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What Do I Know?D&D Beyond 3rd Party Spotlight: The Illrigger
With all the new 3rd party content appearing on D&D Beyond and knowing some of the site’s quirks, I wanted to look at some of that content to see how well it’s been implemented. The first 3rd party product I’m looking at is the Illrigger. Because some companies have sold piecemeal items on the site, I wanted to clarify this is the whole Illrigger supplement produced by MCDM. That includes the following:
- The Illrigger class
- Five subclasses
- Six Combat Masteries (basically alternate Fighting Styles)
- Eight new spells
- Five NPC stat blocks for Retainer characters
- Two Magic Items
The Illrigger supplement, including the introduction and the accompanying fiction, appears in D&D Beyond. All the material above is covered precisely as it was in the supplement but formatted for electronic display. That’s how the material in the Illrigger works in the Sources section of the site. Let’s look at the other integrations.
Character Creation
Illrigger appears in the character builder options as long as Partnered Content and MCDM are checked. I created an Illrigger with all 18 stats at 20th level to see how the class abilities and the subclasses were implemented.
The base features all display correctly. There are boxes to check the number of seals you have and a counter to track for your Infernal Conduit Dice once you have that feature. The features set up to reset on a short rest reset on a short rest, and the ones that reset on a long rest reset on a long rest.
Only two of your Combat Mastery abilities would reflect as passive boosts on your character sheet. Bravado changes your unarmed armor class as expected when it is chosen. Lies allows you to pick one type of weapon and use your Charisma bonus to attack instead of Strength or Dexterity. There is no option to select that weapon or a way to display what your Charisma-based attack will look like.
If you multiclass into Illrigger, D&D Beyond shows the proper proficiencies granted by taking a level of the class. The subclasses have varying degrees of implementation. None of the subclasses with a once-per-long or short rest ability get the single check box that other rules and elements that function similarly have. The Architect of Ruin’s spellcasting works fine, similar to the Eldritch Knight or the Arcane Trickster. Other than its once-per-rest abilities, the Hellspeaker gets checkboxes for its two abilities with multiple uses. Neither the Painkiller nor the Sanguine Knight have check boxes for their multiple-use abilities. All subclasses have text on the character sheet indicating the correct number of uses; there is just nothing to track it with.
Spells
Other classes can also use several of the Illrigger spells. The spells will appear if you search for them in the Spells section of the Game Rules. Unfortunately, the spells only show up in the spell lists for the 2024 version of the classes that gain those spells. If you’re using a 2014 class, the spells aren’t available.
Magic Items
There are two magic items included in the supplement. One magic item is a “template” magic item that can be applied to any weapon, and D&D Beyond treats this like it does any other special weapon property. The potion will also appear if you search for it under Magic Items.
Monsters
Each of the five retainers has a stat block in the Source section of D&D Beyond, but there are no entries for them in the Monsters section if you search for them. This is the same issue that Flee Mortals! has, where none of the Retainers or Companion Creatures appear in the Monsters section, only in the Source section of the complete book.
Final Thoughts
I picked this up mainly to see how D&D Beyond would handle some of the third-party content that WotC seems eager to offer through the service. I know that D&D Beyond can be a little rigid in how it expects rules to work, and even the 2024 rules seemed to be a challenge for the site in some areas.
I usually don’t bring price up except in extreme circumstances, but I think it’s fair to point out that the Illrigger costs $14.99 on both D&D Beyond and Roll20. Although Roll20 has implemented the Retainers from Flee Mortals!, the Retainers from the Illrigger are not available to use from the monster section of the site, either. Roll20 only has the Illrigger spells in the Illrigger’s spell list, although you could drag and drop the spell into a character sheet to make it available, but that’s not an ideal solution. The lesson here is that no electronic solution has fully implemented the content in the book.
Given that they cost the same amount, I don’t want to cut Roll20 more slack than D&D Beyond, but it does feel like part of the appeal of D&D Beyond is that it’s the official source for all things D&D, but in reaching out for 3rd party content, D&D Beyond may not be flexible enough to meet the demands of the material they are presenting. The Illrigger isn’t that strange compared to other classes. It has no twists and turns that deviate from the 5e SRD norm. But it still has some bumps in the road for its implementation. We’ll be looking at something else that does stretch D&D Beyond’s assumptions a bit more soon.
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I’ll have a lot more to say about backgrounds and how they are implemented in the 2024 rules of Dungeons & Dragons, but that’s going to wait a little bit. In the meantime, when I sort out how I think about things, I often put the things I’m contemplating in a spreadsheet. It’s what I do for my day job, and it’s how my brain likes to digest interrelated concepts. Because of that, I made a spreadsheet showing what backgrounds work best with what classes in D&D 2024, here:
D&D 2024 Class/Background Matches
The logic is that a class is a full match for any class for which it provides potential ability bonuses that match the class’ primary ability score. For most classes, that’s just one ability score, but for Monks, Paladins, and Rangers, that means for a background to be a full match, it has to potentially provide bonuses to both of the prerequisite scores.
This doesn’t mean you can’t take a background that doesn’t provide bonuses, just that introduces the old issue of “if I make an elf paladin, I’ll have worse stats than a human paladin that puts their bonuses in Strength and Charisma.”
In addition to making a table for the Class/Background Matches, I also wanted to see what weapon qualities were assigned to what weapon, and it occurred to me that it would be nice to be able to sort by quality to see what weapons existed that offered it.
I’ll also say that part of my logic for this is that I want to tinker with a copy to see what it would look like if I gave weapons the weapon qualities I think are more logical for them, rather than the qualities that reinforce their position as part of the game rules:
#5eSRD #Background #Class #DD #DD2024 #DD5e #Mastery #Weapon
I originally posted these in some threads on social media, but I wanted to put these thoughts all in one place, and hopefully a place that doesn’t get washed away too quickly. If you’ve already seen this, thanks for checking in, again.
Just as a head’s up, I hadn’t found the infographic for the rollout yet, so the fact that you can’t update characters from the 2014 sheet to the 2024 sheet is actually a planned, phased rollout issue, and not a problem with how the sheet functions.
Playing around with the D&D Beta character sheet in Roll20, with the idea that I might try it for a session. It’s not really in a shape that I could run a session of an existing game using the sheet, and in its current state, it might be rough to use it for a new one-shot.
Hands-On Observations
So far, every existing NPC that I open requires the character to be rebuilt. Every player character that I opened needed to be rebuilt. Not insurmountable, but it’s not going to be useful outside of building new characters or rebuilding existing characters.
The “build a character” option when you create a new character has a similar function to the Marvel Multiverse RPG where you can build a new character or pick an existing premade character, and you still have the option to directly edit the character sheet.
Unfortunately, when I tried to use the premade character, the interface wouldn’t allow me to drag the character onto the map. I tried it with multiple premade characters, and for some reason, none could be dragged onto the map. Could I be missing something? Maybe?
An Aside
If you build a player character, from what I could see, things are working . . . for any options that are working to begin with. For example, the Witch and the Theurge from Kobold Press just don’t work if you try to make a character, but that’s true in the regular character sheet as well.
You can set the Theurge’s spells per level manually, and drag spells onto the sheet in the regular character sheet. I saw a place to manually add how many spell slots a Theurge has per level on the new sheet, but not the “use the full caster” option from the old sheet.
For what it’s worth, this is more of a Roll20 issue in general, because I did some quick character building for some of the Adventures in Rokugan and the MCDM Illrigger class, and those appear to present what you need to actually build the character.
This is just that the Roll20 version of Deep Magic Volume 1 & 2 are an incomplete implementation that haven’t been marked as such. But it’s broken enough that it’s hard to even just manually bypass some of the things the character sheet doesn’t do automatically.
Disconnected Bits
Back to stuff that’s actually an issue with the character sheet, this doesn’t really limit the ability to run a game, and it’s probably something on the horizon, somewhere, I hope, but any species that has set ABIs automatically get those, and there isn’t a toggle to use the Tasha’s option.
I say, “I hope,” because this probably wasn’t on the list of things to worry about because D&D 2024 is already built to add ability score bonuses elsewhere, and won’t require a workaround, but to use older content, it would be nice to still have that ability.
One of the big impediments to using this sheet right now is that if you have an NPC character sheet, and you click on, for example, an attack, the character sheet will display a formula that makes sense, i.e. “Claws, 1d20+5,” but when you click on the attack, it only rolls a 1d20.
If you roll on the PC version of the character sheet, the bonuses are applied to the roll. It’s just the NPC/Monster sheets that don’t seem to do it. And both versions of the sheet roll damage properly as expressed on the sheet.
You can add the bonus in your head, but it’s really inconvenient. It’s something I don’t mind doing if an NPC does something unexpected that isn’t set up, for example, and I know I do this kind of thing when I’m running offline, but I’d rather this worked before I test drive it.
I seem to remember that the Alpha version of the sheet had a hit point adjustment section where you could type in damage and either add or subtract it by clicking on a red or green option. Maybe I’m imagining it? But that’s not in the beta version of the character sheet.
Project Scope
None of this is meant to say this project is anything that it isn’t. It’s a beta test, and I’ll be submitting all of the things I ran into. I just wanted to share this for anyone else that might be wondering if they want to fire up a game to play with this themselves.
Although . . . I will say that I’m not really happy that Roll20 listings for Deep Magic volumes 1 & 2 indicate access to the Witch and the Theurge, without mentioning that these classes don’t work. There should be a note that these sources are only partially implemented.
There are actually a few games I’ve run into with these issues. I don’t know if it’s been addressed, but a lot of the rules in the Everyday Heroes Roll20 implementation were missing text and I had to do some tweaking to make characters that weren’t using anything outside of the core book.
This worries me a little bit. I feel like Roll20 may be stretching themselves thin. They’re buying multiple companies and trying to integrate them into the platform, but some games or game products remain partially implemented, along with some long running issues with quality-of-life issues.
Priorities
I know D&D 2024 is the primary concern, but I have no idea when my Roll20 Tales of the Valiant Kickstarter will be available, and I’m worried that when it is active, it’s going to be a separate, incompatible compendium that walls off my 2014 based material. That concern is based on history.
Both the G.I. Joe and Transformers RPGs were up for preorder on Roll20, and the Power Rangers RPG was actively being sold, but over a year after both of those RPGs came out, they still weren’t on the horizon, and they were just pulled from the marketplace and Renegade them to Fantasy Grounds.
That makes me concerned about the amount of resources that will be brought to bear on mechanically robust systems. I’m also concerned that it may take longer to figure out how to map Demiplane interfaces into Roll20 than it would take to build things from scratch.
Looking Forward
I don’t want to end on a note that’s too negative. I would love to get a roadmap for other projects beyond the 2024 D&D character sheet. I think that would do a lot to assuage my concerns. The language around the 2024 sheet implies there is a single team and progress is on one game at a time.
It looks like Roll20 is going the same route as Demiplane, and making character sheets that are “building blocks” that can be plugged into one another in multiple ways, which means some of the work on the 2024 character sheet is work on other games. My assumption on this is based on seeing some of the newer character sheets and their similar structures. If that’s true, maybe once the 2024 sheet is out of beta, it will clear a logjam.
https://whatdoiknowjr.com/2024/08/02/looking-at-roll20s-new-dd-character-sheet-beta/
#800080 #CharacterSheet #DD2014 #DD2024 #Demiplane #dnd #DnD5e #DungeonsDragons #Roll20 #VTTs
This anthology is interesting in that these aren’t brand-new adventures, so they bring with them some expectation of consistency with the original adventures. While we know that WotC is looking for potentially problematic content to address, the adventure itself carries an expectation of unfolding the same way that the original did.
While looking at this chapter, I pulled out my handy copy of OAR4 The Lost City that Goodman Games produced a few years ago. However, I was looking at it as much to reference the older adventure as I was looking for differences in the 5e conversion.
Original Credits for The Lost City (1982)
Design: Tom Moldvay
Development: Tom Moldvay, Jon Pickens
Editing: Harold Johnson, Jon Pickens
Art: Jim Holloway, Harry Quinn, Stephen D. Sullivan
Playtesting: Dave Cook, Helen Cook, Clint Johnson, Steve Kaszar, Bill Wilkerson, Jeff Wyndham, and the Kent State University Gamer’s Guild
What’s Different
Other than the 5e statistics, not a lot changes in this adventure, although I didn’t do an in-depth reread. At least not until we get into the Extending the Adventure section. There is a Raiders of the Lost Ark homage in one of the hallways that gets removed, and some of the factions that were more gender-specific become more egalitarian. That does make the factions feel a little less dogmatic than in the original. There are some creatures that the original adventure notes are good ways for the DM to impart information to the PCs if the DM wants, and this adventure makes some of that adventure sharing a little more explicit.
Both the original adventure and the adaptation contain an “Extending the Adventure” section, but the original adventure has some additional example dungeon levels that aren’t completely fleshed out, not unlike In Search of the Unknown, an early D&D adventure that was more about presenting dungeon levels and conjecturing on what might be located in different sections. This conversion adds two potential extensions, one leading to the underground Cynidecean city itself, and one leading to a temple of Zargon that may involve Zargon the Returner . . . returning. Considering he’s a CR 17 creature, you probably don’t want to spring this on 1st level characters.
What’s Different, Part Two
I didn’t do a strict reread of OAR 4 The Lost City, the license D&D 5e conversion done by Goodman Games back in 2020. If you haven’t heard of them the OAR series (Original Adventures Reincarnated) were books done by Goodman Games that featured interviews with TSR staff, essays about the adventure featured in the book, pages reproducing the original adventure (sometimes more than once if there were different printings with changes), and a D&D 5e conversion. While most of the body of the adventure was the same, but with 5e statistics or presentation, there were often expansions of the material in addition to the conversion. For example, OAR 1 Into the Borderlands populated the dungeon levels that were left partially undefined in Into the Unknown, and it does something similar with the example dungeon levels in The Lost City.
Beyond being a lot more literal in its conversion, meaning that some of the factions retain their gender restrictions, NPCs aren’t expressly depicted as sharing information that isn’t asked of them, etc., OAR 4 The Lost City has its own version of Zargon.
Measuring Zargons
The Zargon that appears in OAR 4 is a CR 13 creature, while the Zargon presented in Quests from the Infinite Staircase is CR 17. Some of the highlights of this disparity include the following:
- Zargon’s CR 13 version actually as an armor class one higher than CR 17 Zargon
- CR 17 Zargon has 78 more hit points than CR 13 Zargon
- Both Zargons have Legendary Resistance
- CR 13 Zargon regenerates 5 more hit points per round than CR 17 Zargon
- Both Zargons have multi-attack, but CR 13 Zargon has more attacks
- The damage potential (i.e. the average damage if all attacks hit, of CR 13 Zargon is 133 hp, versus CR 17 Zargon’s 71 hp
- Both Zargons are +12 to hit
- Both Zargons have a slime-based area attack that recharges on a 5-6, but CR 13 Zargon averages 18 points of damage and blinds targets, while CR 17 Zargon averages 38 points of damage and inflicts the poisoned condition
- CR 13 Zargon has Legendary Actions which let it do 10 points of damage without an attack roll, make three tentacle attacks, or cast a spell (for 1, 2, or 3 actions)
- CR 17 Zargon has three reactions per round, which allow him to counter a spell and cause 6 points of damage to the caster, or to make a save-based attack to do 7 points of poison damage
Some of the creatures that first appeared in the OAR series, and later appeared in D&D 5e products, had the same stats that they had in the OAR product, which I’m assuming is a case of editorial approval and oversight. That’s why this Zargon being different is interesting to me, because that’s not the case here. It’s also a reminder that I have no idea what the magic spreadsheet of monster design actually weighs in monster design for WotC, because the CR 13 Zargon hits just as consistently for more damage than the version that’s 5 CR higher.
I’m also not a fan of the move from Legendary Actions to additional reactions for some creatures. I guess there is concern that people don’t remember to take Legendary Actions, but I’m not sure that giving something multiple reactions fixes that problem, because I think I’m more likely to forget that something has more than one reaction per round than to forget it’s Legendary Actions.
Artwork
We’ve got 18 pieces of art in this chapter, including a picture of the door in the Infinite Staircase that leads to this adventure, various locations, the masks worn by the Cynidiceans, and five maps, including an underground cityscape. There is an interesting mosaic showing the rise of Zargon, as well as an image of Zargon rising from the lake of slime. While these suitably creepy images of our Returning mono-horned, mono-eyed monster, the best image of Zargon is in the appendix with his stats.
The Framing Device
The setup connecting this adventure to the story framework of Quests from the Infinite Staircase is pretty brief, about on par with the connections we got with Keys from the Golden Vault. There is a paragraph detailing the wish that Nafas has received, from people asking for deliverance from the creature that destroyed their society. This is specifically framed as “scout this location out and let me know what’s going on there.”
There are also some notes on where you could place the ziggurat in Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, and Mystara. The most intriguing placement to me is setting it in Anauroch in the Forgotten Realms, because it probably takes less effort to frame this as a Netherese enclave that fell early in the empires history than it does trying to determine how the gods and Zargon fit into Dragonlance, or reconciling the difference between gods and immortals in Mystara.
Nafas’ directive works with the original premise of the adventure, i.e. try to find a way out once you get locked in, because it just requires the PCs to lean something to report back, and not the destruction of Zargon or his cult. That said, I wouldn’t have minded a more specific goal within Nafas’ request that gave the PCs a reason to keep looking around even once they find the exit.
Adventure Overview
There will be some spoilers going on in here, so if you want to be surprised, this may be the time to find another corridor to explore.
This may not be the first time you hear this setup in this book, but you run into a pyramid in the desert. In this case, it’s a ziggurat, a stepped pyramid. As soon as you enter, the door closes behind you, and you need to find an exit. As you are looking for that exit, you run into four different factions, three of which don’t work well with one another, and another one actively working against everyone else.
This is an adventure for 1st level characters, and if you’re using story-based advancement, you get your levels when you first run into a faction, when you first enter the fourth tier of the ziggurat, and when you escape.
Deep underneath the ziggurat is the remains of Cynidicea, a city that fell long ago when the inhabitants encountered an aberration exiled from the Nine Hells, Zargon the Returner. In the time since the city fell, everyone has adopted the custom of wearing masks. While everyone from Cynidicea wears a mask, all of the members of a faction wear matching masks. Three of the factions want to help Cynidicea return to its former glory, but each faction is beholden to a different god of their old pantheon. While not enemies, the factions are all rivals due to their affiliation with different deities. The fourth faction is the cult of Zargon, which is dominating the descendants of the Cynidiceans, and occasionally sacrificing them to their deity.
One thing you may notice is that for an adventure called The Lost City, the adventure doesn’t actually take place in a city. The people are present in the ziggurat because there are important locations with meaning to the fallen city. This includes holy sites for all three of the gods, as well as the crypts of the fallen king and queen of Cynidicea. There is also a whole level that is dominated by the cult of Zargon.
When the PCs meet the three factions not aligned with Zargon, they are given the opportunity to join them. Joining them makes them friendlier. Not joining them makes them a little more aloof, and if they join a different faction, the other factions become wary of them, not fully trusting them or wanting to share resources.
There are several places where the PCs run into ghosts and other undead. It behooves the PCs not to attack undead on sight, not just because they might lose, but because more than one ghost in the ruins provides information, either providing additional context for what’s going on, or telling the PCs where the exit is. On the other hand, there are still skeletons, zombies, and ghouls that are less than friendly to people enamored of breathing.
There are several places where the PCs can find evidence of what happened to Cynidicea, including a mural that shows the rise of Zargon and the fall of the city. It’s actually pretty noteworthy to look at how many set ups and pay offs there are when it comes to story. You can find out about the relationship of the king and queen, a priest and his brother, and some of the events that led to Cynidicea’s demise. Assuming your players are willing to talk to some of the undead in the ruins, it’s actually pretty easy to provide them enough information to point them at these mysteries. In fact, there are a number of people willing to share information in the adventure, which I appreciate, given that some older adventures provide a lot of hoops to jump through before the PCs get actionable intelligence.
Extending the Adventure
There are two places in the ziggurat where the PCs can either find a passage to a new location, or, if you don’t want to explore more of Cynidiciea story, they find some collapsed passages. The new underground version of Cynidicea has a nice map, various locations, and notes on how the factions are operating within this city. If you want to adventure here, you’ll be making up your own information based on the location information provided.
If you wander down the passage that leads to The Mouth of Zargon, the encounter area could give the PCs whiplash, depending on when they explore this section of the ziggurat. If the PCs have already picked up a level, they might be able to handle most of this section of the ziggurat, since the range of creatures is from CR ⅛ to CR 4 . . . until you get to the primary altar of Zargon, which includes a CR 7 aberration in service to Zargon, and even worse, if the cultists of Zargon manage to sacrifice someone, the CR 17 Zargon shows up to make his presence known. A party that can take on Zargon is going to steamroll most of this section of the ziggurat, but there is a wide gap between 2nd level and “can take on a CR 17 aberration.”
Thoughts on Chapter 2: The Lost City
Given some of the adventures I ran into when I started my D&D career, I think I would have absorbed this a little better than Keep on the Borderlands, if only because it’s pretty clear that the PCs have a goal, find the exit, and if they are curious about any of the mysteries they run into, that’s on them to explore beyond finding the exit. While I already mentioned that “you find a mysterious pyramid in the desert” is a pretty common starting point for earlier adventures, it does strike me that at least some of the setup of this adventure echoes Jenell Jaquay’s Dark Tower, although that adventure has two very stratified factions rather than a collection of opposed factions suffering at the hands of a fourth.
I mentioned this above, but I wish there was an additional objective to tie this into Nafas’ request. Maybe describing a specific item in Darius’ office that is needed for summoning Zargon, meaning that the PCs would have done a measurable good for the Cynidicean descendants, instead of just doing a reconnaissance run through the ziggurat that may not gather than much information depending on how focused the PCs are on just finding the exit and using it.
If you would like to check out The Lost City in its original form, or do some more research on Zargon the Returner, and you don’t mind sending game-buying funds my way, you can use the affiliate link below. Thanks!
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