Elden Ring's Spectral Steed Whistle Needs to Be in Your D&D Game - D&D Expertise Episode 18
Channel: DiceCold
Date: 2022-03-21

Elden Ring shows us that having a horse you can summon is a basic quality-of-life feature that players can appreciate.

Music is “Chill S.A.X.” by Esteban Orlando on Soundcloud.

The content of this video is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)



Video transcript:

Hi, I’m Casey Grey - Guided by Grace - and this is D&D Expertise, episode 18.
 
Elden ring is a fantasy rpg set in The Lands Between and published by From… I’m just kidding, you already know what the game is. If you’re like me you’ve spent dozens of hours traversing its incredible open world, and while it’s overflowing with ideas you can drop into your campaign the one I want to talk to you about today is Torrent. You get given the Spectral Steed Whistle fairly quickly, and it’s so nice not having to travel the enormous distances of the Lands Between on foot. Mechanically it’s a lot like your horse in The Witcher 3, you decide you want to travel and a few moments later you have yourself a horse. Geralt’s horse also magically appears out of thin air, but that’s because it’s a video game. It’s just spawning in out-of-sight to make things convenient and you know when you do it that the horse wasn’t there a moment ago even if the game pretends it was. 

Elden Ring has the elegance to acknowledge that your steed is supernatural and give you an explanation for it, your horse appears immediately no matter where in the world you previously left it because it’s a spirit that you’re summoning. 

D&D almost gets there with its Figurines of Wondrous Power, but they intentionally make it too limited to rely on consistently. Tiamat forbid that your character just has something convenient, except that the Bag of Holding Exists to give characters a video game sized inventory anyway. Making it an instant summon also makes it more action-oriented and you can use it in dramatic situations instead of just to save time on road trips. Unless your game is grim and gritty, give the party magic mounts and let them ride in style.