by Beadle & Grimm’s Pandemonium Warehouse called "Faster, Purple Worm! Everybody Dies, vol. 1", Heliana’s Guide to Monster Hunting: Part 2 by Loot Tavern, and the first Griffon's Saddlebag book, a popular magic item supplement.

And hey, this is very much WoTC just doing what it should've been doing for years—but given we've gone from the seemingly open hostility to third-party creators via the OGL fiasco in 2023 to this, I'm more than happy to give credit where it's due.

Two years ago, Wizards of the Coast released a Fallout-themed Magic expansion, and it was good. (I went bad karma and played a Caesar deck. Don't judge me.) While it included characters and events from across the games, it came out a month before the well-loved TV series began and so didn't feature any of the show's cast. That'll be rectified in a set of four "Secret Lair" drops later this month that return to the world of Fallout, one of them highlighting the stars of the TV show.

That particular drop will include cards based on The Ghoul, Maximus, and Lucy, who gets her own card as well as appearing on Spirit Mantle (emerging from the Super Duper Mart in her armored vault suit), and Pre-War Formalwear (in the chaos of the cornfield on her wedding night). Max technically gets a second appearance as well, since that's him inside the T-60 Power Armor, which gets its own card as well.

But it's not all TV tie-ins. There's also a batch of five New Vegas-themed cards, with Benny, Joshua Graham, The Platinum Chip, a Custom Caravan Deck, and a Sunset Sarsaparilla Machine all included. Like a lot of the cards in Magic's secret lairs, these are reskinned versions of existing cards, reusing their mechanics—the Sunset Sarsaparilla Machine, for instance, gives you Food tokens you can turn into Treasure just like the Nuka-Cola Vending Machine from the main Fallout set.

Dogmeat returns for five more cards, including a Sol Ring in case you need another one of those, only this time it's a dog's water bowl. And the Rad secret lair features mutant and mutation-themed cards like The Wise Mothman. The Rad Superdrop releases on January 26.

Larian's next game, Divinity, is gonna have some big changes to the usual Original Sin formula—and it's thanks to Baldur's Gate 3, so sayeth a Larian lead in a recent Reddit AMA. Nick Pechenin, head of design at the studio, said that its take on the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset informed a lot of how Divinity's shaping up.

"We went through our original ideas for DoS1 and DoS2," Pechenin writes, "Looked again at how they worked out in practice, picked up some inspirations from our BG3 EA and post-release journey, consulted the star charts to see what we need to do to stay competitive—and cooked a new action economy and character progression system."

As for what that action economy and character progression system looks like, I can only make guesses at this point. Which is fair, works in progress are, indeed, works in progress. It'll really depend on which direction Larian swings the needle—D&D's action economy has a heavy reliance on crowd control, given you only have one action per turn (alongside a bonus action and movement).

While DoS2 was also crowd-control heavy, you also had a bunch of action points to spend—which, via certain abilities, could be refreshed, allowing for some pretty drawn-out turns. While you started each turn with four, you could have six total, including some Action Points banked from your prior turn: So not having something to do wasn't all that punishing.

Contrast this to D&D 5e, where whiffing your one attack leaves you with your pants down unless you're built around having more. If I were to soothsay a bit, I reckon the sentence: "We hope that both fans of BG3 and fans of DoS2 will find the new system intuitive but deep" suggest a balance between the two. Maybe something like Pathfinder 2e's three-action system? A guy can dream.

In another reply, Pechenin re-affirms something I feel like everyone's felt playing DoS2. That being, the surfaces can sometimes get a bit much: "It is cool to have alternative versions of elemental surfaces that change how you have to play around them. We maybe went too far last time with giving every surface a cursed and a blessed variant. Few people immediately guessed the function of blessed oil for example.

"The duration of combat encounters is also on our mind. [The] Oilfield fight directly inspired the tech we showcased in BG3 that allows multiple simple enemies to move and attack at the same time, cutting down waiting by the player. We also try to avoid monsters crawling around veeery slooowly."

The biggest of Pechenin's reveals, though, is a veer away from randomised loot, inspired by D&D's magic item system. While Baldur's Gate 3 was far more madcap than the TTRPG, allowing you to equip an entire MMO character's worth of magic gubbins (rather than D&D's limit of three attuned magic items), it was still a far cry from randomised loot, given the stricter ruleset.

"The BG3 approach of handcrafting every magic item worked well, and it's something we've always wanted to do for DOS2," Pechenin explains. "Something we realized when working on randomized loot for DoS1 and DoS2 is that fully random loot is frequently confusing, so we added more and more rules and pre-made patterns to make it feel more intentional."

And yet, did this actually save time when compared to just hand-crafting things? Not really, no: "In the end randomization did not save us much time." Sometimes it's just easier to do it yourself.

Lorwyn Eclipsed is an upcoming Magic: The Gathering expansion that returns to the dual planes of Lorwyn and Shadowmoor—a pair of fairylands that used to switch pre-eminence in a 300-year cycle, in which the whimsical eternal-daylight realm of Lorwyn would trade places with the dark and spooky Shadowmoor. Now the two lands exist side by side, but anyone who crosses from one to the other is transformed, no longer quite the same person (or elf or boggart) they were on the other side.

This duality is demonstrated in a short film called One Light, One Dark that's basically a Magic-themed Muppet musical, with characters designed by Jim Henson's Creature Shop singing about how different their lives are on either side of the twilight border. On the one side, they playfully squeeze frogs. On the other, they murder pigeons. Swings and roundabouts, really.

It's delightful is what it is. And while it's also a perfect opportunity for the Fun Police to say how this proves Magic is better when it concentrates on its original setting rather than crossovers, I think I'd be even more stoked if this was a Muppets/Labyrinth/Dark Crystal set. Maybe we'll get a Secret Lair Drop with David Bowie as the Goblin King, that'd be neat.

Mechanically, Lorwyn Eclipsed is adding a keyword called Vivid that varies effects based on how many different colors you're playing (to emphasize the bright rainbow sunshine-funtimes of Lorwyn), while Blight lets you plague your opponent with -1/-1 counters (to represent Shadowmoor's nastiness). There's also a returning concept from the original Lorwyn set, with the Changeling attribute letting a shapeshifter enjoy the effects of any bonuses that would normally only apply to a specific creature.

Lorwyn Eclipsed will be out digitally in Arena on January 20, and physically on January 23 with the usual array of themed Commander decks and booster packs.

Critical Role's fourth campaign is a banger—and while I haven't kept up with it as much as I'd like (it's Christmas, you'll have to forgive me for not having four extra hours to put aside every week) I have still been tuning in and keeping up with secondary news when I can.

Thus it reached me through the grapevine (some people call it Polygon) that Brennan Lee Mulligan was changing D&D forever, shaking things up, the madman, the maverick! He was doing so by, as the video below from the official Critical Role channel details, allowing players to level up at a time of their choosing—doing the pesky things like rolling for HP in advance, but otherwise letting them hold off until a satisfying moment occurred.

"We're going to prepare for a level up, that, actually—we don't know exactly when it will occur. That's right, folks are home! We're holding off levelling up to occur in game, not in a moment of my choosing, but in a moment indeed of each and every individual player's choosing."

As I sat there, watching Brennan pop open a cool and exciting new concept, I found myself going—wait a second, where have I heard this before?

There's a slight wrinkle to it, given that the podcast I'm about to talk about has Brennan himself choosing when characters level up—but that's also because it's less of a live actual play and more of a structured, narrative-focused shindig—tightly edited with an original score and lots of table talk cut out. Even so, he's done this trick before in Worlds Beyond Number.

Worlds Beyond Number, which I literally cannot recommend enough (and am presently taking any excuse to talk about) is a podcast DM'd by Brennan Lee Mulligan, featuring Dimension 20 guest star Erika Ishii, current Critical Role player Aabria Iyengar, and D20 regular Lou Wilson.

It's been going on for two years and, as I said back when Brennan was announced as DM for this season of Critical Role, is complete proof that the man can handle what's been presented to him with Campaign 4. Moreover, he also repeated this trick there.

Rather than level up characters after a conveniently-placed nap, Brennan waited until there were narratively significant moments—ones which I shan't spoil here—for most of their level-ups. Again, this is a smidge different from what Brennan's doing here, but the man already has a lot to manage with, you know. 13 players.

That's 10 more players than Worlds Beyond Number. An increase of 430% in raw headcount. I'm not surprised he's leaving the moment of levelling up to them. Still! It's a cool technique I'm glad to see adopted—it's always been a little weird that the whole party gets stronger at the same time, after all.

Just one week after a new trailer for the upcoming Mass Effect-alike Exodus was unveiled at The Game Awards, a Bloomberg report says James Ohlen, the head of developer Archetype Entertainment, has stepped down.

The change comes as part of what appears to be a shakeup of gaming efforts at Hasbro, which has brought in industry veteran Paul Della Bitta to head up Wizards of the Coast's Digital Ventures division. Della Bitta spent 10 years across two stints at Blizzard, as well as two years as general manager of Riot Games in North America. More recently, he was a co-founder of Dreamhaven, the developer and publisher headed up by former Blizzard co-founder Mike Morhaime.

But it's the departure of Ohlen that strikes me as the most notable development here, at least from a gamer's perspective. A 22-year BioWare veteran with lead design and director credits on everything from the original Baldur's Gate to Anthem, Ohlen took the wheel of a then-unnamed new development studio at Wizards of the Coast in 2019; Exodus, the studio's first project, was revealed at The Game Awards in 2023. But just two years later, Ohlen is out.

"At this stage, James felt his work on the game was complete and that the polishing and tuning were in great hands with the team," Hasbro vice president of corporate communications Abby Hodes told Bloomberg. Hodes said Ohlen had "asked to shift his creative focus" to tabletop games, and will remain with Hasbro as a creative consultant.

Good for Ohlen if he feels like he's done his bit, but there's a lot of time left before Exodus actually ships: It's currently targeting a release sometime in early 2027, more than a year from now. That's a lot of time for "polishing and tuning," and also what I would think is when you'd really want your studio chief to be on top of things.

I've reached out to Archetype Entertainment and Wizards of the Coast for comment and will update if I receive a reply.

If there's one thing I love about card games, it's the absolutely obscene sentences that come out of explaining play-by-plays to the uninitiated, especially when you're playing a game with licensed characters. For example: Disney's Lorcana once had a combo with minor character Hiram Flaversham that elevated him to godhood via banishing and re-summoning a popsicle.

Now a new sentence has emerged: Magic: The Gathering's new Marvel set has a combo where you make the Incredible Hulk so, so very angry by forcing the poor guy to step on spiky caltrops over and over and over again, hurting his poor feetsies.

As spotted by Wargamer, you do need to put in a little work here—the card starts off as an un-crashed out Bruce Banner that has to be transformed with six mana. Once he's all green'd up, though, there's a crucial bit of rules text: "Enrage—Whenever The Incredible Hulk is dealt damage, put a +1/+1 counter on him. If he's attacking, untap him and there is an additional combat phase after this phase."

Combine this with Caltrops, which deals one damage when a creature attacks, and you start to see the vision: The Hulk crashes into an enemy, roaring, frothing at the mouth. He takes a step back and steps on a little itty-bitty piece of metal. He loses his gourd. He attacks them again. He steps back, and—god damnit, those Caltrops are still there.

This is what we call an "infinite". It's not a completely unavoidable one: If you've got enough "blockers", creatures who can soak up damage in play, then ramming The Incredible Hulk into them will eventually kill him. The +1 to its health each combat phase from Enrage is negated by Caltrops, after all.

However, as Wargamer notes, there are cards that can get around this—like Moonmist, which transforms Bruce Banner into the Hulk immediately, though with the caveat that combat damage is completely prevented for the turn, unless they're a Werewolf or a Wolf.

Fun fact, though: Caltrops doesn't deal combat damage. So you could just spend your Moonmist-neutered turn sending the Hulk out to stomp on legos until he is strong enough to one-hit KO anything in the known universe on his next turn. Again: One of those new sentences, you love to see it. From what I've heard about M:TG, finding obnoxious new strategies is part of the fun.

The US edition of PC Gamer magazine liked The Temple of Elemental Evil enough to award it a respectable 79% in 2003, but we still had more than a few monster-sized bones to pick with Troika's D&D RPG: NPC companions silently loading themselves up with so much worthless loot they become encumbered by it; atrocious pathfinding; and numerous other obvious bugs and avoidable snags bringing down an otherwise promising adventure.

This matched my own experience with the game back then. The enticing promise of a full and faithful digital recreation of D&D's 3.5 ruleset—and a chance to throw magic missiles somewhere other than the Sword Coast thanks to the game's use of the Greyhawk setting—was brought down by frustrating technical issues and odd design choices.

I was never quite sure if I was doing something wrong or because the game had got its d20s in a twist again, so I quickly decided to stop playing rather than spend hours scouring forums in the hope of finding the right workaround. Which is why SNEG's re-release of this famously temperamental game, out now on Steam, is so interesting.

The 1000+ community-created tweaks, fixes, additions, and restorations within have been floating around the web for years, but for the first time ever they're baked right into the default install. I don't have to wonder if I should try to preemptively correct a common issue before it's even popped up. I don't have to manage a wobbly tower of patches that must be added in exactly the right order to hopefully fix something that should have never been this broken to begin with.

It's not a completely different experience like a remake would be, with everything simplified and sanded down out of a fear our doomscroll-addled minds won't have the patience for 2003-style tough battles and reactive questlines. It's pretty much the same game. It just works as intended, right from the first click.

Actually, that's not quite right. It's better than intended. Temple of Elemental Evil is littered with thoughtful additions and restored quests, all of them well-integrated and subtle enough to make it easy to believe they've always been there. NPCs can offer sidequests they didn't have before, unlocking further rewards. I can now find a magic chest to stuff my loot in, neatly sidestepping the original's boring, bagless inventory woes. I'm able to freely wander into a building that didn't make it into the original release, and take part in multiple storylines that were otherwise destined to remain unseen.

And it still looks amazing, too, with a very specific early 2000s style that no modern game has truly replicated. Thanks to new high-resolution support and an optional windowed mode I can display the game at whatever size suits me best, and the mix of pre-rendered backgrounds and 3D characters still meld together beautifully, my window of choice filled with more, rather than graphics stretched or squashed to fit.

Locations are detailed, pin-sharp, and packed with character. Smoke rises from chimneys, trees sway in the breeze, magic missiles twirl in the air before finding their mark, and gelatinous cubes wobble in evil temples.

Which is great, but why bother playing something this old anyway? Why not play through Baldur's Gate 3 (again), or Rogue Trader or Wrath of the Righteous or Pillars of Eternity or any other CRPG that isn't already old enough to buy its own drinks?

It's not complicated, really—because without those thousand-odd bugs, it's a lot of fun. The Temple of Elemental Evil is an interesting stepping stone in turn-based D&D's digital development, a halfway point between the classic "gold box" RPGs that were all about hand-drawn maps and manually flipping to journal entry #13 in an actual paper book, and the breezier, entertaining homebrew present in Larian's genre-reviving wonder. It's a uniquely faithful recreation of an underserved flavour of D&D; not better or worse than anything that came before or after but different in a way that means it will always stand out.

Regardless of how many glowing retrospectives better-known old games get, or how many awards the shiny new games win, they'll never play the way this one does. As PC Gamer's Jody Macgregor once put it, Temple of Elemental Evil might not be the best D&D game, but it is the most D&D game.

Even selecting the most basic "Please, I just want to hit whatever's standing in front of me" option in combat here brings up at least five different choices to pick from, all of them offering their own tactical strengths and weaknesses.

Movement is never just about picking where in range I want to stand: I have to decide if I'm walking or running, or taking a single five-foot step. I have to consider how a party member's tumble skill is going to interact with an enemy's attack of opportunity. I can see a group of monsters down a corridor and select Ready vs. Approach to prepare for the rush to come, and learn to appreciate how devastating a successful trip attack can be, my opponent left prone and vulnerable to coup de grâce hits when they're down (and yes, I'll pile on my free additional attacks should they survive long enough to stand up).

It's a tactically satisfying experience that only improves as my characters grow, new monsters and new encounters giving me the chance to flex skills I'll never find in another PC RPG, no matter how many I play.

I'd have never known if it wasn't for this new release. It's not a remake or a remaster, but perhaps something even better—a repair. The game fixed up and presented in a way that allows all the good that was always in here the chance to finally shine. For people old enough to still have the original CDs gathering dust on a shelf somewhere, this is a sensitive collection of curated improvements that retains all the fun and flavour of an older and enjoyably distinct ruleset. For anyone itching for more D&D after smooching Karlach for the hundredth time, the enormous array of helpful additions jammed in here make this impressively freeform RPG feel like a fresh take on the popular series.

It's taken far too long, but the temple's finally open for worship.

There's been a deep, unfortunate friction between voice actors and videogame studios, recently—the looming spectre of AI hangs large over everything, with some bigwigs salivating at the idea of getting infinite performances out of people without actually paying them.

That is, despite the fact that—aside from efforts so far mostly being bland as all hell, and confusing for the actual voice actors—players seem to have a deep appreciation for human performances. This is especially the case with Baldur's Gate 3, where performers like Neil Newbon and Amelia Tyler have gone on to become evangelists for the game.

Speaking with our friends over at GamesRadar during the Golden Joysticks, Karlach's VO, Samantha Béart, says they've noticed this discrepancy first hand: "There's a weird disconnect between, maybe, developers' attitude towards where we fit in the ecosystem—where we're not actually part of the team—versus the players, who very much see us as the forefront. More like film and TV.

Logistically, there is somewhat of a point behind that—Charlie Cox, voice of Gustave from Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, has repeatedly gone on record to say that while he's happy to receive his laurels, he didn't spend all that much time in the recording booth; instead highlighting mocap actor Maxence Cazorla as a huge talent behind the character.

In other words, how involved an actor is in any given game is going to depend on the game itself. Baldur's Gate 3's cast did a huge amount of mocap work, and would often bounce ideas back and forth between their character writers in an involved process.

Other times, as was the case with Cox, you show up for a couple days' work, knock something out in the recording booth (something very, very good, mind—Cox is an exceptional actor), take your paycheck, and then get very confused when people ask you about your character, bless.

But it's also true that voice actors get hard done by, even before bosses at studios started claiming AI was fine because games apparently "don't really have acting", which is an actual sentence uttered by the CEO of Amazon Games.

As for how they push back against that brand of nonsense, Béart tells GamesRadar that: "I feel like we weaponize social media and algorithms to do that. Because I think we're still seen as outsources for a lot of the time."

Last week Magic: the Gathering announced its Monster Hunter collaboration, to which PC Gamer's Lincoln Carpenter replied "hell yeah." But after MTG shared details on the long-awaited Secret Lair drop, the internet replied—and I'm paraphrasing here—hell no. Now Wizards of the Coast is delaying the set so it can get it right.

As the company announced in a blog post titled "Back to the Drawing Board with Secret Lair x Monster Hunter," the superdrop is delayed until some point in 2026. "Let's cut to the chase," the post reads. "[The drop] we revealed last week fell short of expectations. We heard loud and clear that you were disappointed, and we believe we can do better. So, we're going to postpone this release and rework this Superdrop entirely."

Nobody likes delays, but this one comes as some consolation to fans who were disappointed by the initial reveal. As Reddit user Sweet-Breadfruit6460 stated in a popular thread on the Magic subreddit: "At least they're listening but what possessed them to release that shit in the first place?"

You may be wondering where this all went wrong; Magic and Monster Hunter should get on like bread and butter. As Lincoln noted in his above article, both are basically extravagant excuses for world-class artists to render giant, awesome lizards. Well, if you're unfamiliar, Secret Lair is Wizards' line of collaborations that involves re-releasing old cards with altered thematics and art, but identical mechanics—and for Monster Hunter fans online, the chosen cards for this drop lack flavor and value.

As Polygon spotted, Reddit threads popped up all over deriding the set. This thread from user ferretlike cried out "WHERE ARE THE CATS" and pointed out that the pairings of card and Monster Hunter character seemed arbitrary. As ferretlike wrote: "This was supposed to be easy, why does Zinogre play with graveyard, why does Brachydios care about instant speed?" Commenter Buldaboy said further down in the thread, "They don't care … I could make a better Monster Hunter Secret Lair in seconds."

Even those more concerned with the reprinted cards than the crossover were puzzled by the announcement, as the drop mostly consisted of low-value cards in low demand. A popular thread on the MTG finance subreddit called it "the worst drop of the year" as commenters discussed how cheap the selected cards generally were. User Evadude said in the thread, "I'm in the group that are getting these because we love Monster Hunter. But as a player I am disappointed."

In its aforementioned blog, Wizards said it wouldn't redo Secret Lairs very often, noting that "Capcom is on board for us to take another swing." Further details on the updated drop will be shared sometime next year.

Back in August 1994, not long after Doom had pulled PC gaming blinking into the spotlight, Magic: The Gathering released a small expansion named The Dark. Comprising just 119 cards, the set was unique for how it upended the traditional depiction of Magic's mana colours. Most notably, it radically reinterpreted white mana cards—normally presented as angelic and peaceful—with scenes of religious fanaticism and violence.

It has long been believed that the cards' designs were influenced by the Satanic Panic, which Magic itself was caught up in after its release in 1993. But only recently has this been confirmed. Just before Halloween, Magic's original art director Jesper Myrfors took to Facebook and laid out the design philosophy behind the cards, writing "The Magic: The Gathering release The Dark was 100% a commentary on the evils and hypocrisy of bigoted right wing Christians.

"Having gone through the idiotic Satanic Panic of the '80s and then listening to their moronic and unfounded pearl clutching arguments that MTG promoted 'devil worship' I had had enough and decided to hold up a mirror to them," Myrfors continued. This, he says, is why White is "represented as dangerous, dogmatic and unempathetic in the set," adding that "White in The Dark glorifies ignorance, mob mentality and violence against those who are different."

Myrfors provided further context in an interview with Polygon, discussing the direct influence the Satanic Panic had on him as a teenager and an avid Dungeon & Dragons fan. "When I was about 15, my friends' parents told me I couldn't hang out with them anymore because they thought I was into Satanism," he recalled. "At that age, that really hurts. You're too young to defend yourself."

As time passed, all of this "bubbled up" in Myrfors, until he eventually decided to "poke back" at the religious right. And an opportunity quickly arose. The release of Magic's third expansion, Legends, saw the game explode in popularity, to the point where Wizards of the Coast had an "internal panic" because they lacked something to follow it up.

Hence, Myrfors quickly set about producing The Dark, confident that Wizards of the Coast would accept it because "the clock was ticking". Not only was he right, The Dark seemed to chime with unspoken sentiments the rest of the team had. "I’m sure they could tell what the direction of the set was. But all of them had lived through the Satanic Panic too. We’d all been victims of those false accusations, so I think everyone appreciated it on some level."

A more modern example of what Myrfors saw during the Satanic Panic is Stephen Dollins, a former pro-wrestler and self-proclaimed "prophet" who has accused everything from Pokemon Cards to the Tooth Fairy as being linked to Satanism. One of Dollins' earliest targets was Magic, where he suggested that the mana circle on the reverse of Magic's cards was evidence of hidden pentagrams. "He pointed to the mana circle on the back and what 'they' did," Myrfors explains, with 'they' referring to Magic's purportedly devil-worshipping design team. "But for the record, there is no 'they'. I was 100% in charge of the look and feel of that game."

As for why Myrfors has chosen to reveal this information now, he doesn't say explicitly. But in his original Facebook post, he writes about how he sees history repeating itself:

"The truth is that people who view themselves as virtuous and righteous can be as deadly and dangerous as any blood sacrificing devil cult when they forget the message of love that is supposed to be the foundation of their belief system," he wrote in the original Facebook post. "We can see that replaying today with MAGA."

Elaborating further, Myrfors says the name of the expansion pack was "a reference to the Dark Ages, when the Church had full control of the population, when wise women and folk healers were burned as witches, education was only for the very elite and anybody who spoke up or strayed from the herd was killed in horrific ways." He worries that "even today people are trying to bring those dark days back. I was shining a light on them with this set."

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Stephen Dollins was one of the inspirations for The Dark expansion, but Myrfors was just using him as a modern example of the Satanic Panic.

Avatar: The Last Airbender has a magic system they repeatedly claim isn't magic (though it clearly is), which is themed around the four elements. You might think that maps easily onto Magic: The Gathering—red is fire, blue is water, white is air, green is earth, you've got black left over so throw it on any leftover bad guys like those creepy Canyon Crawler insect things, bish bash bosh, job's a good'un. But where the previous Spider-Man crossover set was content to wrap deep cuts from the Spider-Verse in existing mechanics, Avatar is more systemically ambitious, giving each flavor of elemental bending its own mechanic.

Which is an interesting choice for a set you would expect to be aimed at younger players, but I guess they figured if a 12-year-old can play Magic and make it through the filler episodes where Aang and the gang trudge through a swamp or a town where things are a bit weird then they can sure as hell learn some new rules.

Firebending seems like an obvious one. Magic's already got fireballs. But firebending is more than just a spicy ranged attack—it's the one variety of bending where you don't need to have the element at hand. While airbenders have it easy because the element's usually all around, in the show waterbenders have to carry a bottle just in case and earthbenders can typically be defeated by cutting them off from the ground. Firebenders meanwhile just pull fire out of nowhere.

So in Magic, firebending becomes a bonus that gives you red mana whenever you attack. It's a free lunch you can spend on whatever you like, whether or not that's a fireball, and a reward for playing aggressively. It's a nice match for the show, where firebenders can technically do all kinds of things, but often default to violence.

Waterbending, meanwhile, needs a source. Instead of being free, waterbending effects all have a cost—but that cost can come from multiple places. As well as tapping land, you can also tap creatures and artifacts to pay for its effects. And since the show depicts waterbending as able to heal or harm or freeze or do any number of things, Magic's waterbending can likewise have varied effects like stunning, card draw, swapping a creature's stats, and so on.

It reminds me of the way Ishi Barasume describes her fighting style in the Forgotten Realms comic: "We fight like the river. Changeable. Malleable. Always present, but always moving—and a river flooding its banks will uproot the oak and drown the lion."

Earthbenders turn the ground into a tool, whether attacking with boulders or summoning a shield or molding it into a quick door to escape through. That's a neat fit for Magic where you're always drawing on land for mana, so the earthbending mechanic lets you turn land into creatures. Whether you use them for attack or defense is up to you.

While it's the same idea as the awaken mechanic introduced back in the Zendikar set, the downside to awaken is that you can end up losing the land cards it turns into creatures. Earthbending doesn't have that downside—you can bring those lands back from the graveyard or from exile. Those boulders Toph rolls don't go away when she's done with them, after all. Land you earthbend also gets haste, which maps to the speed the show's earthbenders display in battle, or in wrestling tournaments.

Finally, airbending is all about agility, shoving enemies off-balance and scooting away from them. In Magic that translates to an ability to exile cards that can then be brought back for two mana. It's both a push and a dodge, simultaneously able to knock enemies away from you and flip your own creatures out of danger. The most thematic thing about it is its rarity. It's right there in the name of the show—Aang is the last airbender, so airbending is the least common of the four effects in Magic.

Where the Spider-Man crossover set was mostly about putting characters from the Spider-Verse onto fairly typical Magic cards, the Avatar set uses its setting to inspire changes. It's an interesting contrast, and even though I'm not as interested in Avatar as a property I am more interested in how this set plays. The Universe Beyond sets have been at their best when they warp Magic in unexpected ways, like Tales of Middle-earth did with The Ring Tempts You and hobbits spraying a proliferation of food tokens everywhere. I'm glad the Avatar set is a more ambitious crossover, even if I'll never love it as much as the Avatar Enthusiasts do.

The idea of "canonicity" in RPGs is an odd one, given the whole point of both videogame and tabletop RPGs is that the players decide what the main characters do. But sequels, spin-offs, and sourcebooks have a habit of choosing particular outcomes as the "real" ones—unless it's the Elder Scrolls, where every ending of Morrowind happened at once.

Baldur's Gate 3 had to deal with characters from Baldur's Gate 2 having canonical events happen to them between games, like Minsc and Boo being turned to stone or Viconia and Saarevok backsliding into evil, and now the cast of Baldur's Gate 3 are in the same boat. The latest Forgotten Realms supplements, Adventures in Faerûn and Heroes of Faerûn, move the timeline on from 1492—when BG3 happens—to 1501, and hint at the fates of its cast.

Quotes from Karlach crop up throughout Adventures in Faerûn and she appears more than once in the art for both books alongside Astarion, Shadowheart, and Minsc. And in none of those illustrations is she a mind flayer or a pile of ash—two of the potential outcomes for her in Baldur's Gate 3.

The best ending for Karlach is that she returns to Avernus with the Infernal Engine still burning away inside her chest, which a lot of players weren't happy about, and in the epilogue Larian added post-launch she mentions finding blueprints for something that could prevent the timebomb in her chest from blowing up. Seeing her run around the streets of Baldur's Gate, fight a remorhaz with Astarion and Shadowheart, and generally be a heroic adventurer who doesn't have a gaping hole in her torso, makes it plain that Karlach's canonical ending is the good one.

Funnily enough, the same pictures depict Shadowheart with dark hair and bangs, which isn't how she looks in her best outcome in BG3, where she dyes her hair white and parts her hair in a way that makes it look like she didn't just go through a messy breakup. But hair color isn't proof that canonically she never gave up on worshipping Shar, and it's entirely possible she just changed her mind about being a silver fox.

Although if you helped Shadowheart achieve her redemption arc it's entirely possible that in act three you told Dame Aylin about the jerk wizard Lorroakan who wants to steal her immortality, and she wrecked the dude as he so richly deserves. According to Adventures in Faerûn that didn't happen, and Lorroakan is still alive and holed up in Ramazith's Tower. However, it's mentioned that he was "Humbled by a recent failed bid to achieve immortality through undisclosed means," so at least he didn't succeed. Presumably the canonical PCs lied to both him and Dame Aylin, preventing the conflict from ever happening.

Astarion gets his own supplement in a digital add-on called Astarion's Book of Hungers, which includes rules for playing a half-vampire dhampir as well as a string of adventure outlines where you get to hang out with everyone's favorite vampire spawn, although these are noted as being set before the events of the videogame. No canon conflict there.

It's not all videogame characters in these books, of course. The heroes of the D&D cartoon make another appearance, just like they did in the movie Honor Among Thieves, looking slightly older and perhaps a bit more competent. Elminster rates a mention too, though he's said to have been missing for a few years, which conveniently explains why he's not around to solve whatever problem your own players are involved in.

Princess Azula is introduced in a flashback in which she's watching her brother receive his disfiguring scar while pumping her first in the air with glee. But even more tellingly, when her brother and uncle are torn between turning for help to the Earth people who might kill them, or the Fire people who might turn them over to Azula, they immediately settle on the Earth people. Her enemies fear her, but her family fear her more, which makes her a perfect fit for a Magic card with an unpredictable effect.

Azula appears in Magic: The Gathering's Avatar: The Last Airbender set on one of its source material cards. Each of these 61 cards reprints a classic Magic card while depicting a scene from a different episode of the show. In this case, that's season three's episode The Beach.

This card, Azula, Flame of Ember Island, is a reskin of Diaochan, Artful Beauty, a card originally from the Portal Three Kingdoms set. That set's a rare one, released in Asia, but only available in English in Australia and New Zealand. It's a thematic card to build a deck around, especially a Commander deck—Diaochan, Artful Beauty was even reprinted in Commander's Arsenal back in 2012.

This set's headliner card is a borderless raised foil version of Avatar Aang that's illustrated by series co-creator Bryan Konietzko. The set also includes battle pose cards inspired by the four benders shown in the opening credits, and scene cards that combine to recreate the climax of each of the show's three seasons. My favorite thing about the set though is Sokka's Haiku, a card whose text has the structure of a haiku:

Counter target spell.
Draw a card, then mill three cards.
Untap target land.

Now that's poetry. Magic: The Gathering | Avatar: The Last Airbender will be available in Arena from November 18, and on tabletops from November 21.

Critical Role 4's Overture is officially all wrapped up, and we'll be moving onto the three-group, 13-player campaign that's had me salivating ever since it was announced. As confirmed during the last episode's cooldown, one of its most shocking moments had been pre-planned. Kinda.

As confirmed then—and re-emphasised now—enough was left up to chance that even the person it was happening to thought the dice had led him astray. That's per a Fireside Chat on Beacon with Alexander Ward, who plays Occtis. In case it wasn't clear, I'm getting into spoiler territory for Episode 4.

Here's some context: In Episode 4, House Tachonis manned a red-wedding style assault on House Davinos, showing up with an overlevelled sorcerer and an entire gaggle of ghouls. During the melee, Occtis, himself a youngest son of Tachonis, was pinned to a table by said gaggle and stabbed to death by his brother. Then he had an ancient artefact shunted into his chest for good measure.

This was, per Ward's comments at the time, a pre-planned storybeat with Dungeon Master Brennan Lee Mulligan—Ward had initially intended Occtis to be an undead necromancer who'd been slain by his family, and Mulligan asked him if he'd like to do it at the table. With the understanding that, if the dice disagreed, Ward would be consigned to the terrible fate of playing, like, a normal human wizard. Or straight-up dying.

The exact details, though, were completely unknown to Ward—to the point where, as doubly confirmed in that Fireside chat, he "thought I'd actually fucked up."

See, being the scion of a house so thoroughly linked to death, and being killed in a mystery ritual, Occtis got to make some rolls and checks on the other side. But "when Brennan told me that my spirit, like, faded away and disappeared … I thought I messed up Brennan and I's plan by rolling poorly, and Brennan just killed me. So I did leave the table thinking I'd really fucked up.

"I was already brainstorming new character ideas when that happened, because I walked off-set and Marisha was looking at me like 'what happened?' and I was like 'I don't know'."

Later in the chat, Ward also describes some of the cast's reactions, such as Luis Carazo (Azune) who "was so concerned that I was upset and it was very sweet." Marisha Ray (Murray), however, had some choice words: "Brennan brought us into a side-room and was like 'okay great, the plan worked', and Marisha went 'what do you mean?'" After finding out about the ploy, "She went 'oh, you piece of shit!."

Honestly, that fourth episode was a great little example of how to make a pre-ordained story beat still have stakes at a TTRPG table. For one, Ward could've absolutely rolled high on initiative and—as he said after the episode—skitter out of there with a Spider Climb spell. But seeing Matthew Mercer and Aabria Iyengar fighting for their life in a horde of undead was just as nail-biting and, more than once, nearly went so very wrong.

Humble Bundle continues to come out of left field with some wild deals that intersect with my very specific interests—just last week, you could sweep up $365 of TTRPG sourcebooks. Now, like a true transmutation wizard, the folks over at Humble have turned $203 of comics into $18.

The Critical Role comic collection bundle features 21 books, including entries from both the Vox Machina and Mighty Nein Origins series, volumes one and two of the Chronicles of Exandria: Mighty Nein run, and two Tales of Exandria volumes that cover the stories of The Bright Queen and Artagan.

In case you have no idea what Critical Role is, it's a livestreamed D&D campaign turned multimedia empire that's currently in its fourth campaign—starting as a crapshoot experiment by Geek & Sundry back in the day, the now-independent company's got its own TTRPG systems, animated series, and (obviously) comic runs.

As per usual with these Humble Bundles, there are also some other tiers, with the full bundle costing $18/£13.19. You can find the full bundle details and pricing below:

• Critical Role Vox Machina: Origins Volumes 1, 2, and 3
• Critical Role: The Chronicles of Exandria The Mighty Nein, Volume 1
• Critical Role: The Mighty Nein Origins – Jester Lavorre
• Critical Role: The Mighty Nein Origins – Caleb Widogast
• Critical Role: The Mighty Nein Origins – Yasha Nydoorin
• Critical Role: The Tales of Exandria Volume 1 – The Bright Queen
• Critical Role: The Mighty Nein Origins – Fjord Stone
• Critical Role: The Mighty Nein Origins – Nott the Brave
• Critical Role: The Mighty Nein Origins – Mollymauk Tealeaf
• Critical Role: The Mighty Nein Origins – Beauregard Lionett
• Critical Role: The Chronicles of Exandria The Mighty Nein, Volume 2*
• Critical Role: The Mighty Nein Origins – Caduceus Clay*
• Critical Role: Tales of Exandria Volume 2 – Artagan*
• Critical Role Vox Machina: Origins Volume 4, Issues 1-6*
• Critical Role Vox Machina: Origins Volume 4, Issues 1-3**

(Items marked with a * are also part of the $10/£7.32 bundle, while items marked with ** are also part of the $1/£0.73 bundle).

Honestly, if you're a fan of the livestreams and want to brush up on your Exandrian lore, or even just see your faves rendered between the panels, you could do far worse than this bundle—that's a ton of raw comicage for the price you're paying.

The bundle supports the Critical Role Foundation (yes, they've got one of those, too), which partners with charities and non-profits including 826LA, Red Nose Day, The Pablove Foundation, OutRight Action International, First Nations Development Institute, Shanti Bhavan, and NCWIT.

Running an actual play is hard—especially one with the weight and heft of Critical Role. Originally a crapshoot by Geek & Sundry to see if folks wanted to watch voice actors play Dungeons & Dragons, Critical Role is now a small media empire. We're talking multiple animated series, entirely new systems. It is, to put it plainly, a bunch of pressure to play D&D in front of its now-sizeable crowd.

Which is part of why Campaign 4 has impressed me so thoroughly so far, because it's not staring down the barrel of that loaded gun with anything other than manic glee. A new DM, 13 players, a West-Marches style structure and—concluding (for the most part) on this Thursday—a 4-episode overture that's the mother of all session zeros.

If you've not yet caught a livestream, I'd wait until next week for the VOD before reading further, as I'll be getting into spoilers after this paragraph. I'll just say this: DM Brennan Lee Mulligan ain't screwing around, here. Not with worldbuilding, not with story pacing, and certainly not with the combats.

In Dungeons & Dragons encounter design, there's a consideration most DMs have to take into account called the action economy. Essentially, whichever side has more players on the board—more actions to spend—will have a major advantage. Even if you're up against a bunch of mooks, you're still in danger if you're sufficiently outnumbered.

The assault on the Palazzo Davinos, orchestrated by House Tachonis, is a complete nail-biter. A group of ghouls (who can all paralyze with their claws) swarming a level three wizard to quite literally cut him open. A mage capable of flinging high-level spells, far too jacked up to be a fair fight, backed up by an entire gaggle of Shadows capable of strength-draining everything but an immortal elf.

The overture's final episode starts with a nightmare of a combat where the numbers are rallied against them. I haven't been this enthralled by a fight in actual play since the finales of past campaigns; on paper, the four players present didn't stand a goddamn chance.

That's not to say Mulligan didn't pull any punches, some landed soft in between the haymakers. The Primus of House Tachonis had a plan, did his plan, and then left. His son ordered his ghouls to haul a jeopardised NPC through a window rather than bite through her death saves and, in what I imagine will be the most controversial element, Occtis' shocking death (and subsequent reanimation) was somewhat pre-ordained.

Not a sure thing, mind. If he'd rolled higher on that initiative count, if he'd had a chance to get out of that ghoul-infested room, or even if he hadn't tanked a crit the the clavicle, Occtis could've scrambled out of there alive. But in the post-show "cooldown" chat on Beacon, it's been revealed that his player, Alexander Ward, wanted his necromancer to be killed by his family at some point.

No, Occtis is just the set-dressing. I'm talking about Mulligan choosing to drop a Circle of Death spell on two other characters, scrambling to get to their already-dead friend, and narrow avoidance of a doom spiral due to two successful saving throws against that spell.

As someone experienced, at the very least, with running D&D combat? This episode was two dice rolls away from opening on catastrophe. I'm left feeling like I just watched a scythe graze past two player's ears.

In an alternate universe where both of them tank over 40 damage and hit the deck, nobody reaches jeopardised NPC ally Lady Aranessa Royce before she's thrown off an 80ft balcony. Ashley Johnson's character is forced to spend her turns trying to get her allies up while shadows swarm them, and that hoard of ghouls (if Mulligan was feeling particularly vicious) likely sweep downstairs to finish the job. Bare minimum, they probably don't get Occtis' body back, and Alexander Ward's left to puzzle over his backup character.

If Campaign 4 of Critical Role has started as it means to go on, coming to the end of these overture episodes? I am going to be sitting here with my jaw agape for many combats to come, with a deeply unhealthy blood pressure and a well-worn edge of my seat.

Critical Role Campaign 4 is off to a terrific start—even if it is a borderline magic trick to see DM Brennan Lee Mulligan handle thirteen players at once for its first four episodes (they're not all at the table at once, mind, but it's still a terrific feat). I've been equally impressed by the new players that've filled out said number—including Whitney Moore, who plays Tyranny.

In case you're not caught up, I'll give you the broad strokes: Tyranny's a demon, who the Church of the Candescent Creed have taken on along with a host of infernal (or abyssal, I'm not sure what Brennan's hell lore is like yet) siblings. On the outside, she's being taught by Sam Riegel's character how to be pious and virtuous.

It's already an excellent mechanic, with Riegel's Wicander Halovar playing the straight man to Tyranny's messy antics. At least, on first blush: In a recent interview with Moore by Wargamer's Mollie Russell, she confesses that she's bitten off a bit more than she could chew.

"Sam Riegel and I are a duo, and I made the mistake of thinking that I could out-troll him, so now we're in a race to the bottom to see who can be the voice of reason first."

That tracks. I've been following along, and I've already seen Riegel's propensity for mischief shine bright in Wicander (mild spoilers for the first few episodes to follow). See, House Halovar isn't at all what it seems, operating more like an organised crime family that's using its religion as a front.

Tyranny isn't just his minder, she's his handler. So when li'l Wicky gets ahead of himself, and starts moving against his family, the roles are suddenly reversed—Wicander keeps blabbing at inopportune times, nearly getting himself killed, and Tyranny's the only person in the world who is capable of saving him.

I'm not surprised Riegel's managed to pull this switcheroo off, though. One of his most infamous gambits in Campaign one (spoilers, again, to follow) is seeing his character leave the party in a dramatic, heartbreaking speech, then coming in with his backup: A foppish rich-boy adventuring on daddy's money who can't even remember his new allies' names. He sure knows how to rope-a-dope his fellow cast mates.

As for Tyranny the character, Moore explains that "Wicander is the model for her, and even though she thinks he's kind of a nerd, he is rubbing off on her. I think that she didn't realize—or maybe didn't plan on—being as affected as she is by the world around her. That's something I also really relate to as a person. Her dynamics and her loyalties are shifting, and it's a very scary, very teenage sort of time.

"… the longer she spends out in the real world, the less she identifies with her demon group. She has an agenda that's fundamentally built into who she is, and I think that she's going to have a lot of crises of spirit the more that she develops bonds with her adventuring party." I, for one, can't wait to see it. You can catch Critical Role every Thursday on YouTube, and stream VoDs early on Beacon.

Critical Role's The Mighty Nein is on the horizon—and I'm quite excited. Based on the company's second livestreamed campaign, I always figured the deeper complexities and political landscape of Wildemount would make for better TV.

Don't get me wrong, I love Vox Machina as much as anybody—I was there, weeping my eyes out when Campaign 1 ended—but Campaign 2's characters are, for lack of a better term, less "trope-y" than their predecessors. The story itself has some better dramatical stakes, too—the follies of corruption and empire, as opposed to 'there are too many dragons'.

Not helping The Legend of Vox Machina much was the fact it wound up rushing some plotlines. For instance, the Briarwood arc—a compelling gothic horror gauntlet to liberate the vampire-ruined home of one Percival Fredrickstein von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III—was squeezed into a tight-fitting pair of season 1 jeans.

Things only got hastier with season 2, which saw like, five entire story arcs from the livestreamed campaign squished into a season of TV. And to be fair, I think they did a pretty solid job, but as confirmed by Critical Role CEO Travis Willingham in an interview with Polygon at New York Comic Con 2025, it wasn't necessarily their first choice.

"The thing we learned from making Vox Machina was that we didn’t know, after the two-season order, if we were going to get anything after that. So, we really crammed a lot of stuff into season 2. I think our pace suffered a little bit for it in some places."

Out of curiosity, I decided to check, and yep—season 2 of TLoVM crunches 16 episodes of the D&D livestream into 12 episodes of TV, though it also introduced a bunch of skipped-over plot points that were tackled in the absent Slayer's Take arc from earlier in the live show.

Even with the comparatively breakneck pace taken by the animated series already (which is entirely understandable, every episode of Critical Role averages around 3-4 hours and there's over a hundred of 'em) that's quite the compression.

We know that The Mighty Nein, in contrast, will be starting with the offscreen sessions then-DM Matthew Mercer used to get the table comfortable with their characters. Willingham tells Polygon: "We're throwing caution to the wind and taking our time more with these seasons. Hence, the 'starting from a session zero' perspective."

That's not to say there won't be changes, though. Laura Bailey, who played Vex in Campaign 1 and Jester in Campaign 2, explains: "There's not enough time to incorporate everything that happened in a three-year campaign of four to five-hour sessions."

That's not necessarily a bad thing, though, as she explains: "You can make the scenes have more meaning because of the timing of them. And we still get those moments that we love. They might just happen in a different way."

I'm inclined to agree, though I do think these departures have been hit-or-miss. In the middle of season 3, the story took some brutal departures that had me really excited. I shan't repeat them here in case of spoilers, but you can go ahead and click that link if you want my full thoughts.

The season finale, though? I was far more lukewarm on it, especially since it skipped—and in one case, omitted—a lot of the smaller plot points that made the conclusion of the Chroma Conclave arc so compelling in Campaign 1. Here's hoping a slower pace, unconcerned about the potential woes of season renewals, will do The Mighty Nein a great deal of good.

The next Magic: The Gathering set is far from the caverns of Ixalan and the grottos of Theros—indeed, it's set somewhere beneath the storm drains of New York City. As Wizards of the Coast announced Friday, it's a crossover with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles themselves.

Universes Beyond might be something of a contentious talking point in the MTG community these days, but ignore that for a moment and check out these awesome turtle cards. You'll find the main four turtles and Splinter, sure, but there's plenty more from nearly every incarnation of the venerable comic book heroes.

I'm someone who just thinks the ninja turtles are neat, so I'm over the moon to see new art from Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, as well as nods to deep cuts like IDW's Wolverine claw-wielding female turtle, Jennika. The art is as painterly and vibrant as you'd expect from a new MTG set, and the new land artworks are of pizza toppings in the shape of each color's mana symbol, so that's cute.

There's also the Heroes in a Half Shell commander card, a rainbow 5/5 that draws a card and doles out +1/+1 counters to each of your mutants, ninjas, and/or turtles every time they deal combat damage to a player. In case that doesn't sound synergistic enough with all those new turtle cards, it also has vigilance, menace, trample, and haste—fitting for the world's most fearsome fighting team.

The continued Fortinitification of Magic: The Gathering might be something longtime veterans balk at, but there's no denying these crossovers are in high demand. And where a game like Fortnite is eager to hand Hatsune Miku a golden assault weapon and have Thanos hit the griddy, I'll give MTG credit for giving its crossovers such lavish artwork and card mechanics carefully considered to celebrate the source material. That attention to detail has made its videogame crossovers in particular a decently fun aside.

In a new interview with Polygon, fantasy (and sci-fi, and videogame) writer R.A. Salvatore dished on some of the unique challenges of writing stories that have to stay consistent with an ever evolving tabletop ruleset and world state.

Salvatore has notably contributed to the Star Wars Expanded Universe (RIP), but is most famous for his novels set in the Forgotten Realms, a world shared with classic PC games including Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and most of the Gold Box RPGs.

Like Realms creator Ed Greenwood's Elminster, Salvatore's characters have gotten cameos in Baldur's Gate. Heroic cleric Cadderly pops in to say hi near the end of Baldur's Gate 1, while Salvatore's signature Drow Ranger and memetic Best Swordsman Ever, Drizzt Do'Urden, can be befriended or fought in both Baldur's Gate 1 and 2.

According to Salvatore, making sure the action in his books hews close enough to the D&D rules of the day has been one of the job's more challenging demands. "That's been one of the toughest parts," said Salvatore. "4th Edition D&D almost broke me, not because I didn't like 4th edition D&D. I'm not making any judgements⁠—positive or negative⁠—on any of the editions, but the changes were so sweeping."

Even with the addition of feats and prestige classes, as well as fundamental reworks of systems like AC and attack bonus (goodbye THAC0) when moving from AD&D to 3rd Edition, it still felt more mutually intelligible with previous rulesets than the controversial 4th Edition. I've always found it telling that the explosively popular 5th Edition⁠—which Baldur's Gate 3 is based on⁠—plays like a more approachable riff on D&D 3.5.

But mechanics aren't the only 4th Edition zag Salvatore had trouble adapting to: He and Greenwood both objected to The Forgotten Realms' world state shakeup. Previous new editions moved the timeline forward a decade each, while 4th Edition skipped a century and introduced The Spellplague, which altered Faerûn's geography, politics, and cosmology. Drizzt would still only be a spry 180 years old or so (of a 700-year lifespan), but his human buddy, Wulfgar, and wife, Catti-Brie, weren't so lucky.

"Ed looked at me and says, 'Bob, what are we going to do?'" Salvatore recalled from the moment when the two found out about the changes. "I said, we're going to figure out how we're going to fix it because in about five years they're going to come to us and say 'Bob we got to fix this.'"

That timeline was pretty much on the money: Just as 5th Edition's rules hewed closer to 3rd Edition, The Forgotten Realms moved forward another decade or so, but underwent yet another metaphysical calamity that made its politics, geography, and metaphysics look suspiciously similar to how they did 120 years previously.

Salvatore even got a mulligan on Do'Urden's dead friends, with Catti-Brie, Wulfgar, Bruenor Battlehammer, and Regis the Halfling all getting a second chance at life. Salvatore's most recent novel, the 39th in the Legend of Drizzt saga, was Lolth's Warrior in 2023.