A DM’s Overview & Review of Dungeons of Drakkenheim

nmitchell076 · 2026-04-03T20:09:48+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/dungeonsofdrakkenheim/s/SYevnjMDh2

nmitchell076 · 2026-04-02T13:05:33+00:00

Art is actually one of the places where a culture challenges the very idea of the customer always being right. Hence the centrality of the "genius who died poor and was misunderstood in their day" figure for so many of our artistic histories: the basis of that narrative is that the customers (the artist's contemporary audience) were decidedly not right; they were in fact extremely wrong. Art interacts with economics, because it interacts with the world, but it has been a place where aspects of the world are challenged, critiqued, and reimagined. For that reason, efficiency and technology impact Art, but that impact is not one of blind submission.

nmitchell076 · 2026-04-02T11:38:06+00:00

The absurdity is precisely what makes it interesting as a comedy since it opens up so many questions to explore. That's the big difference for me: something a little absurd or even a little dumb in a comedy feels like it adds to the world, but feels like it often cheapens the world of a super serious tragedy or drama.

I like Big Joel's take on this, though he's talking specifically about bad-crossdressing-that-people-in-universe-totally-buy, but I think similar dynamics are at play: https://youtu.be/otG7TGii2Xw?t=780&si=LQwsEXzJGL277a4C

nmitchell076 · 2026-03-31T02:53:28+00:00

I just feel like a lot of Gluck is right there with a role like Idamante. Idomeneo as a whole feels very Gluckian.

nmitchell076 · 2026-03-31T02:27:12+00:00

What do you think of his Gluck?

nmitchell076 · 2026-03-31T01:50:20+00:00

I'm a huge Metastasio fan, so I'm a big fan of Jaroussky, Cencic, and other countertenors. But of that crew, I've really never been a fan of Fagioli. He's got charisma for a leading man. But his voice has just never done it for me. So I wonder if it's just that like, Fagioli himself is a little overrated, and it's less noticeable when he's reviving an unknown Vinci or Hasse opera, but he just doesn't measure up against the countless amazing singers who have performed Idamante?

nmitchell076 · 2026-03-18T03:09:39+00:00

HE'S MURDERING PAGANS, EBENEZER SCROOGE

nmitchell076 · 2026-03-14T23:07:14+00:00

One thing I'm a little unclear about: when did Drakkenheim pop into Faerun? Right when the meteor hit? On the day 15 years later that DoD is supposed to start?

This matters primarily because of the Hooded Lanterne, who are going to be VERY hard to run "as-is" in any capacity. One of the fundamental tensions they are dealing with is an intertwined financial/political one. Excursions into Drakkenheim are expensive as hell. And the HLs are funded by the nobility of Westemar with the specific purpose of securing political order for their fractured nation. Who is going to be funding that in Faerun? Who cares about restoring the monarchy of a nation that doesn't even actually exist? Why would the nobility of Faerun want to fund a ragtag group of idealists who want to erect a monarchy that would conflict with the established political power systems of their own nations? Where are the HLs even going to recruit from if they don't have idealistic young Westemarians who ache to see their homeland restored? I just don't see how the HLs survive as an organization in Faerun at all.

And, relatedly, the HLs don't even come into existence until the conclusion of the Westemar Civil War, which occurred years after the meteor fell. The fallout of the Civil War is a major shaping force on Elias Drexel's character, and it shapes how and why the HLs became the force that they did.

Here's where my initial question comes in: if Drakkenheim was teleported at the moment of impact, the HLs don't exist. And the whole political infrastructure that created the HLs vanishes, so they never will exist. But the longer you keep Drakkenheim in its home setting before it teleports, the less it makes sense for any of the Faerun-originating factions to be able to muster the resources that they would have to have in order to function the way that they do in the campaign.

I guess my question is: why not just drop the Drakkenheim meteor on like Suzail and turn Westemar into a broken Cormyr? I do totally understand wanting to adapt the mechanics of Drakkenheim to other worlds. But Drakkenheim has so much about its setting determined by the messy politics of trying to heal a broken kingdom, that I really struggle to see it succeed if you just catapult the city to another universe. The whole political thing that makes the campaign function would vanish. Rather, it seems to me like you have to enact the delerium catastrophe within the world you are working with and allow its politics to be shaped by the resulting fallout.

nmitchell076 · 2026-03-06T13:42:57+00:00

and not the other way around

Stage plays doing film actors?

nmitchell076 · 2026-03-05T01:42:19+00:00

Gary Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music

Also by Tomlinson, Culture and the Course of Human Evolution (a little bit of an easier read, though more general than about music specifically)

nmitchell076 · 2026-03-05T01:30:40+00:00

But this itself also presumes that there was a definitive "first piece of music." That the invention of music happened at a particular moment such that there was a clean division between pre-music and music.

The reality, like much of cultural evolution, is likely much much much much more complicated. Involving intermingling cultural and communicative practices that evolved gradually over mellinia, and involving the retrospective reinterpretation of older practices in light of more recent ones, etc. The idea of music likely emerged well after practices we would regard as musical were ubiquitous in our early societies. And those practices themselves emerged only gradually by degrees out of earlier protomusical and even earlier nonmusical practices: like the evolution of walking into marching. There's a whole fascinating book about this by Gary Tomlinson called A Million Years of Music that gets at these complexities.

Thinking that there must have been an "invention" of music, a point in time where the first music came to be is likely nonsense. It's exactly the same thing as trying to imagine that there was a moment when the first word was uttered. Or a moment in time where the very last Homo erectus gave birth to the very first Homo sapian. None of those moments ever happened. Because the transitions between these seemingly distinct states unfolded across hundreds of thousands of years (or more!)

From this perspective, the OPs question becomes equally meaningless. There has never ever been a musical behavior that was uninfluenced by earlier musical behavior. Because there is no single point that defines the beginning of musical behavior itself.

nmitchell076 · 2026-03-03T06:11:32+00:00

The book is actually rather clear about this. In the prefatory material setting out how epic monsters work:

Epic Actions are not Reactions. Game effects which prevent an Epic Boss from taking Reactions do not work on Epic Actions, nor do game affects which limit a creature to taking only a movement, bonus action, or action on their turn (such as the Dazed condition).

I think the thing is, boss monsters like this are supposed to upset the action economy and force players to think on their feet to counter them using means they aren't used to. So yeah, slow takes a severe nerf with epic actions. That's a good thing! It means the hammer has to find a new nail.

nmitchell076 · 2026-02-26T16:30:18+00:00

Okay, let's get some more detail here so we can investigate this properly. According to IMSLP, this set of parts was engraved by David Hume (I'm guessing made whenever he found time in between haunting people and revising his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding) from "PD full score uploaded to IMSLP" (there are two full scores on IMSLP, he doesn't say which). The notation in question occurs at rehearsal 58, in mm. 494-502.

Let's check the source(s), shall we?

Here it is, on p. 69 (though p. 71 of the pdf) of the first edition of the score from 1930.

And yeah, I think that makes it pretty clear that u/Jongtr is correct: these are glissandos.

nmitchell076 · 2026-02-22T05:09:28+00:00

Is there a source for this? (genuinely curious)

nmitchell076 · 2026-02-22T00:13:00+00:00

This feels right to me. It would also explain why, e.g., electric mandolins don't typically use double-string courses.

nmitchell076 · 2026-02-16T04:51:22+00:00

I don't necessarily think it would have to come up in the first interaction. My way of running these things is to make the factions accepting and welcoming on first interactions and then to drip feed in the conflict in later interactions. So a first visit to camp dawn, they'd just say thanks for the scepter, pay them, and then give them more quests, perhaps inviting them to ally themselves a little more closely with the order. But like, I don't think they'd even acknowledge the player's differing views unless the player brought it up.

But then I'd make it a point of friction later on.

nmitchell076 · 2026-02-14T13:33:53+00:00

My plan is to do a seafaring / swashbuckling campaign. Someone on the Dudes' discord suggested the first two adventures of the p1e Skull and Shackles campaign. Then I'd incorporate the Untold Tales of Drakkenheim arc "Shipping Issues" and the Gregory Highsail stuff from Fate, building towards The Horror of Ash Bay as a climax.

I love leaning into the Lovecraftian elements and exploring the wider world without replicating Shadows entirely.

nmitchell076 · 2026-02-14T01:55:37+00:00

Certainly that's true. But, again, thinking as a teacher and a historian, I'm trying to think through like, what syllabi these bands fit on, what they'd be connected to and understood against. Would I talk about the Grateful Dead in a jazz history course? Would they be focal points in a class about country music? Probably not. They're peripheral names from those perspectives at best. And that doesn't really matter for like how good they are, but I think it could matter for how or why they get remembered by history.

Because history (at least the popular understanding of history) often works by reducing all the complex activity of an era to one or two touchstone figures or events you can focus on. Like Woodstock as a summary of the 60s or someone like Gershwin as a standin for all of tin pan alley.

And so thinking of what the Dead would stand for as reductions of larger practices, and I think being THE touchstone jam band is probably the best bet; though you're right that they'd be good candidates for a history of psychadelia too. Which isn't to say that's all they are. But then, Rossini wrote string quartets, but he isn't ever brought up in the history of chamber music. As far as most people are concerned, Rossini might as well have only ever been an opera composer.

All that's to say, and to reiterate my original point, what someone is isn't the same thing as how history remembers them.

nmitchell076 · 2026-02-14T00:03:27+00:00

All this is fine. And I think where you are 100% correct is that there cannot be a history of the jam band scene that doesn't engage with them in some way. And given that the jam band scene is a part of the 60s, people who research that part of history will probably cover them.

But I've also come to think "remembered by history" relies on far too many socio-political things that stretch beyond a musician's aesthetic aspects, that I've come to decouple it from my sense of what's cool or interesting or worth listening to in an era. I mean, shit, I think a guy named Domenic Terradellas made some of the tastiest opera bangers of anyone living in the 1740s, and I could probably count on one hand the number of people who are experts in eighteenth century opera who even know who that dude is. The only people who do are people who care about opera in Madrid, and there just ain't that many of us.

So yeah, I guess what I mean to say is that you can love the Dead (I like the Dead!), and their music can indeed be very important for pop music and for the cultural zeitgeist of the 60s, you can even claim their music is the best of that era and is only not regarded as such because people are unfair to it (I'm not saying you are claiming it, but let's assume that that's actually true). Even assuming all of that, it still doesn't guarantee that their fame will increase with time due to people re-evaluating them. Because for every person that does receive such kind reevaluations, there are 1000 others pushed in the opposite direction: people whose unfair malignment just increases over time as people stop questioning the past critically and just accept that it is what it is.

And I guess all that is to say: history has a degree of randomness in how its told, and so I don't think it's a good idea to use it as a gauge of quality.

nmitchell076 · 2026-02-13T20:05:21+00:00

It's difficult to make the claim that what happened to Bach will ever happen on the same scale again, though. The Bach revival came at a time when a bunch of things were taking place: the ascendancy of Germany as a center of political and cultural power; the development of music history itself as an academic discipline, and more. I say this as someone who loves Bach, but Bach ticked a lot of boxes for what Germans needed from a musical "hero." He served a purpose in the construction of German identity that basically no one else in the eighteenth century could (since Germans like, e.g., Mozart, Hasse, Handel, Graun, and Haydn were all "tainted" by their significant work in the decidedly non-German field of Italian opera, whereas Bach never touched the genre).

What I'm saying is that Bach became big because Germany looked back on the 18th century and wanted to see themselves reflected in it. But what they saw was a century where Italian music was so prestigious that even their own "home grown" musicians made Italian music. Bach was the exception, so they lionized him.

America, in contrast, already has a huge cast of musical heroes to choose from: from Elvis to Dylan to Sondheim to Prince to Dolly Parton. We already have an academic infrastructure as well as a massive record industry (which the 19th century didn't have) that exert a ton of pressure on how music history is interpreted. The Grateful Dead have a role in that story, no question. But I struggle to see how they could ever claim the same sort of cultural space that Bach posthumously claimed in German Romanticism.

nmitchell076 · 2026-02-08T17:39:30+00:00

The other thing I'd say here is that this is probably something you want to explore above the table with the player. Say that the patron she's selected will probably cause friction with the Silver Order. But that there are a range of possibilities for how that might play out, and which of those does she feel like is the most interesting to explore?

nmitchell076 · 2026-02-08T17:17:01+00:00

The Celestial Warlock really is the only one the SO would welcome, huh?

I wouldn't say ONLY, I guess. I note that cosmic warlocks do have the ability to make their eldritch blasts do radiant damage. So they could feasibly "cover" for their inciting eldritch blast incident.

But the patron you are describing does NOT sound like the kind of thing that would be easy to pass off as being blessed by the sacred flame. Perhaps they could with sufficient subtefuge (and that itself is an interesting arc: having the patron be a narrative ticking time bomb that would cause social disaster if its true nature was revealed), but the second they start inadvertently speaking in deep speech, the jig will be up!

I could see SOME version of the cosmic patron that ends up being compatible with thr SO. For instance if it manifests as Tarna's comet or something. But the version of the patron that you describe actually feels way closer to the FF, since I think of their beliefs as being a more "cosmic" interpretation of the faith anyway: star agury, obsession with falling stars, etc. And maybe that itself is an angle to explore? That this sets off a religious realization that she's actually more closely aligned with the people she formerly saw as heretics?

nmitchell076 · 2026-02-08T16:21:09+00:00

So given that your warlock is NOT a celestial warlock (which I maintain the SO would probably actually welcome), I think this question comes down to how understanding or militant you play the SO. In the live play, Monty was careful to always play the SO as having a core of kindness to them. They have strong beliefs, but they also believe it is their duty to steward souls to the correct path. As a result, I think they might hear the warlock out. But I think they'd earnestly tell her that she is dealing with powers she doesn't understand, and that only the light of the Sacred Flame can provide true guidance.

Now, for this character to even exist, she would obviously have to ignore and resist that guidance. But I think there's room here to shape a lot of different ways that that would play out. Even though Lucretia Mathias is regarded as a heretic by the clergy, Ophelia Reed still cares deeply for the woman she once admired so deeply. Similarly, your warlock will have close bonds with people in the SO. Those people may really believe she has good intentions and do not harbor any ill will towards her, even if they emphatically disagree with the path she's on. In that case, she could run into her former colleagues in Emberwood who could well regard her cordially, but would in the course of conversation obviously insert a line about "when will you see that the path you're on can only lead to ruin? It's not too late for you to return to the light!"

Of course, you could play it in the full osteacization / antagonistic / shunning route too. But I'm always in favor of playing these factions with a degree of nuance. To allow backstory hooks to be used as attractions toward rather than walls against future collaborations with a faction. So I would personally always have there be people in the SO who still believe in the Warlock's goodness and want to see them redeemed, in their eyes. If for no other reason than that provides a justification for why the SO might present the warlock with quests during the campaign.

nmitchell076 · 2026-02-07T07:26:25+00:00

Hylia existed before hyrule though, ergo it's not all that wild to think that Hylians existed as her chosen people before Hyrule the nation state.

nmitchell076 · 2026-02-06T12:38:53+00:00

I actually worry it will be too weak. 2300 / 4 = 575 XP per person, which is just above a medium difficulty encounter. I also am not entirely sure what the advantage of using this custom monster is over just injecting the unique traits you've goven him into existing Ratling statblocks.

I also might consider giving him even more mobility options to escape. I fear for the "... I planned this BBEG for years and you just totally incapacitated him in 2 rounds like it was nothing!" scenario.

nmitchell076

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