Warlock's Buried D&D Lore Won My Trust, But It Still Won't Teach You Tabletop D&D

If you strip out every dice roll, every character sheet and the entire table of people you would normally play Dungeons & Dragons with, can a video game still make you feel like you are playing your character? I already run a Hexblade Warlock at my own table, which happens to be the exact class this new D&D game builds its entire magic system around.

I have already covered what the class itself actually is and how split the reaction to it has been. This time I want to get into how the gameplay actually plays, how much of it is real D&D lore, and my honest verdict on whether it is a good way to pique someone's interest if they are new to the hobby.

The Combat Plays Like a Warhammer Wizard, Not a Video Game Hotbar

The actual gameplay is probably the bit that has hooked me most. It is not just point and click fireball, then wait for a cooldown bar to fill back up. You are levitating objects, chucking enemies around, using gust of wind on the environment, and trapping people in black tentacles. It is basically a toolbox of spells.

I would describe it as less video game hotbar, more a Warhammer wizard having a go with the winds of magic. Combat, exploration and puzzles are all running off the same systems.

I Thought the Protagonist's Patron Was My Own Hexblade Backstory, and Apparently So Did Half of Reddit

My own tabletop character is a Hexblade Warlock, an ex pirate captain who nearly died, ran into the Raven Queen, and ended up with a pact where she is now supposed to help keep the balance between life and death. So when I first saw the game's protagonist, with the sword, the dark magic and the slightly questionable supernatural arrangement, I thought that was basically my character.

Apparently half of Reddit thought the same thing, and I think loads of people immediately assumed the same thing, that her patron was the Raven Queen or a straightforward Hexblade. Then it turned out her patron is actually Tasha, which had me putting my own character sheet away. I am actually a little pleased about that, because the part I enjoy about playing a warlock is not just Eldritch Blast until the problem goes away, it is the pact. Your power belongs to a relationship, there is somebody on the other end of it, and depending how your Dungeon Master plays it that relationship can be helpful, manipulative, completely terrifying, or maybe all three before you finish breakfast.

The developers have said the warlock class specifically gave them both the magical creativity they wanted and a relationship with a powerful patron they could build the whole story around, which if you squint is kind of the same basic pitch as Anakin and Palpatine except with slightly better dental work. There is still some skepticism out there because of Dark Alliance, and fair enough, but what has been shown already feels a little closer to what I would actually want. The most important thing they have said is that they are "building a game that is intended for players that could have never played Dungeons and Dragons." Keep that line in your back pocket, because it is going to land very differently later on.

Tasha Is Secretly Iggwilv, One of D&D's Oldest Villains Going Back to the 1970s

When I first saw Tasha in the trailer, I clocked her as potentially a bespoke patron built just for this game, which is normally the route these games go down: new character, new story, powerful witch, clearly going to be a problem later. Except Tasha turns out to be proper D&D lore, and not lore from a book that came out three years ago.

Tasha is secretly Iggwilv, the Witch Queen, one of D&D's oldest villains, dating all the way back to the 1970s and the work of Gary Gygax, who co-created D&D in the first place. Her adoptive mother is Baba Yaga, basically D&D's version of the ultimate evil witch, the one every other witch in the game gets compared to.

She is also the Tasha from Tasha's Hideous Laughter, a spell that has been sitting in the core Player's Handbook this whole time. If you have played any D&D at all you might have heard someone cast it, and it tells you precisely nothing about who she is. The actual answer is buried in a specialist sourcebook, Tasha's Cauldron of Everything.

What looks like a mysterious witch made up for this game is actually about 40 years of D&D history in disguise, and that is exactly the sort of lore rabbit hole I would have stayed up chasing on game FAQs at 1am in 2003.

Darkon's Collapse in the Game Matches the Real Ravenloft Timeline From 2021

It gets better, because Darkon is not new either. It is one of Ravenloft's domains of dread, traditionally ruled by a lich called Azalin Rex. In the game, Azalin has disappeared and Darkon is basically falling apart. I assumed that was its own invented story, but that is pretty much where the actual tabletop setting currently sits. Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, from 2021, already had Azalin vanish and Darkon start being consumed after losing its dark lord.

I really like this part, because technically the developers did not have to do any of this. Wizards of the Coast's own policy is that the tabletop game is canon, and novels, comics and video games are just separate expressions of it. They could have taken Tasha, Darkon and Ravenloft and gone their own way with them, but they have not. They are digging into properly deep D&D lore and building the game around it, and as a lore driven person I do appreciate that. It is a bit of a shame the same cannot be said for everything coming out of Wizards of the Coast at the moment, but that is a separate story.

The Mechanics Break Tabletop Rules, and I Do Not Mind

Mechanically the game is much less precious about the lore. There is obviously no dice rolling, and no picking between Hexblade, Archfey or Fiend for 45 minutes before landing on the one you always planned to pick anyway. Same energy as staring at a Warhammer Codex and then still building the army you had in your head before you even opened it.

The protagonist is given abilities that do not map onto the tabletop warlock at all. Even control weather is not a warlock spell in current tabletop D&D, I believe that is cleric, druid and wizard. Somewhere someone is probably filing a copyright complaint, but I do not think it bothers me, and I say this as someone who already plays this class at the table.

What makes my character feel like a warlock is not physically rolling the dice, it is where the power came from. My Hexblade is tied to the Raven Queen, the whole character grew out of that relationship. The power is not simply mine, there is something on the other side of it, a bargain, an expectation, and potentially at some point a bill. That is warlock to me. The mechanics matter too, I like choosing my invocations and actually getting into combat instead of standing six feet back on Eldritch Blast, and those choices are what make my warlock mine, the same way nobody wants a balanced faction in a board game, you want one that feels like yours.

I do not need the game to copy my character sheet, but I do need enough freedom in the protagonist's magic that by halfway through my version of her feels different from somebody else's, different spells, different upgrades, different ways of solving problems. Most importantly I want the relationship with Tasha to actually mean something. If she is just the woman who shows up in a cutscene now and then and says well done, here is another spell, I think we have lost the most interesting part of the whole thing. But if I am constantly wondering what she wants, whether I can trust her, whether taking more power from her is going to come back round to ruin my week, then yes, that feels like being a warlock.

My Verdict: A Good Doorway Into D&D's World, Not a Way to Learn the Game

So is this actually a good way to start Dungeons & Dragons, like the marketing claims it is? Honestly, no. I do think it is a good way to discover the world of Dungeons & Dragons, hopefully, but I do not think playing it means you have started playing D&D, because the bit that is missing is the table. There is no Dungeon Master sat there watching you completely ignore the adventure they spent three evenings preparing because somebody mentioned an interesting looking door instead. That is D&D, and video games just cannot reproduce it.

Even Baldur's Gate 3, to an extent, is probably as close as we have got, but it is not the same thing, and this game is further away than that. It looks like an action adventure game that borrows D&D's worlds, spells, characters and ideas, and I am fine with that. They are not trying to make me play tabletop D&D with a controller.

I would not tell somebody that playing it means they will understand what D&D is like. I would tell them they might understand why people love the world of D&D, and that it might pique their interest. The thing that makes tabletop work is not Tasha or Ravenloft or knowing what an Eldritch invocation is, it is sitting down with other people and then "collectively making increasingly poor decisions." That is the hobby, including that awkward first step of not knowing what you are doing or whether you will be comfortable roleplaying in front of people, which is part of the barrier you eventually have to cross.

If You Actually Want to Start D&D, Grab These Two Things Instead

If somebody messaged me this week saying they wanted to try D&D, I would tell them to go grab Heroes of the Borderlands, get a few friends together and just play it. That is literally what it is for, with pre made characters and a guided first adventure, no need for everyone to turn up having studied the Player's Handbook like they are sitting their exams again.

I am still the biggest advocate of Lost Mine of Phandelver, honestly. If somebody in the group actually wants to run it rather than just play it, that adventure has been the go to for new tables since fifth edition launched, and there is a reason it has never really been replaced. Think of it as D&D's equivalent of a gateway board game, nobody hands a newcomer Twilight Imperium on session one.

If this game is the thing that gets somebody from thinking D&D looks too complicated to thinking they quite like this world and want to give it a go, that is probably the best thing it can do. But it is approaching the doorway, it is absolutely not the room.

The Bigger Story: Why Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro Are Under Fire Right Now

Normally that is where I would leave it, but there is more going on. Tailoring everything for beginners, the game itself, the statements, the interviews, is great if you are a beginner. It is a lot less great if you are one of the rest of us who has been playing for years and would quite like D&D to still remember we exist. That tension is not just me being precious about it, it is tangled up in why Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro are extremely controversial right now for reasons that go way beyond one video game.

Looking into this game, I ended up considerably further down the Hasbro rabbit hole than I meant to. The president of Wizards of the Coast, who was publicly talking this game up when it was announced, is no longer in that job and has already stepped down into an advisory role. There have also been cancelled D&D game projects. Now Netflix have announced a Ravenloft series about Strahd, which sounds brilliant, except it has landed right after another D&D Netflix series set in the Forgotten Realms that was already in development and then died.

On one side you have this game, a new Netflix show, more video games and more tabletop books, all of it built to push D&D in front of a much bigger, much more beginner friendly audience. Underneath all of that, things are considerably less tidy. As someone who plays a Hexblade Warlock, I should know by now that whenever somebody powerful offers you something exciting, you should probably read the terms of the pact first.

What is actually going on with Dungeons & Dragons right now, and why does it have this many people annoyed?