Blog update: Out with the old, in with the new... old?

So this has been a bit of a whirlwind of a couple of months. A lot of the stuff you see being published -- particularly the D&D and Digimon reviews, and any Pokemon let's play -- were all mostly done prior to my hiatus. They were all mostly just produced out of order, which was why I haven't published them before. Peeling back behind the curtain, I wrote the first reviews for the Liberator series Digimon in April; and more than half of the Mordenkainen D&D entries were done all the way back in last November.

It's just that getting things in order, formatting them (which is a nice little thing to do in-between work that doesn't require much brainpower) and spacing them up to cover my hiatus is what keeps a stream of posts here.

It is a nice pace for the blog, though. I do enjoy having longer, more substantial articles that are more... 'timeless', so to speak, compared to chasing whatever episode was newest or whatever. Some things like the One Piece live action or Marvel shows might still crop up here and there, but it will be the minority.

Seasonal reviews have also been good for me. I know that I am doing Daredevil and Bleach episode-by-episode, expect seasonal reviews for some other TV shows. I know that's how I'm going to handle some shows like Spider-Noir, and if I ever finish the CW-DC catalogue.

I also have been doing a bit of a cleanup for my older posts -- circa 2014 to 2017 I did a lot of quantity over quality, rapid-firing posts to ratchet up the numbers. Not all the reviews were good, particularly manga reviews that I did to catch up with weekly reviews. If you've been noticing the numbers changing in the older posts, that's because I've been quietly archiving and deleting the older reviews. Some were just essentially one or two paragraph forum posts anyway, and a lot of them used strong, crass reactionary language that I don't really reflect who I am currently. I really was trying to ape youtube reviews back in the day, I think.

So yeah... My Hero Academia, Bleach, Nanatsu no Taizai, Fairy Tail, Toriko, Attack on Titan and Black Clover reviews are now no longer on this site. They are archived, and if you ever feel the need to see them I'm happy to zip over my old reviews to you. Honestly, they were very weekly and reactionary, and I don't think anyone's looking at them anyway, If you feel the burning desire to check out my opinions of them more than a decade ago now (...time, god) I'm happy to lob them at anyone who asks. I thought of doing the same thing to some older One Piece content, but I need to find a nice cutoff point to where I started giving actual effort into those particular reviews. 

Also gone (or soon to be gone) are some old one-off TV and movie reviews that aren't superhero related, and many had... very poor writeups. If you know what they are, you're free to ask me for them too. I have them archived in my hard drive, and I'm not exactly ashamed of them...  but they are a product of my past. I was just trying to review everything, trying to talk about everything, and many of these reviews weren't made with any real understanding, analysis or much of a discussion beyond what's essentially a summary of the episode and about as much content of a forum post. Some of the lengths were about that of a forum post as well! Some older DC/Marvel animated movies were also similarly reviewed that way, and those have been removed as well.

There were a couple of other older superhero live-action TV shows who have been merged into 'season' reviews as well, since a lot of them were quite short and reactionary. I don't want to do this to every TV show just because I don't have a high opinion on the CW-DC stuff nowadays, but it's just to tidy up the blog so each individual post has a decent length. 

Ditto for a chunk of the reactionary Hearthstone content, particularly reaction/review stuff which definitely aren't relevant around three months after any given expansion. I did make a concession with the 'lore' articles, outdated as they are (and irrelevant as they are since the tcg has moved beyond actually adapting the Warcraft franchise and going into 'hats' territory) can stay. I did put in quite a bit of effort into them, and while Hearthstone has moved away from being particularly tied to Warcraft lore in terms of its themes (and WoW has moved through way too many expansions, toned down their novel production, and cycled their characters to be appealing to me) I feel like I'm proud enough of those articles to leave them up. 

There are also a couple of monster review pages whose wikis have gone belly-up and what is left is a mess with broken image links. For the most part I've been trying to host images either from larger wikis or from an imgur account, and that's a lesson I didn't learn until recently. 

By my notes, a total of slightly shy of 1000 (yes, that is one thousand) articles have been deleted (and a small portion like the D&D and some Digimon reviews were converted into newer articles). If my selections are right, you won't miss any of those thousand articles. 

It really boggles my mind how much I was trying to do -- manga, live action TV shows, monster reviews, card games... at this point, the identity of this blog, my writing interests and the engagement around them seems to be quite defined and I do want the backlog to reflect that.

I also feel like I might merge some of the articles, particularly super-old and rushed reviews for the older superhero shows, into huge mega half-season articles. I won't do it for everything, but some of my older DC/Marvel stuff are admittedly quite rushed... I don't have the desire to rewrite everything, but they look much neater in chunks like what I did with the recent Supergirl and Black Lightning final season reviews. So expect that to maybe hit some of the oldest of my superhero TV content, and probably things like Dragon Ball Super episode reviews.

But enough about removing stuff... what about adding stuff?

As anyone that might be paying attention to my... extremely disorganized Digimon review revisions, I'm paying attention to some of the older articles. Many stand up quite well, but not all of them! I just did a big rewrite of D&D and did a bit of a MTG rewrite; and republished both of those. But some others could use a bit of a polish. It really depends on whether I feel like essentially republishing a majority of the rewritten articles, which I did with D&D and MTG since I rewrote everything more or less in order. But for everything else? Especially when I'm just rewriting parts of it? The older Digimon reviews will slowly get revised and reshelled out over time. It is a bit of a problem with the reviews that I have specific numbering systems! It's also... a lot less fun to be rigidly reviewing everything as per a system, which burns me out quite quickly, hence me rethinking how I want to revise or republish some monster reviews.

(For D&D, Fizban's -- which didn't need that much work but was still substandard, shorter reviews, is also up for a rewrite)

But in addition to refurbishing my old stuff... I also do want to move back to finishing up D&D 5th edition and finishing up on all the books I've never covered on this site! New stuff! Ravenloft, Dragonlance, Barrier Peaks, Vecna, Mind Flayers, all sorts of weird stuff! And that's before moving on to new (or rather, old) material as I'm quite excited in covering the 2E Monstrous Manual. 

There are a couple of new 5E D&D discussions I do want to do -- the 5E player races is a bit of a bug on my side that I do want to do at some point. I don't think I care enough to do classes, though. But 'appendix' style reviews for beast statblocks released in the adventures, and a "Rogues Gallery" of the named bosses I removed from my older reviews might be an option. That one will just take a particularly large amount of work.

And beyond that? I've been thumbing through a brand new 3.5E Monster Manual I find, and the Pathfinder 2E Monster Core... it'll be fun to go through a different set of ttrpg monsters!

Digimon, now -- my rewrites will continue. It will be sporadic, and some rescorings and rewrites will take priority. I did get through a chunk of the Olympos XII,  Frontier characters and 02 Armor evolutions, but not all of them. Video game bosses, baby Digimon and non-show lines that debuted without a significant media counterpart have also had poor reviews by my standards. These little extra rewrites will, hopefully in time, Ship-of-Theseus my entire Digimon review catalog pre-2026 without me needing to rewrite everything in a regimented way like my D&D and MTG articles. 

Also in general, all the introduction segments for the Digimon articles suck. I will rewrite them and make them less of a anime series review perspective, but rewriting intros is a lot less interesting to me than actual monster reviews, so that would probably take a while. (This extends to a lot of my older content like Pokemon, Resident Evil and MTG where my intros really try hard to summarize entire chunks of lore; when the same things tend to either get repeated or be entirely irrelevant to the monster review).

The X-Antibody articles are dire. I know. They are also some of the ones that are a bit less interesting to rewrite. Being numbered "episode X" now means those are probably ones I will re-publish and move the release date to a future time, depending if I ever get to the mood about talking about the X-antibodies.

Currently, the plan is to finish at 2025's releases -- I've done most of the legwork all the way up to Liberator and New Century's releases, but while I have a draft up for some of the Beatbreak partners, I won't be publishing/finishing those until the anime has finished airing it; so expect the Digimon reviews to go on another (hopefully shorter) hiatus after I hit the Toho Braves/Pendulum Warriors series. I think we went on a pretty good run for the Digimon reviews this time around, and particularly so with the engagement and the additional revisions to older articles. 

And, of course, my MTG rewrites is always a thing.

I'm done re-reviewing the entire Mirage block, after a massive, well, writer's block back in 2025 when I was doing a lot of the MTG. But I'm through with that, and with us entering the Weatherlight saga and me taking these reviews at a much slower pace to preserve quality, I do hope to get through all of the pre-Mirrodin blocks over the next couple of years, and catch up to where I stalled back in 2020 or whatever when I had my massive MTG hiatus.

I do love talking about Magic; it's just that the MTG articles really take a bit longer to write due to the average length of one of those. I suspect once I move past Mirage and through a bunch of the slower Weatherlight-themed blocks that I can blast through the older sets a bit faster. 

There have been questions about Yu-Gi-Oh as well, which I think is also overdue for a revamp. I did significantly less Yu-Gi-Oh than MTG, though, mostly because of how different the Yu-Gi-Oh release format is and how annoying it is that some cards that are significant in the anime/manga just only appear in random bonus side-booster sets. That said, I do want to take a crack of at least doing those articles again, at least the main expansions all throughout the original first series and maybe the GX era -- with more consistent image quality, too, which was a problem back in the day. 

I do think a lot of these older reviews that I am rewriting are all essentially new content enough that I can justify essentially reposting them if I do enough changes. One on top of mind are Resident Evil reviews, particularly the post-RE7 games and the remake series. I've since played through almost all of them (plus RE5) since I've done the reviews the first time around. These, I feel, will change quite significantly that I can justify to myself republishing them.

Anyway, a long self-indulgent talk about what I've been doing with my little corner of the internet. Over the next week, more reviews as usual!

Daredevil: Born Again S02E06 Review: AKA The Defenders

Daredevil, Born Again, Season 2, Episode 6: Requiem

This episode is a bit of a mixed bag compared to the previous one. We're setting up a three-episode escalation and conclusion after Vanessa's death, and to that end, actually having the Daredevil moral dilemma pushed front and foremost is amazing. 

The argument between Matt and Karen -- emotionally charged and with the show not really doubling down on either side of the argument too much -- is well done. Karen does acknowledge how killing Wesley all the way back in Daredevil's first season is still haunting her, but she doesn't regret it because it was self-defense and it protected them. Karen went quite close to pulling that trigger next to Bullseye's head in this episode, and Bullseye isn't even unwilling to let Karen go through it under his 'balance the scales' mania. There's a great yelling-discussion from Matt's end about how this is the one line that separates them from monsters like Bullseye... something that Karen wonders if they haven't crossed over it already.

It's the eternal argument, and it's something that I felt is quite similar to Matt and Foggy's discussion in the flashback last episode about how much does context matters. The fact that Bullseye is an unrepentant psychopath that killed Foggy is probably as relevant of a context as if their drug-dealing client gets into prison he'll get shanked. But of course, it wouldn't be a Daredevil story if Matt makes all the smartest choices instead of the most angsty one. 

The Kingpin, meanwhile, is having a lot of his plans crumble. Protesters outside, Mr. Charles making deals to replace the unstable mayor, and of course Vanessa's death. This ultimately culminates in a confrontation between Daredevil and Kingpin, and the choreography is pretty great as far as these things go, with a nice mix of Daredevil's agility compared to Kingpin's brute strength.

This fight takes place partially in front of the Rabbit in the Snowstorm painting, with blood splattering on the painting and Kingpin throwing Daredevil through the painting at one point. There's a great brief shot of Kingpin looking up at the painting with melancholy for a brief moment, before continuing with the fight, a nice showcase of just how much grief-driven and rage-driven he is now after Vanessa's death. 

Daredevil also comes with a rather unconventional request to Kingpin, that they... that they just stop and both leave New York after everyone else that they have both lost. 

Of course, Kingpin isn't in a listening mood, and actively mocks Daredevil for his unwillingness to do the difficult choices (i.e. kill him), mirroring what Karen mentioned earlier to Bullseye. Daredevil may have won the fight, but as Kingpin points out -- Daredevil can't arrest Kingpin, and would not kill Kingpin, so how is he going to stop him? That's an interesting thing to end the confrontation on. 

There are some side-plots, the most interesting and the one spotlighted by a lot of media being Jessica Jones's big return... which amounts to a great introduction and a bit of a sidequest before she disappears from the episode. That was a bit annoying. Them also slapping Jessica with a bit of a 'her superpowers disappear every now and then because reasons' is also quite lazy and out of nowhere, and while I appreciate that they want to keep down the 'street' level mentality of this show, Jessica's super-strength isn't exactly that big of a game-changer. We did get to see her brutalize the men sent to harass her -- and a cameo by Danielle Cage (that's Dani, right?) and the brief hints that the government has been trying to get her and presumably Luke to work under them. 

It really would've been much better to slot this a bit earlier in the season when it's not so hectic, is what I'm saying. 

Karen, Angela and Soledad also later end up showing up at an anti-Kingpin protest. Among the AVTF, there's a bit of a conflict as Powell figures out that Saunders is the agent that helped out Daredevil a couple of while back. As the conflict escalates, Powell shoots Saunders (much to the horror of Cole, the dude that was retconned to not have died and hasn't done much since then) and uses his death as an excuse to go weapons-free against the protesters. The episode's cliffhanger is him holding Karen at gunpoint. 

Blake and BB's plot goes into a bit of an overdrive, as much as I can get excited about these side-characters. Again, performances are great (especially Blake) but I can't really say that I care since they've really been mostly removed from Kingpin now -- it's just Buck that's dealing with them. They finally confront each other about the spying, and grown to care about each other a bit too much. 

There's also a bizarre subplot of Heather hallucinating Muse and trying to strangle Buck. I... I don't care about Heather, honestly; I'm assuming that this season is going to end with Heather embracing the Muse mask and while it's obvious, Heather's kind of just there. Oh, and the Governor seems to be intent on putting Sheila as the replacement for Kingpin, which is... okay, neat. 

Again, the focus on Matt, Wilson, and to a lesser extent Karen and Bullseye does really make this episode a lot more exciting than the first half of this season for sure, and the huge confrontation is most certainly welcome. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• 
  Danielle Cage, the daughter of Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, make an appearance in this episode. While this episode tries to drag out the mystery, it's rather obvious for those aware of Danielle in the comics.
• Jessica notes that the government has been recruiting superhumans for black ops, something that we see in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Thunderbolts*. 
• With this reference highly implied to be Luke Cage, it would fit since Luke worked for the government leading one of the incarnations of the Thunderbolts at one point; as well as being part of Nick Fury's Secret War (which had Nick Fury send superheroes as black ops agents to different countries). 
  
• Mitchell Ellison, who's listed in BB Urich's phone, is Ben Urich's boss in Daredevil season 1; and made sporadic appearances throughout season 2 and 3.  
• Kingpin punching through a brick wall, then reacting in pain, was previously done in the MCU in Daredevil season 3 during the Bullseye fight. 
• The slow-motion shot of Daredevil kneeing Fisk in the face after restraining him with the billy clubs is a reference to the Inhyuk Lee cover of Devil's Reign #1. 

Daredevil: Born Again S02E05 Review: The King's Tears

Daredevil, Born Again, Season 2, Episode 5: Grand Design

This is a great episode. 

Part of it is due to the obvious 'nostalgia bait' of the original Netflix Daredevil cast returning in a flashback, and we get Foggy Nelson and (unexpectedly) James Wesley back. I recognize the obvious fanservice for what it is, but it also works a lot in context of this episode. 

The episode goes around different characters and different time periods, but let's go through them one at a time, since technically not a whole ton happened. In the present day stuff, Vanessa becomes lucid for a while before dying; Matt and Dex evade the AVTF; while Buck and Blake have a bit of a mafia moment. But the way the present-day stories tied to each other and to the flashbacks really did work in making this a really good character focus for our characters. 

Vincent D'Onofrio is one of the best castings that elevated Kingpin so much during the original run of Daredevil and all of his subsequent appearances (by and far being the strongest actor in Hawkeye and Echo as well) and the present-day scenes with him babbling with joy at Vanessa's brief moment of lucidity, his rage at the nurse, and his utter distraught expression at the end of the episode is amazingly acted. You really do feel sorry for Wilson Fisk -- regardless of the handling of Vanessa's writing in this season, the show has been quite consistent at portraying Wilson's love and care for Vanessa. 

And for a moment, it does seem that Vanessa's back -- a little changed, a little loopy -- but she's back and I would like to highlight, again, how amazing that performance is as Wilson Fisk drops all of his mask and just asks what he can do for Vanessa. All of that disappears by the end of the episode, of course, as Vanessa eventually succumbs to her wounds. 

On the flashback side of things, we get to see a bit of a reinterpretation of Vanessa's original meeting with Wilson. Vanessa's meeting with Wilson was a combination of both characters' ruthless pragmatism as well as their own longing in life. There is always something about that painting that strikes both of their hearts, and Vanessa even mentions to her old boss that this painting will 'speak' to someone. But they're both ruthless businessmen as well, with this episode having Vanessa reveal that... yes, she likes that art piece but she also ripped off Wilson a whole ton for it. Meanwhile Wilson also does like the art, but went there to diversify and move money into different forms under James Wesley's suggestions. That's neat.

In a way, too, this helps to reconcile the sometimes-inconsistent portrayal of Vanessa over Daredevil and Born Again, incorporating how Vanessa could be the 'normal person in Wilson's life' as well as the more ruthless 'co-conspirator' she would be portrayed as under different writers. 

Meanwhile, Daredevil and Bullseye are running around town, avoiding the AVTF members. Bullseye continues to rant about how he's just balancing the scales, and I think stops short of telling Daredevil that Vanessa deserved it for ordering the hit on Foggy... but Daredevil cuts him off there -- he's not willing to justify Vanessa's death as anything but murder, and notes that it's the same reason why he's trying so hard to save the murderer of his best friend. Whether it's to make up for the past crimes of seriously attempting to kill Bullseye last season, or Matt's own way to balance the scales, it's a neat enough nod to the character's mindset. 

Of course, not everyone agrees with Matt -- least of all Karen, who is less than impressed that Matt brought Foggy's killer to their base. 

Foggy himself appears very prominently in Matt's side of this episode's flashback. The two burgeoning 'avocados at law' get to muck around as young lawyers with huge ambitions. Ah, we were all there, once. Their client, this time, is Lionel -- an asshole that used to bully Foggy. Lionel is scared shitless about going to prison, noting that the mysterious organization that he crossed will have him killed within 24 hours. There was an argument between Matt and Foggy later on, where Matt argues that Lionel is a drug dealer and deserves the punishment... but Foggy counters by listing the fact that Lionel was screwed by the system; and more importantly, now that they know the punishment won't be fair, that knowledge precludes them to ask. 

Again, the ethics of this argument could be debated over and over, but ultimately Foggy takes things into his own hands. Taking the money out of the pile that he and Matt have been saving up to open their own firm, Foggy gives Lionel a second chance to get out and do something with his life. 

(This happens right at the same time that Kingpin and Wesley send their hitman Buck Cashman, who's retconned to be one of Kingpin's enforcers and a nice little tie-in for one of the many side-characters introduced last season.)

But more importantly, Foggy's optimism -- regardless of whether you agree with it or not -- is something that's clearly struck a chord in Matt as he interacts with Bullseye. Even if Bullseye did kill Foggy. It's an interesting decision for the show to explore this storyline, and while I'm not fully convinced that it will be wrapped up in a manner that satisfies everyone, it does help to bring a wrinkle and some explanation as to why Daredevil isn't beating up Bullseye and leaving him for dead. 

Meanwhile, in the C-plot, Daniel Blake gets confronted by BB Urich and under the price of a hug, ends up blabbing about Vanessa's condition to her. It's... it's a bit silly and after episode 3, Blake surely realizes fully that the (very dangerous) leak is BB, isn't he? But he dose so anyway, and BB leaks it to the media. Buck comes in and we get a bit of a tense sequence where he makes it appear as if he's going to take Blake out to a forest and shoot him; but instead gets him to help dispose of another body. The tension is palpable, and well-done, even if I don't really care about Blake all that much as a character the acting between the two characters are excellent.

Still, the highlight of the episode is still Kingpin and D'Onofrio's acting throughout scenes both past and present. Curious to see how this will develop as Born Again's second season zooms to its final three episodes. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• The events of the flashbacks all lead to Wilson and Vanessa's initial meeting in 'Rabbit in a Snowstorm'.
• James "Owl" Wesley makes a surprising return in the flashback, having only been seen as a major supporting character in Daredevil season 1, where he was killed. In addition, the status quo of how the criminals describe the Kingpin in hushed tones, almost as like an urban legend, fits with the pre-Daredevil-season-1 status quo as well where Kingpin works through a lot of intermediaries.
• The specific word Daredevil uses for someone who can help, 'nurse', is a clear reference to Claire Temple, a.k.a. Night Nurse. 
• Bullseye lampshades that he should have died after being thrown off the roof by Matt. Daredevil season 3 did end with Bullseye receiving an operation that gave him a version of his comic-book counterpart's adamantium skeleton (changed to 'cogmium'), but I'm not sure if Bullseye even knew about this. 

Reviewing 5E D&D Monsters - 5E Adventure Modules, Pt 6

Come one, come all, to one of my favourite official D&D 5th Edition modules, The Wild Beyond the Witchlight! In which case I mean that I actually purchased this book and ran the adventure! I'm not a big carnival theme fan, but two-thirds of the adventure takes place in the Feywild and I've always felt like D&D's 5th Edition has a severe dearth of Feywild and Far Realm stuff. Lots of coverage of D&D's other aspects, but two of my all-time favourite aspects of world-building never really got much shine... until now! I really like the vibe of Witchlight, I really love that the adventure is technically doable without having to engage in any combat against the major NPCs (technically, not likely) and I just love the 'twisted children's fantasy' vibe of the whole thing. 

I will note, however, that looking back, I feel like a lot of the 5th Edition content just isn't the best for me to do 'reviewing monsters' for. So much of the creatures in this adventure are just creatures that were released in older material (though to be fair, it's not like there's a lot of Fey-centric creatures for Redcaps and Korreds to show up in), reskins of older creatures (a roc substituting for a giant owl involved in the story; golem statblocks substituting for sentient toy soldiers) or NPCs that are just a bit too unique for me to really talk about in a 'reviewing monsters' segment. Which I think has been one of the causes why I'm not too happy with some of my older content, which covers a bit too many NPCs opposed to monsters. It's like... Amidor the talking dandelion here is my homie, but talking about him or the batch of other 'wacky' NPCs doesn't really lend to a proper 'reviewing monsters' segment, right? That's not to say I don't like the NPCs, because I feel they're wonderful -- and Witchlight in particular is great -- but if I start doing an NPC review segment, then it really ends up defeating the purpose of these 'reviewing monsters' articles, I feel.

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[Context: my review of Wild Beyond the Witchlight originally published in July 2025]

Bless this article. This was one of my first reviews for my return to talking about RPG monsters alongside the Spelljammer books in 2025, and since then I've gone back and re-did and republished all of my Dungeons and Dragons reviews originally published in 2018-2020. That was so fun, and I felt like the improvements to the articles were really significant. 

But since I'm doing revisions on all of the adventure modules and doing them all together, I felt like Wild Beyond the Witchlight was a bit oddly left out. So I'm re-publishing it with no changes (other than moving the Giant Dragonfly and Giant Snail into the appendix with a lot of the other 'just a beast'), but tacking another book - The Book of Many Things! It is a splatbook (with a very... interesting way to arrange its content) themed around the titular magical item, the Tarot-inspired Deck of Many Things, and potential adventures you could have with it. It's an interesting one, with the Book teleporting your adventurers to many different locations, but ultimately while there are a lot of statblocks there, there aren't a whole ton of monsters that I can really talk about. 

Also, also, since it's in the theme of the fey sort of, I'm including some (not all) of the weirdo monsters from the web-only supplement Monstrous Compendium, Vol. 4: Misplaced Monsters!

• Click here for the previous part
• Click here for the next part
• Click here for the index.

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Fairy

• Small Fey; Any Alignment
• Debut: The Wild Beyond the Witchlight (2021)

So for most of Dungeons & Dragons' life, the term 'fairy' is just used for a wider classification of... well, all fey creatures. And even if 'fairy' is used, older editions tend to make sure to know that it can mean a lot of things from sprites to pixies to the more seldom-reprinted grixies and nixies and brownies and atopies. I think 5th Edition has reduced a lot of these same-y 'tiny guy with wings' into just sprites and pixies.

Come Wild Beyond the Witchlight, they decided to give us a couple of extra player character options, one of which is just... 'Fairy'. It's just a bunch of honestly quite generic balanced abilities, with the most important differentiators being that fairies are small, they are fey, and most importantly, they are capable of flight. D&D has been very careful about giving flight to any playable character (and that's the major reason why Dragonborns don't have wings, and why Aasimar flight is so limited) but if you're small I guess it's a lot more believable! 

We don't really get any particularly interesting lore here for the fairies, but I do think that the vibe is that it's meant to be a catch-all for any kind of pixie or sprite or more obscure fey sub-types you want. I like that the official art showcases two Fairy characters with very different wings -- one having a colourful moth wing, and another with the distinctive two-part wings of a beetle. And honestly, the fact that it's so hard to classify the fey actually makes a fair amount of sense, doesn't it? I've always found the Fey to be particularly interesting because while they do play by some rules (which is why I don't like interpretations of D&D fey as being 'lol me so random'), they don't play by our rules. So yeah, what makes a pixie and a sprite different might be obvious to fairies themselves, but to other humanoids, not so much. And the general visual customization for a lot of these non-standard player characters have always been one of the most charming elements, and being able to pick what bug wings to slap on your fairy guy is absolutely one of them. 

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Harengon

• Medium Humanoid; Any alignment; CR 1/8 (Brigand), 1/4 (Sniper)
• Debut: The Wild Beyond the Witchlight (2021)

The other new race introduced in Witchlight is the brand-new-to-DND Harengon, which are bunny-people! They are rabbit-folk that are native to the Feywild, sometimes migrate to the Material Plane, and is always moving from one place to another. Interestingly, whether in the playable character section or their enemy variants (the Harengon Brigand and Harengon Sniper) they are consistently referred to as merely humanoids instead of being fey. I guess they just stay in the Feywild without any of the fancy wacky magic? 

The Harengon's gimmick is that they can jump really far, and they are very lucky -- a cute pun with the 'rabbit's foot', eh? Even their name is a rather bad pun on 'here and gone'. The adventure features a sequence where a bandit band of Harengons harangue our heroes, but they're otherwise just... just bunny people. They're cute! A lot of their culture describes their wanderlust and them absorbing culture and personalities like a sponge, which is... honestly just makes them regular people, aren't they? 

They're charming enough, I suppose! I don't really have much to say here beyond 'cute bunny people', but I definitely appreciate the additional playable race, and I'm happy that it's not just another elf subtype.

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Brigganock

• Tiny Fey; Neutral Good; CR 1/8
• Debut: The Wild Beyond the Witchlight (2021)

Moving on to the actual new monsters... look at these guys, they're just little guys! The art doesn't really show it properly, but these guys are like, the size of little mice, enough for them to hide in your pocket. Brigganocks are another type of fey that live in the Feywild, and I'm quite happy that Witchlight expands on a bit more of the Fey races beyond just the same old ones from the Monster Manual. Resembling World of Warcraft's take on the Kobolds somewhat, I like these guys. They're little green mice-men with bushy beards and pickaxes. That little blue ball of light behind it is its soul, however, which stays outside its body and doubles as a candle as it scurries around tunnels. And in a nod to old-school stories about brownies and whatnot, Brigganocks can accelerate time around itself to specifically 'accomplish hour-long tasks in a matter of seconds'. 

Brigganocks run around in mines, which in and of itself isn't the most novel. What the mine for, on the other hand, is what's interesting -- they mine for wishes. And this is tied specifically to the strange nature of the Feywild! Any time a person makes a wish in the Material Plane, like a birthday wish or something, an 'echo' of that wish manifests in the Feywild. Brigganocks mine for these wishes, which they then refine into gemstones, but also filter out 'wishes of ill intent'. The gemstones are then traded to other Fey.  This is the kind of weird, whimsical metaphysical dream-scape stuff that I like from my Fey creatures, which fits so much in the 'it's chaotic but there are some rules that we mortals don't quite understand' vibe of the Fey, I feel!

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Bullywug Knight / Bullywug Royal

• Medium Humanoid; Lawful Good (Knight), Any (Royal); CR 3 (Knight/Royal)
• Debut: The Wild Beyond the Witchlight (2021)

The book also features a lot of returning Feywild creatures from previous books, where they have been underutilized due to a lot of settings not really featuring Feywild elements other than maybe Hags. We've got a bunch of Faerie Dragons, Korreds, Quicklings, Redcaps, Darklings and a bunch of others, but the coolest expansion are to the Bullywugs. With the introduction of the Grung and their instant addition as playable races back in Tomb of Annihilation, the Bullywugs kind of became redundant. Both tribes were smallish frog-people who live in tribes in swamps, and are comedic... and... uh... that's it. The Bullywugs are technically fey but don't do much with it, and the Grung are kind of poisonous, and like many overlapping aspects in D&D they don't really do as much to differentiate them. Throw in the much more iconic Slaadi, and the Bullywugs kind of have the short end of the stick as far as humanoid frog-men goes.

Until now! With a gigantic Bullywug swamp being the centerpiece of a huge chunk of the adventure, we get to see Bullywugs be fleshed out a lot more as whimsical toad-people whose idea of 'royalty' is completely different -- seen from the eyes of a frog, basically. The artwork for the statted Bullywug Knights and Bullywug Royal is absolutely adorable. I actually think the knight looks quite smashing, doesn't he? With his suit of armour and his rose and those curled boots? 

The royal wears a delightfully puffy outfit, and the many royals described in the book have so much character as they are obsessed with their fight over the Soggy Court, and giving themselves titles like 'the Baron of Muckstump' or something along those lines. It's a glorious wacky mockery of typical royalty tropes, which doesn't only help to build a nice sense of Fey-flavoured hijinks but also helps to rescue Bullywugs from being the most boring of the froggies!

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Campestri

• Tiny Plant/Medium Swarm of Tiny Plants; Unaligned; CR 0 (Campestri), CR 1 (Swarm)
• Debut: The Wild Beyond the Witchlight (2021)

I am surprised to find out that the Campestri came from 2nd Edition, and was brought back and adapted for 5th Edition in Wild Beyond the Witchlight! Very happy to see older monsters be given some love. I would like to say that I like the snaggly, shit-eating faces and the rougher caps of 2E Campestri... but that's not the flavour we're going for here, no. 

5E's Campestri has them as being happy-go-lucky sentient toadstools whose entire point of living is that they really, really like music. It's just that being mushrooms (and not even the ones shaped like an ear) they can't actually tell if a music being played is good or bad. And honestly... fair enough, if you like it, you like it, y'know? But Campestris will always sing along whenever someone plays an instrument or sings nearby, in "an obnoxiously nasal falsetto", and with enough repetitions they will perfectly memorize it. But they're just having a good time! They're just like that one drunk friend of yours in karaoke night! 

Campestris can also move, and the book even describes encountering a swarm of Campestri, all of which just trying to adorably headbutt you. As shown in the 5E art, Campestris can actually move along like weird cartoon worms, though the book describes it as 'manipulating the mycelium of its stem'. The way they consume minerals from soil also makes them unpleasant to most creatures since they're super-salty, though this just makes them a delicacy to the Bullywugs... and honestly, it's just a matter of preparation, isn't it? Preparation and the fact that these are cute singing sentient beings.

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Displacer Beast Kitten

• Small Monstrosity; Unaligned; CR 1/8
• Debut: The Wild Beyond the Witchlight (2021)

KITTY! The Displacer Beast Kitten is part of a small 'side-quest' where your heroes find its parent earlier in the adventure, and have to go forth and rescue the cute baby kitty. It's a cute baby kitty! The fact that it's statted means that either your players are psychotic enough to kill a harmless little itty-bitty kitty, or the DM is going to try his/her best to put the kitty in danger of the other monsters in the game. 

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Glasswork Golem

• Medium Construct; Unaligned; CR 2
• Debut: The Wild Beyond the Witchlight (2021)

Not actually listed among the bestiary at the back of the book (and many of the 5th Edition adventures do this) is the Glasswork Golem. Which I thought was a bit too cool to not mention. It's also very similar to an earlier monster from 2nd Edition, the Stained Glass Golem, except the Glasswork Golem is a lot cooler-looking. On one hand, there is just something special about the fact that the Stained Glass Golem just peels off from that church fresco and attacks you as a two-dimensional image. On the other hand, the Glasswork Golem still retains a fair bit of whimsy even though it's a more 'serious' design of a slightly-disembodied-and-disconnected humanoid form made up of broken glass. I just really enjoy the art in general. 

Being made up of glass, and potentially shattering glass, the Glasswork Golem will actually regenerate its health every turn, presumably by doing something similar to the artwork by having its broken pieces float up around itself... but it loses this ability when hit by thunder or bludgeoning damage -- the ways you would shatter glass. That's neat! In addition to typical golem stuff, the Glasswork Golem can also use its body as a prism to shoot light attacks. I like this!

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Jabberwock

• Huge Dragon; Chaotic Evil; CR 13
• Debut: The Wild Beyond the Witchlight (2021)

Based on the creature of a very similar name (the Jabberwocky) from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, the Jabberwock is shown to be a temperamental evil dragon that haunts the Feywild. Or rather, it's a type of dragons since it's not noted to be a singular being. As a nod to the original poem it's based on, people who have met the jabberwocks are confused on what it looks like, retaining a confused impression of its parts caused by the Jabberwock's "confusing burble", which is also useful in combat where it forces the Jabberwock's enemies to run in random directions or attack its enemies. 

I like the 5E's interpretation of the Jabberwock as a particularly sickly green dragon, with arms and legs that look a bit too humanoid and a gloriously weird head with bright white orbs for eyes and a disturbingly human mouth. Instead of a traditional dragon's breath weapon, it has eye beams that it launches from those blind-looking eyeballs. I did feel like it could've been weirder, though I suppose it does fit into the theme of the original poem. 

An additional aspect of the Jabberwocks is that they are also extremely great tracker, being able to track any creature it's wounded and hunting them down with an unerring obsession which is always a nice plot hook. Also, rather interestingly, Jabberwocks don't reproduce normally -- if it's slain, another one appears a couple of decades later, materializing near the site of the older one's death fully formed without going through adolescence. It's just weird Feywild stuff, I suppose. I kind of like it, although I kind of feel like, again, they really could've gone a lot weirder with this one. 

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Living Doll

• Tiny Construct; Neutral Evil; CR 2
• Debut: The Wild Beyond the Witchlight (2021)

Okay, yeah, we've got just an evil doll here. One of the main antagonists of the adventure is themed around twisted toys, and the Living Dolls are littered in her domain. They're basically what you expect from one of these things -- it disguises itself as an inanimate object before attacking you, and then tries to latch on to you and damage you mentally with psychic cackling. Pretty horrifying, isn't it? 

Also, trapped within each doll is a mean spirit that encourages those around it -- most likely children -- to behave badly towards others. And failing to find children as targets, it's just as likely to torment the guilt-ridden and despondent, driving them to paranoia. It's a nice little plot hook for what could've been a simple humanoid fight, and the idea that this tiny evil doll being an evil little manipulator is a creepy one. I like it!

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Tin Soldier

• Small Construct; Unaligned; CR 1
• Debut: The Wild Beyond the Witchlight (2021)

This is a shorter bestiary for the adventure due to the fact that a lot of the enemies actually are described in the adventure itself, with a note saying 'please use X stat for this'. Which I feel is particularly good when it's meant to represent like, just a goblin with a pumpkin head or something! Tin Soldiers, for example, make use of the 'Animated Armour' stat block from the Monster Manual, only they're small. They serve as the toy soldiers of the toy-themed hag, and I love their goofy mustachioed painted faces. 

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The Hag Coven

• Medium Fey (Hag); Neutral Evil; CR 7 (Bavlorna), CR 8 (Skabatha), CR 6 (Endelyn)
• Debut: The Wild Beyond the Witchlight (2021)

The book actually features a good dozen or so statted characters who are just NPCs you meet along the way. There's a pair of twins, the circus ringmasters, a group of evil adventurers, a group of nice adventurers, the ruler of the fey realms you're trying to free... and I think I'll make it a point in all my D&D reviews to not cover them. It's a monster review, after all, and I think I've tried and failed to describe 'it's a cool knight'. 

But! But NPCs that also happen to be monsters, or at least unique takes on monsters? They are fair game. So these are the three sisters -- a nice showcase of the three-hag covens described in Monster Manual and Volo's Guide to Monsters -- that took over the plane of Prismeer from their sister, the arch-fey who rules it rightfully, and corrupted three parts of it into 'Hither, Thither and Yon', giving us three thematic fey-themed 'levels' to go through. 

The first one you meet is Bavlorna Blighstraw, who's the first one here. Riding a lily-pad sofa with vines and roots that scuttle below her, Slack-Jawed Lorna rules over a swamp of Bullywugs, and herself looks like a toadish old lady. She is attended by little frog-shaped minions called 'Lornlings' (reskinned versions of the Quicklings) and in the spirit of being gross and nasty, she's always covered by a cloud of flies and if she fails to take a bath to moisturize herself with slime, she'll seize up. In a nice bit of fey whimsy, Bavlorna is allergic to people running counterclockwise in circles, which would literally cause her to burst into sneezing fits. 

The second one you'll meet is the oldest, Skabatha Nightshade. She's the toy-themed hag, and has imprisoned a lot of kids to work in her workshop. The magic of Prismeer has caused children to be unable to be harmed, but Skabatha found a loophole in making them work for her. Skabatha herself looks like a particularly creepy toy and is described as 'part toy', and under the makeup toy paint she has flesh 'like rotten bark and infested with wood lice and fungus. She also has a wind-up key on her back. She also hides in a little dollhouse in her otherwise regular-sized child-labour factory, shrinking herself into a doll to sleep.

The three Hourglass Coven hags additionally have a theme of past, present and future, with Lorna getting 'present' and Skabatha representing 'past'. This has more to do with the kinds of deals they prefer, but Skabatha has a nice little quirk where she will forget and be completely unable to perceive the first thing she sees after waking up. 

Our final sister is Endelyn Moongrave, the coolest one of the three and the one representing 'future'. Her realm is a massive theater stage built into the side of a stormy mountain, but Creeping Lyn herself is a very awesome gothic-looking hag wearing an outfit fashioned like a fancy funerary dress... clearly the most fashionable one of her family! She's got a skeleton face underneath that veil, and four arms that play with marionettes on her... dress? These being hags, I wouldn't surprise if Endelyn's entire abdomen is actually thin air and the whole torso-and-head just floats over it creepily. Her lower body is one of those fancy giant dresses, except it's scuttling along like a crab or spider. Absolutely metal design.

Being the hag of the future, Creeping Lyn is able to tell the future (for an unfair price, of course) but is herself tormented by visions of her own demise 'during a solar eclipse'. This actually makes her the most difficult of the hags to deal with since she's essentially unkillable unless there's a solar eclipse. The idea, of course, is that your characters need to engineer a solar eclipse, even if they have to make a symbolic one using a pair of NPCs that are acting as the sun and moon. 

That is, if. This module is quite interestingly unique that you can actually progress without ever doing a single piece of combat, using negotiations, problem-solving or stealth to evade every single threat in your way. That also extends to the three main hag antagonists, whose status as hags actually makes them pliable to making deals with you... you just have to make sure to word them properly while you search for a way to get what you need from their domains. 

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Dandylion

• Large Fey; Chaotic Neutral; CR 6
• Debut: Monstrous Compendium, Vol. 4: Misplaced Monsters (2023)

There have been a couple of 'Monstrous Compendium releases online, mostly to tie in with specific crossovers like Magic: The Gathering planes and, siiiiigh, freaking Minecraft. But a charity one released in 2023 had a bunch of monsters that were created by kids. Not all of them were particularly interesting beyond being 'a kid's imaginary monster', which is adorable and all but also doesn't leave me much to talk about... but technically 'Coral', 'Rain', 'Seth' and 'Sheldon' are described as if they are actual characters and not a type of creature, so they do fall under my (completely self-enforced) rules of not talking about named characters. 

Two actually come with actual properly-written descriptions, though, and being tied to the feywild actually does make the zaniness make sense! It's a bit weird going back and forth with some of the entries essentially having a child's babbling, and others having more D&D-entry speech. But anyway.

Dandylions are green lions with a braided mane, and stands atop some flowers. It's a bit hard to tell due to the positioning, but its tail has a dandelion flower with seed pots, which they wave around and cause the seeds to bloom into plants. They are the farmers that cultivate the flowers and crops in the Feywild, and share their knowledge and crops with those that treat them with respect. Their crops may have magical properties, which is a nice bonus -- all you need to do is to flatter the Dandylion! But the Dandylions protect their farms ferociously, and anyone who tries to steal them are going to be attacked by it. They often brag about their fields and produce, and are jealously proud of it. 

That does sound like a creature that would live in the Feywild, doesn't it? Even the punny name fits with the Feywild's "logic". 

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Scrapper

• Large Construct; Unaligned; CR 8
• Debut: Monstrous Compendium, Vol. 4: Misplaced Monsters (2023)

These are just junkyard monsters! They have one good robot arm, and another arm made out of entangled wires, which sparkle with electricity. I actually love the description about how their quasi-mechanical minds are shielded with lead... which protects them from psychic damage. Love it! That's a big middle finger to all you psionic classes out there, ha ha!

Scrappers feed on scrap metal, and utilize their wires as grappling tendrils to reel in foes. In addition to all of the above, it's got a hidden laser beam attack in its eye, because of course it has. A kid made this up! Are you going to tell them that their magic scrapyard robot doesn't have sneaky little gimmicks hidden up its sleeves?

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Deck Defender

• Medium Construct; Unaligned; CR X
• Debut: The Book of Many Things (2023)

We're going into the third book now, the Book of Many Things. Now let me note that the Book of Many Things features a lot of statblocks -- many just depict random spirits summoned by the deck if you draw a certain card, such as the 'Reaper Spirit' that is summoned if you draw the 'Death' card. A lot of them are really just one-off enemies that I can't really say much about, especially without a profile or an art piece. But the Deck Defenders are adorable! If you draw a 'Knight' card, traditionally the Deck of Many Things will just summon a random Knight for you. Pfft, boring!

You could instead have a Deck Defender,  who is a knight that is made out of an origami-folded playing card. It also grows to the size of a human, which I thought is less cute than if the card gave you a swarm of these little dudes, but it's still adorable regardless! I love that its attack is called 'Paper Cut'! 

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Breath Drinker

• Medium Aberration; Chaotic Evil; CR 14
• Debut: The Book of Many Things (2023)

Oh, a Dementor! Or, well, a Breath Drinker. As far as I can tell, this is a brand-new creature to Dungeons & Dragons, and the Book of Many Things did include a bunch of new additions. The Breath Drinker are just living shadow-specters, and they actually behave similarly to a much higher-level version of the classic Shadow, being one of the rare 5th Edition D&D creatures to do 'stat damage'. Breath Drinkers drain the charisma stat, consuming the victim's personality and identity, before drawing out their entire soul. That does feel like something that could be represented by having charisma be drained for sure. 

Breath Drinkers are associated with the "Void" card in the Deck of Many Things, and were even created in the Far Realms because the very first Void card was drawn. This book really does its best to hype up the Deck of Many Things as this ultimate magic item, which I appreciate the dedication towards. One of the few creatures to receive a full bio in this book, the Breath Drinker is also described as independently serving more powerful Far Realm entities. 

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Fate Hag

• Medium Fey; Neutral; CR 4
• Debut: The Book of Many Things (2023)

Oh! A new hag! Fate Hags are based on the Moirai or Fates from Greek mythology, who sometimes are depicted as villainous and malicious in adaptations. The Three Fates are three sisters in Greek myth that consist of Chloto the spinner, Lachesis the weaver and Atropos the shearer, who decide the fates of every being in the universe, even the gods themselves. The 'three women with supernatural powers' bit with the Moirai undoubtedly framed the 'coven magic' of the Hags in Dungeons and Dragons. 

We technically already have hags associated strongly with prophecy and fate, with the Dusk Hags of Eberron. Fate Hags are a bit more of a blatant adaptation, noting that they are able to manipulate the strands of fate and snip them with magical scissors. Fate Hags are noted to be 'neutral' unlike most hags, and their maliciousness depend more on the individual Hag's personality and where they set up base in. Fate Hags in the Shadowfell are more attuned to fates of doom and destitution; while Fate Hags in the Feywild are more attuned to hopeful and prosperous destinies. I actually like this, that the location that the Fate Hag based in actually influences her reality-warping powers as to the kind of futures and fates that they can affect. 

Fate Hags aren't as powerful as their inspirations, but they are powerful enough to be diviners and to do minor reality-warping effects as the silver threads of fate turn against their foes. These aren't anywhere as badass as instant death or ruinous destinies, and in combat is just really bad luck during that fight. But as NPCs, quest-givers or neutral figures to beseech, I feel like having the Fate Hag as a concept is a much-overdue addition to 5th Edition D&D. 

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Living Portent

• Small or Medium Celestial; Lawful Neutral; CR 3
• Debut: The Book of Many Things (2023)

Mmm, not the biggest fan of this one. Or at least, the 'vanilla' version. Living Portents are CR 3 celestials, and are embodiments of prophecy that land in the form of falling stars and land on earth, creating craters where miraculously no one is harmed. Living Portents assume humanoid forms, and look out for beings that are destined for prophecy by the gods and will... aid them? Inform them of the prophecy? Most of their abilities revolve around blessing and healing their allies, so probably the former. Even in a 'Chosen One' scenario I feel it's a bit ingenuous when the gods are sending celestial envoys to actually hang out with them. And in any case, it feels like a role that could easily be filled with angels (or the Pari above). 

More interestingly, though, is the 'Portents of the Elder Evils' sidebar, which are aberrations that are sent by the Elder Evils as heralds. This is a soft adaptation of one of the cooler enemies from 4th Edition, the Star Spawn (not to be confused with 5E's Star Spawn, which were called Farspawn/Foulspawn in older editions) that are heralds of Elder Evils from beyond the stars. Suddenly the language of meteors and comets and mysterious craters makes more sense when realizing that the Living Portents are celestial adaptations of this older monster!

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Riffler

• Small Fey; Chaotic Neutral; CR 5
• Debut: The Book of Many Things (2023)

This one is fun. Rifflers are just gambling fey tied to the Deck of Many Things. They resemble gnomes, they are obsessed with fate and destiny and chance, and were manifested into being when the Deck of Many Things was shuffled for the first time, creating bodies and coming into form specifically because they like the idea of fate and chance being tied to the shuffling of cards. 

Rifflers wander the world to search for the Decks of Many Things, going around and collecting, trading, hoarding and freely scattering the cards like the most chaotic Magic: The Gathering player ever. There's some incomprehensible agenda to manipulate the fate or the universe... or maybe they just really, really like chaos.  

In addition to typical luck-manipulating magic and the expected random effects, I very much like their 'Riffling Step', the Riffler's take on other fey's 'Misty Step'. Instead of just teleporting, they temporarily turn other objects and people to have the consistency of cards and 'shuffle' their way through them. It's a very JoJo's Bizarre Adventure ability!

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Talon Beast

• Large Monstrosity; Unaligned; CR 7
• Debut: The Book of Many Things (2023)

The Talon Beast is tied to the 'Talon' card in the Deck of Many Things, which upon drawn will disintegrate all of your magic items. What a dick card! The Talon beast is a full-on manifestation of it, being these strange fusions of vultures and... what appears to be an elephant? Or a rhinoceros? It's a neat enough 'chimera animal' artwork, and I like how strange talons look on a pachyderm body. The Talon Beast can sense magic, and its beak can destroy and remove enchantments from magical items. 

It's not quite as oppressive as the actual Talon Card from the Deck of Many Things, but it is a nice type of 'fuck you' monster that 5th Edition has been shying away from since its inception. The Talon Beast, in essence, is just a remake of the infamous Disenchanter from the original Fiend Folio; who had the same role of destroying magical items. These kind of 'screw over your players' monsters can lead to very toxic roleplaying moments in newer, less-experienced GM's, and I like that the 'base' set of D&D rules limits it to the Rust Monster... but I also like that these supplemental books are reintroducing the concept to some degree. 

It's just tied into the 'Talon card' to tie with the themes of this book. Unlike the Breath Drinker above, I do like that Talon Beasts do just exist in the wild, prowling ruins and catacombs and the Underdark. I really like that they are giving alternate avenues for campaigns and settings to utilize some of these monsters independently of a Deck of Many Things campaign! I also love the description about how scholars agree that there must be some link between Talon Beasts, the Talons card, and even a constellation of the Talons, but they can't agree or find enough evidence to say which comes first, the beast, or the card, or the constellation? That's fun. 

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Ruin Spider

• Large Monstrosity; Unaligned; CR 5
• Debut: The Book of Many Things (2023)

The innocuous Ruin Spider might look simple for a D&D monster. It's just a giant spider with an abdomen that looks artificial, with some runes and whatnot (matching the card back of the Deck of Many Things) inlaid on it. It reminds me of the Armagohma boss from The Legend of Zelda! But just like the Talon Beast above, the Ruin Spider is associated with another item-destruction card, the 'Ruin' card, and the Ruin Spider has a ruinous acid on both its venom and even its own carapace. Any armour it hits slowly disintegrates, and weapon that hits it slowly disintegrates, losing armour class points and damage respectively until they shatter. That's neat, and, again, not the right enemy for every campaign but it really does feel cool to have some of these old-school 'item destruction' monsters back. 

The Ruin Spiders, unlike the Talon Beasts, are explicitly created by the potent magic roiling out of the Deck of Many Things, mutating nearby giant spiders. That's why it's got the card back on its abdomen!

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Grim Harrow Beasts

• Medium Undead; Chaotic Evil; CR 3 (Harrow Hound)
• Tiny Undead; Unaligned; CR 1 (Harrow Hawk)
• Debut: The Book of Many Things (2023)

The Book of Many Things introduced a bunch of extradimensional factions tied to the deck, and one of them is the "Grim Harrow", which is a multiversal crusade led by a group of undead victims of the Skull card (where an Avatar of Death comes and kills them). The lingering spirits are now a dedicated to destroy every single Deck of Many Things in the universe. On one hand, it's a bit overwrought... but on the other hand, that's the exact kind of specificity that a book about the Deck of Many Things should have. And to be fair to the Grim Harrow...  there are a lot of horrible things that the Deck of Many Things can do!

I am skipping the many, many humanoid enemies introduced in this book, but the two beasts included, the Harrow Hound and the Harrow Hawk, classify enough as monsters. The Harrow Hound are transformed from a group of blink dogs slaughtered by the Grim Harrow (no!!!) and now utilize their half-flayed bodies as trackers. I do like the art, showing the rear part of the undead Blink Dog in the distance as it is mid-teleportation. 

The Harrow Hawks are types of undead that died alongside their companion and have such a strong bond that they rise again as undead. And for some reason, they can even travel through the multiverse. This leads the Grim Harrow faction to seek them out, capture and tame them, using them as scouts. I felt like I like this one better if its multiversal-travel origins were tied to the Grim Harrow, since it felt a bit odd jumping from its 'faithful companion' origin straight to somehow inexplicably possessing multiverse-jumping powers. 

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Werevulture

• Medium Fiend; Chaotic Evil; CR 4
• Debut: The Book of Many Things (2023)

I am genuinely flummoxed that we never got a Werevulture before in D&D, at least from what I can tell. I actually spent a bit too much time going through 2E and 3.5E material because I was sure that I've seen a Werevulture mentioned before... but do you know where that was from? A background, one-off information from The Elder Scrolls, where Werevultures were offhandedly mentioned in lists of lycanthropes all over Tamriel. They were not from D&D! 

So yeah, welcome to the ever-expanding lycanthrope family, I suppose, Werevulture, even if being an 'animal person' is increasingly losing a special 'edge' of uniqueness in this franchise. I feel like they really should go back into making lycanthropes look actually feral, to differentiate this guy from like, just an Aarakocra! 

Werevultures have all the expected abilities you'd think a lycanthrope vulture would have, and I like that the bio notes that there are a lot of speculation that Werevultures are related to the vulture-demon Vrocks -- whose plagues in one particular attack ended up cursing its victims with the Werevulture transformation instead of outright killing them. In addition to all the typical lycanthrope stuff, Werevultures also have a compulsion to feed on carrion and to take pretty, fancy baubles when they are in the sky.  

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Daredevil: Born Again S02E04 Review: Boxing Match of the Century

Daredevil, Born Again, Season 2, Episode 4: Gloves Off

At the rough mid-way point of Born Again's second season, we finally get a confrontation between the lead characters. And it's... it's a bit sad, really, that it took so long to reach this point. The show has been spinning its wheels so much with less interesting characters and I'm continually surprised to be reminded that each of these episodes are 50 minutes long. 

But after being awkwardly set up and disappearing, we start off this episode with a fantastic Bullseye killing spree of Taskforce minions in a diner. Love that whole sequence as Bullseye sits down to order a milkshake, fools the Taskforce into coming, and then just uses cutlery and at one point a lobster claw to brutally take down the goons. Still not sure about how 'look so realistic' his balaclava supervillain outfit looks, but I love this interpretation of Bullseye's craziness. MCU's take on Bullseye changes him from being a psychopath who kills 'just because' into someone who sees a warped version of the world due to a combination of trauma, psychological disorders and evil people pushing him in different directions. He's still undoubtedly not sympathetic, but it does make him so much more interesting than a lot of other villains I've seen lately in superhero TV. 

The minor sequence of Bullseye going through his daily life also pays off rather well. Matt goes on his own investigation, tracking down the very specific coin back to his church (which was the random scene in episode 2) and detectives his way to where Bullseye is hiding. And despite the showcase of 'Tom' bonding and being nice to the old neighbour with the cat, Bullseye doesn't hesitate to hold her hostage with a gun while yelling stuff about how he's "the hero" and how he's going to balance the scales of Foggy's death with "one good deed". 

This is a very cool reorientation of Bullseye and a proper spotlight for him not dissimilar to the one Punisher received around the mid-way point of Born Again's first season. The wacky props like lobster claws, lunch trays and Walkman CD's being used in the fights that Bullseye does against his opponents makes it extra fun. 

Meanwhile, the Kingpin takes literal center stage as he sets up a trap for Bullseye that he can't resist by making a huge boxing match. We get some buildup to this and a nice sequence of brutality as Kingpin beats up his opponent (who's just some random guy) while the crowd cheers around him. It's a nice little setpiece. And after spending so much of this season just either sitting around giving orders or trading barbs with Mr. Charles, it feels like a nice release for Kingpin as well as he's allowed to indulge in some physical brutality. 

Oh, and Mr. Charles finally makes a reappearance after the first episode, doing another confrontation of Kingpin over the whole smuggling business. Charles tries to make Kingpin feel small by noting what a tiny part of the world he's controlling, but Kingpin refuses to be intimidated and his main goon Buck Cashman murders Mr. Charles's two bodyguards before Kingpin walks out of the meeting. That was cool as well. 

But the boxing match is, of course, the main highlight. Kingpin tries to send away Vanessa for her safety, but Vanessa refuses. I... I would've really loved this more if the previous two episodes actually highlighted Vanessa and Wilson's relationship a lot more. Instead, she gets a nightmare and tries to ship two minor characters together and just feels so unfocused. Really, instead of Angela, BB or Blake, you'd think that Vanessa Fisk should've gotten the spotlight episode early on in the season -- especially considering what happens at the end of this episode. 

Vanessa's unexpected arrival in the boxing match triggers a fervour in Kingpin as he accelerates his brutality over his boxing opponent, but also a panic as he's expecting Bullseye to arrive. Vanessa does have a bit of a motive discussion in this episode, talking about how she wants to be Wilson's partner, and manages to talk down the Governor in a short scene. It's a nice rereailment after last episode focuses way too long on their marriage counseling, but it also comes at a bit too little, too late. 

That said, Bullseye's attack on the boxing match is fantastic. The fight between Bullseye and the Taskforce as he launches stuff into the crowd, and when Daredevil comes intent on... saving everyone? Vanessa and Fisk both have their moments of pulling out a gun at Bullseye. But ultimately, Bullseye throws one of those tacky glass souvenirs, and despite Kingpin blocking it, the glass item shatters and a huge piece pierces Vanessa's temple. Daredevil and Bullseye manage to escape with the AVTF in hot pursuit, but Kingpin is left at the end of the episode cradling a bleeding, dying Vanessa. 

(The show did spare Cherry for seemingly no reason, but Vanessa's death looked pretty final -- and, all right, I did take a peek to see if it sticks)

It's definitely a massive escalation and a surprising one, and a great one because I actually care a lot more about the Daredevil/Kingpin/Bullseye conflict. I do feel that there are some weaknesses here, of course -- Vanessa's lack of buildup, and maybe we could've had more scenes devoted to Matt's struggle on his stance about killing/sparing Bullseye and/or Kingpin. But that was pretty great to look at. 

Other stuff happen in the background of this episode, too, which I felt are the right amount of times to be dedicated to a lot of these more minor characters instead of the meandering we've gotten in the first 3 episodes. Kirsten gets her office harassed by AVTF goons, and the frustration leads her to accept Karen's offer to help Christofi. Blake and BB are present but aren't taking up precious screentime. Jack Duquesne/Swordsman exits the resistance after handwaving and giving some resources to Matt and Karen, so there's one less character to look out for. Angela is intent on sticking around and being the new White Tiger. Angela helps to smuggle some plot devices around to BB. Buck is sent away by Kingpin on a mission to kill Christofi, plugging up that loose thread. 

There's a world where any of these less interesting storylines are given entire episodes on their own to develop, but I am happy that they're all sped-run in the background here. It does really help to add to the chaos of everything that's going on in the boxing match for sure. 

But of course, the main spotlight of this show is the confrontation between the three primary movers of the show. It's a nice breath of refreshing air after the show twiddled its thumbs so much in the first couple of episodes. With some plot threads resolved and some slammed shut, I look forward to what the second half of the season has to offer. 

Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Just like Bullseye's spotlight episode in season 3 of the original Daredevil show, this episode opens with a sequence of Dex going through his morning routine. 
• Fogwell's gym being associated with Matt's dad is brought up.
• The shot of Vanessa falling mirrors the shot of her being poisoned (less brutally) in Daredevil season 1. In this episode, Vanessa also makes a fuss about being 'sent away' for her own protection, similar to season 1. 
  
• Vanessa Fisk does die in the comics, but died due to terminal illness (and after launching a villainous scheme of her own against Daredevil), and in a much more hostile relationship against Wilson.