Rogues are masters of disguise and subtlety, who lurk in the shadows waiting for the perfect time to make their lethal strike. Barbarians are an unsubtle slab of mindless rage and feral instinct able to shrug off lethal blows while screaming and charging down their enemies at full tilt. Put them together and we get a bit of a thematic mismatch, but a mechanical synergy wonder. And while you may not exactly elude detection, your enemies will definitely be surprised when their heads get chopped off. Grab your burglar’s tools and your battle ax as we go through everything you need to know.
Fundamentally, barbarian and rogue may normally go about it in very different ways but they’re still both DPS classes. Their goal in combat is to dish out as much melee damage as possible, while avoiding clap back through either meat shield tanking or nimble evasion. But the reason why you might want to try and combine these strategies rather than take the classes straight is a simple handy interaction between the barbarian’s savage attacks and the rogue’s sneak attack. Sneak attack is a powerful damage dealing ability but that requires advantage or nearby allies to trigger, and the barbarian’s savage attacks can guarantee us advantage every turn.
With a little bit of effort, we can combine these classes into a frothing mad sword blender, landing savage “sneak” attacks able to both tank and dodge with the best of them.
Sneak attack damage for rogues is tied to their own class levels, which means dipping or splitting levels will turn the ludicrous amounts of rogue damage into merely decent damage. We’re also spreading ourselves across all three of the physical ability scores. We’ve also got a few weird limitations on our weapon choices in order to meet the requirements of both class abilities, so we can’t take our big battle axes or throw daggers.
Finally, just like with any other multiclass build, we have to give up on some of the best barbarian and rogue abilities like the 20th level capstones, and we’ll get to our mid-game and late game features significantly slower than the rest of our party.
The core of our build is relatively simple and quick. We only really need 2 barbarian levels and 1 level of rogue to put together our core synergy so we kick in at 3rd level. There are some further fun potential builds past that, but 3 levels will feel solid. Generally, plan on treating rogue as your core class, with a 1 to 5 level dip into barbarian as a secondary class.
Our rogue barbarian multiclassing core synergy is simple but some of our build variants care about different features from both classes. The following class abilities either factor into our build or are just solid bonuses you should be aware of when constructing the rogue barbarian multiclass.
We’re a purely physical class combination and can thankfully make the build work focusing on just the three physical ability scores.
Despite the plan to use finesse weapons so we can trigger sneak attack, we still have to use Strength for our rage bonus which means we want our highest ability score to be Strength.
Next, since we’ll be using unarmored defense and trying to tank a lot of hits in rage, Constitution should be our second highest ability score for AC and hit points.
Finally, while we aren’t going to be attacking with it, Dexterity also factors into our AC and it should be our third highest ability score. Also keep in mind that due to the multiclassing requirements, you’ll need to make sure your Dexterity is at least 13.
As for the three mental scores of Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma, we can use all three as dump stats as needed. I’d recommend putting at least some points in Wisdom though, just so we aren’t oblivious when it comes to Perception checks.
Our equipment here is sadly pretty limited but at least it’s simple. To start with we’ll be relying on unarmored defense so the answer to what armor to wear is nothing.
As for weapons, we have access to all sorts of martial weapons and even unarmed attacks and natural weapons, but we need to specifically use finesse weapons to trigger sneak attack, and since we want a pair of one-handed weapons to maximize the rage damage bonus, our options are really down to just scimitars or shortswords. The weapons are basically identical except one does piercing damage and the other does slashing damage. There is technically an argument to be made for rapiers but I’d strongly argue that a pair of shortswords or scimitars is the way to go UNLESS you take the dual wielder feat which we’ll discuss in a minute.
Rogue gains a ton of proficiencies if we start out with them, and we don’t get much extra by starting out as a barbarian, meaning your best bet is to take your first level as a rogue. However, starting with barbarian does get us maximized starting hit points using the d12 hit die. I still think the extra proficiencies make rogue the better starting option but consider starting as a barbarian if your 1st level adventuring promises to be particularly punishing.
As a pure martial build there are several feats we could utilized to eke out a bit of extra damage or utility. One feat sticks out though and that’s dual wielder.
Dual wielder is the de-facto feat for two-handed weapon fighters, and it’s split between three bonuses:
That last feature rarely matters unless your GM is a rules stickler, but the first two are quite powerful for us. +1 AC is pretty fantastic, and losing the light limitation means we can upgrade one of our shortswords into a rapier, taking us from a d6 weapon to a d8 weapon. Is this feat necessary for the build? No. But it is a useful pickup if you find yourself thinking about a feat.
Our equipment here is sadly pretty limited but at least it’s simple. To start with we’ll be relying on unarmored defense so the answer to what armor to wear is nothing.
As for weapons, because we need to specifically use finesse weapons to trigger sneak attack, and since we want a pair of one-handed weapons to maximize the bonus rage damage, our options are really down to just scimitars or shortswords. The weapons are basically identical except one does piercing damage and the other does slashing damage. There is technically an argument to be made for rapiers, but I’d strongly argue that a pair of shortswords or scimitars is the way to go UNLESS you take the dual wielder feat which we’ll discuss in a minute.
.
The core of the build is refreshingly simple and easy to apply. At our first rogue level we gain the sneak attack feature that deals an additional 1d6 damage (more by putting levels into rogue) on one of our attacks. Now, sneak attack has quite a few requirements to trigger. Firstly, the attack must be with a ranged or finesse weapon. Next, the attack must either have advantage, or one of our allies needs to be standing next to them as a distraction.
Thankfully, with a second level of barbarian we get the feature savage attacks. Savage attacks let us just choose to get advantage on all our attacks for the turn, in exchange, attacks against us also have advantage.
Rage also gets us some rage bonus damage, so long as we’re making melee weapon attacks that use Strength. Thankfully, sneak attack tells us the weapon has to be finesse, but it doesn’t say we have to use the Dexterity option. That means so long as we use Strength for our finesse weapons, we’ll be meeting all the requirements for both rage and sneak attack.
Putting this together as a 3rd level character (2 barbarian and 1 rogue) gives us a pretty substantial damage profile for such a low level. Using a pair of shortswords in rage with 16 Strength, we’ll be getting additional melee attacks (using our bonus action for an offhand attack) that both have advantage with +2 damage per hit from rage and 1d6 extra damage on the first attack with sneak attack. This gets us a total of damage 18 (3d6 +4 +3) per round, all with advantage thanks to reckless attack!
As you advance in levels, consider taking a few more levels in barbarian (either up to 3 for just the archetype or up to 5 for extra attack) but afterwards prioritize rogue levels. Sneak attack damage will scale up faster than rage damage, and rogue levels will get you a better DPS bang for your buck.
Now that we have the core of our build, we can push it forward and take advantage of it in a few different ways.
For this version of the build we basically go all-in on defense and hope to be both unkillable and elusive. First, we need 1 more level of barbarian taking the path of the totem warrior and selecting the bear totem. Next, we take 2 more levels of rogue and pick up the swashbuckler archetype.
Those of you who have min-maxed builds before will know the bear totem all too well. Bear totem barbarians gain one of the best defensive abilities in the game, that grants resistance not only to physical damage, but all damage types except psychic while in rage.
Swashbuckler is a bit of an odd duck to add to this, since the main draw of swashbuckler is getting sneak attack easier and we’re already doing that. But the swashbuckler’s fancy footwork lets us ignore any and all opportunity attacks, which will add a huge amount of mobility to our already nearly indestructible bear barbarian.
As a side note it is worth spending a few points on Charisma for this build, to take advantage of the bonus to initiative checks and for a few later game features.
For this build we’re going to double up on some spooky ghost themes for a bit of annoying hit and run gameplay. We’ll need to start with our core build, take 1 additional level in barbarian taking the path of the ancestral guardian, and 2 additional levels in rogue taking the phantom archetype.
So, while we’re taking the phantom archetype mostly to keep to a ghost theme, the path of the ancestral guardian gives us access to a nasty keep away strategy. Ancestral guardian’s 3rd level feature lets us tag a creature with an attack roll that swarms them with ghosts until the start of your next turn. While they’re swarmed with ghosts, all their attacks against anything but you have disadvantage, and your allies have resistance to damage they deal.
Normally, this is just a sort of “taunt” feature that forces the enemy to attack the tank. But what if you were on the other side of the battlefield? Because of cunning action, we can dash as a bonus action. This means we can slap somebody, tag them with ghosts, and then dash behind the rest of your party. For their turn the enemy now has to choose between rushing past all your allies and taking their attacks of opportunity or making terrible resisted attacks with disadvantage against them. Your ghost trick can be rinsed and repeated as many times as necessary or until your DM just fills the fights with ranged enemies.
This is an odd one, but our goal is to be incredibly mobile and provide the archetype abilities bonus of the wolf totem barbarian as often as possible and also to essentially take the role of our party’s ranger in the most roundabout way possible. To do this we’ll need to take one more level of barbarian and select the path of the totem warrior, choosing the wolf totem. Next, we take 2 more levels in rogue getting us to a 3rd-level rogue and selecting the scout archetype.
The wolf totem grants our allies advantage on foes so long as we’re within 5 feet of them and so long as we’re raging. Being a rogue with access to cunning actions already goes a long way towards keeping our allies swinging through good repositions, the scout just adds one more layer of mobility. Scout rogues gain the skirmisher feature, which lets us move up to 15 feet as a reaction without provoking attacks of opportunity when something ends their turn next to us. One of the ways a wolf totem play can fail is getting locked into a fight while your allies are fighting something else. Skirmisher allows us to slip away and get back to our wolf pack where we belong.
Scouts also gain survivalist, which gets us the Nature and Survival skills along with double our proficiency on them. This is actually a very strong utility, and I’d recommend giving your Wisdom score a little love to take advantage of this and solidify your “ranger” role.
Our Complete Magic Item 5e Guide HERE.
Want to know how these dice work? Check out our DnD Dice Explained Guide!
]]>
Monks are the pinnacles of discipline and martial technique that test the limits of humanoid capability. Wizards are the studious researchers of universal truths and the masters of arcane secrets. Put them together and you get a jumbled mess BUT with a bit of work we can turn that mess into a whirling ball of knives that moves faster than humanly possible. Grab your monk weapons and your spellbook as we go through everything you need to know.
Monk levels won’t add much to a wizard’s spellcasting, but a bit of wizardry can be a huge boost to running fast and punching people in the face. You run a Monk/Wizard build to run faster than WotC would have ever thought a player character could run. With a bit of effort we can maintain some good DPS while essentially becoming immune to melee attacks (unless our target can also run like the wind).
The ability split is a bit upsetting, but we can stack a few wizard and monk abilities together for a truly impressive AC, meaning that even when facing ranged opponents we’ll be nigh impossible to hit.
The biggest issue with a wizard monk build is the ability score split. Monks already really need three scores, Dexterity, Constitution, and Wisdom. Wizards add Intelligence into the mix and there just won’t be enough points to spare to get all our scores as high as we’d like them.
There’re a few rules interactions that are a bit unintuitive in the way that spell attacks interact with monk features like martial arts. We can work through these and still make the class combination work, but you’ll need to be on top of using the character correctly to play without breaking rules technicalities.
Finally, as with every other multiclass character, we’re going to be reaching our mid-tier class options later and not reaching 20th level capstone features at all. This build isn’t too bad, but still expect to have a couple awkward early levels where the synergies haven’t really clicked yet and you lag behind your other party members in power level.
We have a couple variations, but each of our builds start with a core of 2 monk levels and 2 wizard levels. This means our monk wizard kicks in at the 4th character level with some additional goodies down the line.
We’ve got the one core build here that depends heavily on several core class features. Let’s go through each of the special abilities that’ll factor into it and at least comment on the features that provide us with a bonus.
With this class combination we’re in a tough spot-on ability scores since we care about 4 of them. However, since we’re not planning on using our wizard spellcasting for actual damage, we really only need the minimum ability scores for wizard and can mostly play it off like a normal monk.
Our primary ability score should be Dexterity, since it factors not only into AC but also our attack rolls and it should be the main place for all our ability score improvements.
Our second highest score should be Wisdom, since it factors into our AC and while it doesn’t directly affect our attacks it will contribute to many of our important monk features.
After that we need to make sure we meet at least the minimum Intelligence score for multiclassing with wizard, which is 13. However, I recommend spending the point to push that up to 14 since that’ll increase our AC by 1 during our bladesongs.
Finally, any points we have left over should go into Constitution, since while we’re going to try hard not to be hit, it’ll still be nice to have a buffer.
I'd also recommend taking the variant human race will be ideal for the build. And by putting 1 point in both Wisdom and Dexterity, we can get the following starting ability scores using point buy:
Strength 8
Dexterity 16
Constitution 10
Wisdom 16
Intelligence 14
Charisma 8
If you don't go with variant human, normal humans also work quite well since +1 to each ability score applies to 4 scores we care about. Tabaxi are also a great option thanks to the natural weapons and the improved speed.
The equipment is pretty simple for this build since we won’t be wearing a whole lot without any armor proficiencies. We’ll be relying on unarmored defense, so we won’t be wearing any armor or shields. If you maxed out Dexterity and sort of ignored Wisdom, you can also consider making use of mage armor, which may end up being a higher AC and still doesn't count as wearing armor for all our monk features. T
For weaponry, we need to stick to one-handed and specifically we want to use things that can count as “monk weapons” which is mostly simple weapons and a sparse selection of martial weapons. I recommend putting a short sword in each hand, and just keeping a spellcasting focus on your person rather than in your hand since most of our proper spellcasting will happen outside of combat.
The short answer is start with monk. We don’t gain any proficiencies at all when we multiclass into wizard, but with our starting ability scores we’ll be a fine monk, but an absolutely terrible wizard.
There are some other tempting feats but we have just one feat to make the build work and that’s mobile. Mobile is pretty simple, and provides us with the following bonuses:
Every bit of this is amazing for our little speed demon. The 10 extra feet should be self-explanatory, giving us even more movement speed. Dashing is only something we’ll need to do if the enemy also has some serious speed, but this allows us to overcome what would be one of the build’s weaknesses in difficult terrain. Finally, the crown jewel that makes everything work is ignoring opportunity attacks. Unless the enemies are stacked up in such a way that you can’t single one out, we’ll always be able to avoid repercussions when we bolt in and out of combat.
We honestly won't be casting spells that much, but as with many arcane/martial builds we’re going to take advantage of the “sword cantrips”, namely booming blade and green-flame blade.
I’m lumping these two together because they’re functionally similar and we’re going to be abusing the heck out of both of them a LOT. Both of these cantrips use weapon attacks “as part of casting the spell”. This means we’re stacking the extra damage these cantrips do on top of whatever damage we do with our melee attack.
Note that this counts as “casting a spell” rather than taking the “attack action”. Which is unfortunate, because both martial arts and flurry of blows only trigger when we “take the attack action” and make an attack. However, there are going to be many turns where we need to use our bonus action for something else, like activating our bladesong or dashing to reach the target. On those occasions these cantrips allow us to essentially make up for the lost damage.
As for the actual effects of the spells, when you hit with green-flame you deal extra fire damage to another target adjacent to them. And when you hit with booming blade you force the target to stay still on their next turn or take 1d8 thunder damage if they move. Both spells improve drastically at 5th level, with green-flame in particular adding 1d8 fire damage to both the initial target of your attack and also to the extra adjacent target.
This is a very simple 1st level spell. On touch we can give ourselves 10 extra feet of movement. The spell lasts for 1 hour and doesn’t use concentration. For us, this is just a clean extra 10 feet and we’ll want it on essentially whenever there’s a chance combat will happen.
Alrighty let’s put the pieces together and get the core build up and running. We need 2 monk levels and 2 wizard levels selecting the bladesinger wizard archetype.
Our starting class needs to be variant human and select the mobile feat. If your DM doesn’t allow variant humans or you’ve got your heart set on something else, we can instead spend our 4th level ability score increase to pick up mobile.
In any dungeon delving situation or any other scenario you think might turn into combat, you’ll want the longstrider spell cast on yourself. Worst case scenario it’s only an action to cast so you can just start combat off with it. Finally, we just need a couple of regular old short swords in each hand.
So, how does this work? Well at the start of combat (or even right before if you’ve got the drop on them) we use a bonus action to start our bladesong, the final ingredient in our recipe for ultimate speed. We have 30 feet of base movement, + 10 feet of movement from the monk’s unarmored movement, + 10 feet of movement from the longstrider spell, + 10 feet of movement from the mobile feat, and + 10 feet of movement from our bladesong.
Without dashing or doing anything else, we’ve now accomplished 70 feet of base movement, which is quite frankly nuts. 70 feet is a sort of magic number, because it allows us to move 35 feet towards an enemy, and 35 feet away in the same turn. This means for most (at least humanoid) enemies, we can run up, attack them, and get to a distance they can’t get to in melee on their own turn. Thanks to the mobile feat, the target of our attacks also can’t make attacks of opportunity against us, and we can essentially make runs at them every turn until they die.
If 70 feet isn’t enough, as a monk we can dash as a bonus action just by spending a ki point, which means we can run a lightning fast 140 feet in a single turn while still using an action to attack!
As for actually dealing damage, on turns where just our movement can reach our target and get away from them, we can make our shortsword attack, and choose between making another one using our other shortsword, or spending a ki point for a flurry of blows (you don’t need a free hand to make an unarmed strike).
For situations where we need to use our bonus action (either for dashing or activating our bladesong) we can use our action to instead “cast” green-flame blade or booming blade through our sword attack, essentially making up for the lost attacks.
Finally, if they have range or somehow manage to catch up to you, your AC should be pretty healthy thanks to unarmored defense. With +3 in Wisdom and Constitution we’ll have a base AC of 16, but thanks to bladesong adding our Intelligence (hopefully +2) we get a lovely 18 AC. And as one final fallback, deflect missiles can catch the odd arrow that manages to find you.
Now that we’ve established the core of the build, we can get into some variations paths you can take as you advance in levels.
This one is very simple, by taking the way of mercy we take our speed demon and turn them into a one man health care delivery system. The way of mercy provides the ability to turn our ki points into healing (not a ton but enough to pop somebody back from 0) with a touch. Normally the big limitation here is proximity to your downed ally, but with a potential 140 feet of movement in a turn you’ll be able to provide medical assistance to a downed ally a city block away.
We can get even faster using the power of booze. By taking the way of the drunken master we gain a few bonuses whenever we use our flurry of blows. When we flurry, we get to take the disengage action for free, which means that even when the enemy is grouped up we can still run away Scott free. Whenever we flurry, we also get 10 extra feet of movement! That stacks our base movement all the way up to 80 feet. Sadly, since flurrying uses our bonus action we won’t also be able to dash for a full 160 (at least while also making an attack), but the extra movement may well be worth a drink or two.
One last way we can take advantage of all this movement is by taking the way of the ascendant dragon. This will take a bit longer to kick in since the feature we really care about is at the 6th monk level, but hey, in the meantime we get to play around with some draconic breath weapons and alternate damage types.
The trick here is the 6th level feature wings unfurled, which lets us sprout spectral draconic wings whenever we use the step of the wind (the ki dashing feature). These magical dragon wings only last for the turn, but they grant us a flying speed equal to our walking speed, and our walking speed is fast. This supersonic dragon dash basically lets us do all our previously established speedy nonsense, but while flying, which means you’ll be able to threaten enemies over in the next area code.
Other Blog Posts You Might Like:
Our Complete Magic Item 5e Guide HERE.
Want to know how these dice work? Check out our DnD Dice Explained Guide!
]]>Despite the claims that 5th edition will only be growing rather than updating to a new edition, dungeons and dragons is still getting a new set of core books in 2024. Is One D&D really 5.5? Is this just a bunch of new stuff for 5th? Will all my old builds, monsters, and adventure paths still work in this brave new world of TTRPGs? Grab your character sheets and your big pouch of shiny math rocks as we go through everything you need to know.
Before we get too far, at the time of this writing WotC has been very hesitant to confirm or deny much of anything about One D&D. The interviews and videos they’ve released have been frustratingly vague and while we can glean quite a bit from the Unearthed Arcana playtests we have no confirmation on what will make it into the final products from those playtests. Everything we currently have is at best, educated guesswork.
We don’t have official names for them yet, but we know WotC is working on functional replacement/upgrades for the player’s handbook, the DM’s guide, and the monster manual. Functionally, these three books represent the “core rules” of dungeons and dragons, and in any other situation we’d be considering this a new edition. They keep promising however that this will be a sort of “updating” or “upgrading” of 5th edition rather than a new edition, but the reality remains to be seen.
Fundamentally this means a complete overhaul (or at least upgrade) to character creation, base mechanics, and monster designs.
Even this is quite hazy. We have multiple announcements and advertisements that say all three of the new core books will be released “in 2024” which is uncharacteristically vague. Previous releases have given us firm release dates months in advance so this may be hinting at a very late 2024 release.
We did get a leak however. An official image and tweet that was very rapidly taken down advertises that the new core books will be releasing on May 21st 2024, but that date has been scrubbed from the website. We’ll see if that date was taken down because of delays, or if they were just jumping the gun on the announcement.
Nothing is ever going to stop you from playing D&D 5th edition as it is now. The books aren’t going to disappear and all the content you already own will still work just fine. You may need to buy these new core books for any new content released after it though.
Based on what we’ve seen so far, they’re attempting to integrate this new content rather than replace the old content, but regardless of their claims most of what we’ve seen consists of functional replacements. This means that for any adventure paths or supplements we’ll see after these new core books come out will use them as a foundation.
WotC has been working on its own virtual tabletop version of D&D for a few years now. Virtual tabletops are typically system agnostic, but this one will be decidedly D&D exclusive. It’ll also be the new D&D exclusive on release, so if you’re planning on booting up the shiny new VTT, expect to need a few new books along with it.
Based on what we’ve seen this new VTT will likely be quite good, but it’ll also likely carry a monthly subscription fee. Keep that in mind when you start considering what system to run after the change over.
You’ll have to take all of this with a grain of salt since it’s not actually released yet, but we can still run down all the things that have been strongly hinted at and how they’ll affect your games.
Something they’ve openly talked about is switching your starting ASI (ability score increase) from a racial feature to a background feature. Functionally many builds will stay as they are but you’ll get a lot less pressure to select specific races for classes that use their boosted ability score. It also makes a bit more sense that your early life and career makes that difference rather than just what you were born as and helps cut down on biological determinism.
It seems that aasimar are no more and are being replaced by the aardlings, animal-headed celestial creatures either born on the higher planes or with angelic ancestors. Weird choice here, but I highly suspect that it has something to do with the fact that WotC doesn’t own the word aasimar and can’t copyright it, but they’ll own these angel animals whole cloth.
This is less of a change than you’d think, but the fiddly “trading” your ability score increase for a feat has been made into simply gaining a “feat” with the “ability score increase feat” as the default option.
Basically a base-building mechanic, this will seem very familiar to players who remember strongholds and they seem to be picking up a lot of those old ideas. Bastions are structures that grant bonuses for resting in them and build up special points the players can spend to essentially gain resupplies and reinforcements.
Every class has been combed through and updated. Some are functionally about the same, while some have been completely reshaped into something new. There are far too many changes to go over them all here, but I can at least list some of the most drastic changes.
Druids started the playtest VERY differently, but they seem to have settled on relatively minor changes to how wild shapes work. Druids will now get to wild shape as a bonus action by default, but in exchange they’ll only be able to select a few wild shape options rather than having the whole monster manual on their roster.
Sorcerers are getting a bunch of substantial tweaks, and the one I’m most excited for is that converting your sorcery points into spells no longer takes a bonus action. We’re also messing a bit with the sorcerer archetype progression, so it’ll be strange to see how they consolidate that with older sorcerer archetypes.
Warlocks are surprisingly similar to their current state but practically all the invocations have gotten tuned and altered slightly. We’re also getting some limited capacity to regain spell slots (thank god) and you’ll find a lot of the language in pact magic has been cleaned up.
This is sort of an internal change that won’t affect play much, but all the character classes are getting placed into one of 4 class groups: experts, mages, priests, and warriors. This may seem familiar if you played back in 4th edition, but essentially some abilities and effects would only be usable or only apply to certain classes. A good current example of this are all those magical items that are usable by “spellcasters only”, in One D&D “spellcasters” will instead be the “mage class group”.
For players this will only really be a guideline for what general battlefield role they can expect each class to take, and what powers they can expect to gain as the class advances.
Practically every background printed in 2023 had this already and had to make caveats for “if you’re not playing this way”. It is all but confirmed that once the new books roll around every background will also provide a feat at 1st level. It looks like most backgrounds will provide a specific feat, but some will give a choice between a short list of feat options.
While most games don’t reach level 20 anyway, they are trying to make reaching that high bar a bit more enticing. In addition to having a unique capstone feature, One D&D will introduce “epic boons”, extremely powerful feats that can only be taken at level 20, or potentially at post-20 gameplay.
Functionally, this does make your capstone feature more flexible, but 20th-level games are so rare to begin with this isn’t likely to make much of a difference at your game tables. That being said WotC has hinted at trying to make extremely high tier play more workable, so we’ll see if “epic adventures” and their epic boons stick the landing.
Rather than having a unique spell list for each class, we’re now dividing all spells into three spell lists, arcane, divine, and primal. On one hand this removes some of the uniqueness of each class, but on the other it really does streamline things quite a bit. Arcane, divine, and primal do a good job of laying out the general behind-the-scenes divisions we already had anyway and makes looking up spells much simpler.
Every weapon category is now getting a “weapon mastery” that can be unlocked through class features “mainly from the warrior classes”. For example, the weapon mastery for great axes is called “cleave”, which allows you to make an additional attack at an adjacent creature once you hit the first one with your mighty swing.
This is a fun idea that gives weapons more utility and more powerful options when in the hands of characters that are specifically trained in them, without just locking other characters out of using the weapons.
In the ever-evolving landscape of Dungeons & Dragons, the anticipation surrounding One D&D 2024 Core Rules is palpable. So, ready your character sheets and brace yourselves for the dawn of a new era in tabletop roleplaying. May your quests be epic, your battles legendary, and your stories unforgettable. Until then, let the anticipation fuel our imaginations as we eagerly await the next chapter in the saga of Dungeons & Dragons.
Support our content:
Want to know how these dice work? Check out our DnD Dice Explained Guide!
]]>
You lose your way in the woods and find a path through a willow tree arch you’ve never seen before. The path twists and turns through ever-more vibrant old groves and flower fields and you spot a young girl. She giggles as she takes your hand and whisks you away into a courtyard gala where you dance and sing amidst what seems like hundreds of smiling faces. The days and hours blend into a colorful haze before eventually you wander home away from the fop and fey only to find your loved ones old and tired from all the years they spent without you. You’ve just wandered in and out of the feywild, a chaotic and whimsical realm where logic has little meaning and emotion shapes reality. Grab a cup of tea and don’t give any strange fairies your name as we go through everything you need to know.
The Feywild is not a proper plane amidst the astral plane but rather it’s an “echo” of the material plane (to us the “normal” world) that parallels it and exists alongside it, making it more or less the good version of the Shadowfell that also hugs tightly to the material world. This means that for every major landmark in the material plane, there will be some sort of happier and more whimsical version of it in the Feywild at roughly the same place. However, things like “landmarks” have so little impact here most of these reflections are easily missed, just more specks of interest in a kaleidoscopic and chaotic realm.
A Fey Crossing is a portal to the feywild, magical sources typically hidden in plain sight and often guarded by druidic circles or powerful fey guardians. Some consist of stones arranged in arcane patterns and carved with runes, but others may be simple mushroom rings or natural tree arches. Many require specific rituals to activate but some can just be walked through, leading to travelers accidentally stepping between the realms. Convincing the fey guardian to let you plane shift features prominently in many Feywild campaigns, as they could demand anything from “secrets” to “memories” to, “whatever you’ve got in your pockets”.
Things like time and logic really don’t matter much in the Feywild, it is a morphic plane where feeling and emotion dictate reality. Happy archfey make for happy and colorful twilight glades, while areas ruled by a cruel hag can be despicable craven woods where the very air tastes bitter. Emotions and sensations are also more intense here, food tastes better, color is more vibrant, and a minor inconvenience can feel like the greatest of insults. This emotional intensity is largely responsible for the seemingly erratic behavior of its inhabitants, beings who have lived their whole lives amidst the sway of heightened sensation.
Elves are not natives of the material plane, rather they are the descendants of eladrin that left the feywild thousands of years ago, but countless eladrin still remain in their ancestral homeland. Eladrin are similar to material world elves but are far closer to fairies than their mundane cousins. Many are bound to nature and the seasons, and even physically change as seasons pass.
The eladrin share these wildlands with sylvan creatures such as fairies, hags, pixies, harengon, and sprites. Creatures who spend significant time in the feywild often become saturated in fey energy becoming more chaotic and colorful versions of their material plane cousins. The twilight woods contain feytouched versions of numerous creatures found on the material plane, such as goblins, ogres, and giants.
While a lot of the Feywild sort of blends together, there are powerful beings who put some very clear dividing lines on which half of the chaos is theirs. Queen Titania is a godlike archfey and her bright domain is called “The Seelie Court” (also called the Summer Court). The darker domain belongs to The Queen of Air and Darkness, another godlike archfey. Both courts have a similar “Alice in Wonderland” style royal chaos going on but the Summer court is typically good aligned if a bit mischievous while the Unseelie is typically evil aligned but also welcoming to outsiders. If something important is happening in the Feywild, odds are one or both of the courts have their hands in it.
Though it doesn't work this way in 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons, you'll also find some versions of the Feywild where the powers are divided by the seasons into a Spring Court, Summer Court, Autumn Court, and Winter Court. Since the Seelie Court is also called the "Summer Court" this leads to some confusion, but in 5e the Feywild is just divided between the Seelie and Unseelie.
If perhaps you're here after watching Vox Machina's plunge into the Feywild with Otohan Thull, Mystic Iothawisher, and Planerider Ryn, you'll have seen that there are also powerful fey amidst these forest domains that own their own spaces apart from the courts and their archfey leaders. This is true in Dungeons & Dragons as well as Critical Role's setting, and you're free to create all sorts of minor domains like the ligament manor ruled by any number of powerful fey both evil and benign. To fit them in it's best to at least consider their relations with the Seelie and Unseelie court but all sorts of alliances or arrangements can work. Note that the forest nightward, tangleward, duskward, seaward direction thing is one of Vox Machina's inventions and isn't a part of the Forgotten Realms Feywild.
The Feywild is highly morphic, which means the landscape is going to shift and change a bit every time you turn your head. However, since the plane is so influenced by emotion, locations that people care deeply about tend to stick around. Particularly powerful or influential creatures tend to warp the landscape around them. A happy meadow might house a conclave of cheerful pixies, while a gnarled dying wood is likely owned by a wicked hag.
Many cities exist in the Feywild, most of which belonging to the elves such as the ancient citadels of Evermeet, Astrazalian, Evereska, and New Sharandar. There’re also the nearly endless tunnels of Nachtur, greatest of all feywild goblin warrens. And forbidden to most fey, Brokenstone Vale is a feyland of lycanthropes, wild werewolves free to live amidst the ruins of long forgotten beast lords.
While it’s much rarer to see one as a campaign setting, there’s also a much happier version of the domains of dread called domains of delight. Domains of delight are tailor-made dreamlands created by archfey and other deific powers to suit their creators wants and whims. Notably (spoiler warning) the three connected worlds of Hither, Thither, and Yon you adventure through during the Wilds Beyond the Witchlight campaign started out as a domain of delight until a hag coven broke it up and corrupted it.
Finally, the feywild is a mirror for the entire prime material plane, and that means there’s a Feywild mirror for the Underdark as well. This place is called the Feydark, which is far livelier and more enchanting than the Underdark, filled with colorful and magnificent mushrooms. The Feydark is still a nearly endless maze of twisting tunnels and massive caverns, but many of those caverns and passageways are filled with overworld terrain like forests and swamps.
So, your party has slipped down a particularly dark hole and popped out into the Shadowfell, what next? Do you just announce “things are dark and spooky” and move on? Well thankfully we get a bit of mechanical impact with two rules found in the Dungeon Master’s Guide called Memory Loss and Time Warp.
This is an optional rule suggested if you want to emphasize the Feywild’s ephemeral and dreamlike qualities. Whenever a non-fey creature leaves the feywild, they have a chance of losing their memories in a fey-flavored haze. When they exit, each non-fey creature makes a DC 10 Wisdom saving throw. On a failed saving throw, creatures have no memory of their adventures in the Feywild, on a success creatures remember but some of the details are a bit hazy and dreamlike. If adventurers want to recover those lost memories, they can treat this effect like a curse and remove it with the remove curse spell or similar effects that can remove curses.
This is an optional rule that should be used carefully, since it can easily warp a campaign. When the players spend a day or more in the Feywild, they can return to find that the time they spent there was not the same time experienced by the rest of the world.
You can essentially use this feature in 1 of 3 ways.
The first is simply as a quest objective. Archfey and other powerful figures within the Feywild may be able to undo or mitigate this magical time distortion on the players, for a price. Essentially turning the time warp into a hook to keep the players from leaving the Feywild until they finish up a quest or two.
The second is as a controlled time change. You simply adjust the time however best suits the next leg of your campaign as the players leave the Feywild. Mere minutes could have passed in the days or weeks the players spent adventuring in the Feywild, or it could be years later so that the outside world progresses to the next interesting bit of history you want your campaign to cover. Use that years option carefully though, as it’ll have dramatic effects on any NPCs or backstory characters that your players care about.
Finally, we have the third option which is rolling randomly on the following table to determine the time discrepancy as the players leave the Feywild. This is by far the most dangerous option as a DM and depending on the dice rolls could be completely campaign shattering.
Time Warp Table
D20 |
Time Warp Effect |
1-2 |
Days become minutes. |
3-6 |
Days become hours. |
7-13 |
No change. |
14-17 |
Days become weeks. |
18-19 |
Days become months. |
20 |
Days become years. |
While there are definitely fey creatures to fight, the Feywild lends itself more towards narrative scenarios than straight combat. Most fey creatures are mischievous in one way or another, so there’s plenty of opportunity for conflict, it’s just the sort of conflicts that get solved with gossip and favors more often than swords. Because of this, the Feywild is a fine adventuring prospect no matter what tier you’re on, and whatever shenanigans or nonsense you want to subject your players to.
Early Feywild encounters can be charming, confusing, or as simple as tracking down a pixie that stole your hat. If you’re itching for a fight in the Feywild at this tier, hags are an excellent foe with varieties that scale in power depending on what you need. Pixies and sprites can be a real threat in numbers or with coordination. Goblins and ogres are also traditional early Feywild enemies, but can be a bit bland considering the setting. To make your goblins, ogres, or any other monster manual creature a Feywild themed threat you can make “feytouched” versions.
For a quick and easy “feytouched” template, just apply the following to an existing creature and pump it’s CR up by 1:
The creature can cast the spell misty step as a reaction once per day.
The creature makes saving throws against spells and magical effects with advantage.
At tier 2 most of the creatures they can fight won’t be challenging unless spammed, and they’re not ready to deal with the really nasty stuff yet. I highly recommend using narrative and roleplay at this tier rather than combat. The players can track down an eladrin who stole their names, or sneak into an archfey’s garden party to steal a pie. Play around with the dreamlike chaos of the Feywild wonderland with some riddles and contradictions. They should adventure in this tier figuring out what to do or say, rather than figuring out how many hit points it has. If you need a fight, consider upgrading those hags to hag covens, or make a villain out of an eladrin who has a particular interest in messing with the players.
I have similar advice in general for this tier (roleplay encounters work better here than combat) but at these levels the players can stand their ground a bit more in the fey courts. Consider getting them involved in the high fey politics caught between the Seelie and Unseelie courts. These fights can range from petty squabbles to full on political intrigues, and the line between the two gets fuzzy in the Feywild. If you need stats for fights at this tier I’d recommend picking up the Monstrous Compendium Vol: 4. It contains some juicy stats for a range of high fey enemies.
At tier 4 the Feywild is no longer “statistically” very threatening to the average player, but so much of the Feywild magic involves things simply “happening” without dice rolls that you can still make the place quite challenging. Consider using one of the domains of delight as a staging ground, as it allows you to essentially do whatever you’d like. Pit the players against the whims of an archfey, or even put them up against the Summer Queen or the Queen of Air and Darkness herself for a climactic world shaking finale.
Our Complete Magic Item 5e Guide HERE.
Want to know how these dice work? Check out our DnD Dice Explained Guide!
]]>You’ve lost your way in the graveyard and stumbled your way through an open grave. The shock creeps into a confused and foreboding terror as you crawl out of the cold earth and behold a dark and twisted landscape bereft of color and solemnly still save for the lumbering forms of countless undead. You’ve just fallen from the forgotten realms through a shadow crossing and if you don’t scramble back through before it closes, you’re likely in for a bad and spooky time in this unapologetically evil echo of the material realm. Grab your lantern and some holy water as we go through everything you need to know about the plane of shadow.
The Shadowfell is not a proper plane amid the astral plane but rather it’s one of the “mirror planes” of the prime material plane (to us the “normal” world) that exists as a parallel plane alongside it. This makes it more or less the evil version of the feywild with its positive energy that also hugs tightly to the material world. This means that for every major landmark in the material plane, there will be some sort of dark and evil version of it in the Shadowfell at roughly the same place. Mountains are reflected by looming crags, forests by gnarled groves, and cities by rotten and degraded citadels. The landscape itself is morphic and literally shifts to be as ominous and evil as possible, bleached of color, and incredibly dark.
The primary way mortals reach the Shadowfell demi - plane is through passages called “shadow crossings”. As the Shadowfell is so closely tied to the material plane, the planes often briefly overlap and freely allow travel between them. You’ll find these in particularly dark and dreary locations rife with necrotic energy, like graveyards, the creepy corners of basements, or anywhere that light and joy rarely reach. Many of these crossings are permanent, and a deep cavern within the Underdark is a good place to find them. But many at the surface occur for only a single night or return with the setting sun only accessible in true darkness.
It isn’t just darkness, it’s advanced darkness. Flames and other bright light sources function here but they’re muted and work like dim light across the entire plane. They serve to give the blacks and grays definition rather than proper illumination in this negative energy plane. There’s no sun here, no stars, nothing but an endless black canopy to oppressively cloak the shadowstuff landscape and necrotic energies. Adventurers will find that this world hates light, a spite shared by many of its inhabitants. It's also a “fugue plane”, which makes reality and consistency tentative at best. Anything could be lurking in the dark.
The Shadowfell is infested with countless undead and dead creatures, particularly shades, wraiths, shadow mastiff, and spirits but also the odd death knight or lich and their zombified minions leftover from the Spellplague. Shadow dragons loom from the mountaintops and fiends lurk in the deepest dungeons. Material plane creatures sometimes wander in as well through the shadow crossings and manage to survive the evil creatures there. Owlbears, umber hulks, wolves and basilisks can all be found hunting the shadowlands. Over generations many of these creatures have become saturated with the negative energy of the plane becoming a form of undead called “dark creatures”, beings bleached of color and gifted with dark powers.
Mortals also call the shadow plane home, though they too have become “dark creatures” one with the plane. They’re called “shades” though technically we haven’t seen them pop up yet in 5th edition but in previous editions these shadow people haunted the twisted Shadowfell streets. With a soulless lack of emotions, pointy teeth, and shadow powers, they straddled the line between monster and mortal inhabitant. In some editions you had to do some specific nasty rituals to absorb shadow powers and become a shade, and in some just living in the Shadowfell long enough did the trick.
So, while the Shadowfell is already dark and spooky, it also links to even worse places collectively called “domains of dread”. These are nightmare-scapes or the domains of powerful evil entities who are usually trapped in the hells of their own design with their own lore. The most famous of these is Castle Ravenloft, ruled by the vampire Count Strahd. Domains of dread can open up all over the place, but the Shadowfell is essentially “next door” and most of the permanent passages to numerous domains of dread lie somewhere in the plane of shadow.
The Shadowfell demi - plane is highly morphic, which means the landscape is going to shift and change a bit every time you turn your head. The locations that stick are “reflections” of material plane places and cities. Every city back in the material plane has a dark and twisted version here with their own shadowy population and potential quests and conflicts. We haven't actually visited most of them in 5th edition yet, so they're all blank evil canvasses for you to work with.
The vast swamp back in the forgotten realms has a notable mirror version here called the shadow swamp containing a mysterious form at the bottom of a magical trench called the black rift. There's also a shadow keep called the “shadow citadel” at its heart just waiting for some evil rituals. The vast swamp is already dangerous enough but with the interplay into an even darker and more dangerous shadow version it makes for prime adventuring real estate.
The Shadowfell is also a favorite home to the Goddess of Death herself, the Raven Queen (not quite the one from critical role). She keeps a castle here called the Fortress of Memories filled with the memories and soul fragments taken from dead gods. She's also said to keep a divine realm here called Letherna, a dark ice fortress surrounded by a frozen wood.
If you're looking for a more structured location. Take a dig through Thunderspire Labyrinth from back in 4th edition by Mike Mearls. It's not 5th edition but there's a ton of Shadowfell dd lore to mine content from.
So, your party has slipped down a particularly dark hole and popped out into the Shadowfell, what next? Do you just announce, “things are dark and spooky” and move on? Well thankfully we get a bit of mechanical impact found in the Dungeon Master’s Guide called Shadowfell Despair.
This is an optional rule that they suggest you run if you want to emphasize just how creepy and unnerving the Shadowfell should be and the negative extreme emotions they'll be bombarded with. Once a day or just whenever you feel the situation is especially unnerving, have each player (that’s not native to the Shadowfell) make a DC 10 Wisdom saving throw. On a failed save, have them roll a d6 and use the following table:
Shadowfell Despair
|
If a character fails a save but already has one from a previous failed save, they replace the old negative emotions with the new emotion. Whenever they finish a long rest they can make a DC 15 Wisdom saving throw (it’s a higher save once the despair sets in) and on a success they end the effects. They can also get rid of despair with calm emotions spells or any magic that can remove curses.
Unlike many of the other “evil” planes the Shadowfell is actually fairly survivable at early tiers. Not that you couldn’t pull a few shadow dragons out to challenge a high level party but the inherent despair effect is passable by low hit point characters and there’s nothing intrinsically lethal about it unlike say Hell or the elemental chaos of the plane of fire, or even the Underdark with its dark elves. If your party does have trouble, try giving them something that deals radiant damage since half the things they'll fight here will be weak to it.
This early, a stay in the Shadowfell should be brief and frightening. They should be huddled in dark corners as hordes of undead and terrifying shadow creatures narrowly miss their discovery and subsequent devouring. The “dark creatures” are an excellent resource for creatures to fight, as are typical low-level Underdark creatures like darkmantles or shadow mastiffs.
For a quick and easy “dark creature” template, just apply the following to an existing creature from the monster manual and pump it’s CR up by 1:
The creature gains darkvision to a range of 120 feet.
The creature deals an additional 1d4 necrotic damage on each attack.
The creature becomes invisible in areas of darkness.
Tier 2 honestly feels ideal for Shadowfell campaigns. Not so low that you can’t play around with all the fun evil creatures but not so high that they aren’t scared of anything. Still a bit low to be taking on the serious contenders of the plane though. This is a good spot to fight a bunch of ghosts in a Shadowfell ruin, maybe do a few quests for a suspiciously helpful shade, or even just a few random encounters as a prelude to entering a domain of dread.
To make the Shadowfell encounters interesting at tier 3 I’d recommend tying the adventurers into a power struggle at one of the shadow cities like Chaulssin or Evernight, or perhaps pit them against a particularly nasty dark wizard, death knights, or a shadow dragon. At this tier the adventurers shouldn’t be too worried about your average undead and you’ll have to start raising the stakes beyond just “spooky”.
At tier 4 the Shadowfell monsters are actually a bit mild compared to what the players will be able to take on, unless they're here clashing with the Raven Queen. Ironically, at tier 4 I find the Shadowfell functions best as a “normal” staging ground and “safe place” to set against the real adventure taking place in an extremely nasty domain of dread linked by stable shadow crossing to the Shadowfell.
Like this content? Check out our RPG dice subscription or make your next purchase via this link
]]>D&D isn’t just the Forgotten Realms, those ironically well-remembered lands are just one version of the material plane which is just one component of the great wheel, the cosmic dance of realms who turn according to the universal constants of Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos. Planescape as a setting goes all the way back to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons back in 1994, and we’re returning to Sigil and the Outlands once again with 5e’s new collection. Did they traverse the planes safely? Is this another flop like Spelljammer? Grab your portal key and don’t upset the Lady of Pain as we go through everything you need to know.
Once again, we’re doing a package of 3 smaller books just like we had in Spelljammer and Planescape is split into a setting book, a new bestiary, and an adventure path. I am happy to report that both the setting book and the adventure path both clock in at 96 pages, and when combined with the 64-page bestiary Planescape finally beats the current WotC trend of “fewer pages and higher price” we’ve seen steadily getting worse over the last few years. Collectively Planescape totals 256 pages, beating the similar Spelljammer product which only had a combined 192 pages. Sadly, we are still stuck paying more though. There’s no MSRP but the 3-book set seems to be selling for about $85 physically and $50 digitally, compared to Spelljammer’s $69 physical price and $50 digital price.
All told, the Planescape collection includes the following:
Let’s go through and evaluate each book on its own before coming back around and evaluating it all as a set.
This is your setting guide with a little bit of player content on the side.
All together this booklet contains:
Included are the new Gate Warden and Planar Philosopher backgrounds, both meant to accommodate players who’ve spent all or most of their lives exploring sigil or the multiverse. Both backgrounds grant you a feat, which I’m now 100% convinced will be a standard rule once we hit 5.5.
Speaking of feats, we get 7 new ones mostly reflecting the extreme alignments, giving you the opportunity to make your evil character more evil or your lawful character more lawful. I was a little disappointed that we didn’t get feats representing the factions of Sigil, like we did with the schools of Strixhaven. Still always nice to get more options though.
We gain 2 new spells here that are unsurprisingly portal themed, gate seal and warp sense. Gate seal is a 4th level spell that essentially shuts down portals and stops them from opening for a while. Warp sense is a 2nd level spell that lets you detect nearby closed portals, which is handy for spotting the well-hidden gates throughout Sigil. I highly doubt either of these spells will find a home outside of a Planescape adventure, but they’re welcome additions, nonetheless.
Here we gain the mimir, which are basically servo-skulls filled with useful planar information (and are very plot relevant to the campaign). The portal compass which conveniently directs you to the last portal you traveled through. And the sensory stone which can replay feelings and sensations and I’m already dreading the NSFW applications my players are going to use it for.
Firstly, I want to say I’m sympathetic to the writers here. They only had 96 pages to fully reintroduce players to a setting that originally took up over 200 pages back in the day. And for what they had to do I think they did a fantastic job. But the way they did that was by narrowing the scope. “Sigil and the Outlands” is an apt title as the lore only covers Sigil and the Outlands. There’s nothing on the plane of fire, the depths of the abyss, or the lofty peaks of mount Celestia here; you're expected to do your own research from some other supplement if your players step out of the Cage and off into the multiverse somewhere.
Again, I sympathize with the writers here. Sigil itself is such a complicated setting it’s nearly impossible to do it justice in such a small space while also spending word count on the other planes. We do get a taste of some of that flavor though through the gate towns. The edges of the outlands are dotted with cities surrounding the main portals to all the planes that border it in the great wheel. Each one gives us a little slice of their connected plane, and each of the gate towns is fleshed out enough that you shouldn’t have a problem adventuring in them.
That sort of shaved down feeling is true for the Sigil factions as well. Each of the factions of Sigil has a deep and intricate lore, or at least they did in earlier editions. Here we get some solid bullet points, a map of their important building in Sigil, and generally enough to get the flavor and use them in a campaign.
Appropriate to its name, the book provides you with everything you’ll need to run your own adventures in Sigil and the surrounding Outlands. While it doesn’t detail the other planes, it takes the opportunity to detail Sigil instead, and is filled with quirks, mysteries, and adventure hooks to take the players all throughout the bizarre streets of Sigil. Putting the emphasis on the gate towns as well lets us essentially sample the major planes with their border towns, all of which with their own hooks and content worthy of their own adventures.
I am perhaps spoiled by the indulgent lore books, but what we get seems like it has been trimmed down to the bare essentials, then spiced up with a few quirky stand outs. You’ll get exactly enough to run a game in Sigil, but there isn’t much depth beyond bullet points and highlights. And fundamentally, a Planescape game is meant to include traveling between the planes and you’re really on your own for DM support once you step through a gate. I get that including sections on all the major planes would be a much bigger project, but I feel like such a project was warranted.
Sigil and the Outlands gives you exactly what it says on the tin, Sigil and the Outlands. My criticism of the book is less about what was included, which is great, and more about what’s missing. This isn’t a “Planescape” lore book, it is exclusively a Sigil and the Outlands lore book, and with that in mind the book delivers on its promise.
My other criticism is the tone. The original Planescape is gritty and dark, and this new incarnation can be downright goofy. I happen to be a DM that loves a bit of goofy fun in my adventures but for veterans looking to capture that dark otherworldly vibe of the original will find it significantly more colorful and played for laughs.
I think overall this book will be a welcome addition to players who’ve never experienced Planescape, but a bit disappointing to veterans who were expecting a return to old form.
The planescape bestiary of Morte’s Planar Parade has 54 new monsters and NPC statblocks, along with some rules for modifying creatures according to the plane they’re on. We also get some encounter tables, but they’re based on simple alignment rather than the individual planes.
For each of the alignment planes we get a set of rules that work like a creature template to represent that plane’s influence. That’s not just a bear, it’s now an abyssal bear. For some of the planes this is really all we get, which to me also harkens back to the “space templates” we got back in Spelljammer. Templates are nice, but I wish we’d gotten some more unique monsters.
We get 5 d100 encounter tables to encompass all the planes across all 4 tiers. Instead of making a table for each plane we get a table for the major alignments, meaning we get a Good, Evil, Lawful, Chaotic, and Neutral plane encounter table. While the planes have a ton of influence from alignment, it feels really weird to use a single Lawful table for both The Nine Hells and Mechanus, or a single Good table for both Arboria and Mount Celestia. I really dislike this and feel like they could’ve at least sprung for a few extra pages to fit a table for each plane.
54 is a substantial drop from the most comparable bestiary in Boo’s Astral Menagerie, which sported over 70 new critters. What we get though is well designed but dominated by creatures needed for the accompanying adventure path rather than a good sampling of the planes. We get NPCs representing the Sigil faction rank and file, which are incredibly useful. We get the specific and peculiar oddities that you’ll run into during Turn of Fortune’s Wheel, but not much else. There are a few fun headliners like the time dragons, but I’d have expected more.
Interesting monster designs and some useful templates will get you through a lot of planescape encounters, and the inclusion of all the Sigil faction NPCs will make navigating Sigil encounters much easier.
It’s pretty evident that this bestiary’s goal was supplying the needs of the adventure path, and not acting as a “planescape bestiary”. Whole major planes simply don’t have a single inclusion. Not a single creature from any of the elemental planes? Nothing for Arcadia? Nothing for Gehenna? The encounter tables are practically unusable, unless you’re fine with modrons showing up randomly in hell, or angels appearing in random encounters for Mechanus. What monsters we got are great, but it simply doesn’t serve as an adequate bestiary for running a Planescape adventure of your own.
I feel like Morte’s Planar Parade is the weakest book of the collection. I can’t shake the feeling that it’s really just an attachment to the adventure path. Yes, it serves fine for said adventure path, but I can’t really use this effectively to run my own Planescape adventures. When the best I can get for an entire plane is a standard monster with a template applied, the book has failed as a bestiary. The encounter tables feel especially insulting, and largely useless. Some great creatures to use here, but it could’ve been so much better.
Turn of Fortune’s Wheel is a complete planescape adventure that runs from 3rd level to 10th level, and perplexingly also 17th level. It makes sense but be prepared for a wild ride. The players are “multiversal glitches”, a plot contrivance that neatly solves the issue of running a lower-level adventure in Sigil while creating a truly unique experience.
This glitch gimmick has each player create 3 versions of their character, representing different versions of themselves from alternate realities. Whenever a character dies (and they’ll die often) their corpse glitches out and a different version appears after the encounter is over. Death is cheap in Fortune’s Wheel, which means that while Sigil and the Outlands are as dangerous as ever, it doesn’t really matter if you turn down the wrong alleyway or spill the wrong omnipotent being’s drink.
The flip side of this is that players will need to track and advance three separate character sheets simultaneously. Probably welcome to more experienced players, but I’d hesitate to throw this adventure at newbies.
The adventure itself is kooky, lighthearted, and takes the players through a substantial portion of Sigil and a half dozen Outland gate towns. The conclusion (the jump to 17th level) is a bizarre and intriguing moment where the players can reabsorb their missing memories and “true selves”, creating the fantastic moment of telling your party to “level up 7 times”.
“Kooky” and “lighthearted” are probably not what old school players of Planescape were hoping to hear though. I really like this plot, but I can definitely sense a jarring shift in tone when I compare it to the original books. Much in the same way that Spelljammer did, this version is silly at times, and that’s a tonal taste that some will love, and some will hate.
Turn of Fortune’s Wheel is essentially a sight-seeing tour of Sigil and the Outlands in a walking castle, where your impressions of the locales play a surprisingly strong role in the ending. Functionally unique, Fortune’s Wheel gives your players permission to throw caution to the wind and just try stuff for the sake of trying. Mechanically fascinating, the 3 characters-in-one gimmick is a brilliant solution to the high level of Sigil, and the final level jump provides a powerful ending chapter without the grind.
The light tone and cheap deaths are probably not what veteran players are looking for in a Planescape adventure. Coupled with the extra bookwork of maintaining 3-character sheets means it’s also probably not right for newbies. This gives it the awkward intended audience of experienced players, but not so experienced as to remember earlier versions of Planescape. If you’re in this window it’s fantastic, but it has issues for everyone else.
Similar to my take on Spelljammer, the adventure here is the highlight of the set. But that’s for me. I also recognize that this tone is very off-model if you were hoping for a return to the old Planescape. Turn of Fortune’s Wheel is goofy, encourages you to do stupid and life-threatening things since death is cheap, and gives you the ability to run 3 characters in one. A lot of the plot is a bit contrived, but the result is an excuse to essentially sample everything Sigil and the Outlands has to offer as you track down a missing modron. The adventure is a unique experience, a fun time, and will be genuinely memorable, even if formerly serious settings are taken for a laugh. If you’re looking for something crazy and exciting for a playgroup who’ll be excited to make multiple characters, this is the adventure for you.
Firstly, let me say that WotC jacking up the price of their products every release should not be tolerated or rewarded, but I’ll analyze the product on its own merit.
I think this is a worthy buy, but as with other WotC books, I’d advise waiting a couple months for the price to cool off. The similar Spelljammer product that was released last year is barely half its original price on amazon now, and just waiting a bit can ease up the price tag.
The biggest issue here is expectations. If you’re expecting a return to the form of the original Planescape then don’t bother, this is a new and much lighter beast. Are you expecting a full guide and bestiary for all the planes? Then move along, this covers Sigil, the Outlands, and enough monsters for that and one adventure path.
Ditch those expectations though, and what you have on offer is a fantastic adventure, a bestiary to support it, and enough lore and content to stage your own campaigns using Sigil and the Outlands as a hub. You’ll have to do your own research and dig up your own monsters for when the players step through any of those Sigil portals, but you're set for any shenanigans that happen within the Cage itself. Give it a shot if planar travel holds any allure, definitely take this over Spelljammer, and tell the Lady of Pain I said hi.
Like this content?
You can support us by making your purchase via this link, or checking out some of our other products
]]>The bard is an artisan of magic, knowledgeable and witty musicians and warriors capable of lethal arts. Druids are masters of nature and primeval magics, capable of transforming into beasts. Put them together and you get pied pipers musically commanding bestial armies or literal songbirds singing magical blessings as they fly across the battlefield. Whether you're itching for this 5th edition combo or just fresh from Baldur’s Gate it's time to queue up your favorite drum beats as we go through everything you need to know.
Both druids and bards can play a powerful support role and while their main ability scores don’t line up their buffs can. By using wild shapes we can make up for low physical stats (don’t need high strength when you can just be a bear) and focus all our points on our spells. With both the ability to fly and the ability to cast spells at range, a druid bard has an incredible keep away game. These builds are all about putting your party or your summons out in front and buffing them up, while keeping yourself out of harm’s way. Druids are arguably one of the most powerful classes, and bards are an excellent class and among the most versatile classes.
Depending on DM discretion you’ll be able to use your bardic performance while in an animal form, and that can set you up for a sweetly efficient situation of flying around in a wild shape while using your action for repeating spells (like call lightning) and your bonus action for bardic inspirations.
We have a couple main routes to go here, and both end up as powerful party buffs, skill monkeys with all the knowledge skills, damaging spellcasters, and even healers. Done right, you and your summons can practically be a party on your own.
The glaring issue with this class combo is that we’re splitting between a Wisdom class and Charisma class as our spellcasting abilities, and if we want to have decent spells there isn’t much left for a decent ability score spread. Outside of the wild shapes, we’ll be pretty squishy and have to rely on magical ability. We aren't martial classes and can't use a martial weapon, will have weaker spellcasting progression than a single class, and are mostly locked into a support role. We'll have to make use of impactful low-level spells, since it'll be a while until we get past unneeded spells and hit higher level stuff.
Most of the features we care about can't be gained with a single level like a cleric level or a barbarian level. Bards are versatile classes, but don't add a ton with only a few levels. We aren't getting the maneuverability of a rogue's cunning action, and we can't even effectively dip for heavy armor proficiency effectively since druids won't wear metal. This is not a strong combo, and if you're simply looking to optimize for damage, fighter levels for fighter abilities, action surge, and heavy armor may be better than levels in bard. For spellcasting a level dip for a life cleric level with channel divinity may be better than druid, or even just the magic initiate feat for cantrips like booming blade. Even things like paladin, artificer, monks or warlocks make better level dips. You get things like martial arts, flurry of blows, eldritch blast, agonizing blast, divine smite, and warlock spell slots. Ultimately in most cases we're just going to be in an arcane trickster situation, where our core features just don't mesh for much-reduced damage.
Next, by taking multiple classes we’ll have quite a few features competing for our actions and in a lot of cases we’ll have to choose between them or need prep time to be best ready for combat. And of course, like with any multiclass option, we’re giving up on 20th level capstone features and other late-game abilities, and getting to our mid-game features significantly later as a multi- and dual class than a standard class.
To do most of what we want to do we’ll need at least 3 levels of bard to pick up the first bard archetype feature, and at least 2 levels of druid for wild shape. But really, we also want our first druid archetype feature as well so I’d say the builds will really kick in at 6th character level.
Druid and bard features both have some odd content but we can put them together and make sense of their interactions with a bit of detailed explanation for each class feature and the many abilities of classes.
Our plan is to focus mainly on spellcasting and often using wild shapes, which means we want to focus mostly on our mental stats. Both Wisdom and Charisma are going to be vital for us and we want them both as high as possible. It leans a bit harder on Charisma though since both bardic inspirations and many of the archetype features rely on it, so Charisma should be our highest score, followed by Wisdom 2nd.
Our 3rd highest score should be Constitution. We get to cheat on our hit points a lot due to wild shape, but we can’t always count on it and a high Constitution will not only help us stay alive but it will also help us maintain concentration on our spells.
Intelligence, Strength and Dexterity can all be dump stats for us. We can make use of medium armor so we don’t need the Dexterity, but if you have points to spend, Dexterity would be the most impactful of the three to make better use of light armor proficiency or even finesse weapons.
We’re trying hard to be a summoning and support character, and while none of the following feats are 100% needed for the strategy, they’re all strong options for a support character and should be at least considered when you gain ability score increases.
At the cost of a 10 minute hype up speech, you can grant your allies a number of temporary hit points equal to your level + your Charisma modifier. You can do this once per short rest, and since you can affect 6 creatures, this can be like adding 50 to 60 hit points across your group every short rest which can really turn the tide in battle. Worth taking, but remember that temporary hit point don’t stack.
This one is a strong option but it depends on your DM’s approval since it’s technically lore locked to the Dragonlance setting. It’s a half feat first of all and gives you +1 to your choice of the physical scores. The surge ability lets you use your bonus action to command an ally to make an additional attack roll with an extra d8 worth of attack damage. You get to do this a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus per long rest, and depending on how strong your allies are it’s a ton of extra damage and practically like two-weapon fighting since you'll be "getting" two attacks a turn like offhand attacks.
Just like knight of the crown, you’ll need DM approval for this Dragonlance feat. It’s also a half feat, but for the mental scores instead. As a bonus action we can provide temporary hit points to an ally equal to 1d8 + proficiency + our mental stat. A lot of what we’re doing uses temporary hit points but it’s nice to have these emergency backup defensive abilities.
Most of our strategy here focuses more on summoning than wild shaping ourselves, but it’s still a powerful feature to have. We’re spread thin on stats so simply turning into something tough when you need to is a great option and you’ll want to prioritize things with high armor class and hit points. The dire wolf or giant hyena are fantastic picks early on, followed by the chunky giant toad and giant elk later on. You can find a more comprehensive list of good wild shape options, what happens to you and all your magical items when you wild shape, and the levels you can access them here.
At first it may seem better to start with bard since you snag an extra skill proficiency, but you’ll get an extra one anyway if you start as druid before switching to bard. Druids get an odd hodgepodge of martial weapon proficiencies, but they're mostly just simple weapons. What you’re really picking between a set of saving throws, and 2 instrument proficiencies vs herbalism kit proficiency. You wouldn’t be wrong to start with either, but I value herbalism kits highly and I’d recommend starting out as a druid.
This multiclass combination has a lot of completely different ways to go with some very different results. Let’s go through some of the more interesting and impressive possibilities.
Our goal is to annoy the hell out of our opponents using a team of pestering birds and our own heckling to ensure our allies almost always attack with advantage while our enemies miss their marks.
To accomplish this, we need to start with 3 druid levels, selecting the circle of the land and specifically the “coast” spell set. Next, we take 3 bard levels selecting the college of lore archetype. College of lore gives us short rest refreshing spell slots and some key defensive options. We follow up with 1 more druid level for a total of 4. We do this firstly so we don’t miss out on the ASI, but also so that our natural recovery feature can restore a 2nd level druid spell on a short rest. Finally, all our remaining levels should go into bard, giving us a final split of Bard 16 / Druid 4.
Now to wrangle some birds. Firstly, we can take advantage of the druid’s optional rule wild companion and use our wild shape to summon a familiar instead. Specifically, we want to summon an owl because it has a 60 ft fly speed and the flyby feature. Flyby lets our bird move in and out of combat without provoking an attack of opportunity. For bird number 2, we need the 2nd level druid spell summon beast. Summon beast’s “air” mode also has flyby, and we can control both at the same time.
So how does this all work? Before going into combat, we set up our two birds using find familiar and summon beast. We don’t use them for dealing damage, instead we send them off like annoyable target seeking missiles and have them use the help action to distract foes before flying out of their reach. When you use the help action type in this way, the next time one of your allies attacks the target, it will have advantage. None of this uses your action economy, and only requires our concentration for the summon beast spell.
For our bonus action, we want to use our bardic inspiration on our allies as needed, heal via healing word, or we also get a great reaction from our bardic feature cutting words. With cutting words whenever an enemy manages to get a good shot at one of our birds, we can roll a bardic inspiration die to make them flub the attack. As a bard we also have access to the spell silvery barbs which imposes disadvantage on an attack and grants advantage on a target’s next roll, all for the low cost of a 1st level slot and a reaction!
For our actual action, we can do some healing spells via cure wounds, but for a ranged option for damage I rather like the rather underutilized spell ice knife. We get it thanks to our druid levels, it’s long range, only uses our first-level spell slots, and can do serious damage to a group of enemies. The target of our spell attack rolls take 1d10 + 2d6, and everybody within 5 feet also takes 2d6, giving us a decent blaster caster game.
But what if they come after our squishy butt with martial weapons and melee attacks? The circle of the land coast spells have us covered for defensive options in the form of mirror image and misty step. Mirror image is one of the most powerful defensive spells that doesn’t require concentration, and if anybody gets too close for comfort we can just misty step away.
So, on a single turn, we can grant advantage on two targets using our birds, fire off an ice knife, and inspire an ally, then use cutting words to blank an attack! Or we can always use our birds for plenty of utility actions.
Finally, once you reach 6 bard levels, we can use the lore bard’s additional magical secrets to pick up the 3rd level druid spell conjure animals even though we continued progressing in bard. With conjure animals our 2 bird trick multiplies into a 9 bird trick as we get to summon 8 giant owls! Each battle ready giant owl has flyby and can use the help action, meaning your allies will basically always attack with advantage for the rest of the campaign!
Our plan here is essentially the classic “velociraptor rancher” druid class with a bardic twist. We’re going to have a chattering horde of tiny dinosaurs and we’ll keep them constantly refreshed with temporary hit points.
To accomplish this we want to start with 5 druid levels and we want to take the circle of the shepherd. Once again we want to make sure we take conjure animals once we gain access to 3rd level spells. Then we take 3 levels in bard selecting the college of glamour. Finally all our remaining levels should go towards druid for a final split of bard 3 / druid 17.
For anybody who has abused conjure animals before, our "original class tactic" should be very familiar. For the low cost of a 3rd level spell and a single action we can summon a whopping 8 velociraptors which all have not only an extra attack a piece, but also pack tactics. This means our dino pack can charge in for 16 attacks with advantage! With all these extra attacks, you're not only likely to get a ton of hits, but likely critical hits every turn. This can be some ridiculous burst damage with a good average, since this major damage is spread across so many attacks.
But our raptors are pretty squishy. Thanks to the circle of the shepherd we can create a “spirit totem” as a bonus action to grant temporary hit points equal to 5 + our druid level to each of our raptors, effectively doubling their hit points.
We only get one of those totems per short rest though, and that’s where the bard part comes in. By taking college of glamour we get the feature mantle of inspiration to grant 5 temporary hit points to a number of creatures equal to our Charisma modifier as a bonus action. In addition, when we grant them these hit points they get to immediately dash up to their movement speed. It only costs a bardic inspiration, so we can start off with the totem, and whenever one or more raptors gets their temporary hit points removed, we can top them all off and dash them where they need to be with a quick play of the flute!
For this last build we're going to forget mage power and focus on combat power in the form of psychic blades on our claws! Even without a fighting style we can become an animal battle master. We become the biggest weapon beast possible and add in a ton of psychic damage to their attacks, a rarely resisted damage type.
To accomplish this we need a nasty subclass combo. We want to start with a two-level dip with 2 druid levels and select the circle of the moon. We then want to take 5 bard levels selecting the college of whispers. We spend all our remaining levels in druid for a final split of 5 bard / 15 druid. It's a bit awkward to push hard into bard class early even though the druid class will be our primary class, but it'll be worth it.
The strategy here is a high-damage rush-down build. The college of whispers feature psychic blades functions on our attacks in wild shape and we'll be pouring all our bardic inspirations into our attacks. The unarmed attacks of beasts still count as weapon attacks, and the psychic blades don't count as spellcasting. Arguably we can even perform bardic performances as an animal, depending on how your DM rules it. Once we have 5 bard levels, we not only restore our bardic inspirations on a short rest, but the extra damage also increases to 3d6. Thanks to the circle of the moon we have access to the strongest wild shapes, and can transform into them as a bonus action. We don't get extra attack, but once a round we'll be able to pour on the damage essentially for free.
Like this content?
Support us by using our affiliate link to get your bard druid mini.
]]>Not all magic is fireballs and magic missiles, sometimes you’ve got time to breathe and perform a few magical rituals. Ritual casting is an alternate form of spellcasting for many spellcasters that essentially lets them casually cast a few spells during downtime and between encounters where the action economy isn’t so important. But how does it work in 5th edition? Do you need a full moon? Who can do it? Put down a circle of salt and get to chanting the magic words as we go through everything you need to know.
You might have noticed “ritual casting” in your spellcasting class features but in the actual class itself they tend to just say “you can cast rituals” without explaining any of their ancient secrets. That’s because the ritual magic rules are tucked into the main spellcasting section of the player’s guide which we’ve repeated here:
“Rituals
Certain spells have a special tag: ritual. Such a spell can be cast following the normal rules for spellcasting, or the spell can be cast as a ritual. The ritual version of a spell takes 10 minutes longer to cast than normal. It also doesn't expend a spell slot, which means the ritual version of a spell can't be cast at a higher level.
To cast a spell as a ritual, a spellcaster must have a feature that grants the ability to do so. The cleric and the druid, for example, have such a feature. The caster must also have the spell prepared or on his or her list of spells known, unless the character's ritual feature specifies otherwise, as the wizard's does.”
Let’s go over this slowly and make sure you don’t miss a few key pieces here.
This is the big important part that makes you consider casting a ritual in the first place. If you cast it as a ritual, you don’t use up a spell slot. This means you can cast as many ritual spells as you want in a day, it won’t affect your combat effectiveness, and all it costs you is time.
The reason that infinite ritual spells aren't game breaking is this 10-minute casting time. 10 minutes doesn’t sound like much, but it not only guarantees you won’t be doing it in combat (rounds are each 6 seconds meaning ritual casting mid-combat would take 100 rounds) but it also means you typically have to be in a place of reasonable safety to do so. You can’t just duck behind a corner in the middle of a dungeon to cast a ritual without at least the threat of something coming along and interrupting you.
When casting spells as rituals, you always cast it using the lowest possible spell level. Most ritual spells are utility spells that don't do anything extra with spell slot increases anyway but still.
If you’ve got a set list of spells you know like a bard or a sorcerer, you have to know the spell to cast it as a ritual. If you’re a prepared spellcaster like a cleric or a druid, you need to have the spell prepared for the day if you want to cast it as a ritual.
That rule about needing the spell prepared? Ignore it if you’re a wizard! Wizards are special little lads with a special little exception to the rule that lets them cast rituals so long as the ritual is in their spellbook.
So, while you might want to flavor your ritual spells with mantras and magic circles, ritual casting doesn’t actually add any material costs or really modify the spell. It still uses the same components, uses the same spellcasting focus, and functions identically to the normal spell other than the casting time. Flavor to your taste, but no worries on spell components.
The short answer is that the Artificer, Bard, Cleric, Druid, and Wizard classes all have access to ritual spells as a base part of their spellcasting features.
The long answer is that anybody can be a ritual caster if you’re willing to spend a feat on it, even if you don't get it as a class feature.
“Ritual Caster
Prerequisite: Intelligence or Wisdom of 13 or higher
You have learned a number of spells that you can cast as rituals. These spells are written in a ritual book, which you must have in hand while casting one of them.
When you choose this feat, you acquire a ritual book holding two 1st-level spells of your choice. Choose one of the following classes: bard, cleric, druid, sorcerer, warlock, or wizard. You must choose your spells from that class's spell list, and the spells you choose must have the ritual tag. The class you choose also must have the ritual tag. The class you choose also determines your spellcasting ability for these spells: Charisma for bard, sorcerer, or warlock; Wisdom for cleric or druid; or Intelligence for wizard.
If you come across a spell in written form, such as a magical spell scroll or a wizard's spellbook, you might be able to add it to your ritual book. The spell must be on the spell list for the class you chose, the spell's level can be no higher than half your level (rounded up), and it must have the ritual tag. The process of copying the spell into your ritual book takes 2 hours per level of the spell, and costs 50 gp per level. The cost represents the material components you expend as you experiment with the spell to master it, as well as the fine inks you need to record it.”
So, to start with that Intelligence or Wisdom requirement means you should probably only consider the feat if you’re already making use of one of those ability scores, but if you really want to ritual cast 13 isn’t too bad of a dip.
Next, ritual caster gives us a couple of ritual spells to actually use our new ritual casting feature for. But what’s really interesting is the “ritual book” that functions like a wizard’s spellbook. If you have this feat and manage to find new ritual spells from your chosen class, you can potentially use this feat to gain any or all of them for a single feat.
Is this feat an automatic pick? No, not at all. But if you’re finding that your party is missing some important utility spells, this is a handy way to fill a need in your adventuring group.
If you’re looking at online sources like D&D beyond, ritual spells are often marked with a big “R” symbol. For the actual books, you can find the ritual tag right after the spell school and spell level at the top of the spell. It’ll look like “1st level abjuration (ritual)”.
We could always get more ritual spells as books are released and there’s plenty of homebrew magic out there. You may also be surprised due to Baldur’s Gate and their habit of swapping around what spells are rituals. But this is the list of ritual spells currently on the books divided by level:
10 minutes means 10 minutes, and if you get stopped by something in the middle you’ve got to start all over again. You weren’t using a spell slot in the first place, so it’s not like you wasted anything. This is really the big “cost” of a ritual, in that you need a reasonable expectation that you won’t get interrupted for a decent chunk of time.
Casting a spell as a ritual doesn’t modify the components used in the normal casting. This means that if the spell normally has a type of spell component, the ritual version will as well. The wording isn’t entirely clear on if those components are involved for the whole casting, but generally you can assume they’re involved. This normally doesn’t matter much, but in cases where you’re trying to cast a ritual stealthily there’s a good chance that your DM will determine that a ritual with verbal components will involve some sort of non-stealthy chant for the duration.
Casting as a ritual doesn’t cost a spell slot, but it’ll still cost you any pricy ingredients that the spell may have. This shouldn’t come up very often, since practically no ritual spells have components with gold costs. But at much later levels you’ll run into a few like forbiddance and instant summons.
D&D isn’t just combat, or at least it shouldn’t be. Even a classical dungeon crawling adventure will have numerous situations where you’ll have to solve a puzzle, figure out an item, or generally accomplish something other than beating up a monster. Almost every ritual spell can be considered a utility spell, which should make sense considering how long they would take to cast in combat.
Rituals are useful for essentially saving your spell slots for combat, while still being able to use your utility spells. Whenever you are both reasonably safe and time isn’t a major factor, you should probably save yourself the spell slot by taking 10 minutes to cast the spell as a ritual. This doesn’t mean you should always cast it as a ritual though. If the party is somewhere dangerous with monsters roaming about, it might be prudent to just snap the spell off using a slot, get what you need, and bounce.
It’s hard to rate utility spells in general since we’re dealing with situational effects rather than just damage dealing spells and other combat magic. Every utility and ritual spell has a time and place they can be effective, but some rituals tend to be more effective or effective more often. The following ritual spells should probably be early picks on your spell list, or at least considered.
The go-to utility spell of utility spells, depending on your DM it will range from a mildly helpful tool for spotting loot with magical auras to a straight up “detective vision” for important items. This is a powerful classic wizard spell even when cast with the spell slot, but as a ritual you’ll always be able to pick out the important items in a pile, the relevant bits of a puzzle, or just see who’s got the good loot on them. If you take a single spell for utility, it should be this one.
This is the twin brother to detect magic and if you have the opportunity, you should take the pair together. Once you spot an item as magic using detect magic, identify lets you know what the magic item actually is and does. Some DMs will tell you general facts about the item, but many will just hand you the item’s full description. Together, and with 20 minutes for both rituals, you should be able to reliably find and figure out any magical baubles your DM throws your way. Be aware though that identify has a 100-gp pearl component that more strict DMs will require you to have. The pearl isn’t used up by the spell, so you only need the one, but still.
This one is more dependent on the type of game you’re playing, but alarm as a ritual lets you prevent (hopefully) any sneak attacks while you’re resting. You ward a small area for the next 8 hours (conveniently the length of a long rest) with a mental or audible alarm that triggers whenever a creature enters the area, other than the creatures you designate. If your DM isn’t the type to interrupt rests with surprise attacks anyway it’s significantly less useful, but still a strong utility spell to have on a ritual.
The spell that earns you a fuzzy friend is also a ritual. We can and have spent an entire article talking about the many applications of this spell which you can find here. For here just know it’s a sneakily powerful spell, and since it’s a ritual all classes have access to it through the ritual caster feat, even if it isn't on your class spell list and without taking magic initiate.
I see a lot of newer players get confused on how to actually use this one, but the old vets know how useful it can be. You can’t ride it like a magic carpet since you can’t direct it as such, but it follows you, and can carry quite a bit of weight. Think of it like an emergency cart you have in your pocket, that floats. Injured party members? Treasure? Normally that sort of thing could be a hurdle, but a floating disk can whisk it along with you with ease.
]]>Giants are striding into 5e Dungeons and Dragons in this newest addition from Wizards of the Coast. In a similar vein to Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons from a couple years back, Glory of the Giants is primarily a lore book centered around the giant folk and their Ordning but with quite a bit more mechanical oomph than we got last time around. Does all this add up to something worth buying? Find your place in the Ordning and get climbing that beanstalk as we go through everything you need to know.
WotC has not only shrunk this offering once again, but they’ve also raised the price, making Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants both the smallest and most expensive official D&D content on offer (not a great start). Early on in 5e’s history books commonly clocked in at about 256 pages and sold for $49.99. Bigby is a whopping 64 pages shorter at 192 pages, and the MSRP is officially all the way up to $69.95. Granted, you can still find digital versions of the book for $29.99, but that physical copy price just seems ridiculous to me considering previously offered slim volumes still only ran about 30 bucks for a physical copy.
Getting off my soapbox about the price for a moment, the actual content is mostly aimed towards Dungeon Masters, with a little bit of player content sprinkled in. It’s a bit more mechanical content heavy than Fizban’s, but lore still occupies most of the pages.
All told you can find the following within Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants:
Giants in the forgotten realms have a deep and detailed history filled with gods and divine dramas that spill into the lives of their titanic descendants. If you played Storm King’s Thunder you’ll already know quite a bit of this, from the grand hierarchy of giants called The Ordning, to the giant offshoots like trolls and ogres. Here we frame the lore as the titular Bigby’s conversations and musings with the giant goddess Diancastra. We also get a few snippets of giant lore outside of the Forgotten Realms, but the lion’s share goes towards our established canon. I appreciate how much of the lore is oriented towards how it relates towards potential adventurers rather than just lists of facts and dates. I think it beats out Fizban’s in that regard, as each chunk of lore serves a purpose, and I can see most of it coming up in a game.
Probably the biggest piece of player facing content, this first and foremost lets you become big while you rage, an effect that feels even more impactful if you start with a small race. Beyond that gimmick, it focuses surprisingly hard on thrown weapons and turning the tiny people around you into thrown weapons which is just (chefs kiss) perfect flavor.
The new backgrounds Giant Foundling and Rune Carver are interesting to me not in the theming (which is fine) but because they’re bound to two new feats of similar names. The backgrounds each provide much of what I’d expect from a background, but also specifically grant a bonus feat (at first level mind you). We also get a little rules snippet saying that essentially if using these backgrounds, everybody else should also get a bonus feat at 1st level even if they don’t take the new stuff. I think what we’re seeing here are ripples coming off the new 5.5 or “D&D Next” content, where starting off the game with a bonus feat will be the norm.
This is a bit misleading, really what we get here is two new feats, namely Rune Shaper and Strike of the Giants, and 6 half-feats you can only take if you already have Strike of the Giants. Each of these half-feats has a different mostly elemental twist, taking you down the routes of the 6 main giant families. I think these will be much more relevant in the upcoming 5.5 reality where everybody starts with feats, but right now requiring 2 feats to make something happen isn’t going to be seen often at many game tables.
Part of my inner DM smiles whenever I see well-made encounter and loot tables and I was grinning ear-to-ear on these. The book is absolutely brimming with useful tables for all occasions, many of them even giant related. I wasn’t expecting a dinosaur encounter table, but I’m happy to have one. I think this is one of the big ways that Bigby presents itself as a DM tool book first, and a lore book second, as opposed to Fizban’s which went on for chapters without dealing with anything game related.
This is the book’s biggest and best innovation and I’m very glad they pushed it and gave it a solid chunk of the book. Each “enclave” is a map, either a small dungeon or a whole region, with accompanying fluff and giant-flavored lore. Each one is given to you with the special rules concerning the area’s strange and magical properties (love the endless rockslide cave), and 4 to 5 potential hooks to use in your adventures. More than just idea prompts, these hooks go on to tell you how to populate the map with encounters (using those handy encounter tables and monsters), and even how you could string some of them together to create greater story narratives. I LOVE this technique. It holds the DM’s hand loosely, giving them all the tools they need to make what they want without just driving them down a pre-written adventure path. Kudos WotC! I hope they do this more in the future.
We get a surprising wealth of fun magic items here ranging across all tiers of play. A good number of these are either directly related to giants, or at least have some form of rune magic going on. I know at least a few of these will be making their way into my future games, particularly the tyrannosaurus rex figurine of power cause just imagine the trouble a party can get up to with a pocket T-Rex.
This is a LOT of monsters for what was expected to be more of a lore book. For example, the bestiary section of Spelljammer had a total of 72 monster stat blocks, only a single point up on Bigby. I don’t know if this is the result of getting the remains of a scrapped adventure path, the new normal, or something in between, but I’m here for it. I’m particularly interested to see what they do with the new “death giants” which are essentially huge drow. Purple-skinned murder giants who’ve sworn fealty to the Raven Queen.
Before I get to the conclusions here, we need to talk about Wizards of the Coast’s most recent case of foot in mouth. For everyone unaware, Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants has shipped with AI generated artworks. If the debate on AI art has escaped you completely somehow, the issue is complex but when boiled down is an argument about an artist’s right to their work, and on replacing artists with machines that use those same artist’s work to replace them.
Very close to the release of Bigby, we started getting some spoiler artworks and some of our more observant nerds noticed some of that distinct AI weirdness in those artworks. Not all of them, but a few. According to WotC these AI abominations are all from a single artist that used AI without their knowledge and without their permission.
I’m not entirely sure I buy that. Hasbro has been aggressively trying to milk more money out of everything they own for the last few years, and I highly doubt their ability to resist the allure of free art for their products. This could very well be a single artist trying to sneak it in, but it could also very easily be the management trying to sneak it in to test the waters and they threw the artist to the wolves. I don’t know either way, but at the very least it means their quality control was slacking hard because those wolves definitely had weird mutant human feet.
To their credit, the AI artwork has been quickly pulled from the digital version, but the first print run has already shipped, weird human/dog wolf paws and all. Take this as just another reason not to pick up Bigby as a physical copy, which we’ll get much more into in a moment.
This is Fizban’s 2.0 in the best possible way. At the core, Bigby is still a lore book and should scratch that info itch and provide you with plenty of Forgotten Realms reading goodness. But Fizban’s was almost just a lore book, and that made it hard to recommend for the average player. You only bought Fizban’s if you wanted a bunch of dragon lore, but you should buy Bigby’s if you’re a DM, and if you’re interested in giant lore that only makes it better.
Monsters and magic items are fantastic, and I’m happy to see so many of them here, but that’s not what impressed me the most here. The “giant enclaves” are a beautiful middle ground between planned encounters and disparate DM tools. The hooks are simple yet compelling, and the locations are interesting and well-designed no matter how you decide to use them as a DM. There’s enough here to craft multiple giant-themed campaigns, and it wouldn’t be hard to assemble either. Bigby’s has set itself up as an actual set of DM tools, and I think any DM will be better equipped to run their games with this in their arsenal.
The content we got is good, it’s everything that isn’t there and all the stuff surrounding this book that’s terrible. Let’s put aside the whole AI art issue for a second, because that’s not fair to the book we did get. It still means the book is now missing a few art pieces, but that’s not the biggest issue.
In the last few years I noticed some worrying trends, and I’m sad to see my own predictions vindicated. The books are getting shorter, and they’re charging more for less content. Charging more than ever for a standard issue of their shortest book release is a ballsy move of a heartless management team. $70 is a hefty price tag for a short collection of DM tools and lore. I honestly think that their inclusion of a few player-facing options is less about including content, and more about trying to trick players into spending $70 for a few pages of content intended for them.
I wouldn’t be ranting about it if it was one or the other. Shorter volumes? Fine, tighter content with more effort put into it can be a good thing. More expensive? Hate it, but I understand inflation hits us all. But both together? I feel like unless we draw a line in the sand somewhere, by this time in a few years we’ll be spending $100 for a third of the book we used to get for $50!
Conclusions
Ultimately, I think Bigby is a step up from Fizban’s, a well-rounded set of lore and DM tools that is elevated above a mere lore book. HOWEVER, I can’t ignore all the surrounding issues. Some great writers and artists obviously worked hard on this book and accomplished something good, but getting squeezed on both price and content is a terrible position for any product. Throw in some god-forsaken AI artworks and it’s just too much for me to overlook.
Normally, I don’t make that big of a distinction between a physical and digital copy and say to each their own. But in this case the value is just not there for a $70 physical book. Digital copies can still be had for $30 though, and while still smaller than I’d like I still feel $30 is a reasonable price tag for what you’re getting (and with the digital cut, there’s no human/dog wolf feet). If a big set of DM tools and giant lore sounds interesting, pick Bigby up, but do so from a digital provider rather than bothering with actual paper.
Physical Copy Final Score: 3 out of 10
Digital Copy Final Score: 7.5 out of 10
Want to support our content? Use this link when making your purchase/
]]>Artificers are the inventors of the impossible and the crafters of the arcane, capable of assembling the most wondrous and deadly of magic items. Clerics are the devout ministers of divine will, imbued with celestial power to heal the sick and smite the unworthy. Put them together and we get priests of arcane science and the machine god’s clergy, bedecked in all the powers that can be assembled by God or man. Grab your schematics and your prayer books as we go through everything you need to know in this artificer/cleric multiclass guide.
This isn't one of the multiclass options that most people think of, and you'll likely have a truly unique character. While the classes may feel very different at face value, both can be built as support casters or as combat tanks and most of those features will stack together. Two prepared spellcasting classes together means we'll have tons of additional spellcasting options. Cleric gains quite a bit at 1st level, meaning we can get away with some of the builds with just a single character level dip. Artificers are usually stuck in medium armor or even light armor, and just a pinch of cleric will let us upgrade to heavy armor. Finally, since infusions don’t rely on any ability score, we have some wiggle room when it comes to our ability spread. Built it right and we can become the ultimate party buff with half a dozen different buffs online at a time, or a power tank bolstered by both our own technological and holy buffs.
The big problem here is that both artificer and cleric are both casting classes and they use different spellcasting abilities. Then if we want to tank or get anywhere near combat we’ll also have to care about Constitution, and one of the physical damage abilities. Both classes can go for a martial prowess combat build, but without a lot of work you'll lag behind the actual combat classes at doing the same thing. This basically leaves us going full glass cannon with severe combat limitations and maxing out our two casting abilities, spreading ourselves thin over at least 4 abilities, or ditching one of our spellcasting halves altogether. With some careful building we can overcome a lot of this, but we don’t have a lot of wiggle room if we want the build to actually work and at least be on par with a single class build.
Since artificer in particular is already a half-caster class, multi-classing an artificer means we'll be even further behind full casters than normal, and artificer multi-classes can expect to feel weak at the mid-levels. We also can't make much use of the arguably best artificer class archetype the artillerist and their eldritch cannon, since the arcane cannon just doesn't synergize with the cleric.
And just like with any other multiclass build, we’re going to be sacrificing high-level artificer abilities and high-level cleric abilities, and we’ll be getting to our mid game and higher level class features significantly later than a single-class character.
We'll cover the best combinations of just these two classes, but they actually lend themselves better towards “class soup” builds with dips in multiple different classes, such as ranger, paladin, and rogue.
Multiclassed characters tend to have a level goal they're working towards and a synergy that provides a massive boost of power to justify the level dips. Most of our builds require at least gaining the 3rd level archetype features of the artificer class and at least the 1st level archetype features from cleric class. This means most of our builds will be kicked-in with 4 character levels, with 3 artificer levels and 1 cleric level. Most builds will also continue on with artificer as the primary class, with only the small level dip into cleric.
As a dual-class option we've got a ton of features to consider but only a few of them will be important. We can shift the build in a few different ways so not every class feature will factor into every build, but the following features all play into at least one of our strategies.
For these dual-class option builds we’re taking advantage of some artificer archetype features which will let us use Intelligence for our attacks. As such, for these builds we want to focus on Intelligence as our highest ability score. Any ability score increases should be spent on Int until you max it out.
Next, for both of these builds we’re going to be making use of our cleric spellcasting, and we’ll want to make Wisdom our second highest ability score.
Then, since we don’t want to die and care at least a little about our hit points, we’ll need to make Constitution our third highest ability score.
Finally, we’re going to be relying on heavy armor for these builds and heavy armor has a Strength requirement. Ideally, we’ll want 15 Strength so we can wear plate armor, but we can also make due with 13 Strength so we can at least wear chain mail. If however you’re going for our Machine God Tank build, we’ll have a special artificer feature that lets us ignore the Strength requirements and we can just use Strength as a dump stat.
For all these builds, Dexterity, and Charisma can both be dump stats. And just as a reminder, the base attribute requirements for multiclassing artificer and cleric are 13 Intelligence and 13 Wisdom and that's the absolute minimum for the build.
We’re going to be relying on heavy armor but beyond that our builds will be using wildly different equipment. Put on the best heavy armor you can wear and take a look at each build for further equipment instructions.
You get similar skill proficiencies and the starting weapon and armor proficiencies are identical, and we pick up all the missing tool proficiencies when we multiclass anyway. This means there isn’t really a correct answer, and you could start with either. For my personal preference I’d start with the cleric though. For most of our builds starting with cleric will get you to heavy armor proficiency faster, and you can avoid the awkward swap from medium to heavy later.
When you mix spellcasting classes things get a little messy for multiclass characters. The easy part is the spells you know. Your known and prepared spells don’t mix whatsoever and work just like you were a single class character. If you’re a 3rd level artificer and a 4th level cleric, you’ll have all the spells of a 3rd level artificer and a 4th level cleric.
The spell slots are the confusing bit. In the back of the basic rules you can find a table called “Multiclass Spellcaster” that shows you your spell slots by your combined levels in spellcasting classes. Unfortunately, artificer is considered a “half caster”, while cleric is considered a “full caster”, so we’ll have to do a bit of math. To figure out your spell slots, you’ll add your cleric levels to half of your artificer levels rounded down. So, for example, if you had 4 cleric levels, and 2 artificer levels, you’d be a “5th level caster” for finding your spell slots on the table.
When it comes to actually casting your spells, you’re going to have to keep track of your spell attack modifiers and the spell DCs of each class. Your cleric spells will all run off your Wisdom, and your artificer spells will all run off your Intelligence.
Finally, you need an arcane focus (orb, staff, whatever other magical thing you feel like) in your hand to cast your artificer spells. The cleric spells are a bit easier, you need a holy symbol (literally anything that represents your god) but you can thankfully just be wearing or displaying that so you don’t need to be holding it. You do need to keep a hand completely empty though to perform the somatic components of spells due to some wonky rulings about spell foci, but thankfully it can be the same empty hand for both your cleric and artificer spells.
There may be more combinations hiding in these class features, but the following three builds are among the best multiclassed characters of this particular brew.
Our goal here is to build a robot and buff our own private tank/DPS machine with divine power, getting free extra attacks as we buff the bot.
To start off with, we need 3 levels of artificer taking the battle smith archetype, and just a single level of cleric taking the order domain. We’re only going to be dipping into cleric for that single level, and all our remaining levels should go into artificer as our primary class.
Battle smith has a 3rd level feature called battle ready that gives us proficiency with martial weapons and more importantly it lets us use Intelligence instead of Strength or Dexterity on our weapon attacks. It’ll be an awkward first few levels, but with this we can actually get some hits in without investing into Strength or Dexterity.
At 3rd level battle smith also gets a handy robot friend in the form of a steel defender. Your robot pal acts on your initiative, and you command him with your bonus action. Its attacks and saves are all linked to your own proficiency bonus, and it sort of acts like an animal companion. Ideally battle smiths want to rely on their steel defender to defend them, while lobbing spells at the target and keeping distanced. The problem is that the steel defender doesn’t have that many hit points, and its AC is a reasonable but not amazing 15. Usually, you’ll be stuck spending your turn mending the steel defender and then ordering it to make a single attack.
Here’s where the cleric level and order domain kick in. Order clerics gain a 1st level feature called voice of authority which grants one allied target of our 1st level or higher spells a free attack using their reaction. Doesn’t matter what the spell was or what class it came from, it just has to be 1st level or higher. This essentially means we get to 3 “actions” a turn, since our action to cast a spell buffing our bot also gives the robot an attack, and we get the attack from the robot using our bonus action as well.
When it comes to our infusions, we’d really prefer to buff our steel defender with magical armor and weapons but sadly due to some annoying technicalities it isn’t proficient with anything and early on we should just buff ourselves up. We should be rocking heavy armor with the enhanced defense infusion for a +1 bonus to AC, with a spellcasting focus in one hand and a hand crossbow in the other with the enhanced weapon infusion on it not only for the +1 bonus to attacks and damage but also to transform it into a magical weapon so we can use our Intelligence for it thanks to battle ready.
So what spells are we buffing our robot with? Firstly, from our handy cleric levels we gain access to the spell shield of faith which grants +2 AC for 10 minutes so long as we can maintain concentration. +2 AC brings our little robot up to a healthier 17 AC and I’d recommend you try and make that your initial spell at the start of each combat. Bless also uses concentration and conflicts with our shield, but I still recommend it for situations where hitting is more important than blocking. Next, we have the classics cure wounds and false life which heal HP and provide temporary HP respectively, and can conveniently be found on the artificer list. At higher levels, consider spells like enlarge/reduce for giant robot fun, and haste when you reach 3rd level spells to stack up even more robot punches. Finally, make sure to use one of your artificer cantrips on mending, since that provides massive healing for your robot as well.
So, let’s put this all together and take a look at how it plays at 4th level. Combat begins with us casting shield of faith on our robot friend which allows it to make a force-empowered rend attack for 1d8 + 2 force damage. We then use our bonus action to command the robot to make another attack bringing us to 13 (2d8 + 4) force damage for the turn. That may not sound like a lot, but we can do this while staying well out of danger and pushing the enemy to attack your expendable and AC buffed robot pal, instead of you or anyone else in your party.
As a side note, MUCH later in the build you get a strange opportunity to turn your robot into an archer sentry! One of the magic items you can replicate using your infusions at 10th level is bracers of archery. The robot can attune the bracers, and the bracers actually provide proficiency with bows, allowing the bot to use our conveniently infused longbow! Also, once you reach your 6th artificer level consider swapping in some boots of the winding path and attuning them to your robot for teleporting robot shenanigans.
Our goal here is to become a living holy relic weapon, swooping in swinging holy fists of justice while shrugging off whatever comes our way and giving the martial classes a run for their money. We're going to stack up every defensive boost we can get our hands on, at try and become unkillable.
To start off we want to take 3 artificer levels selecting the armorer archetype, and at least 1 cleric level selecting the forge domain. We then want to push our original class artificer up to 10th level to snag extra attack, armor modifications, and the 10th level infusions, and all our remaining levels go towards getting us to 10th level cleric, for a final even split of 10 artificer levels / 10 cleric levels.
So how does this work? We have heavy armor proficiency as an armorer artificer so firstly we want to get our hands on some plate armor, and use the forge cleric’s blessing of the forge to turn this non-magical armor into +1 plate. It’s important to do this step first because it specifies that it can only be done to non-magical armor, but all our artificer iron man stuff doesn’t so it’ll only work as written if we do it in the correct order.
The iron man part of this build comes from armorer and the arcane armor feature we gain at 3rd level, specifically we want to take the guardian option for our armor. Arcane armor is complicated and grants several benefits, the most important of which is to make our fists into magical 1d8 thunder weapons that use Intelligence instead of Strength or Dexterity. These melee attacks also impose the “distraction” ability, and when we hit targets, they’ll have disadvantage on all attacks that don’t target us on their next turn. It also ignores the Strength requirements of the armor.
For our next defensive boost, we infuse our forge-blessed arcane armor with enhanced defense for yet another +1 AC bonus. From here we have a couple tempting options. Go FULL TANK by putting a shield in one of our hands or go for additional damage options and put a weapon in it. We don't actually have access to martial weapons but it's still a fair option to augment our defensive abilities with some melee attacks.
Finally, our go-to cleric spell should be shield of faith, which cleanly stacks another +2 AC bonus defensive boost so long as we can maintain concentration, which hopefully shouldn’t be difficult.
What does all this look like at say 4th level? We’ve got plate armor starting us off at AC 18, + 1 for blessing of the forge, +1 from enhanced defense, +2 from a shield, and +2 from shield of faith for a whopping 24 AC! We can come in punching with our gauntlet, forcing targets to waste their turn scrabbling ineffectually against our impenetrable holy science!
Later on, you have nice options to improve this further. Armor modifications lets us essentially apply a whole ton of infusions to our armor rather than just one. I highly recommend going for winged boots for flying and higher movement speeds, repulsion shield on the shield for another +1 AC for additional defense, and radiant weapon for the gauntlets to get some holy justice into those punches. All told this build is capable of some of the highest ACs a player character can reach with an insane 28 AC in tier 4.
Here we make use of the idealistic weapon for priests, a gun! Our goal here is to live out the trope of a holy man with a gun and blast our way through the heretics with massive amounts of damage. This is simple but one of the most offensive options the cleric artificer multi-classes have to offer. While this build revolves around firearms, it can work fairly well using crossbows instead if those don’t fit your campaign, though with a significant dip to the cool factor.
First off, we want to take 3 levels of artificer and once again we want to take the battle smith archetype. We then want to take a single cleric level taking the war domain, followed by 2 more levels of artificer to pick up extra attack. Finally, all our remaining levels should go towards cleric giving us a final split of 5 artificer levels / 15 cleric levels.
Firstly, we get our hands on a gun (or heavy crossbow if the world is lame). Often forgotten, artificers start the game off with any firearm skill proficiencies for the setting just in their base rules! If using renaissance guns, your best option is a musket. For modern firearms it’s an automatic rifle, and finally for futuristic guns we want a laser rifle. Next, we want to emboss that puppy with our holy symbol, since it’s a two-handed weapon.
Next, we need to infuse our lovely gun with repeating shot, which not only makes it a +1 magic item weapon, now it also ignores the loading property by making magic bullets. And, because it is now a magic weapon, battle ready allows us to use our Intelligence instead of Dexterity for its attacks and we can now make our attack rolls like we were martial characters. And since it’s displaying our lovely holy symbol, we can cast all our cleric spells through it.
Before going further, I do need to point out the silliness that is the distinction between loading and reload. Crossbows and the renaissance guns all use “loading”, which just says you can make a maximum of 1 shot with it a turn, but that we can also ignore thanks to repeating shot. Repeating shot basically lets us skip the crossbow expert feat that these sorts of builds normally need. “Reload” on the other hand counts the number of shots loaded into a gun and forces you to use an action or bonus action to reload it. All the modern and future weapons use “reload”, and there’s no way for us to bypass it. All this really means is every other turn or so for most later guns, we’ll have to only shoot twice in a turn as we spend a bonus action to reload rather than fire a 3rd time.
So how does this work? Let’s take a look at the build at 6th level. When initiative rolls we fire our gun, followed by another shot from extra attack, but we’re not done! The war cleric’s war priest feature gained at 1st level allows us to make another attack as a bonus action (uses equal to our Wisdom modifier) for yet another shot. That means that thanks to war magic at only 6th level our heavy armored preacher filled to the brim with magical abilities and healing spells can also pour out ridiculous damage rolls each turn. Martial classes? Hah! We've got two casting classes dishing out more damage than most martial characters.
If using the humble heavy crossbow you’ll dish out 32 (3d10 + 15) a turn.
Brandishing a musket brings you up to 35 (2d12 + 15) a turn.
The mighty hunting rifle pushes us up to 47 (6d10 + 15) a turn!
And if your DM is insane enough to give you futuristic guns and a laser rifle, you’ll be unleashing 56 (9d8 +15) every turn!
]]>Barbarians are creatures of adrenaline and wrath, berserkers whose blind rage and strength allow them to power through mortal wounds and cleave through the impenetrable. Paladins are living paragons of divine grace, conduits of godly power and deliverers of divine punishment. Put them together and we get a rage knight, dealing divine wrath in a zealot's fervor, if perhaps a pit less cognizant of who actually deserves it. Grab your holy book and your axe and get ready to strike down the unbelievers as we go through everything you need to know about 5e Dungeons & Dragons barbarian paladin multiclassing.
Barbarians are the best meat sponge class and are decent damage dealers. Paladins are the original nova damage class capable of pouring on insane amounts of damage. Put this cool combination together and we have a fantastic damage dealer that also soaks up damage like there’s no tomorrow. You’ll be able to deal nova damage using smites, consistent damage using rage, and will just generally be a nightmare to bring down as you shrug off everything that comes your way.
This class combination with barbarian and paladin will feel fantastic at early levels but sadly the primary damage scaling of both classes is essentially dependent on their respective class levels. You can’t get more smiting without more spell slots (here only from paladin), and you can’t get more rage damage without more barbarian class levels. We also can’t rage in heavy armor, meaning we’ll be sacrificing one of the paladin’s greatest defenses.
This means that we’re stuck either just taking a single level dip and being happy with what we got off a single level or two. Or for a more even split we’ll be very behind compared to a single-class character. This isn’t a deal breaker, but just be prepared for the under scaled features. Both classes also unfortunately have some early dead levels, and it doubly hurts to go through dead levels twice.
It's also worth noting that paladins are great for multiclassing, but this class combination isn't making the best use of it. Paladin cleric multiclass is strong, just dip into cleric provides a ton of extra spell slots for smiting with even just a few cleric levels. You could smite with a monk weapon's flurry of blows for maximum martial arts chances to land the divine smite. Or for a combination with barbarian you could rock an incredibly high damage fighter barbarian build with action surge to boot. And of course, there's always warlock for some evil magic. Make sure this is the combo you really want to go for and maybe look elsewhere if you're trying to min-max.
Finally, as with any multiclassed characters, we’re going to be reaching our mid-game features slower than single class builds, and never reaching our highest-level features like 20th level capstones at all.
The core of the build kicks in with 2 levels in each class. We want both rage and reckless attacks from barbarian, and we want both the fighting style and the divine smite from paladin. We have some more fun things to combine with both of their respective 3rd level archetype features, but the core concept works with 2 levels in each class and kicks in at our 4th character level.
We’ve got two martial classes and while we want to focus on a few of these features, most of their special abilities will factor into our build in one way or another. We'll most likely be treating paladin as our core class and only dipping a few levels into barbarian.
First and foremost, we’re going to be smashing for the lord and we need our Strength as high as possible for our attacks and damage. Only attacks made with strength get to apply our rage damage so there’ll be no finessing here.
And then, as with any martial class, we should put some points into Constitution to help pad out our hit points to survive the front line. For us this is especially important, as it also calculates into our AC for unarmored defense. We'll be able to survive a lot due to rage's decrease in damage, but it's always good to have high hit points to back it up.
Next, we have several paladin features that rely on Charisma, and we’ll want to make it our 3rd highest ability score. You could argue that this can be dropped if you’re only dipping into paladin, but we plan on making use of several features that would benefit from the charisma boost. We’ll likely not have that great of a spell DC with this as our 3rd highest stat, but we plan on siphoning most of those slots into smites anyway.
Unfortunately, barbarians can’t rage in armor, so we’ll also need to put points into Dexterity to keep our AC reasonable using unarmored defense. We don’t make much use of it elsewhere, but it’s needed as our 4th highest ability score.
And finally, Intelligence and Wisdom don’t factor into our build at all, and we can use both as dump stats.
Since we're stretched into so many abilities, I highly recommend using all your ability score increases on boosting your stats and holding off on feats for this build. I see people mention magic initiate to snag another spell slot for divine smite but it doesn't actually give you the spell slot so no dice. Keep in mind you'll gain an ability score increase at each 4th level, 8th level, 12th level, 16th level, and 19th level in a class, not those levels overall. It may be a tempting option to pick up a 4th level eventually in our secondary class.
To start off, we’re not allowed to wear metal armor, heavy armors, medium armor, light armor or any armor at all while raging so that’s a simple answer on what armor to wear, nothing. We may have heavy armor proficiency, but we can't have our cake while eating it too.
Thankfully no matter which class we start with, we're not stuck with simple melee weapons and have full martial weapons proficiency to play with. When it comes to our choice of weaponry, we have some martial options to pick from, big weapons, sword and board, or dual wielding.
For the biggest weapons, we want either a greatsword or a maul, both big two-handed heavy weapons that deal 2d6 damage a swing. For this biggest weapon route, we definitely want to take the great weapon fighting fighting style to reroll any 1’s or 2’s we get for damage dice.
For sword and board, we want to take a shield, which we can use while raging, along with any of the 1d8 martial weapons such as a longsword. For this route we’ll be best off taking the dueling fighting style, that’ll toss an extra 2 damage onto each of our attacks. +2 AC from the shield makes this a tempting option, but it'll be up to you if you want a more defensive option or offensive option.
Finally, for dual wielding we take a pair of one-handed light martial weapons such as shortswords, and most likely just the defense fighting style for a bit of AC. Note, attacking with an off-hand weapon is a bonus action attack, so we can’t use a bonus action to rage and make our bonus attack on the same turn. The big advantage for dual-wielding is you'll have an extra chance every turn to land a hit and fire off your divine smite.
The skill proficiencies are nearly identical (except heavy armor which we can’t use anyway), we don't pick up additional skills either way, and we’re mostly picking between Strength and Constitution saving throws or Wisdom and Charisma saving throws. It’s also rather juicy to start with a barbarian class level, since we’d be starting with a maximum 12 + Constitution modifier hit points. And, considering how weak a 1st level paladin is (no spells, no smites) I’d recommend starting out as a barbarian, and taking your paladin levels afterward.
The core character concept we’re going to build for is the combination of the barbarian’s rage and the paladin’s divine smite for a high damage output. With 2 levels in both barbarian and paladin, we’ll be able to activate our rage and then slam in for a powerful divine smite attack. Using a greatsword for example, our 4th level character smiting will deal a hefty 24 (2d8 + 2d6 + 3 + 2 + 3) average damage (+3 on average from great weapon fighting). Great weapon fighting applies to smite damage, giving us even better odds on hitting higher damage numbers, and we can help ensure that we hit by ignoring our own defense using reckless attack.
All of these strategies utilize the core of the build, but we can elevate that into some more interesting and powerful concepts.
Our goal here is to make a single mighty swing with a divinely infused great weapon that’s as accurate as possible to deliver our smite and as many damage bonuses as we can stack up.
We start with the core of the build, taking 2 levels of barbarian, 2 levels of paladin, and selecting great weapon fighting as our fighting style. Next, we want single level of barbarian to bring us up to 3 to pick up the path of the zealot, and all of our remaining levels should go towards paladin making it our primary class, selecting the oath of devotion.
Oath of devotion gives us a powerful channel divinity option called sacred weapon. As an action, we can infuse our weapon with divinity, making it glow like a torch and giving it an attack roll bonus equal to our Charisma modifier for a minute. This Charisma bonus to attack rolls stacks up with our normal Strength bonus and should give us along with proficiency a +9 to +10 to hit. But we’re not done yet, with reckless attack we can guarantee we’ll also get advantage on our attack.
Now that we’ve all but guaranteed our big attack will hit, let’s stack up the average damage. As a great weapon master, we're starting with a greataxe (or greatsword or maul if you’d prefer) for 1d12 or 2d6 damage. Next, we can convert one of our 1st level spells into divine smite for 2d8. Then, due to path of the zealot we have the feature divine fury we deal extra holy damage (our choice of radiant damage or necrotic damage) equal to 1d6 + half our barbarian levels on our first attack each turn. Finally, we’ve got good old rage damage for an extra +2 damage output. And since all of these “extra damage” effects are dealt in addition to the attack, great weapon fighting applies to all the damage dice rolled, statistically pushing up our output by about +1 per die rolled. Putting it all together, our 6th level character will be swinging at +10 with advantage to deal 33 (1d12 + 2d8 + 1d6 + 3 + 2 + 1 + 4) attack damage!
For this build we’re going to blind our opponents while hitting them from a safe distance and obscured from ranged attacks. We’re going to be the eye of the storm and with clever positioning you’ll blow through all opposition.
Once again, we start off with our core build of 2 levels barbarian and 2 levels paladin taking great weapon fighting as our fighting style. We will deviate a bit here because rather than taking one of the 2d6 weapons, we’ll want to take a 1d10 reach weapon such as a pike, halberd, or glaive.
Next, we take a 3rd class level of barbarian taking the path of the storm herald and selecting the desert special ability. Then all our remaining levels should go into paladin, taking the oath of the open sea. As a side note, oath of the open sea is technically 3rd party content from Matt Mercer, but I doubt most DMs will object to it.
So how does this work? Well, we’re relying on the channel divinity option marine layer that emits a 20-foot radius cloud of fog around us as an action. But this fog is particularly special, as every creature treats it as heavily obscured, unless they’re you or they’re standing within 5 feet of you, in which cast it’s only lightly obscured. The intent of this is to basically blind everyone around you, except for the target you’re actually fighting. But what if your target was 10 feet away? With a reach weapon, we can dance around our target as they suffer from the blinded condition, which will grant us advantage on all our attacks against them, while inflicting disadvantage on all their attacks against us.
But why stop there? Let’s hit everybody lost in your fog with some stormy wrath. Thanks to our storm aura, we'll deal damage against creatures within 10 feet. All those creatures will suffer 2 fire damage when you go into a rage and every turn you start in your rage. And this damage doesn’t need to target, doesn't need an attack roll or allow a saving throw, its just free automatic damage and this automatic damage will keep happening while they remain blind and confused within your burning fog cloud!
Our goal here is to jump into the middle of combat and force our enemies into a catch-22 where they’ll be stuck attacking at disadvantage no matter who they target. We'll have to take a small decrease in damage, but this is a very disruptive tactical option.
To start we take the same core build of 2 levels in barbarian and 2 levels in paladin. Since we’re trying to be more of a target nuisance than a raw damage dealer, we’ll also want to go the sword and board route with the defense or dueling fighting style. Then we’ll need to take a 3rd level in barbarian, selecting the path of the ancestral guardian, and all our remaining levels in paladin, selecting the oath of conquest.
So, what have we accomplished? With path of the ancestral guardian, we get the feature ancestral protectors that surrounds us with angry spirits whenever we rage. While raging surrounded by ghosts, anybody we hit gets hassled by our spooky friends, and has disadvantage on any attacks that target anybody but you until your next turn, and any damage they’d deal to them gets cut in half.
Now, we combine that with the oath of devotion, which gives us access to the channel divinity option conquering presence. Conquering presence lets us as an action force a Wisdom saving throw on everyone within 30 feet, and on a failure, creatures become frightened of us for up to 1 minute until they manage to save. Frightened gives them disadvantage on everything so long as they can see you and stops them from willingly moving closer to you.
Now, so long as the targets we hit are frightened, they can’t do literally anything without disadvantage. Even if they run around a corner and get out of eyesight of us, they’ll still be making attacks at disadvantage since they’re attacking something other than us!
This last one is more for fun than efficiency, and just sort of reveling that you can use divine smite using natural weapons. Divine smite works with anything so long as it's a “melee weapon attack” which natural attacks and martial weapon attacks count as. We're going to jump into combat, suddenly grow a bear head, and absolutely freak out everybody in the near vicinity. It's not quite a wild shape, but it's about as close as you can get without taking druid levels.
We'll start out with our core build of 2 paladin levels and 2 barb levels, then we want to take a 3rd barbarian level and pick up the beast barbarian archetype path of the beast. This archetype gives us access to form of the beast which is sort of a partial beast form transformation, so you just get the head, claws, or tail of a beast with a natural attack rather than fully becoming a beast shape like a moon druid. And to top this off, take the oathbreaker paladin archetype as we make paladin our core class and put all our remaining levels into it.
Oathbreaker has a channel divinity option called dreadful aspect which as an action forces a save on everybody within 30 feet or they become frightened. Our beast form activates when we enter a rage, which means we can go into a beast shape and scare everybody in the same round, which just makes sense and the image of freaking everybody out with my sudden bear arms makes the build worth doing.
Mechanically your best options for your form of the beast is between the bite or the claws. The bite can regain some lost hit points when you're below half, but the claws allow for an extra attack as a part of the action without using your bonus action and are likely your best offensive options.
]]>Fighters are versatile powerhouses, capable of countless techniques for applying cold steel to worthy opponents. Monks are ascetic disciples of the martial arts who have surpassed the physical limits through sheer willpower and skill. When combined you apply the speed of a martial artist with the skill of a dedicated murder machine. Eat your protein powder and don’t skip leg day as we go through everything you need to know about the 5e Dungeons & Dragons fighter monk multiclass.
Dungeons & Dragons monks are cool, but they’re artfully dodging and nimbly outmaneuvering their foes, what if you just want to punch good? By combining the fighter and monk we can become a walking meat hulk that could punch a hole in a horse. Fighter monks have a very high DPS very early, are survivable, quick, and get to seamlessly play with most of the features of both classes without clashing on the action economy. We don’t even have to stretch between ability scores, and you’ll still be able to effectively multiclass without having any “dead levels”.
This class combination feels really good at early levels, but your martial arts die increases anyway at later class levels, making it a redundant level dip if we continue forward with monk levels. However, if we continue forward with fighter levels instead, we essentially get the primary benefits of a high-level monk while only taking a dip in the class. This does mean all our builds will be core fighter with only some monk levels though. It's also worth mentioning that the 5E monk is fairly weak overall, and other than that initial monk dip it can be hard to argue to pursue the class further considering the poor monks damage output.
And as with any multiclass build, you’ll be delayed on your mid-level class features compared to builds of a single class and will be outright losing out on late game class features like 20th level capstone features.
The nice thing about this combination is that it functions right off the bat with only a single level in each class, meaning you’ll see the build kick in as early as 2nd level. There are some more synergies we can work out later, but the core synergy starts at 2.
All our features fighter and monk abilities stack together to build a more perfect martial machine, but we’ve got a few features and options we really care about to make the combination work.
Thankfully, we don’t have to spread our abilities thin and can essentially just build our character out as if they were just monks. Firstly, you want Dexterity as your highest ability score, as it will factor into both our attacks and our AC. Thankfully, our base class is fighter, and we'll have the opportunity to spend an ability score improvement on a feat in addition to boosting up our core stats.
Our next highest ability score should be Wisdom, as it will fuel many of our monk features and adds into our AC thanks to unarmored defense.
For both Dexterity and Wisdom, we want to get to a minimum ability modifier of +3.
Next, every hit point could matter. Like any martial character that wants to get up in the front lines, we’ll want too make Constitution our third highest ability score to pad out our hit points and make ourselves a bit more survivable.
Finally, everything else can be a dump stat. Intelligence and Charisma won’t factor into our build at all, and neither should Strength (though keep an eye on Strength depending on what route you go).
We’re going fully unarmed here, so the answer is no equipment at all! There are some exceptions for the variations on the build, but generally you don’t need any weapons or armor for this build whatsoever.
This is a close call, but I’d advise taking your first level in monk. Starting with monk gets us a bonus tool or instrument proficiency, and starting with fighter would net us heavy armor proficiency. Now normally heavy armor proficiency is much more valuable, but since we plan on going unarmored anyway, we might as well get the bonus tool. Starting out as a monk also gets us unarmored defense right out of the gate, so we don’t have to awkwardly wear armor for our first level just to ditch it at level 2.
There are a slew of feats that seem like they’d fit into our build, but I find most of those are traps. Tavern brawler mostly gives us redundant features, and the bonus action grapple clashes with our flurry of blows. Similarly, Grappler feels like it could work but the feat only grants us advantage after we’ve grappled a creature, and the pinning feature is confusingly bad. There are a couple feats that may be worth taking.
Crusher deals with bludgeoning damage, conveniently the damage type dealt by our big meaty fists. It gives us a single point of Strength or Constitution, and two pretty interesting bonuses:
Normally this feat is a bit underwhelming when using a single big bludgeoning weapon, but with a flurry of attacks all potentially critically hitting our odds of triggering the free advantage is pretty high. Keep in mind this is all attacks with that target, not just attacks from you. This means you can potentially give your entire party advantage against a boss for a whole round.
Gunner revolves around firearms and is obviously only going to be useful if we go down the “gun monk” build. It’s a half feat as well, giving us a point of Dexterity along with the following features:
All of this is predicated on the setting having access to firearms, but in those settings it does everything we could want. Ignoring loading means we can pick guns with a higher damage output, and no disadvantage means we’re free to shoot and punch in any combination.
The core interaction we’re going to take advantage of is the combination of the fighter’s unarmed fighting style and the monk’s martial arts feature, both of which are gained at the first level of each class.
Both features interact in a weird way, unarmed fighting style lets us deal 1d6 + Strength (or 1d8 if completely unarmed) with our unarmed strikes. Martial arts at 1st level lets us deal 1d4 + Dexterity for unarmed strikes. And because of the way the features are worded, the end result is that with both features we’re now allowed to deal 1d8 + Dexterity with each punch. Normally, a monk wouldn’t be able to do this until their 11th level when their martial arts die increases, and by taking unarmed fighting style we can essentially skip ahead and do the same thing at 2nd level. At just our 2nd character level, we’ll be able to make two attacks in a turn, each attack dealing 1d8 + 3 damage per hit. With just one more monk level, we’ll have access to ki and flurry of blows, making us capable of 3 attacks a turn for a total of 23 (3d8 + 9).
All of these strategies utilize the core of the build, but we can tweak and improve upon it, taking it in some interesting directions.
This is what I would consider to be the default route for this multiclass combination. We start with the core of the build, take one additional monk level for Ki and Flurry of Blows, and take all our remaining levels in fighter selecting the battle master fighter archetype.
Battle master is already arguably one of the strongest and most versatile fighter archetypes, and it doesn’t use up our bonus action since many of the more powerful maneuvers trigger on hits. The battle master gets 4 (and eventually more) superiority dice, d8s they can use to activate a set of different options called maneuvers, and they recharge on a short rest.
You get to select 3 battle maneuvers, and we really want to prioritize options that can take advantage of our numerous attacks and that don’t use up our bonus action. I recommend choosing at least one of the following: disarming attack, menacing attack, and tripping attack. All three function in similar ways, adding our superiority die to the damage of an attack, while either nerfing their ability to attack you or buffing your ability to attack them.
Disarming attack forces the target to save or drop their weapon, menacing attack causes the target to be afraid of you until the end of your next turn on a failed save, and tripping attack knocks them prone on a failed save. Tripping is especially brutal for us, since we’ll get advantage on all our remaining attacks while we pummel our opponent on the floor. Finally, it’s probably prudent to take parry which lets us reduce the damage of an oncoming attack by our superiority die + Dexterity modifier, effectively padding out our hit points when needed.
To put this all together, let's take a 5th level example with 2 levels of monk and 3 levels of fighter. Using a bonus action for a flurry of blows, we’ve got 3 unarmed attacks, all of which deal 1d8 + 3 bludgeoning damage for a damage output of 23 (3d8 + 9). Where it gets interesting is when we through one of our maneuvers in there as well. Once one of our unarmed strikes land we can trigger tripping attack, dealing an extra 1d8 damage along with a solid chance of knocking our opponent prone, granting us advantage on the rest of our attacks and likely for our allies’ attacks as well. All in all, as a 5th level character, that gives us 27 (4d8 + 9) damage a turn, with high odds on a full party advantage buff for massive damage!
For this build we’re going to do some critical hit fishing while also taking advantage of a weird additional damage interaction to try and get some devastating crits.
To start off, we’re going to stick with the core of the build, taking a fighter level and the unarmed fighting style along with our monk level. We want a total of 3 monk levels selecting the way of mercy monk archetype, and all our remaining levels should go towards fighter taking the champion archetype.
Champion fighters are a bit bland, but importantly at 3rd level their critical hit range increases to 19-20, and since we’ll often be attacking 3 times a turn, our odds of snagging the odd critical hit are statistically quite high.
The way of mercy is a bit of an odd duck. Designed as the “healing monk”, we can use ki points for healing (not our focus but still useful), we get proficiency in Insight, Medicine, and herbalism kits. And we get a weird plague doctor mask that does literally nothing but looks cool. The feature we’re actually going to care about however is called hand of harm which lets us spend a ki point to do bonus damage on an unarmed strike equal to our martial arts die plus our Wisdom modifier.
All that doesn’t sound like an amazing use of our ki points but it has some unique functionality for us. Firstly, we don’t have to decide to apply this extra damage until we’ve already hit with the attack. Next, and most importantly, this is treated as extra damage dealt by the attack itself, which means it is also doubled on a critical hit.
Armed with improved critical and multiple attacks, we can fish for our crits and pop hand of harm whenever we land one. At 7th level, one of our critical hits with hand of harm applied will deal 13 (2d8 + 4) bludgeoning damage and 13 (2d4 + 8) necrotic damage for a nasty 26 damage punch!
Here we’re going to make the biggest departure from the core concept and turn our monk fighter into a revolver twirling and quick punching desperado. A bit of a warning though, the odds are high your DM isn’t playing around with guns, and even if they are, they may not allow Matt Mercer’s Gunslinger fighter archetype, since it’s still technically unofficial material.
Firstly, we’ll be starting out with the same core build, but we’ll be getting up to 3 monk levels and taking the Way of the Kensai monk archetype, and all our remaining levels should go into fighter taking the gunslinger archetype. Finally, at our first opportunity we’ll want to take the gunner feat, either at our 7th level with our first ASI, or at 1st level if your DM is allowing variant humans with their free feat. We’re still going for the same ability scores of Dexterity and Wisdom, since thankfully the gunslinger grit ability is also based on Wisdom.
We’ve now put quite a few strange features in a pot here, but I promise they’re going to melt together into something wonderful.
To get this high-falutin party started though you’ll need to figure out what firearms your DM is giving you access to. There’re the Matt Mercer firearms included as a part of the archetype, but there’s also the renaissance, modern, and futuristic firearms found within the DMG.
If you’re using the Mercer firearms, your best option (without unique weapons) is going to be a blunderbuss, which is a short-range one-handed gun that deals 2d8 damage.
If using renaissance firearms, your best option is the pistol, a 1d10 damage weapon.
If you have access to modern firearms, your best bet is the revolver, which deals 2d8 damage.
And if you’re lucky enough to be playing around with futuristic firearms, your best option is the laser pistol, which deals an insane 3d6 damage.
Next, and I know this will be very weird for our unarmed build, but we need to put a one-handed monk weapon in our other hand. This can be practically any one-handed melee weapon, just pick whatever you think is coolest.
Alright, now that we have our weapons, we need to select both of them as our “kensai weapons”. This not only converts them to monk weapons but gives us two special benefits, one intended for range and the other intended for melee. The ranged one is a bit meh but the melee one is worth going after. Whenever we make unarmed strikes while also holding onto a kensai melee weapon, we get +2 AC until our next turn.
Ok, so now we’re 7th level, we’ve got a blunderbuss in one hand, and a dagger in the other, how does this work? Well, we’re going to be playing some silly games with some rules minutia, but the end result should be glorious. Firstly, we run in and shoot our target with our blunderbuss point blank (ignoring the disadvantage due to the gunner feat). Then, even though both our hands are full, they’re full of monk weapons and because of martial arts we can still make unarmed strikes and we get to make our two unarmed strikes using flurry of blows. Because we aren’t completely unarmed they’ll be d6s rather than d8s, but that +2 AC is too juicy for just holding a dagger that is now essentially our shield. Also because of the gunner feat, we completely ignore the loading property on our weapons.
And we’re not done yet, because we still have all of the gunslinger’s grit and trick shots to play with, that all give us secondary effects on our gun attacks. We can activate a trick shot by spending a grit point, and we regain all grit points on a short rest. We really want to take winging shot, that’ll knock our enemy prone when we blast them in the face.
So, to put all this together, we use our extra speed to rush up into our opponent’s face, and we blast them with a blunderbuss, using winging shot to knock them prone. We then immediately headbutt or elbow our target for flurry of blows and make two unarmed attacks against our prone target. We’ve now done 25 damage (2d8 + 2d6 + 9) and are standing above a prone target with a +2 bonus to our AC until our next turn. Due to gunner ignoring the loading feature entirely, we can repeat this every turn so long as we have the ki and grit points remaining. And more importantly, we got to be a cool martial arts cowboy while doing it.
]]>5e D&D has picked up its 4th official starter adventure kit, this time taking our fledgling heroes to an isolated island ravaged by the undead and the lingering curses of a long dead dragon. Players will have to investigate shipwrecks and sea caves, help the local kobolds and perhaps stop a young dragon before they tamper with something they can’t control. If you’re starting out is this the best option for a new playgroup? Is Stormwreck Isle worth playing for experienced groups? Grab a paddle and get rowing to that distant shore as we go through everything you need to know.
The timing on Stormwreck Isle is odd. It was released in late 2022 and with what is essentially a new edition coming soon (I know they don’t call it that, but it is) it seems like a strange time to make a brand-new starter set. But of the 3 official 5e starter sets, 2 were branded tie-ins selling off the popularity of Stranger Things and Rick & Morty respectively. The last non-branded starter set we had was The Lost Mine of Phandelver way back in 2014. I’d have still thought Phandelver worked well enough as a starter kit not to necessitate a new one, but it turns out there’s a twist.
The Lost Mine of Phandelver is getting transformed into a full 1st-12th adventure path, using the original starter kit as appropriately enough a starting point for a much deeper adventure. Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk is set to release sometime in late 2023, and with Phandelver growing into a full book WotC needs a new starter kit to take its place.
Stormwreck Isle is fairly bare bones compared to the previous starter sets but the price tag seems locked in at the low point. For 20 bucks you can get the boxed starter set, and the PDFs seem to go for the same price. This is 10 bucks lower than the branded starter kits sold for, but you’re also not getting any extra goodies like minis or DM screens. All told it contains:
Just like Phandelver, Stormwreck Isle gives you 5 handouts with fully pre-made characters, just missing the names. Stormwreck’s sheets do a better job of explaining how all their features actually function, making for fewer delves into the rulebook and faster comprehension. They also pepper the background features with some character motivations. Overall, the pre-gen sheets are definitely an improvement on past iterations.
Also just like Phandelver, Stormwreck gives us 6, (NOT 7) polyhedral dice. They’re fine dice, but it baffles me that they can’t put in just one more d10 to give new players a full normal polyhedral set. I can’t imagine it’d be that much more expensive to put in one extra die so players can roll percentile.
Stormwreck Isle is technically one adventure that takes players from 1st to 4th level, but functionally it’s a starting hub area connected to a final mission, with a middle made up of two small mostly unrelated dungeon crawls and a few random encounters. That might sound like I’m being critical of it, but I actually really like the more episodic nature.
The plot is centered around the titular dragons, the first is a powerful dragon NPC that acts as a benevolent quest giver, and the second is a long dead evil dragon whose grave is slowly corrupting the island. Two more opposed young dragons pop up at the end, one allied with your quest giver that can aid the players in their final fight, and one villain trying to perform an evil draconic ritual.
Before we get to that dragon-filled conclusion, we have two mini-dungeon crawls that can interchangeably be run at either 1st or 2nd level, each ending with a level-up. The “first” of these adventures takes place in a sea-cave fighting stirges, fire serpents, and formerly friendly corrupted myconids. The “second” has players investigating a shipwreck infested with undead and harpies. In between these adventures we have a handful of minor random encounters, and the players are expected to return to a dragon temple to rest under the care of our benevolent dragon NPC.
Each encounter is bite-sized in a way that I think will be greatly appreciated by new players. Each dungeon is only a handful of eventful rooms, rather than a slog, and while the encounters are only loosely connected it is one cohesive story, just in manageable chunks. It’s also significantly shorter than Phandelver, and you can expect to finish up with Stormwreck in about 5-6 sessions, with each session having a satisfying arc completing a whole distinct section. Compare that to Phandelver which is more likely closer to 10-12 sessions, often ending sessions in the middle of dungeon crawls or combats.
I also need to note the advantages of always returning to a “home base”, especially for new players. The dragon temple is populated with an assortment of entertaining kobold characters ready to cheer the party on as they head out or arrive back from their missions, giving the players great opportunities for roleplay.
Ultimately, this adventure is very simple, very straightforward, but not boring. The mini dungeons are filled with interesting creatures and encounters that would be entertaining even if dropped into an adventure designed for more experienced players. The conclusion is a fight against a small but fearsome dragon that the players should be invested in fighting, and if this was my first experience with Dungeons and Dragons, I don’t think I’d be disappointed.
Dragons of Stormwreck Isle seems like it was genuinely designed for new players, rather than just being a shorter than normal adventure path. The bite-sized nature of the encounters gives you excellent odds on getting full and satisfying games even with short sessions. The encounters themselves are varied and provide a good mix of quick combats and relatively simple roleplaying opportunities. The player story hooks are simple, but at least tentatively hook into the plot and get the players to ask questions and involve themselves in the story as much as they want to be.
The bite-sized nature of the encounters is good, but it is a double-edged sword. The players can easily lose the thread and be left wondering why they’re doing anything if they aren’t paying enough attention, which is often a problem with newer players.
Beyond that I may be spoiled, but I was disappointed to just see the weird minimum 6 die set and nothing else for a starter kit. This is probably a pricing limitation and if they added any extras, they might not be able to keep the price at 20 dollars, but the 30-dollar branded box sets included DM screens, extra dice, and even miniatures! As a box set it just feels very slim and only the bare minimum was included. I just wish we could have a good adventure path and also get some nice extras in the box, but it seems we’re stuck choosing one or the other.
With four 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons starter sets now on the market, choosing to recommend this product really comes down to comparing it to the other 3.
The branded starter kits were bad, full stop. Rick and Morty vs Dungeons and Dragons was a very generic and unpleasant mega-dungeon with copy/paste Rick and Morty art and a few burps. The Stranger Things starter set was intentionally made to be like a middle schooler’s first campaign and the nostalgia was vastly outweighed by the terrible quality and the kit’s only value was in the little demogorgon mini.
That leaves us with Phandelver which is going to be a tough challenger to beat mainly because right now Phandelver is free. Right now, on D&D beyond you can get the Lost Mine of Phandelver digitally for free and zero dollars is a hard price to beat.
That being said, I do feel that Dragons of Stormwreck Isle is a better adventure. Stormwreck Isle is a bunch of small encounters linked together which is perfect for players just starting out. I’ve run players through Phandelver before, and many of the mine’s encounters start blending together as they go through numerous groups of goblins and advance through much larger dungeons. I don’t think anybody is going to mistake their encounter with a fungus octopus for any other encounter. All the fights and characters in Stormwreck just feel much more memorable and genuinely fun to play through.
This also means that while the encounters are fairly simple, experienced players can get some good fun out of the starter adventure. To me, this makes Stormwreck the perfect starter if you’ve got a mixed group of players. Both newbies and veterans will enjoy this adventure, and while the veterans might find it a bit on the short and simple side, I think you’ll end up with a far superior experience than if you slogged through a ton of goblin fights in Phandelver.
If you’ve got 20 bucks to spare, I do think it’ll be worth your money to buy Shipwreck Isle rather than introducing players to the game using Phandelver. The quality is there, and it seems like an overall better experience that’ll be well worth your money.
Final Score for New Players: 8.5 out of 10
Final Score for Everybody Else: 6 out of 10
Support content like this by using this link: Dragons of Stormwreck Isle
]]>Monks are the pinnacles of discipline and martial technique that test the limits of humanoid capability. Warlocks are the servants of eldritch beings who’ve bestowed upon them unknowable cosmic powers in exchange for dark and mysterious pacts. When combined you get a sword wielding martial arts master whose intense training is empowered by the dark gods. Grab your hexblade and put on your gi as we go through everything you need to know.
Warlock has always been the multiclassing darling, providing some of the best bang a single level in anything can provide. The monk class often gets passed over often in that regard, but actually boasts a ton of powerful features in the first couple levels. While these classes don’t necessarily mesh well at the later tiers, as dips we can gain a ton of power using warlock to enhance a monk playstyle or using monk to enhance a warlock playstyle. We’re also not shifting too hard into different ability scores, as both classes are mainly Dexterity dependent, and while their core features clash on Wisdom and Charisma we can build in such a way that we can ignore one or the other.
Ultimately, you play a monk/warlock to play a martial DPS powerhouse for massive damage. We’re looking to pile additional damage through multiple attacks by using hexes and buffs. We're hoping to crush whatever we run into quickly and then regain all the features from both our classes on a short rest.
Our features really don’t work well together other than the first couple level dips, so any sort of 50/50 split will end up as a sad collection of incoherent features. We’re also mixing a martial class and a spellcasting class, so we’re having to limit ourselves down to specifically the martial focused warlock archetypes. That means hexblade which is never a bad thing, but it still means there isn’t much variety.
The monk’s martial arts feature also scales with monk levels, so a dip into warlock means getting that improvement even later, and if dipping into monk we have to accept a paltry d4 for our fist’s base damage forever.
Finally, just like any other multiclass build, you’re giving up entirely on capstone features and other late game features, and you’ll be getting your mid-game features later even if it’s only a dip.
Every build we’re going to go through relies on combining the 1st and 2nd level Martial Arts and Ki features of the monk, with one of the warlock’s 1st level archetype features. This means that in each of our build’s cases, we’ll be kicking in with 3 class levels.
We’ve only got a few monk abilities and warlock abilities that really synergize with each other and a few more that will matter for every build or at least most of them.
Warlock Features for Monk / Warlocks
Right off the bat both classes are Dexterity based and it should be your highest score. After that it gets complicated.
Many of our monk features care about Wisdom and many of our warlock features care about Charisma, and if our class level split was even, we’d be forced to care about both ability scores. But since we’re just doing level dips and the features we care about in either case don’t rely on these stats we can have our cake and eat it too (mostly).
If you are primarily a monk with a level dip in warlock, Wisdom should be your second highest ability score and we can use the minimum Charisma required for multiclassing (13).
If you are primarily a warlock with a level dip in monk, Charisma should be your second highest ability score, and we just need the minimum Wisdom required for multiclassing (13).
Then, as a martial class we do need to worry about staying alive on the front line, so Constitution should be our third highest ability score.
Whatever you do, you’ll need to make sure to meet the minimum multiclassing requirements for both monk and warlock, which means at least 13 Dexterity, Wisdom, and Charisma.
Finally, in every version of the build, we don’t care about Strength or Intelligence, and we can use both as dump stats.
Weapons for this multiclass used to be more problematic but thanks to the monk’s newish dedicated weapon feature a lot of the old restraints here are gone. We just need to select a weapon that fits both the now much more lax requirements for monk weapons, and also the requirements for a hexblade, which together looks like this:
That may sound like a lot, but it actually leaves us with a ton of options, even ranged weapons. It’s also important to note that the versatile ability isn’t on this list, and we can make our unarmed strikes even while two-handing a versatile weapon. This means for raw damage output, our best options are the battleaxe, longsword, or warhammer. Each of these are functionally identical 1d8 weapons with the versatile feature that lets us upgrade to 1d10, and the only difference is dealing bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing damage.
Now you may be asking how we’re using Dexterity for these obvious Strength weapons, but thanks to dedicated weapon we can treat all of them as monk weapons and swing them around using Dexterity to our heart’s content.
When it comes to armor we’re basically stuck using the unarmored defense feature. We aren’t allowed to use the martial arts features while wearing armor or using a shield, so 10 + Dex and Wis modifiers will have to suffice.
Objectively starting with monk gives you slightly more to work with, you don't get an additional skill, but you do pick up a bonus tool or instrument proficiency, but you can honestly start with either. You’ll end up with all the proficiencies we care about in either case, so the main choice is between saving throws. Monk grants proficiency in Strength and Dexterity saves, while warlocks grant Wisdom and Charisma saves. Feel free to start with either, but I do think starting with a monk level is slightly better.
As with most martial caster class combinations, there’s one feat you should really consider and that’s War Caster. War caster has three benefits, and all three are powerful boosts if we plan on both casting spells and getting into melee.
Even just a single warlock level gets us a couple cantrips and a recharging 1st level spell slot with pact magic. So, what in the warlock spell list benefits us the most for a martial caster build?
I often recommend the melee cantrips like booming blade or greenfire blade but sadly they don’t work here. Both martial arts and flurry of blows require us to “take the attack action” to activate, and using the melee cantrips clashes with that since you actually use the “cast a spell” action that just happens to involve your sword. Instead, we want to focus on spells that we can use to buff ourselves before hitting combat, spells that stack up more damage, or ranged options for when the target stays out of melee reach.
Let’s start with the cantrips we can make the most use of:
Next let’s look at some useful 1st level spells:
Monk and warlock don’t mesh well late, but their early features can provide massive buffs to either strategy. The following builds all focus on one class, dipping just a bit into the other class.
If you’re coming into this multiclass trying to maximize damage output, this is probably the strongest option. Firstly, we’re making monk our primary class and dipping just a single level into warlock and taking the hexblade patron.
Our monk archetype doesn’t really matter here, and you can pick what you’d like, though I’d recommend the way of the open hand just for some extra effects on our attacks, way of the ascendant dragon for elemental damage options, or the way of shadow for extra utility and mobility.
For our warlock spells, we want to take hex, which we can stack up alongside hexblade’s curse to pile on damage. We have very limited spell slots, but hex is almost always going to be worth it. As stated in the equipment section, we take a battleaxe, longsword, or warhammer as our primary weapon and hexblade, and convert it into a monk weapon using our dedicated weapon feature.
So how does this work? Well, as a bonus action we can target a creature using our hexblade’s curse, and hit them once with our hexblade, and on the next turn we hit them with the hex spell and stack up the damage further. After that, we can start spending our bonus actions on flurry of blows, stacking up 2 attacks and then defaulting to a single bonus action attack once we run out of ki points using martial arts.
Let’s take an example of the build at 6th level, (1 warlock level and 5 monk levels). After stacking up hexblade’s curse and hex, we’re free to do 4 attacks per turn on our target, (1 normal attack, 1 from extra attack, and 2 bonus attacks from flurry of blows). Each of these 4 attacks gets all the damage buffs from our hexes AND is a critical hit on a 19-20. Our weapon attacks can still be two-handed thanks to versatile, and deal 1d10 + 1d6 + proficiency + Dexterity modifier, and our unarmed strikes deal 2d6 + proficiency + Dexterity modifier. That means on average even without critical hits, if all 4 attacks hit, we’ll deal a whopping 60 damage (2d10 + 6d6 + 12 + 16)!
Admittedly, this requires us to have time to stack up the buffs, but even with just hex or just hexblade’s curse it’s an impressive beatdown you’ll be able to dish out.
Similarly to the hexmaster, we’re only taking a single level of warlock with the rest going towards monk. This time however, instead of hexblade we want to take the undead patron. Our goal here is less about DPS and instead we’re going to focus on inflicting the frightened condition as often as possible.
For our monk archetype we want to take the way of the long death, specifically to get the 6th level feature hour of reaping. Hour of reaping lets us use our action to force a Wisdom saving throw on every creature within 30 feet and creatures who fail are frightened of us until the end of our next turn.
When picking the warlock spells, we still want to pick hex as a powerful way to stack damage. Unlike the prior build, we don’t have a way to pick up martial weapons which means we’re stuck with the best simple weapon with versatile, such as the quarterstaff or spear.
So how does this work? Well, we essentially have a lighter version of the previous DPS setup, but now we can also easily keep our enemies frightened of us for most of the combat. The undead patron grants us a form of dread we can activate as a bonus action. This extra spooky mode gives us temporary hit points, and once during each of our turns we can force a fear save on a target we hit with a melee attack.
Hour of dread lets us use our action to inflict a big burst of fear, and we can do both hour of dread and activate our form of dread on the same turn. Then on the next turn we can use our bonus action to hex a target and start going to town inflicting damage and fear.
Our damage output is a bit lower but using the same 6th level example (5 levels of monk 1 level of warlock) we’re still at 4 attacks, generating an average of 46 damage (2d8 + 6d6 + 16) once we have hex and our flurry of blows up and running. But here, we can reasonably keep our opponents frightened, meaning you’re unlikely to get swarmed, and whatever target you single out will have disadvantage on all their attacks against you. Become a dreadful martial arts monster!
This build trades off a bunch of the monk’s inbuilt resilience for a little bit of bonus damage and much more utility. For this final build we’re swapping it up taking only 2 levels of monk and the remaining 18 levels in warlock. You may be tempted to take a third monk level for one of the monk subclasses, and you can if you’d like, but I don’t think you gain enough bang for the buck. If you do end up taking a 3rd level and an archetype, I’d recommend the way of mercy for the equivalent of a healing spell, way of the ascendant dragon so you can change up the damage type on your unarmed strikes, or the way of the drunken master to avoid opportunity attacks.
For our warlock levels, we’re once again taking hexblade and the hex spell, and since we’re going all the way with warlock, we also want to take the pact of the blade. With all these warlock levels we also get a bounce of eldritch invocations, and we want to make sure we pick up armor of shadows, improved pact weapon, and thirsting blade. For your remaining invocations consider any of the pact of the blade or hex options, such as eldritch smite, lifedrinker, maddening hex for bonus psychic damage, or relentless hex.
So how does this work? Well essentially in the same way, but with additional spell slots and a bit less raw damage. Firstly, we can ignore unarmored defense and our Wisdom score because we have armor of shadows (free mage armor) and can rely on that for our AC. Next, we want to do the same combination of hexblade’s curse and hex whenever possible, or perhaps just one for smaller foes. This will end up with a slightly lower average damage for our full 4 attack flurry of 58 damage (2d10 + 4d6 + 2d4 + 12 + 16) but with the ability to push it up even higher through spellcasting.
For example, if we use the 3rd level spell spirit shroud instead of hex, that full flurry pushes up to 62 damage (2d10 + 4d8 + 2d4 + 12 + 16) with the bonus benefits of stopping enemy healing and reducing their movement. Or through maddening hex we can stack up extra psychic damage equal to our Charisma modifier, for an average of 70 damage (2d10 + 4d6 + 2d4 + 12 + 16 + 12)!
]]>Wizards of the Coast is currently playtesting and tinkering with “One D&D”, which they claim will be the definitive version of Dungeons and Dragons for the foreseeable future. One edition to rule them all, and potentially in the darkness to bind them. But what exactly is it? Is this a new edition or just an update? Should you be excited or afraid? And most importantly, are they messing with your favorite character classes? Hold onto your core books and kiss your old character builds goodbye as we go through everything you need to know.
The rest of this article will go over the new rules as we know them and how your games will change with One D&D but first, we need to talk about several elephants in the room. The announcement of One D&D came in the middle of a massive debacle regarding the OGL the Virtual tabletop, and a ton of confusion about what One D&D even is or is meant to be. If you just care about the new rules skip ahead but the surrounding issues are too important to leave out.
OGL stands for “open gaming license” and it’s the legal document that allows 3rd parties to create D&D content and sell it themselves. I won’t go into the legal-ese and details, but the short version of the story is that along with One D&D Wizards of the Coast tried to sneak in a change to the OGL that would demand royalties from 3rd party developers and grant themselves way more power over the market. Alarm bells were raised in the community and after a huge backlash and fight, WotC capitulated and backed off from their proposed change. Instead, they’ve put out a new OGL that actually grants 3rd parties a bit more access to the core 5e rules to use for their own.
There’s a problem though. WotC has essentially pulled a gun on the 3rd parties, misfired, and then put the gun away and promised not to do it again. They’ve shown their intention is to clench down on the market and kill 3rd parties, which has already caused a lot of players and creators to find different systems to work with.
A big part of One D&D’s announcement was that this wasn’t just an update, but a “unification” of the D&D experience including book codes for virtual copies using D&D beyond and a new D&D exclusive virtual tabletop. The idea of buying an adventure path and automatically getting not only a virtual version of that book, but also all the encounters, monsters, and terrain from that adventure sounds amazing but there’s a catch.
Firstly, until they backed off the OGL, their plan was to make it so their VTT was the only VTT where you could play One D&D, striking down with the ban hammer on other 3rd party VTTs that tried. Next, and this is only rumored and not confirmed, but there’s a good chance the plan was or still is to make this whole “One D&D” package a subscription service for 20 bucks a month. Every corporation drools at the thought of subscription services, and this rumor falls right in line with Hasbro’s overall goal of getting better monetization out of D&D.
The VTT doesn’t even exist yet, and there’s no point getting upset about what hasn’t happened yet, but I’m not looking forward to paying a monthly fee for playing D&D. Finally, I should add that a lot of the rules changes make a ton of sense when you think in terms of making it easier for a VTT to handle. Rules are much more compacted and make fewer outside references, which is good in and of itself, but they do seem to be changes made with the VTT in mind.
Trying to claim this isn’t a new edition is just marketing wanting to have their cake and eat it too. No this isn’t a full new edition, but it’s definitely a 5.5. We’ve been in a new golden age of TTRPGs with 5th edition D&D as the shining frontrunner, but now that it’s time for an update they’re very hesitant to say anything close to “new edition”. This edition update is the hopefully happy middle ground, keeping the skeleton of 5e and then tinkering with the details. This is like 3.0 moving to 3.5, or the pathfinder “unchained” update. A big fix and update but you don’t have to throw out all your old books.
Before we get too deep it’s important to note that at the time of this writing all the available information on One D&D is from unearthed arcana playtest material. Nothing is set in stone and tomorrow they could decide to throw out all the test content for something else entirely. So, if the current playtest is gutting your favorite class, hold off on that rage until it actually gets released and you have the final version.
Quite a bit actually, we won’t go through every little change since at that point you may as well be reading the actual playtest. What we’ll go over are the bigger sweeping changes, and the changes that’ll affect your games the most.
A lot of 5e’s clunkiest bits are getting streamlined down by creating overarching categories that can be referenced rather than having a million instances of reminder text, patch rules, and references. Some of the big ones are:
A ton of the weapons got little tweaks, but the big change is the addition of new “weapon masteries”. These weapon masteries are extra effects or abilities that each broad weapon category is capable of, but only if you have the “weapon mastery”. All the martial classes get to choose one or more “weapon mastery options” to unlock. To sum all that up, martial classes get a few “favorite weapon” types, and if they use their mastered weapons, they get to do things like tripping attacks, or a little extra damage.
There are more character options changing than there are staying the same and we’ll go through each race and class that is significantly changing on their own. But here are the general changes you can anticipate:
With all the overarching stuff out of the way, let’s go through the species (formerly races) and backgrounds seeing the most major changes.
Aasimar are gone, now we have… Animal angel people? The theming here is weird but our celestial blooded race now has animal heads and beast features like a strange mixture of the aasimar and shifter. Time will tell if it sticks but I’m sad to see the aasimar go and excited to see what people do with these.
Breath weapon is a touch weaker but in exchange the dragons finally get darkvision and they get magical wings at 5th level made out of their draconic element. Cool stuff and seems like an overall buff.
The dwarf subraces have been sort of combined into one and they made stonecunning useful. Stonecunning now grants tremorsense on stone surfaces. They have tweaked how tremorsense works a bit but it’s still a powerful new addition that replaces a feature that hardly ever had an effect.
Mostly the same, except an extensive update to the tinkering feature for rock gnomes that is more like having tiny mechanical minions than the previous glorified noisemakers. Wordy and a bit confused, but a definite buff.
Goliaths lose the elevation trait, stone’s endurance, and the powerful build feature that never matters. And in return they gain 5 feet of extra movement, the ability to grow large at 5th level, and their choice of a giant ancestry feature (one of which is stone’s endurance again). The giant ancestry stuff is both mechanically strong and flavorfully interesting, it's a big win for the giant kin.
Like the dwarves, the halfling subclasses were sort of combined into one, meaning you essentially just get more features for the same halfling price. Other than that, the big change is their 30-foot movement speed which replaces the unpleasant 25.
Gone is the era of banning variant humans, humans just get a feat at 1st level, flat-out. They also get a feature that automatically restores inspiration on a long rest which means hopefully we’ll see inspiration getting more use in the future.
Mostly the same except the aggressive feature has been tweaked into adrenaline rush. You can still dash closer to a target as a bonus action, but now you also gain temporary hit points at the cost of making the uses limited to your proficiency bonus per long rest. It’s worth noting here that it seems that half-orcs and the other half-races are gone.
Mostly the same features but the original tiefling has been combined with a couple of the alternative fiendish varieties of tieflings. You mainly get a choice of the racial spell sets from before, not a buff or nerf but a streamline.
Now we get to the meat of the changes. Some classes got minor tweaks, but some are complete overhauls. So far, we have a playtest version of every class except for artificer and monk.
Low-level barbarians will feel hardly any changes at all but tiers 3 and 4 got massively shuffled. The majority of the changes were taking the tier 4 features and shifting them down into tier 3. Probably the most extreme shift down was indomitable might, an 18th level feature originally that has been shifted all the way down to 9th level. Beyond that we get some minor common-sense tweaks to rage (no more hitting yourself to keep rage up) and overall the class seems stronger.
Also, the path of the berserker is finally playable! They got rid of the exhaustion mechanic and fixed up the bonus action conflict that made berserker so bad.
Bard has been pushed more towards a healer role, with a base alternate use of bardic inspiration for healing, and a feature called “songs of restoration” that gives you a list of healing spells that are always prepared in addition to your other spells. Bardic inspiration uses are linked to proficiency bonus rather than Charisma bonus now which means fewer uses early but about the same later. Except font of inspiration has also been pushed up two levels to 7th, meaning you’re going to have to be really sparing with that inspiration until much later now.
I’ve got to say, it feels very weird to nerf their core mechanic, while also trying to push bards hard into a healing role which has always been more of a side option for them. It’s just a very surprising nerf and shift, as I’ve never heard people complain that bards are overpowered. If playgroups allow it I suspect a lot of players will stick to the original version of the class.
For clerics, a lot of the features have been changed slightly or shuffled around. For example, the blessed strikes feature turns all those archetype features that add damage into one core feature for the class. The big change here is starting the archetype at 3rd level instead of 1st which means you’ll be a sort of generic “holy man” until you pick a god at 3rd level, which is odd. They’ve also shifted down and changed the turn undead feature, getting rid of the weird “turned” quasi-condition and replacing it with the new “dazed” condition.
They’ve killed my baby! Wild shape is utterly gutted, instead of being able to turn into any sort of beast you’re stuck with 3 set stat-blocks that represent land, air, and sea creatures with none of the flavor. Then to add insult to injury, they still lock the air and sea forms behind even higher levels than we had before. They also strangely shift druid to be more like a cleric, putting their healing powers front and center alongside a channel divinity-like feature called “channel nature”.
I hate this new version, but I can see the logic. Three forms is a lot easier to implement in a VTT than potentially infinite animal forms from random bestiaries. I understand it, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
They’ve put fighter up as the poster child for their new weapon mastery features giving the fighter more of them than any other class and a new feature that lets you swap them out on long rests. Action surge got a minor nerf but in practice it’ll be essentially the same. Probably the biggest change is a nerf to second wind, making it twice per long rest rather than once per short rest.
It does seem like the fighter archetypes are just straight up gaining more features, as their example of the champion archetype is getting more features and some features earlier than they were before.
Practically unchanged and unscathed, a little bit of shuffling in the later tiers but you should find paladins mostly the same.
Hunter’s mark is now baked into the class and you don’t have to concentrate on it (at this point I have to ask why it’s even considered a spell but here we are), which is a sizable buff. All rangers are starting with spellcasting at 1st level rather than waiting. They’re getting better late game features, and that quasi-invisibility feature that was terrible is now straight up invisibility which is great. Overall it seems like the class got buffed and a lot of the mechanics that just never worked with ranger have been stripped out.
The core class is passing through practically unchanged with just some late tier feature shuffling and some slight rewording to make sneak attack clearer. The thief archetype however has been completely reworked and now allows you to take the new Search and Sleight of Hand actions as a bonus action using your cunning action. Thieves are also getting a built in climb speed and bonuses to jumps, along with just straight up advantage on stealth checks.
More spell slots, more metamagic, and more new features, sorcerer makes out like a bandit this edition. As part of a trend that will hold for all the other spellcasting classes, you’re also getting some specific “class spells” that are always prepared for you and don’t count against the rest of the spells that you know. For sorcerers their class spells are chaos bolt and sorcerous burst. Chaos bolt is unchanged and sorcerous burst is essentially the cantrip version of it, dealing a small amount of a damage type of your choice. Once you hit 5th level you also get a new unique sorcerer spell sorcerous vitality, which gives the paper-thin sorcerer a way to heal themselves.
All of this adds up to a big buff, and you’re going to be able to metamagic spells a lot easier now. The fact that the “class spells” are now baked into the class means you’ll be seeing those spells a lot, but it’ll help distinguish each mage class from the other. The one thing that hurts is moving the archetype to 3rd level, which means all sorcerers will be very samey in the early levels.
This one hurts, it looks a lot worse than it actually is, but it still hurts. The class has been taken apart, twisted inside out and put back together into something new. Not bad, but definitely a departure from what you’ve played before. Firstly, pact magic is no more, now they just have a spellcasting feature and regain spell slots on a long rest like everybody else. Next, a lot of what were warlock features have been morphed into class spells and baked back into the class. You get medium armor for every warlock, and the book of shadows is a cantrip now that lets you shuffle spells around.
I don’t personally like these changes and I’ve seen a lot of people share the sentiment, but I suspect this is a resistance to change rather than logical objections to the changes themselves. It’s easier if you think of it as an entirely new class, since the differences are so extreme.
Wizards at early levels won’t feel much different. Most of the changes concern consolidating some of their rules together and making them easier to understand. Adding a spell to your spell book is now a spell called scribe spell you automatically get, and you can use your spellbook as an arcane focus which is a nice change.
Where wizards will feel different is in tiers 2 and 3 which get you a set of special class spells that let you modify spells and even create new ones. They’re trying to push wizards as not just spellcasters but as spell crafters which is an amazing route that I can’t wait to play around with. They did technically get a nerf in that arcane recovery has been pushed to 2nd level, but it’s a minor nerf at worst.
It’s almost pointless to try and draw a conclusion on playtest material, everything we just went through could be completely different tomorrow. But in general, they seem to be streamlining things that were clunky, restructuring the character creation system in a good way, and putting great efforts towards making the system ready to function in a VTT. Only time will tell what changes stick, and how the community at large will react, but surrounding issues aside, I’m seeing mostly positive changes that should create better gameplay. Let’s just hope Wizards of the Coast doesn’t get any ideas about paid subscriptions and keeps their hands off the OGL.
]]>D&D has released a new set of adventures in “Keys from the Golden Vault”, this time focused on elaborate magical heists. Players will take on the role of noble thieves as they plan their heists, case the joints, and scramble for plan B when something inevitably goes wrong. But does this latest addition to the D&D 5e library capture that heist movie feel? Grab your thieves’ tools and your best disguise as we go through everything you need to know.
Keys From the Golden Vault is a comparatively slim volume, coming in at 208 pages, making it one of the shortest official 5e releases to date and definitely the shortest adventure collection. It’s at the lower price point though of around $29.99 but it is a worrying trend to see these books shrink as the releases roll out. With that said they waste no space, and the entirety of the book is a short introduction including several options for running the adventures and the 12 included heist adventures themselves.
All told you can find the following within Keys from the Golden Vault:
The harpers have a new covert good guy organization rival in the “Golden Vault” an organization and plot device of agents who do crimes for moral reasons. They’ve got vague links to the metallic dragons, and they take care of issues where a bit of law breaking is necessary to do the right thing. All this adds up to an amazing excuse to pull off some heists, with a solid framework for getting the initial missions, contacts, and motivations for carrying them out.
The “keys” from the golden vault are actually the magical dead drops of their organization that fit into little magical music boxes each agent has. Each key is specific to a particular mission, and when turned in the music box produces the mission briefing, should they choose to accept it. It’s a wonderful mix of cheesy spy movie and high fantasy and I really appreciate how well it sets the mood and establishes goals.
So overall, what are these heists like? I’m happy to report that they’re not only well-designed adventures, but also that they nail the heist genre aesthetic. They didn’t just make dungeon crawls with a heist paint job. Each adventure involves a briefing from the music box key, contacts, opportunities to case the joint and multiple different approaches and methods for snagging the McGuffin and getting away. Guards have names and little snippets of personality that a good DM can sculpt into great encounters. The player version of maps are intentionally sketchy hand drawn versions of the DM maps, reflecting the player’s hasty scouting in true heist movie styles.
I can’t emphasize enough how well-crafted and compact these heists are, and every room is packed full of opportunities and angles the players can take without being strung along. There’s no “correct” method to steal each item, only a bunch of moving parts that the players can cobble a plan out of on their own.
Each adventure can be run on its own or run together as a big heist-filled campaign. They also include ways to continue and branch off each adventure if you run one as a one-shot and want to keep going. They’ve set up a rival heist team to add a layer of extra challenge to any given heist, and each encounter is designed flexibly, with contingencies for the major ways the heist can go wrong and the ramifications. They made a ton of excellent design choices here that permeate through the whole collection, and I have trouble finding fault in it. As a nitpick, I wish the rival team had a bit more depth since as it is now, they’re just a sentence or two of description and a generic stat block, but that’s splitting hairs.
Each adventure seems to be designed for 1-2 sessions, depending on how much time your players spend on planning. Though the higher-level adventures might spill into 3 sessions if plans go especially awry.
A mysterious stone is on exhibit at the museum but it’s not the crown jewel that it seems. The stone is actually the egg of a horrible monstrosity and it’ll hatch and devour countless people unless the players can infiltrate the exhibition gala and swipe the offending ovum before it can hatch. The gala is in full swing, so players will have the opportunity to dress up and mingle before slipping into the closed wings. And the giant allosaurus animatronic just so happens to be easily broken to go haywire and cause a distraction. Very fun, campy, and overall, it sets the book off on the right foot.
One gambler double crossed another and set up his own casino, now they want their share back from this cavernous casino nestled behind a waterfall. You’ll feel like you’re roleplaying a James Bond movie as you schmooze, gamble, and drink your way into the casino vault. I really appreciate how well they manage to pull off a spy movie in 5e D&D form, just be prepared for a ton of shaken martini jokes.
This one stretches the term “heist” quite a bit and is more of a scooby-doo mansion styled dungeon crawl. Much more than the previous two, Reach for the Stars is a dungeon crawl first and only technically a heist. You’ll battle traps and monsters while you sneak through a spooky mansion, talk to disembodied heads, and stop a cultist from summoning an otherworldly horror. It’s a fine adventure, but I can’t help but think it was a previous concept jammed into the collection under flimsy heist pretenses.
Players will have to infiltrate the Forgotten Realm’s favorite frozen prison, Revel’s End. An inmate has the key to a vast fortune, and they’ll need to extract either her or the key, or both. I’d have been surprised if a book about heists didn’t include at least one prison break and Prisoner 13 delivers with prison break tropes and misdirections galore. Though players hoping to ride Jarnathan out will find it sadly lacking in luckless aarakocra councilors to fly out on.
A gnomish tinkerer has gone insane and taken over a small town in the underdark with an army of clockwork contraptions. The whole town is almost like one big puzzle with moving bridges, pulley lines, and tons of ways the players can sneak through and avoid the automatons. I’d argue this is less a heist and more just a sneaking mission, but I found the puzzle-like nature of the town very satisfying to put together and figure out.
A thief's guild has stolen a valuable portrait and the owner wants it back, quickly and quietly. This starts off as one of the most straightforwardly “heisty” of the heists, there’s a big house full of bandits and a painting and you need to get the painting out. What starts out straightforward though will almost certainly turn on its head when one of the many twists and revelations (which I won’t spoil here) force the party to change plans mid-thievery. Simple at first, but I expect players to have a great time as they scramble from plan A to plans B through Z.
A famous bard has died and returned from the grave as a zombie that can only be given rest by returning his stolen lute “his axe”. Romp is a good word for describing this one. The players will go through several misdirects before finally finding the lute, and it captures the playful feel of a lighthearted misadventure despite the initial undead premise. Excellent, light, and sure to get some good rounds of laughter out of your players.
This one feels like you get the most enjoyment out of it when running all the adventures together as a campaign rather than a one-off. The heist itself is fairly straightforward, steal a fancy tiara back from one thief to give back to another thief. Where it gets interesting is at the end when the players are presented with an opportunity for a double-cross and some thieving-themed magic items. Good adventure as part of a larger campaign, less interesting as a one-off though.
Get that thing back where it came from, or so help you! In a reverse heist the players must return an accursed object back into the tomb from whence it came to prevent a town from literally crumbling apart. Despite the classical “ancient tomb” setting, this still plays out like a heist instead of a dungeon crawl, as players piece together the reality of this “ancient curse” while sneaking through the abundant hidden passages.
This is another one that’s a traditional dungeon crawl wearing a hat with the word “heist” on it, but it’s a damn cool dungeon crawl. Players must venture into a castle that is literally floating apart beneath an all-consuming magical void. You must jump between floating chunks of castle to find the cursed king’s still-beating heart to save the kingdom. Extremely memorable adventure, still a dungeon crawl and not a heist, but good.
Players will have to sneak aboard an interplanar train to extract vital information out of a legendary prisoner. The flying train is constantly on the move between planes and locales providing the heist with an infinitely variable backdrop. Incredibly fun and imaginative adventure, and I take no shame in admitting that I’ll be stealing this train for my own campaigns.
Infiltrate a fey gala to steal a dangerous gemstone. Nothing is as it seems, however, and this adventure is loaded with twists and turns that’ll surely be high fey gossip for months. This is the most “talky” of the adventures in a good way, and it encourages the players to mix and mingle to talk their way through everything that stands between them and the gem. Great pick if you want to do a lot of roleplaying and pretend to be debutantes for the evening.
Sneak into an evil dragon’s fortress and steal the one and only book of vile darkness before the cultists can use it to transform their master into a dracolich. The first half of this adventure can be called a heist as the players need to figure out how to sneak in. But in the second half it really just boils down to a dungeon crawl with an emphasis on hopefully sneaking but more likely fighting your way through. Still fun, with several twists to keep the players on their toes.
Keys from the Golden Vault accomplishes what it sets out to do and provides a DM with a dozen heist adventures they can use to sprinkle into their own campaigns, run as one-shots, or combine into a longer campaign. Many of the adventures manage to capture the heist tropes and feel, and lets the players figure out their own plans using the pieces the book lays out for them. I especially appreciate the set-up with the key dead drops, and the “hand sketched” nature of most of the player maps making it feel like the players jotted down notes while casing the job. The missions are creative, well-written, and manage to provide tools for the most likely outcomes and player decisions without bogging the DM down (a hard feat to tackle).
My biggest gripe with this book is the size. Keys From the Golden Vault contains 13 short adventures, but Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel also contained 13 adventures but it also had a bunch of additional setting content, and Candlekeep Mysteries before that had 17 adventures plus additional content. I can’t help but notice we’re getting less and less content for the same type of product at the same price point, setting a worrying trend. Will the next adventure collection be another 30 to 40 pages shorter with fewer adventures? Only time will tell but I get the feeling they’re seeing how little content they can get away with without lowering prices and I don’t like it.
Beyond that, 3 out of the 12 missions seem like normal dungeon crawl adventures wearing a “heist” hat. They’re still fine adventures in their own right, but I can’t help but feel like they don’t quite fit in the collection and were jammed in and altered to “make them fit '' rather than being designed with heists in mind from the get-go.
I have some gripes, but if the biggest gripe essentially boils down to “I wish there was more of it” then you’ve got a good product. The heists are thematic, fun, and perfect for shorter campaigns. I’m excited to sneak these scenarios into my own games, and I’ll definitely be saving a few for when one-shot opportunities arise. This doesn’t take the odd setup of Candlekeep or Radiant Citadel, and the adventure quality just seems higher here. Each adventure is a refined and compact package, while still letting the players make their own decisions and not holding their hands. I still have reservations about WotC making adventure collections (I feel the 3rd parties are handling that area just fine) but this is a primo offering to serve that need. I think out of all the adventure collections that Wizards of the Coast has released so far, I’d recommend this one the most.
Want to support the blog? Buy the book (or something else) via this link!
]]>5e is in a bit of a trouble spot right now and many playgroups are scrambling to find a new home. Paizo’s latest system has a lot going for it, but just what does Pathfinder 2nd edition entail for your games? Pathfinder has always been the frontrunning rival to D&D, is now the time they take the front seat? We’re going to go through all the big changes you’ll feel making the shift from 5e D&D to Pathfinder 2e. Get ready to blaze those trails as we go through everything you need to know.
Both editions of Pathfinder have a lot of the same roots as D&D, so you’ll find a lot of familiar rules and themes. Pathfinder is a different game, but it’s not going to be a radically drastic change from what you and your group are used to. Pathfinder is crunchier and more in-depth than 5e but with similar bones and if that sounds appealing then Pathfinder might be the right fit for your playgroup.
And unlike other smaller systems, Pathfinder 2e has a TON of content for you to play with. D&D only gets a few official books a year, but Pathfinder prints dozens of new campaigns and supplements every year, much of which is freely available online.
Pathfinder has 2 editions, and they’re different enough to both be viable options. 2nd edition cuts down on a lot of the rules bloat that 1st edition suffered from, and fixes some of the base problems they couldn’t address without an overhaul. This article will cover 2nd edition Pathfinder, if you’d like to learn more about the 1st edition of Pathfinder instead check out our other article here.
Just like the first edition, one of Pathfinder 2’s best perks is that all the information you need is free and easy to find online. Paizo has always held an “unofficial” stance when it comes to policing their content and they encourage people to freely distribute the rules. Absolutely everything you need is online for free and is even conveniently converted into tools and character creators.
If you really prefer physical books, you’ll have to put together a bit of a collection to get the “base game” put together. At bare minimum you’ll need:
Beyond that there are a good chunk of supplementary rule books with more character options. Unlike 5e, most of these books introduce whole new classes and to have all the “base options” you’ll need the following:
Just like D&D, Pathfinder 2e uses the polyhedral set of d20, d12, 2 d10s, d8, d6, and d4. So any dice sets you picked up for D&D will do you just fine for Pathfinder 2e as well.
Let’s go through some of the biggest changes you’ll feel as a DM switching from 5e D&D to Pathfinder.
This is true for the 1st edition as well, but it seems amplified in the 2nd edition of Pathfinder, you’re going to have to get used to learning hard rules rather than getting by with soft rules. 5e gets away with a lot of spit balling and soft rules, like the advantage/disadvantage system. You rarely get into situations where you can’t handwave away or just improvise a rule for in 5e. In Pathfinder 2 you really have to stick to their hard rules a lot more because of how interconnected everything is.
This is especially relevant when it comes to monsters. In 5e I’ve often fully improvised a monster on the fly. In Pathfinder 2 there are quite a few class features that allow players to accurately determine a monster’s weaknesses and stats, and if they don’t line up your players will be able to see where you fudged the numbers. Players have abilities designed to specifically line up with the things you throw at them, and you just won’t have the freedom to fudge that you’re used to.
If you’re the kind of DM that never fudged rolls or made stuff up to begin with you won’t see much of a change, but if you’re the kind of DM used to making everything up on the fly it might be a bit jarring.
Pathfinder 2e has a mechanic and system for everything which is both a blessing and a curse. Does your character want to craft an item? There’re rules for that, and they may even have class features that interact with the mechanic. This means that so long as you’re able to look up a reference, you likely won’t ever have to make up a system on the spot like you often do in 5e. The flip side is that you shouldn’t improvise your own stuff because you risk disrupting the builds your players worked so hard to optimize.
This is just the old conflict between fixed content and freedom to improvise, and depending on how much you improvised to begin with it’ll either be a huge shift for your DMing style or you might hardly notice.
Skill actions caught me off guard as a DM, essentially Pathfinder 2 has taken some of the more universal activities traditionally covered by a skill check and has created specific “actions” that typically utilize skill checks but are their own distinct thing.
For example, we now have the “Earn Income” action that players can take when they have downtime. Earning income can use skills like Craft or Perform and the action has its own distinct set of rules. This also covers quite a few combat actions that work like this too such as disarming opponents or feinting attacks. Mechanically it’s nice to have these things quantified and rules set for them, just be aware that there’s more to them now than just rolling a skill check.
Skill actions also have their own preset consequences for crits and fumbles. Rather than leaving the results up to the DM, each skill action has its own unique results that you’ll want to be able to quickly reference.
Let’s go through the biggest changes you’ll feel as a player swapping over from 5e D&D to Pathfinder 2e.
If you’re used to 5e, you’ll be used to getting the majority of your abilities and features baked into your class, with extra options from things like your race and class archetype. Feats are an optional rule in 5e, so trading over to Pathfinder 2 may be a bit of a jarring transition when you find that everything is feats. Your ancestry gives you a choice of ancestry feats, your class gives you class feats. You get skill feats, and magic feats, and combat feats, it’s feats all the way down.
Classes really only provide a couple foundational features and things like hit points and base proficiencies, beyond that their main function is to grant access to that class’s collection of class feats.
But what do all these feats really add up to? Everything being feats means your character is more of a collection of options chosen carte blanche from various lists. This gives you a ton of freedom to design your character how you want, but it also means you have a lot more responsibility to design your character well. Pathfinder 2 is a game designed around character builds unlike 5e’s reliance on simple progression. If you want to do a specific maneuver or focus on a style of play, you’ve got to build up to it. Many styles and techniques use a very negative starting point that you need features to overcome and get good at. You don’t start out capable by default in Pathfinder 2, and it’s up to you to become competent in accomplishing your goals. And just like in the first edition of Pathfinder, all these feats have feat trees, and you’ll need to plan accordingly to build up to the feats you really want.
Actions and bonus actions are gone! Now you have 3 “actions” you can use every turn, and everything costs between 1 and 3 “actions” to perform. There are still “free actions” like dropping items and talking, but for the most part you’ve got an action resource and you’ve got to choose each turn how to spend them wisely.
Just on your base starting stats you’ll feel a huge difference in the numbers. You’ll be getting much more frequent ability score increases and you should expect to very quickly get to an 18 in your most important ability score with 16’s and 14’s in most other scores. AC is higher, damage is higher, and the bonuses you’ll be applying to attacks and skill checks will all just generally be higher. The targets will be increasing just as much, and monsters with AC’s floating up in the 30’s and 40’s aren’t uncommon. It all balances out in the end, but you’re going to have to get used to rolling a “25” and failing to hit the enemy. Just be aware of how different the scaling is and shift your expectations accordingly.
Class archetypes are kind of a vestigial leftover in Pathfinder 2. All the classes are just lists of carte blanche options anyway so the need for a defining archetype kind of fell by the wayside. You still pick an archetype, but most class archetypes boil down to a single ability or buff and are essentially just another feat group to pick from. This isn’t bad exactly, you’re still getting way more freedom to build your characters than you’re used to, just don’t be disappointed by the weenie archetype options.
In 5e you have one gradually increasing proficiency bonus and it has exactly two tiers, you’re either proficient in something, or you aren’t. Pathfinder 2 for a start grants WAY bigger proficiency bonuses than you’ll be used to, and you have 5 tiers of proficiency to work with.
A lot of pathfinder boils down to picking some type of attack or ability and getting bonuses for it as high as possible. Pathfinder 2 has a bit of a built-in limiter to the min-maxing though due to the restrictions on the bonus types. Each bonus to your rolls will either be a circumstance bonus, an item bonus, or a status bonus based on where you got it from. The trick here is that you can only ever apply the highest bonus of a bonus type to any given roll. You can stack up a bonus of each type, but once you’ve got two from the same type, the lower ones essentially get wasted. For example, let’s say you’re getting a +4 bonus to Arcana checks from a magic hat you picked up, a +2 bonus to Arcana checks from a wand you’re wielding, and a +1 bonus to Arcana from a class ability. Because both your hat and wand are providing an item bonus, only the higher bonus applies. This means you’d add the +4 bonus from the hat, and the +1 bonus from your class ability, but you wouldn’t be able to also add the +2 from the wand since that’s also an item bonus.
Crits and fumbles work a bit differently in Pathfinder 2 and have a lot more to do with the DC of any given check, not to mention they can happen on skill checks as well as attacks. Pathfinder 2 distinguishes between critical failures, failures, successes, and critical successes and puts them all on a scale they call “degrees of success”. If you roll and meet the DC of a check, you succeed, if you roll under it, you fail. However, if you exceed the DC by 10 or more you instead score a critical success, and if you roll under the DC by 10 or more, you score a critical failure.
Exactly what all of these degrees of success do depends on the check, but most actions have explicit results predetermined for each degree of success.
What we traditionally think of as “crits” and “fumbles” still matter though. Whenever you roll a “20” on a d20 it shifts your result 1 further up the scale, and whenever you roll a “1” it shifts your result 1 down the scale.
This typically means a natural 20 is usually a critical success, but if rolling a 20 still wouldn’t hit the DC, you only score a success since you shifted one up the scale from failure to success.
Conversely this means a natural 1 is usually a critical failure, but if rolling a 1 would still pass the DC, you’d only score a regular failure.
For example, let’s say you’re fighting an Ancient Red Dragon (and are probably about to die) but you roll a natural 20 firing your longbow at it. You add +12 to your roll (from various bonuses) for a total of 32 for your attack roll. Well, the dragon has a whopping 45 AC, which means your attack roll result is still a failure. But, because you rolled a natural 20, your failure result shifts 1 up the scale for degrees of success, changing from a failure to a success! It’s not a critical success, but hey, you still managed to pierce the dragon’s hide even though it’s AC is higher than your maximum result.
Pathfinder 2 did a very good job of consolidating abilities and keywords. Practically every “thing” you can do in the game uses the same standardized format, has an action cost, and one or more of the universal tags that permeate the system. There’s no fundamental difference between casting a spell and performing a spin kick as a monk, it’s all just effects and costs using the same template.
From a game perspective this is fantastic, and you’ll have far fewer rules’ arguments (hopefully) with the clean standardized language behind everything.
From a TTRPG perspective you’ll find Pathfinder 2 feels very video gamey, and if that’s your background that may well be a feel you’re looking for. Just be aware that the feeling of standardization and mechanical weight fills out everything in this system.
More than any other system I’ve played with, Pathfinder 2nd edition’s online tools and character builders make play and character creation a breeze. Everything’s free online in convenient and easy to understand websites and apps. Features pop up with full explanations and rules, automatically filtered for what your character can and can’t take. Handy rules and references are a click away rather than buried in books and guides. I can’t overstate how high quality these tools are and how easy they make the experience.
Just like with the first edition of Pathfinder, Pathfinder 2 has a lot more crunch than 5e and a much deeper swathe of character customization options. 2 has fewer toys to play with but gains a much more refined ruleset and FANTASTIC online tools to simplify the process.
I would not recommend Pathfinder 2 for a group’s first system, but as a 2nd or 3rd system to try after getting bored of 5e it’s perfect. If you’re happy with a heavier and more video gamey rules system you’ll be rewarded with deep combat and well-designed interconnected mechanics.
Sadly no, not really. There’re enough of the same foundations that you can probably get away with converting things but especially with how they changed the action economy they really are different games. Adventure paths and monsters are probably the easiest to convert, but class features and abilities should really be left behind.
It’s a bit of a tossup honestly but I think when you weigh everything Pathfinder 2 is more streamlined compared to the 1st edition. The writers benefited from the years of refining Pathfinder 1 and the 2nd edition has a lot of moving parts but they’re all designed to work together from the ground up, rather than being build onto a shaky foundation like in the 1st edition.
Pazio puts out all the core rules online for free along with some incredible online tools, simply google “pathfinder 2 character builder” and you’ll find everything you need.
Wizards of the Coast has been rolling some fumbles lately when it comes to 5th edition which has a lot of playgroups looking to jump ship. But what if you like 5e or your group just doesn’t want to learn a new system? Level Up: Advanced 5e takes the framework of 5e and builds on it, cleaning up some of its early mistakes and adding new systems without disrupting many of the base rules you’ve grown accustomed to. We’re going to go through all the biggest changes you’ll feel switching systems. Get your supplies together and grab your expertise dice as we go through everything you need to know.
5e has always been an excellent system for onboarding new players to tabletop role playing games, but at the end of the day the system chops a ton of mechanical depth in favor of simplicity. Advanced 5e takes that easy-to-understand framework that your playgroup already knows and adds new depth and possibilities for both the player characters, the monsters, and ways to explore the world. Martial classes gain access to a wide range of maneuvers, ending the days where the optimal play is just mashing the attack action over and over again. Spellcasters can find rare versions of spells that can enhance or alter their existing arcane arsenal. And rather than simply hitting fast-forward during travel, advanced 5e has a built-in exploration system that makes the world more than just a series of combat encounters.
But the real big advantage here is compatibility. You don’t have to toss out all that 5e content you’ve already bought as everything is backwards compatible. Advanced 5e classes can work with original 5e archetypes and vice versa, old 5e monsters can be dropped right in with just a tweak, and whole adventure paths are all still perfectly playable with the new rules.
You can also freely mix and match. Everything is modular so you can cherry pick your favorite new features and mechanics from Advanced 5e and plug them into your existing original 5e games.
Full disclosure, I was one of the designers on Level Up: Advanced 5e and I’m currently on the writing team for EN Publishing. I’ll try to keep my article here with as little self-congratulation as possible but if it feels a bit too glowing of a review you’ll know why. I still highly recommend the system but feel free to take my opinion on it with a grain of salt.
Advanced 5e has several expansions and supplements out and oncoming, but it originally released with 3 core books:
Strictly all you’ll need is the Adventurer’s Guide which contains all the core rules and character creation options you’ll need to get a game going.
Trials and Treasures contains Advanced 5e’s exploration rules, challenges, and a huge collection of magic items and magic item crafting rules. You can make do without it but I’d highly recommend it.
Finally, one of the best changes that comes with advanced 5e is how it handles monsters, and I can’t recommend getting the Monstrous Menagerie enough even if you’re just looking to improve your old 5e games.
Advanced 5e has all its rules and character creation options freely available online with their new tools site. It’s in open beta so they’re still working some kinks out, but you can easily look up any rules online for free.
Just like old 5e, Advanced 5e makes use of a polyhedral set you likely already have which should include a d20, d12, 2 d10s, d8, d6, and d4. If you’ve been playing old 5e you should already have everything you need.
Let’s go through some of the biggest changes you’ll feel as a DM switching from old 5e D&D to Advanced 5e.
On cracking open the Monstrous Menagerie you’ll find that each creature has a lot more than just a stat block and some lore. The design philosophy was that each monster should include everything the DM will need to craft an encounter with that creature. This means you’ll find tables of signs, which are things in the area that might warn or foreshadow the monster’s presence. You’ll also find encounter sets spread across different CRs along with treasure you can loot after defeating them. And you’ll also get legends and lore tables which contain snippets of information your players might learn about the creature from skill checks like history or arcana and what DCs they’ll need to beat to get such information.
Put all this together and rather than just plopping down a monster you can get a full encounter experience just from the book alone. The lead-up, lore, example encounters, and example loot all combine to make each monster listing a full encounter just using the book alone.
Finally, the monsters themselves have a bit more depth on average than you’ll be used to in original 5e. Each monster has a combat section briefly outlining the monster’s general tactics in combat, and many of them have deeper abilities including stages that progress as the monster takes damage.
Advanced 5e pays special attention to the exploration pillar of gameplay. Trials and Treasures contains tons of biomes subdivided by tiers so that no matter where your players are heading, you’ll have a ton of encounters and tables ready to go for it. But exploration doesn’t just have to be a series of encounters. Advanced 5e has built in traveling mechanics that allow players to perform a more active role in their transition from A to B. Players can busk, cook, entertain, and all sorts of other traveling activities that gain the party bonuses and buffs while they go.
And as an optional rule, Advanced 5e introduces the concept of “supply” which is an abstracted unit to measure the amount of food and water you’d need to survive for a day, rather than counting every stick of jerky. For adventures where surviving the wilderness is a core theme, pop in the supply rules and let your players hunt, forage, and otherwise find ways to survive off the land.
Advanced 5e expands on the often-forgotten inspiration mechanic and integrates it into the player’s character creation with a new building block called “destinies”. Each destiny is meant to represent why a character became an adventurer, their motivations and the future they’re working towards.
Mechanically inspiration still works much the same way. It's a reward the DM is meant to give players for creative or quality roleplaying, you can only ever have inspiration or not (you can’t stockpile it up) and players can spend their inspiration to make a reroll on anything. The destinies build on this with special alternative uses for their inspiration, and special sources of inspiration. For you as a DM this means you’re highly encouraged to hand out inspiration regularly and pay attention to each player’s destiny for roleplay situations that should gain those players inspiration.
One of my pet peeves when it comes to original 5e is the ambiguous pricing for magic items that forces me to come up with them on the spot. Advanced 5e not only has fully priced out magic items and potions along with the traditional rarity scale, but it also includes full crafting rules and mechanics that makes magic item creation into something actually in the range of possibility instead of a vestigial non-mechanic. Players won’t be able to break the game with mass item production, but if they want to take some time and effort to make a wand or two Advanced 5e doesn’t punish them for it.
Let’s go through the biggest changes you’ll feel as a player swapping over from old 5e D&D to Advanced 5e.
Advanced 5e gives you a lot more room to play with when building your character with “origins”.
Your character’s origin is divided into Heritage, Culture, Background, and Destiny. Collectively, these 4 options replace the race and background of an old 5e character.
Heritage describes a character’s physical nature and what they biologically are. It’s close to what a “race” is in old 5e, but it has been disentangled from culture and history. There’s no reason dwarves in your world have to have all that Tolkienesque lore attached to them, and just because you were born a dwarf doesn’t mean you were raised in a dwarven mine.
Heritage is also subdivided into heritage and heritage gift. In a lot of ways, you can look at the heritage gift like the old 5e subraces, but because they’re fully modular between races you can mix and match. This lets you create all sorts of mixed heritages. Want to be a half-elf half-orc? Just take the heritage of one with a heritage gift of the other and bam you’ve got an elforc.
Culture is where all that history and lore went and is meant to describe how your character was raised. Was your halfling raised wild in a goblin raiding party? Did your rogue grow up on the farm or in shackles?
Background has been changed dramatically and describes a character’s pre-adventuring life and early profession. It’s important to note that the starting ability score increases got taken out of race and put into backgrounds instead (which should make a lot of sense) which makes them much more important selections.
Destiny is the new kid on the block, and it describes what got a character to go adventuring in the first place and what they hope to achieve. Destinies work with the improved inspiration mechanic and push you to do more roleplaying for mechanical rewards. They also give you some powerful out of combat ways to spend your inspiration, which can be incredibly powerful when used right.
Mechanical depth often involves a lot of math and stacking up bonuses, which is where expertise dice come in. A ton of features will give you an “expertise die” on things like checks, attacks, or saves. When you have an expertise die on something, you roll a d4 and add that to the result. Now, if you ever get multiple expertise dice on something, you instead “improve” the expertise die a step (d4, d6, d8, Etc.). So if you gained 2 expertise dice on say Arcana checks, you’d roll a d6 and add that to your result, if you had 3 expertise dice you’d roll a d8 and add that instead.
Specialties let your character be especially good at certain aspects of skills. Let’s say your gnome fighter is especially good at knot-tying. You’d mark on your sheet a specialty in knot tying next to the survival skill that knot-tying would normally fall into. Now whenever you roll a survival check and the knot-tying specialty applies, you’d get to add an expertise die to the check. So you’d add it for making a survival check to tie a rope off as you scale a cliff, but not when using Survival to track a bounty.
There are examples of these specialties for every skill but you’re encouraged to be creative and come up with your own. Nobody can stop you from choosing underwater basket weaving as a specialty, but it might not come up often.
One thing a lot of players miss is starting specialties. Every character starts at level 1 with 2 specialties of their choice, plus a number of specialties equal to their Intelligence modifier. A lot of class features and options will also grant you specific specialties or let you pick more.
One of the goals of Advanced 5e was to give martial classes more options and let them have deeper strategy choices beyond “hit the thing until it dies”.
All creatures and characters now have a thing called a “combat maneuver DC”, which is calculated in practically the same way as a spell save DC. Your combat maneuver DC is 8 + your proficiency, + either your Strength modifier or Dexterity modifier whichever is higher.
With this, instead of doing complicated grappling checks or contested checks, you instead simply declare what you’re trying to do (shove a guy, grapple them, Etc.) and your target makes a Strength or Dexterity saving throw against your combat maneuver DC. If they fail you successfully perform your maneuver, if they succeed, they stop you from performing your maneuver.
The basic stuff like grappling and tripping all fall under “basic maneuvers” that everybody is able to perform. Martial classes get a lot more than the basics as they gain access to combat traditions and exertion points.
When you learn a combat tradition, you gain access to a bunch of extra maneuvers that are fueled by a resource called exertion points. Most martial classes get a number of exertion points equal to twice their proficiency bonus, and these points recharge on a short rest.
What this means is that your fighter has a whole plethora of combat options to fit any situation, no battle master archetype required!
TTRPGs (or at least most of them) have three general pillars of gameplay, combat, roleplay, and exploration. For the most part, the mechanics of old 5e are designed to work with that first pillar quite a lot, tangentially interact with the roleplay pillar, and practically ignore the exploration pillar.
In Advanced 5e, you’ll find that your class features and base mechanics are spread more evenly across all 3 pillars, with every class gaining abilities that specifically affect not only how you fight, but also how you roleplay and explore.
One thing you might notice when rolling up a new spellcaster in Advanced 5e is that each spell has a list of tags in addition to the traditional magical schools. These do nothing on their own, but class features and abilities can interact with them. This lets things like your pyromancer wizard gain bonuses to all “fire” spells, rather than having to list them all out and potentially cut off fire-themed spells created in the future.
While picking out languages, you might notice that each language lists “speak, read, write, and sign”. As both a nod to the hearing impaired and to finally solve the “we’re signing in combat not talking” exploit, signing a language has been made a core part of learning a language.
A bit of a minor change, but Advanced 5e adds in two new skills, Culture and Engineering. It was always awkward to make a history check to know which bit of cutlery was the salad fork, and Culture wraps together all the aptitude for social understanding, grace, and knowledge. Engineering is the check for any convoluted plan involving ropes, pulleys and pitons you might come up with in the dungeon, along with understanding structures and vehicles.
Advanced 5e doesn’t go nuts with feat trees like pathfinder, but it does have several specific sets of advancing feats called “synergy feats”. Each starting synergy feat requires multiple levels from two different classes, and the latter two require the previous feat. These function a lot like prestige classes, taking core features from both classes and combining them into a new combined class identity. If you’re willing to build for them, take a shot at some of these like the bard and paladin-based proclaimer, or the berserker and druid-based untamed.
Advanced 5e games play out a lot like the 5e games you’re used to, just with a lot of the clunkier rules cleaned up and much more depth to combat. Your players will be tossing enemies back and forth and dynamically using the battlefield rather than just lining up and making attacks until one side falls over. Advanced 5e games are more rounded, giving you mechanical and meaningful interactions across every aspect of your game, not just combat. I highly recommend Advanced 5e for any playgroup looking to ditch WotC, or that just want to get more out of their games without leaving behind all their experience using 5e.
Yup! Advanced 5e has a full tools website containing all the base rules along with all the character creation options in an easy to access and completely free website. Just google “Advanced 5e Tools” and you should find it. It also includes digital character sheets, and downloadable character sheet files. They also have a monster builder tool up and are currently developing their interactive character builder.
Yes, advanced 5e is completely backwards compatible with your old 5e content. You can use an old 5e archetype with an advanced 5e class and vice versa. There are some edge cases where due to how the classes were redesigned some of the old 5e options are tactically suboptimal now, but there’s nothing stopping you from using your favorite existing class or archetype.
The short answer is yes, but it’s a bit more complicated since the origins system made major changes. Advanced 5e moves the ability score increases to the background, and splits what was the “race” into heritage, heritage gift, and culture. If you want to use an old 5e race or background, you need to use both an old 5e race and background together, which you take in place of the advanced 5e heritage, heritage gift, culture, and background.
Yes you can, and they’re incredibly easy to adapt. Most 5e adventures will play perfectly while practically unaltered. For monsters in such encounters, you can plug in the advanced 5e versions where applicable. When the monsters are too unique, simply calculate a quick combat maneuver DC for them in situations where they’d need to grab, shove, grapple, or other similar martial techniques.
]]>Everybody is looking for a new system to try right now with all the chaos surrounding D&D. You might have just heard of a little successful Kickstarter project called Coyote and Crow, a futuristic alternate history setting and system focusing on advanced Native American cultures. Is this journey into the Black worth taking? Will your stories be worth telling? Hop on your Yatsu lift and put on your second eyes as we go through everything you need to know.
Coyote and Crow is a narrative driven system seeped in Native American lore and solar-punk style. It’s flashy, unique, and focuses on “taletelling” in a way that can lead to whole mythologies forming at your table as time and generations pass. The world of Coyote and Crow is idyllic and utopian, but not without conflict. The nations have warred before and many tensions are high, strange and ancient spirits and creatures persist amongst the land, and the onset of the empowered Adanadi is allowing mortal man to peer into the unknown.
If you’re looking to create a story with your players with a bit of mechanical oomph to back it up, then Coyote and Crow might be the game for you.
While the world of Coyote and Crow has diverged drastically from our own, it’s still rooted in real world cultures and history. Living cultures not your own can be a touchy space to play in, and while the book does a good job to address this it’ll still be on the GM and players to address it as well. Keep this in mind when putting together your Coyote and Crow campaign.
Coyote and Crow is a small system right now, and while that means there isn’t a lot out there it also means you don’t have to worry about picking up many books. In fact, to play the system you only need the following book:
A physical copy is a bit pricy, usually running $70 (it is nearly 500 pages to be fair) but you can pick up the PDF direct from the creators or from sites like DriveThruRPG for $25.
Coyote and Crow has a unique dice system based on d12s, and you’re going to need a lot of them. If you’re a chronic dice collector like I am you might have enough d12s from other sets lying around but if not there are Coyote and Crow specific sets for sale as well. You’ll need about 10 of the buggers, and you’ll want a few of them to be easily distinguished from the rest to use as critical dice.
Coyote and Crow is a combination of setting and system, but it’s a setting first. The core book delves deeply into this alternate history where a comet strike in the 1,400’s plunged the world into a new ice age. Our games are set nearly 700 years after “the Awis”, focusing on the new nations, cultures, and technologies that successfully endured the long freeze and rose up within what we would call North America.
The Awis brought with it the gifts of the Adanadi, people born with spiritual powers, identified by the color purple showing up in their hair, eyes, or other markings. Nature has also awoken with these spiritual powers, and gifted creatures walk the plains and haunt the woods. The burgeoning spiritual powers have also brought on more awareness of The Black, a spiritual world adjacent to our own filled with indescribable wonders and potential threats.
A lot of Coyote and Crow is vibes, combining authentic Native American cultures and mythos with a solar-punk utopian aesthetic. Technology progressed differently, we’ve got VR headsets, hover skiffs, and 3D printers, but no factories, no gunpowder, and strangely no wheels (or at least no wheeled vehicles).
The nations aren’t perfect, and their histories are rife with wars and conflicts, but generally civilization as the players find it is largely idyllic, advanced, and harmonious with nature. The players themselves are typically Adanadi, tasked by their tribes to use their gifts to keep peace or complete epic tasks.
Let’s go through some of the fundamental rules you’ll be working with in Coyote and Crow:
Fundamentally Coyote and Crow boils most actions down to skill rolls. You’ll be rolling a number of d12s that will go up or down depending on your stats, your skill ranks, and other circumstances that can add or remove dice from your pool.
Once you figure out how many d12s you’re rolling, your GM should let you know your target number. Any result on your dice that is equal or higher than the target number is a success, the more difficult something is, the higher the target number should be and an average target number is 8.
After you roll, there’s a few extra ways characters can fudge their dice, using their “mind” score to nudge die results up, or if they have legendary ranks they can nudge some dice up for free.
Next, for every result of 12, you get to roll another die called a “critical die”. Any result higher than a 1 on a critical die adds a success, and if the result would also hit the target number or higher it counts as 2 successes.
Exactly how many successes you need to actually do something depends on what you’re trying to do. Some skills may have a set number required to pass/fail, while some might be incremental and have ways to partially succeed or succeed a lot. When making attacks for example, the number of successes you make is the amount of damage you deal.
Coyote and Crow uses a system of “primary” actions and “secondary” actions, and on each player’s turn they can make up to one “primary” action, and any number of “secondary” actions so long as they don’t conflict with each other.
For players used to 5e, the primary actions should make perfect sense. Your primary action is very much like an action in 5e. You can make a skill check (which is also how you make an attack), or use an ability. You get one primary action per turn, and you can also use up your primary action to do a secondary action again.
Secondary actions are a bit more nebulous. In some ways they work in the same way as a 5e bonus action, since there are several abilities that utilize a secondary action, and you use secondary actions to do things like reload weapons, speak to allies, or defend yourself. What’s interesting here is that you have unlimited secondary actions, so long as you don’t use the same one twice, and the actions don’t contradict each other. So you could dive behind cover and reload your gun, but you couldn’t also start dodging while stuck in behind cover. Your movement is also a secondary action, so really most of a turn will be taking several secondary actions, along with one big primary action.
Coyote and Crow uses a very abstracted theater of the mind method when it comes to range and positioning and doesn’t really lend itself towards miniatures or maps. Instead, things are said to be at a “short”, “medium”, or “long” distance from each other.
A “short” range is something you could reach within one round’s movement, which could include things adjacent to you or things on the very edge of that movement range.
A “medium” range is something that would take 2 movement actions to reach, and is described as something “too far to touch but close enough to see” and is generally the range you’d fire ranged weapons at.
A “long” range is something that would take 4 or more movement actions to reach, and is described as everything from “really far” to “just visible on the horizon”. Some really long range weapons might be able to reach these lengths, but generally it’s a range you’ll need to close the distance on to interact with.
Ultimately though, this system will be very hard to track for any complicated combats and that’s fine since combat is definitely not where the game is centered. Coyote and Crow is a very narrative game and you shouldn’t expect many protracted combat encounters.
Let’s go through some of the biggest changes you’ll feel as a DM switching from 5e D&D to Coyote and Crow.
Coyote and Crow is a primarily narrative system, light on combat and heavily invested in creating a communal story rather than tactics. Depending on how you ran 5e games this may or may not be a big departure for you, but it’s something you’ll have to get used to in the setting. Chaining together combats is not how you’ll get the most out of this game. Let your players be clever, talk things out, and come up with creative solutions to problems. Think of the game much more like an act of collaborative storytelling and try to only use the dice when their skills and aptitude are really being challenged.
Coyote and Crow encourages you to weave narratives, and then to allow those stories to change in the retelling. Whenever you reach the end of a major arc or story, encourage each player to retell that story from their character’s perspective as the main protagonist. Each player’s stories combine to form the varied retellings of the events as they happen, creating a natural mythos and legends based on the player’s actions.
Coyote and Crow encourages you to build not only stories but entire sagas. Save snippets of the players retold stories to tell the next batch of characters (even if they’re the same players). The stories can stretch and squash but over multiple story arcs you build entire sagas. The goal here is to create a sort of verbal history that your players share with each other, ranging from campfire story vibes to important cultural legends.
Coyote and Crow actively encourages you and your players to avoid combat and to always provide multiple methods to solve any given problem. They call this idea “the three path concept” which when boiled down basically means having 3 methods of dealing with a conflict. These “paths” can be anything you’d like, but generally when you plan out a conflict the system wants you to have three ideas ready for how your players solve that problem. If they come up with some other 4th thing that’s also great, but you should be prepping multiple solutions.
Let’s go through the biggest changes you’ll feel as a player swapping over from 5e D&D to Coyote and Crow.
Coyote and Crow has a lot of building blocks for a given character, all in all you’ll be assembling the following pieces:
Try not to get too intimidated by all that (it’ll take a bit of character creation time but after that things get simple), really all of these options boil down to skill rolls. Coyote and Crow functions on almost exclusively skill rolls and all these building blocks for your character functionally just add bonuses or penalties to certain skill rolls.
Coyote and Crow doesn’t have character levels and instead advances using things called short- term and long-term goals. At any given time, you should have 2 short term goals and 1 long term goal picked out. These goals are always tied to improving yourself and take a set number of game sessions to complete.
Let’s say your character has a short-term goal of getting better at cooking. Currently, your character has a cooking skill of 2. Once you choose this goal, you’ll mark down every time you finish a game session, and after the 2nd game session is complete your cooking skill will improve from 2 to 3. If you want to keep getting even better at cooking, the next time it will take 3 game sessions Etc.
The long-term goals work exactly the same way, just for bigger stakes such as gaining entirely new abilities, increasing core stats, or gaining new psychic powers. As the “long-term” would imply, these goals take considerably more game sessions to complete, and tend to range from 4-12 game sessions to achieve.
Coyote and Crow doesn’t have hit points like you’d be used to in 5e. Instead, you essentially have three separate hit point pools, body, mind, and soul. Each of these point pools is determined by adding different core stats together, and they represent different aspects of your wellbeing.
Body is the closest thing to the hit points you’d be familiar with, and it represents your physical health. If you get physically injured, it’s your body that takes the hit.
Mind is your mental health, and it can get reduced by taking psychological damage. It also uniquely can be spent to alter your rolls, representing your mental exertion focusing and trying to overcome problems.
Soul is your spiritual health and wellbeing. Angry spirits and other mystical threats can deal soul damage making it a far more important health score for certain encounters.
Once you take damage in any of these scores, you can heal them by taking short or long rests, which functions pretty similarly to how it works in 5e. On a short rest you make a check for each of your scores, and you restore a point on each score you succeed in. Long rests automatically restore points in each score equal to your base stat.
You can also recover points through various skills like healing or ceremonies, and some of the special abilities also provide healing.
Coyote and Crow is a narrative game with a strong emphasis on storytelling and diplomacy. The world has some dark corners but for the most part the world is a utopia filled with people in harmony with both nature and each other. If you’re looking for an upbeat narrative game with a spiritual center, you’ll find a comfortable play space in Coyote and Crow.
I’ve seen a surprising amount of discourse regarding this system and if it can somehow be cultural appropriation to play it without ties to a Native American heritage. I can say at the very least the author’s stated intent is for the system to be enjoyed by everyone regardless of their ancestry. Players are advised however not to create caricatures or stereotypes of Native American peoples in their roleplaying.
Coyote and Crow released a dice game that you can pick up for about $20 that confuses some people when picking up the game. The dice game is a completely separate product and game that makes use of the Coyote and Crow lore but does not interact with the TTRPG. It does however contain a bunch of d12s which if you plan on playing the Coyote and Crow TTRPG might be worth getting.
Not yet. A supplemental book called Stories of the Free Lands is in development and was funded at the same dime as the dice game and DM screen, but it has yet to drop. Keep on the lookout for these adventures sometime in the near future. If you can’t wait there is a novel set in the Coyote and Crow world titled Hemlock and Sage that you can pick up and use for some inspiration.
]]>The TTRPG flagship of D&D is sinking fast, and many playgroups are looking for safe harbors in other systems. Savage Worlds is a fast network of systems and settings all using the same mechanical base that can be used for traditional fantasy games, sci-fi space battles and everything in between. But the Savage Worlds have over a hundred books in their library, where do you start? We’re going to go through all the major differences and changes you can expect switching from 5e D&D to Savage Worlds. Get ready to roll those wild dice as we go through everything you need to know.
I can’t emphasize enough how Savage Worlds acts as a base and a template. Savage Worlds itself doesn’t have a setting or even a genre, it’s just a unique and flexible mechanical core that all sorts of games can grow out of and intermingle. Old veterans who remember GURPS will find a lot of familiar territory here, with the potential for vastly different games played using the same base rules. This makes games where you bridge genres especially perfect for Savage worlds, since mechanically things as disparate as Roman legionnaires, wizards, aliens, superheroes, and cruise missiles can all comfortably play together without the game breaking down.
Fundamentally Savage Worlds is a cinematic system that lends itself towards big emotional conflicts and climaxes. It has low levels of crunch while still letting characters feel unique, and it can flex to fit stories focused on practically any setting or scope. It is however very different from 5e D&D if that’s what you’re used to. If all that sounds like what you’re looking for, then Savage Worlds is a great fit.
Savage Worlds has a TON of books that can be very confusing to parse out at first, but to start playing you really only need a single core book:
Savage Worlds doesn’t like to exactly number their editions, but the “Adventure Edition” is the newest edition that you should be picking up. This single core book is available in PDF for typically only $10 and it covers everything you’ll need from core rules, character creation, and Gamemastery.
You might be interested in Savage Worlds for one of its unique settings, many of which have dozens of books devoted to them with a long and rich gaming history all their own. To play in these settings, you’ll need their core books which build upon the basic Adventure Edition book. All these books work together or rather can work together; it all depends on what elements you want to include in your campaigns. We’ll go into each of these settings later as their own articles, but for now we’ll go over the major options and what books you’ll need to get.
An alternate American history filled with cowboys, zombies, and steampunk wonders, Deadlands is probably the most popular of the Savage Worlds settings and for good reason. If you want an extra wild west, you’ll need to start with the following books:
Both books can be found pretty easily as PDFs for about $10 each nowadays. Be careful though, and make sure you get the latest editions as there are earlier versions floating around.
Take a real-world conflict and add a bit of dark magic to it and you get Weird Wars. Think Wolfenstein, Hellboy, or Valkyria Chronicles. Each Weird Wars book focuses on a different war, with options for WWI, WWII, future conflicts, and battles in ancient Rome.
To get started in a weird war you’ll need one of the following:
The bad news on these books is that they were all written before the current edition. Conversion between Savage Worlds editions isn’t hard, but it’ll still be a pain, especially if you’re new to the system.
Less a spin-off game and more of a supplement, this single book contains everything you’ll need to turn your Savage Worlds game into a superhero adventure. It’s over 200 pages of superpowers and all the comic book trappings surrounding a superhero filled world.
Sadly, once again this book was written before the current edition and to play it you’ll have to work with some conversions.
If you’re itching to use Savage Worlds for a more traditional fantasy adventure, you’ll want this book to fill out all the fantasy tropes. Savage Worlds is built to fit any setting or era but that means it definitely falls short of things like 5e and Pathfinder when it comes to standard fantasy content. This book does a great deal to fill in the blanks and flesh out your Savage Worlds fantasy adventures.
Thankfully this book was updated for the latest edition, meaning there’s no conversions needed!
Savage Rifts or just “Rifts” is Savage World’s sci-fi setting and supplement for everything aliens, lasers, and spaceships. If you’re looking to go for a science fiction angle, you’ll want Rifts powering your campaign. To get started in Rifts you only strictly need this book:
The Tomorrow Legion Player’s Guide acts as the Rifts core book, but if you plan on playing a lot of rifts you should probably also pick up these books:
I also recommend picking up Rifts if you plan on doing any genre-shifting or portaling shenanigans. As the name implies, Rifts focuses a lot on rifts in reality, that can bridge any setting or time period your devious GM brain can think to combine.
Similar to D&D, you’ll need a polyhedral set of d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20. You’ll also need an additional d6 that is different from the first d6 to use as a “wild die”.
Yup, Savage Worlds uses a normal deck of playing cards for certain parts of the game. If you’re playing Deadlands it uses cards a LOT but even in other settings, you’ll be pulling out a deck and shuffling up often. The table only needs a single deck which usually is brought by the Game Master.
Let’s go through some of the fundamental rules you’ll be working with in Savage Worlds:
Savage Worlds is not a d20 system, and rather than adding a bunch of bonuses to a single die, you’ll be upgrading or downgrading the die you roll. If a character is able to do something but they’re bad at it, they’re probably rolling a d4, if they’re good at it maybe they’re rolling a d8. How good a character is at something is determined by their attributes and traits which you’ll see on the character sheet as “d6” or “d8” indicating what they’ll roll for that sort of check.
The standard TN or “Target Number” you need to succeed on anything is 4, but depending on all sorts of circumstances the Game Master can apply bonuses or negatives to your roll, or they might even change the target number all together for really difficult things.
Whenever a character rolls for a check, they also roll an additional d6 which is called a “wild die” and then you take the highest of the two results. This helps with the harsh swing of a single die roll, and mathematically smooths out a lot of the variance. So if you have a d4 in a trait, you’re actually rolling 1d4, and 1d6, then taking the highest result.
When you roll the maximum possible result on a die roll (and that could be your trait die, your wild die, or even both) you get what’s called an ace. When you ace a roll, you get to roll that die again and add it to the result. Let's say you have a d4 in Athletics, and you roll a 4 on the d4, and a 5 on the wild die (d6). That d4 aced, and you roll another d4 getting a 3, and add that total to the original 4 for a total of 7. That gives you your dice results of 7 and 5, and since you always take the highest roll, your final result for the check is a 7.
If you roll particularly high on a check, you can get what’s called a raise that adds additional benefits to your check. To raise a check, you need to get double the target number. Let’s say your character is extremely smart and has a 1d12 in science and you roll a 9 for analyzing some glowing goo. Assuming a normal target number of 4, you’ve doubled the target with a 9 and get a raise. Each skill and attribute have their own unique additional benefits granted by a raise, and in science’s case you learn even more in-depth scientific information than you would with a regular success. So, for our glowing goo the normal success might determine that it’s toxic and dangerous, but a raised check might also determine what sort of creature exuded it.
Critical Failures are the fumbles of this system, and they happen when both of your rolls result in a 1. On a critical failure you automatically fail on whatever you were trying to do, and something extra bad happens as determined by the GM.
Savage worlds uses a system called “bennies”, which they claim is an American slang term for benefits but as an American I can tell you they made that up. Benefits or “bennies” work a lot like inspiration in 5e (a criminally underused mechanic). Each player gets 3 bennies at the start of each session, and the GM is meant to award them with extra bennies whenever they roleplay well or do something cool or noteworthy. Players can then spend their bennies on making rerolls, preventing damage, or even on asking the GM for help or clues.
The primary thing that the deck of playing cards is used for is initiative. Rather than rolling for initiative every player and NPC is dealt a playing card, and the GM can choose to deal them face up or down. Going from Ace to 2, characters take their actions, resolving ties using the card suits going from spade, to diamond, to heart, to club.
Jokers are always left in the deck and their extra special. When someone is dealt a joker, all the players receive a bennie and after that round all the cards are shuffled again. People dealt a joker can also cut in with their action at any time in the round, even interrupting enemies.
Perhaps the biggest departure from 5e in Savage Worlds is how they handle damage. When a character is successfully hit by an attack and damage is rolled, that damage isn’t subtracted from a hit point total, instead it’s compared to the target’s toughness and if the damage total exceeds the toughness, they’re “damaged”.
When a character gets damaged, they become shaken (scraped up but not mechanically hurt in any way), but if they’re damaged while they’re already shaken, they get wounded instead. Wounds are serious business in Savage Worlds, and they can potentially turn into permanent injuries. Wounded characters take a cumulative -1 penalty to ALL their checks equal to the number of wounds they have. Finally, once a character takes 3 wounds, they must make a Vigor check to see if they get a temporary injury, a permanent injury, or if they immediately die. And any wounds past that incapacitate a character.
Wounds are difficult to heal up as well, and if your setting doesn’t have magical healing and you don’t get first aid within an hour of taking the wound, you’re stuck waiting for natural recovery. Naturally healing a wound takes a vigor test every 5 days for the chance to heal up.
Let’s go through some of the biggest changes you’ll feel as a DM switching from 5e D&D to Savage Worlds.
Mechanically, 5e is essentially a resource game. You use smaller encounters to waste some of the party’s resources like hit points and spell slots, before challenging them with a boss, allowing them to rest and regain their spent resources before starting the cycle over again.
Savage worlds doesn’t really work like that. The only resources players typically have to spend are bennies (unless magic and power points are involved) and their capabilities are simply their capabilities. With the way toughness and damage works, most “underlings” will cinematically crumble under the onslaught of the protagonists and our heroes will emerge unscathed except for inconsequential scrapes and bruises.
Think in movie terms. The hero getting wounded is a big deal that should be happening at critical moments. It’ll take a bit of a mental shift to get used to, but I find the end result is a satisfying and entertaining game. You’ve just got to reorient your thinking from a dungeon crawl and boss fight mentality over to the highs and lows of an action movie.
In 5e many players abandoned the Inspiration mechanic altogether, but its equivalent “bennies” are a much more integral part of Savage Worlds. Every player gets 3 bennies at the start of each session and loses any unspent bennies at the end of every session. This is deliberately to encourage players to use them and not hoard them up like dragons. You should be giving bennies out frequently, especially at the start of a session, and typically you should slow down on bennies when the situation gets tense.
Ideally each player should feel free to spend bennies on things that are important to them, while still having some left over for helping with combats that spring up. The scientist should feel free to use that bennie to make sure they succeed on a science check, since that’s the thing they designed their build to do, without feeling like they wasted some super valuable resource.
Savage Worlds doesn’t have levels, instead you can award “advancements” that the players can spend on increasing their stats or gaining new features. There’s no hard rules for when to advance your players, it just depends on how fast you expect a campaign to be. Some games may want to advance at the end of every session, some might advance every few sessions or after major accomplishments or milestones.
You’ll want to play around with this and find what pace feels right to you, but know that the advancements are much less significant than 5e levels. The fundamental power level of a party won’t change much for each advancement, they’ll just get slightly better at some things or gain a new ability. As a rough guesstimate, think of each advancement as about ⅓ of a 5e class level.
Let’s go through the biggest changes you’ll feel as a player swapping over from 5e D&D to Savage Worlds.
Starting a Savage World’s character means putting points in your attributes and skills, picking a race, and possibly taking some hindrances in exchange for better stats or some edges (think of edges like feats). What you won’t find here are classes or levels. Some edges (particularly background edges) feel a bit like classes or themes, but your abilities are defined by your skills and edges and there’s no “pre-built” class system structure. It can take some getting used to but once you realize that this allows you to do practically anything it’s really freeing.
5e really condition us into just “making attacks” and rolling damage, but Savage Worlds has some more depth than that. You can always make “called shots” targeting different parts of a creature, with potentially very different effects and difficulties. Break that guy’s legs, hit the gaps in the armor, shoot that monster in the big obvious weak point.
Just like you can make called shots, you’ve got your own weak points to worry about. You have a different armor rating for your legs, arms, torso, and head. Most attacks by default go towards your torso, but you’ll still need to track your different armor sets separately in case something aims for your head or tries to shoot that gun out of your hands.
Savage Worlds is a solid and streamlined base that can be used for practically any setting without skipping a beat. It’s not the absolute best system for any given setting, but as a jack of all trades it works beautifully to blend whatever genres and styles together that you can come up with. It’s a very different experience than 5e D&D, but it can take you to so many places that other systems just can’t handle. I highly recommend Savage Worlds and its many settings, particularly if you’ve got a genre defying idea for a campaign.
The short answer is Adventure Edition is the current version you should be using. The long answer is that Savage Worlds doesn’t number editions, but there are 3 distinct Savage Worlds editions (technically 4 but 3 that matter):
Yes. You can even just straight up use the older editions if you’d like and there’s a ton of support and supplements for them. I do really recommend using the newer Adventure Edition rules as your base though as it fixed a lot of problems and smoothed out a lot of rough edges. Books written for the Deluxe Edition are fairly painless to convert over to the new rules, and many of the online resources for them also include handy conversion guides.
Yes, in fact it’s encouraged. Each supplement like deadlands or rifts has their own lore and mechanics to work with, but they’re all modular and easily interchanged. As the game master you can feel free to mix and match any Savage Worlds books you feel like to your heart’s content. You may just have to include a setting’s core book as well if you want to use some of their extra supplements.
]]>With all the drama surrounding the OGL update you and your playgroup may be in the market for a new tabletop roleplaying system. Pathfinder is the pepsi to D&D’s coke and if you’re looking for a new game that isn’t too much of a departure from the dungeon delving you know and love then pathfinder might be a perfect fit for your table. We’re going to go through all the major differences and changes you can expect switching from 5e D&D to Pathfinder 1e. Get ready to climb those feat trees as we go through everything you need to know.
You’ve got a whole world of TTRPGs to pick from, why pick Pathfinder? Pathfinder shares a lot of DNA with D&D, so while it’s a very different system you’ll find a lot of familiar terms and mechanics. It’s essentially D&D just with some of those complexity dials turned up high. If you’re still wanting to play games that are very similar to your existing D&D campaigns but with some more crunch and player options, then Pathfinder is a great fit.
Pathfinder 1e has also been around for 14 years and they’ve released a ton of content. WotC releases just a few books a year, Paizo on the other hand releases dozens every year and there are literally hundreds of books full of official content, most of which are freely available online.
Just like with D&D, there are multiple editions of pathfinder to work with. Both 1st and 2nd edition pathfinder are still active and popular games with their own very different pros and cons. For this article we’re going to be talking about the 1st edition pathfinder system but stay tuned for another article discussing the sequel.
This is honestly one of pathfinder’s big selling points, despite there being literally dozens of “core” books for pathfinder, absolutely everything you need is online for free. You and your group can play pathfinder without spending a dime. Paizo has a long running “unofficial” policy regarding takedowns and policing their content. Paizo makes their money with adventure paths and they have no problem with you downloading everything else for free. Huge pathfinder databases are easily accessible and easy to use containing every character option, monster, spell, and feat you could possibly want.
If you’re a purist however and want the physical book, you’ll have to build up quite a library to get the full “core” rules of pathfinder. At the bare minimum you’ll need:
Beyond that there are literally dozens of supplementary books, but I’d recommend starting with:
Just like D&D, Pathfinder uses the polyhedral set of d20, d12, 2 d10s, d8, d6, and d4. So, any dice sets you picked up for D&D will do you just fine for Pathfinder as well. Check out our RPG Dice here
Let’s go through some of the biggest changes you’ll feel as a DM switching from 5e D&D to Pathfinder.
Playing 5e it can be easy to forget how useful the advantage/disadvantage system is until it’s gone. In 5e you’ve probably gotten very used to simply applying advantage or disadvantage to rolls when weird situations come up. Pathfinder has a different solution which is to have special rules for everything.
Let’s say your player is underwater, grappled by a giant squid, blinded by squid ink, and they want to fire an arrow at the merfolk wizard in the distance. In 5e you’d be able to simply tell your player to “roll at disadvantage” but in Pathfinder every single one of those parameters makes a numerical change on the roll. You’ll have a lot of situations where you’ll need to stack up bonuses and penalties for a while before you can figure out what final number to add to a roll and what number they need to reach. And don’t get me started on the grappling rules which I’m convinced nobody ever remembers right.
This isn’t a good or a bad thing exactly. Advantage and disadvantage do a lot to speed combat along, but it also makes some of those situations shallow and inconsequential. Pathfinder gives you rules for practically every weird situation you can come up with and the interactions can get devilishly deep. It just means you as a DM will need to have these rules ready to go, or you at least need to get adept at speedily looking them up.
In 5e magic items are few and far between, they’re rare rewards you can pass out when you feel like it and only categorized loosely by rarity. Pathfinder took a different route and expects you to provide a certain amount of treasure and magic items depending on the player’s levels. You can hand items over directly, but you’ll likely want to plan on some big magic item shops or other ways to make them available to your players. Pathfinder magic items all have gold prices attached, so if you’re unsure what items to give you can simply give them the recommended amounts of gold and treasure instead (found on page 399 of the core rulebook).
You don’t have to get your players everything under the sun, but the way Pathfinder is set up it expects them to gain some basic “stat increase” items and the monsters are all balanced with that assumption. Things like basic magic weapons, magic armor, amulets or cloaks that add to their saving throws, and the belt and headband items that add to their ability scores.
One of the design philosophies in Pathfinder is that any NPC “works” as if it was created as a character. This has led to a lot of very strange trends in how they build their NPCs and how you’ll have to build your NPCs for Pathfinder adventures. NPCs are built using all the same rules as a character, but are often built up using multiple classes, tons of levels, and odd feat progression to be a serious threat to the party while still following all the same “rules”. You’ll find practically every NPC has a few levels of Rogue to add extra damage, and you’ll find humanoid NPCs your party face in adventure paths is often at much higher level than the party with features from countless sources.
As a DM you can always handwave away a lot of this complexity in your own NPCs, but there are some mechanics you’ll have to make up on the spot, and particularly rules savvy players will be able to spot inconsistencies.
Let’s go through the biggest changes you’ll feel as a player swapping over from 5e D&D to Pathfinder 1e.
Pathfinder has a lot of the same basic character-building blocks as D&D 5e, just a LOT more of them. You’re still working with the 6 ability scores and rolling up stats in basically the same way, there’s no background, but you’re picking a race and a class. There are dozens of races to choose from and dozens of classes to choose from.
Pathfinder doesn’t have proficiency, instead you’ll be getting set bonuses to specific saving throws from your class, and you’ll have a number of “skill ranks” determined by your class and your Intelligence modifier you can put in skills of your choice.
Some stuff you should know about skill ranks:
Depending on how long you’ve been playing 5e you might be used to picking your own ability score bonuses from your race. In pathfinder each race has not only bonuses to specific ability scores but also negatives to specific scores. This means there are better and worse combinations of class and race, and you should try not to pick a combination with a negative in one of your primary scores. Practically every race also has alternate versions that change these scores around and replace racial features with new ones. Shop around for the version that works best for you.
In 5e, the class archetypes are built into how a class works with archetype features set at specific levels just determined by what archetype you select. In Pathfinder an archetype is more like a variant option on the class itself. You can just play a “rogue”, no archetype, no changes whatsoever. OR you could play one of nearly 100 archetypes of “rogue”, all of which replace some of the base rogue’s features with new ones.
This is a whole system that’s oddly easy to miss in your character creation. Basically, whenever you take a level in your “favored class” (your only class usually, or your pick if you’re multiclassing) you get an extra little bonus. This bonus is your choice of either an extra hit point, or an extra skill rank.
It gets more complicated though due to the extra racial options. Every race option as a list of their own “favored classes”, and if you’re using that race and class combination you can choose something special instead of the skill rank or hit point. For example, if you’re a half-orc barbarian you can instead choose to get an extra round of rage per day as your favored class bonus.
There are also a lot of the racial favored class bonuses that are fractions. For example, let’s say our half-orc is a sorcerer instead of a barbarian. Half-orc barbarians can gain ½ a point of fire damage whenever they deal fire damage with a spell. Fractional bonuses must be added up to a whole number before they count. So, for example, let’s say we’re a 3rd level half-orc barbarian and we’ve picked this racial class bonus for each level gaining 1 ½ points of fire damage, we’ll actually only deal 1 extra point, but that’ll go up to 2 points the next time we take that favored class option.
Pathfinder doesn’t have proficiency, but it does have a slowly growing number you’ll add to all your attack rolls. Your Base Attack Bonus (often shortened to BAB) is dependent on your class, with the martial classes typically getting a faster progression compared to casters.
Your base attack bonus is also tied to the number of attacks you make. You’ll see on the class tables that when the BAB gets to +6, +11, and +16 it adds another number separated by a “/”. When you reach these, you have the ability to make extra attacks, just with lower basic attack bonuses. So, when you have a BAB of +6/+1, that means you can make two attacks, the first one with a +6 bonus and the second attack with a +1 bonus.
Another rule that’s easy to miss when changing over is that you need to confirm your critical hits. If you make a critical hit (usually rolling a 20 on a d20) you automatically hit, but you then have to roll the d20 again as if you were making the attack again. If that roll would hit, you “confirm” the critical hit and it’s actually a critical hit rather than a normal hit.
In 5e, feats are an optional feature you can take in place of an ability score increase, taken rarely and in low numbers. In Pathfinder you gain a feat automatically at 1st level and another feat every odd level, and there are tons of ways to gain extra feats on top of that.
There are hundreds of feats to choose from, but you’ll have to get used to using “feat trees”. Most feats have other feats as prerequisites for taking them, and you’ll have to plan around building up a feat tree if you want your character to really utilize them.
Let’s look at a relatively high feat called lightning stance. Lightning stance is a cool feat that you might want to build up to, it gives you 50% concealment if you’ve spent two actions on movement in a turn (think moving so fast you’re like a blur). Now lightning stance has several prerequisites you need before you can take it. You must already have the dodge feat, the wind stance feat, a minimum Dexterity score of 17, and a base attack bonus of +11. Wind stance also has dodge as its own prerequisite, which means our path to getting lightning stance is first taking dodge, then taking wind stance, then once you hit a BAB of +11, take lightning stance. You’ll have to get used to this sort of planning ahead quite a bit more than you’d be used to in 5e.
Ultimately, if you’re used to D&D 5e and you switch over to Pathfinder 1e, you’re going to experience a lot more crunch, and a lot more character options than you’re used to. It is however, from the same family tree as D&D and most everything should be at least a bit familiar to you. Pathfinder is an amazing game that has kept going right alongside D&D all these years, it’s just much crunchier. Expect a bit of a learning curve on both character creation and combat, but you should have a great campaign once you and your group get into the swing of things and find the right path.
Other Blog Posts You Might Like:
Our Complete Magic Item 5e Guide HERE.(if you haven't quite yet made the change)
]]>Rogues are masters of disguise and subtlety, who lurk in the shadows waiting for the perfect time to make their lethal strike. Warlocks are the signers of arcane pacts, beings who sold their souls or worse for incredible magical powers that would otherwise lie well beyond their mortal reach. Put them together and you get the ninjas of your wildest anime dreams, capable of disappearing into the shadows only to emerge with their dark magical blades already slicing through their foes. Dress for the darkness and grab your pact weapon as we go through everything you need to know.
Both character classes are very strong multiclassing options on their own, adding sneak attack or a couple warlock spell slots for just a level dip has always been a decent pick. We’re also not far off on the ability scores here, with both classes highly valuing Dexterity and Warlock only adding Charisma into the mix.
By focusing on the martial capabilities of warlock, we can seamlessly blend the classes together into a fearsome stealthy DPS machine. OR, by focusing on some of the odder variants of Rogue and the warlock's magical abilities, we can become a spell sniping powerhouse that can blast enemies apart before they even know where we are. Warlock when built right is a martial class in its own right and doesn't really suffer from many deficiencies in melee combat for our multiclassed character.
The damage output for rogues is tied to their own class levels and dipping or splitting levels will stall us on that damage scaling compared to a single class build. And while warlocks don’t follow the normal rules for spell scaling, it still hurts to get those upgrades even later than usual as a multiclassed character.
Finally, just like any other multiclass options in dungeons & dragons, by taking multiple character classes you’re giving up entirely on capstone features and other late game features, and a multiclassed character gets their mid-game features significantly later. Single-class characters are always going to have the raw strength, and we'll have to rely on variety and synergy.
Just as a side note, rogue and warlock both lend themselves to level dips and really deep multiclass soup builds. From a few levels of cleric for channel divinity, fighter for an action surge and fighting style, to a paladin multiclass for divine smite and heavy armor, a druid class level for some wild magic, or even monk levels for unarmored defense, martial arts and flurry of blows. It's complicated waters and may be hard to justify for story reasons but this starting point makes taking features from levels in other classes a tempting option.
For the builds that focus on a core class with only a single class level dip into the secondary class you’ll feel kicked-in as early as a single level in each class. For the more in-depth builds we’re typically taking advantage of the 3rd level rogue archetype features or the 3rd level warlock pact boon features, meaning we’ll be set up at either 4th level with 3 levels in our primary class, or 6th level with 3 levels in each class.
Each of our builds is different so not every feature will really matter for every build. Still, you should be weighing and considering the following features when putting your multiclass build together even if you're only getting early features from levels.
Both classes care about the same physical scores, warlock is just adding Charisma into the mix for our spellcasting ability modifier. This means we can’t min/max as much, but we still shouldn’t be too thinly spread.
Our primary ability scores are Dexterity, Charisma, and Constitution. First off, our highest ability score should be Dexterity, since it applies not only to our AC but also to our attack rolls. Our next highest ability score should be Charisma, which is our spellcasting ability modifier for our warlock spells. Finally, our 3rd highest score should be Constitution, which helps with our hit point total and our ability to maintain concentration on spells. Each of your ability score increases not dedicated to a feat should go towards improving your dexterity.
The three remaining scores, Strength, Wisdom, and Intelligence are all largely irrelevant to us and we can use them all as dump stats.
Note that if you end up going for the more spell focused build with warlock as your core class, you’ll want to swap Charisma and Dexterity around, making Charisma your highest score and Dexterity your 2nd highest score.
Finally, this shouldn't be an issue if you're following the build but remember the minimum ability scores. Each class has minimum ability scores required for multiclassing and the scores for rogue and warlock are 13 Dexterity and 13 Charisma respectively.
If we go spell focused our weaponry is significantly important, but for a martial character we need to make sure we use finesse weapons or ranged weapons to trigger sneak attack. Rapiers are the go-to choice, and shortswords, daggers, and crossbows are all fair options. Beyond that we'll be stuck with simple weapons for an offensive option unless we take hexblade. Hexblade lets us use Charisma for our attack and damage rolls instead of Strength or Dexterity which would normally open us up to other weapons, but the stipulations of sneak attack still requires finesse so we should stick to it.
As for armor, we’re stuck with light armor unless we take hexblade, which opens us up to medium armor proficiency and shields. Casting with a shield and weapon in hand will require us to take the war caster feat (more on that later) so until then just go with medium armor and your sword and arcane focus. We’ll likely want to be stealthing around, making the breastplate our best medium armor option in most situations. If you're stuck in light armor you're best off with the old standby of studded leather.
Rogue gains a ton of skill proficiencies if we start out with them with a good skill list, and we don’t get much extra by starting out as a warlock, meaning your best bet is to take your first level as a rogue. We’re getting our medium armor and shield proficiency from warlock in most cases, but we’re getting that from the archetype features, not the actual class skill proficiencies.
As with most martial caster class combinations, there’s one feat that's a tempting option you may want to consider spending an ability score increase on and that’s War Caster. War caster has three benefits, and all three are powerful boosts if we plan on using both martial options and magical options in combat.
We can work the rogue / warlock multiclass towards all sorts of tempting options, we just have to pick what strategy we want to go for. Ultimately the combination works as a dip for either class, or as a 50/50 split. Let’s take a look at the following builds that you can use as a whole cut or as a starting off point.
We’ll start with the simplest build, which is almost entirely rogue as the primary class with just a single level of warlock as our secondary class for additional spellcasting options. We want to start out with our first level in rogue to pick up the good proficiencies, then we want to take a single level of warlock and select the hexblade patron for among other things the martial weapons. Past that all of our future levels should be rogue levels, and we want to select the swashbuckler rogue archetype.
Our goal here is simply to add some extra magical damage onto our already solid martial capabilities and take advantage of the swashbuckler features that already run off Charisma.
When we take that warlock level, we want to pick booming blade and green-flame blade as our cantrips which should be very familiar offensive options if you’ve done any martial casters before. These cantrips uniquely trigger using a melee attack as part of casting the spell. Normally the big limitation on that for martial multiclasses is that you can’t use features like extra attack don’t work with it. But as a rogue we’re typically only making the one big attack anyway and we might as well throw some extra magical damage on top. They also conveniently use cantrip scaling that goes off your character level not your spellcasting class levels, so the damage will keep scaling for the length of our campaign.
Now we get to the hexblade part. Hexblade at 1st level gets us a ton of value, including medium armor proficiency, martial weapons proficiency, and shield proficiency. It also gets us the feature hexblade’s curse, which lets us curse a target as a bonus action. They’re cursed for up to a minute, and while cursed we add our proficiency to damage against them, we crit on a 19-20 against them, and if we kill them, we regain hit points equal to our Charisma mod + our warlock level (small for us but still nice). Hexblade also opens up wrathful smite as a 1st level spell, which we should snap up.
The swashbuckler part gives us fancy footwork which prevents our targets from making attacks of opportunity against us so long as we attack them first. It also gives us rakish audacity that gets us a nice initiative bonus to our Initiative rolls equal to our Charisma modifier, and essentially lets us sneak attack lone targets without needing allies nearby or advantage.
Finally, once we hit our 4th level of rogue, we want to take the feat war caster, which will really let us take advantage of that shield proficiency and allows us to use those booming blades and green-fire blades as attacks of opportunity.
So, let’s put all together for a 5th level example, with 4 levels of rogue and 1 level of warlock. First off with a +2 in Dex, a breastplate, and a shield, we should be rocking a respectable 18 AC. Next, in combat we want to mark our enemy with our hexblade’s curse as a bonus action, then go in for a booming blade using our rapier while also dealing our sneak attack damage rolls. That all stacks up to 21 damage (1d8 + 2d6 + 1d8 + 2 + 3) plus another 9 (2d8) if they move during their next turn due to booming blade. And thanks to fancy footwork, we’ll be able to move back after our hit scot-free and if they want to come after us they’ll have to move. We make full use of our action economy, keep ourselves safe, and deal a ton of damage at the same time.
We can make this even nastier on later turns by using our bonus action to cast wrathful smite before attacking with booming blade. Wrathful smite will stack on another d6 of damage but it will also frighten our enemy, making sure they can only come after us when we want them to!
For this build we’re going to flip it around and focus on the warlock as the primary class using rogue as a secondary class. To start with we want to take a single level of rogue, followed by a single level of warlock taking the celestial patron. Then we want to take two more levels of rogue taking the assassin rogue archetype, and all our future levels should go into warlock for a final 3 rogue / 17 warlock split. Our goal here is to utterly annihilate unaware targets with magical lasers from really far away.
Firstly, we’re taking the celestial patron because it adds the spell guiding bolt to our spell list. Our strategy here is going to take advantage of spell attacks and guiding bolt is one of the strongest early game spell attacks there is. We also get some healing spells and abilities as a decent upside.
Next, we’re taking the classic min/max ingredient with the assassin archetype. The assassin rogue gets some additional skill proficiencies, but the assassinate feature is what we really care about. Assassinate grants us advantage on surprised targets, and if our attacks hit while they’re still surprised, they’re automatic critical hits! Note here that it just says attacks, not weapon attacks, that means if we surprise somebody with a spell, they’re all made at advantage and critting as well!
Once we get into higher levels, guiding bolt will drop off a bit when compared to our eldritch blast which will be our workhorse spell most of the time. We want to be able to fire off our eldritch blasts from as far away as possible and to do as much damage as possible. To do this we want to take the agonizing blast and eldritch spear invocations. Agonizing blast lets us add our Charisma modifier to each blast, and eldritch spear increases the range of blasts to a whopping 300 feet! Once you get up to a 3rd level spell or higher level spells, also consider the spell vampiric touch which is a strong back up option in case you get cornered.
As a 5th level example with 3 levels of rogue and 2 levels of warlock, we can hide 120 feet away from our enemy and fire off a guiding bolt. This guiding bolt has advantage thanks to assassinate and with just a measly 1st level spell we’ll deal 28 (8d6) radiant damage from a huge distance, and they’ll be lit up for our trouble. Guiding bolt provides advantage on the next attack against the creature, so there’s an excellent chance you’ll get advantage for free on your next massive blast of radiant damage as well!
Finally, we can take advantage of the relatively new rogue feature steady aim gained at 3rd level. Steady aim lets us grant advantage on our next attack in exchange for not moving on our turn, and just like assassinate it only specifies “attack” so spell attacks are free game. This means that as they try to close the distance to you, you can keep on sniping at advantage with all your bolts and eldritch blasts!
For this build we’re looking to rogue as our core class and warlock as our secondary class. Starting with a level of rogue, then 3 levels of warlock taking the fathomless patron, then we want to take all our remaining levels in the rogue class taking the scout archetype ending with a 17 rogue / 3 warlock split. We're doing this as a strong tactical option, to play keep away using a sneak attacking crossbow and a big spectral tentacle and reducing our target's movement speeds.
For our warlock levels, the fathomless patron gets us tentacle of the deeps which functions a whole lot like the spell spiritual weapon. We conjure the tentacle and make an attack with it as a bonus action, and every subsequent turn we can use our bonus action to move the tentacle and repeat the attack. These tentacle attacks deal 1d8 cold damage, which is fine extra damage, but it also slows the target for 10 feet of movement until your next turn which is amazing.
When we pick our warlock pact boon, we want the pact of the chain to get a powered up familiar. For our invocations we want to take investment of the chain master for an even better familiar, and likely armor of shadows for a bit more protection since we'll be stuck with light armor otherwise. Finally for our spells we want to pick up misty step once we get our first 2nd level spells.
From the rogue archetype scout we get some extra skill proficiencies but more importantly we get the feature skirmisher. Skirmisher lets us move up to half our speed as a reaction when an enemy ends their turn next to us. Besides that we get all the standard rogue features and very importantly sneak attack.
Now to put this all together for a 6th level example with 3 levels rogue and 3 levels warlock. As a bonus action we summon our tentacle and smack a target, reducing their movement by 10 feet. Then we fire our hand crossbow (hopefully applying sneak attack) which together should get us a cool 18 (3d6 + 1d8 + 3) damage. Then we simply move away. Assuming a typical enemy with 30-foot movement speed reduced to 20 feet by our tentacle, even dashing they shouldn’t be able to get within melee of us. And if they can get into melee with us, we can use our skirmisher feature to move even further away. If we get totally cornered, we can simply misty step away.
Finally, our familiar comes in as a tactical option. To ensure sneak attack they can simply fly around our target and use the Help action to grant us advantage on our attack. It isn’t the highest damage output possible with this combination of classes, but it’s one of the hardest to get ahold of and you’ll be able to consistently keep up damage while remaining extremely difficult to hit.
Does your PC have a tragic backstory? Are they an orphan? Learn more about rogues in our Rogue 5e dnd Class Guide
Our Complete Magic Item 5e Guide HERE.
Want to know how these dice work? Check out our DnD Dice Explained Guide!
Want to play a lethal ninja? Dance the blade's edge with our Monk Rogue 5e multiclass guide
Want to always get your sneak attack? Check out our Artificer Rogue Multiclass Guide for details on how to make this happen
]]>
Fighters are living weapons, honed fighters who use their physical prowess to master their chosen fighting style. Sorcerers are the lucky inheritors of magic in their bloodlines, innately magical beings who wield their arcane power like an extension of their own body. Put them together and you have talent and skill combined, a spellsword with all the benefits of both dedicated training and inborn gifts. Grab your sword and tap into the power of your bloodline as we go through everything you need to know.
Do you want to hit people with a sword? How about hitting people with a magic sword made of concentrated darkness? There are several ways to build this multiclass, but they all boil down to swinging magical swords as an armored sorcerer and if that’s your goal this is one of the best ways to do it.
Fighters are always good in combat, but their playstyle often gets boring fast, why not add an extra sorcerous spin on it and keep things fresh and/or on fire? Sorcerers get access to practically all the same spells that wizards have but with more spell slots and options for your favorite spells.
Fundamentally we’re mixing a full martial class with a full spellcasting class, so we have to work harder for our synergies than with many other multiclass options. Even the more magic-centric fighter archetypes use Intelligence instead of Charisma so we can’t even synergize that way. The sorcerer spell lists are a bit more limited so with a limited spell list we have to get the most out of a few low-level spells.
Our conjured weapon spell uses concentration, and that means if we’re planning on getting into melee to make our weapon attacks, we’re going to have to make sure we don’t just lose our spell the moment we’re hit. That means using feats or ability score increases on Constitution which takes those resources away from simply improving our spellcasting or our martial skill.
Finally, just like with every other multiclass character we’re forgoing late game features like 9th level spells and 20th level capstone features to gain more versatility. We’re going to reach our mid-game features later (if at all) and our spellcasting and martial progression will be slower than single class characters at our same level.
There two main ways to go about making a fighter / sorcerer multiclass, and both revolve around taking a small class level dip in the other and then focusing on the primary class. For builds dipping into fighter as a secondary class we usually only want a single fighter level with the rest of our 19 levels in the sorcerer class, so those builds “kick-in” as early as 2nd level with one level in each class. For builds dipping into sorcerer as a secondary class we want to get up to our 2nd spell level, which means getting up to a 3rd sorcerer level and taking the remaining 17 levels in fighter. So those builds will “kick-in” at 4th level, with 1 level in fighter and 3 levels in sorcerer.
Both fighter and sorcerer have relatively few but powerful core class features especially at early levels, all of which will be of importance to our builds.
What scores we’ll need to focus on depend on if we’re going for a build that’s mostly fighter with a touch of sorcerer, or a sorcerer with a touch of fighter.
If you’re going for a fighter with a sorcerer dip, you’ll want your highest two scores to be Dexterity and Constitution. We’ll be using sorcerer spells that don’t actually need a terribly high spellcasting ability so we can make Charisma our third highest score. Make sure Charisma is at least 13 to meet the minimum ability scores requirement for multiclassing.
If you’re going for a sorcerer with a fighter dip, you’ll want your highest two scores to be Charisma and Dexterity, and then use Constitution as your third highest score.
In either case, Strength, Intelligence, and Wisdom are all unnecessary for our build and you should feel free to use them as dump stats.
We're mixing martial and casting classes but thankfully there's no arcane spell failure chance in 5e and we can cast spells in any armor so long as we have the armor proficiencies. By starting out as a fighter we get access to the full complement of light armor, medium armor, heavy armor, and shield proficiencies. Depending on how high we get our Dexterity we’ll want to be using either the light or medium armors. At +2 to +3 Dexterity your best options are half plate if you don’t care about stealth, and a breastplate if you do care about stealth. Once you reach +4 Dexterity or higher, you’ll be better off with studded leather armor. Do keep in mind that if you go with the draconic bloodline sorcerer you may be better off with no armor at all.
Shields are a bit tricky since we need to keep one hand free for an arcane focus to use for our spell casting. Once we take the war caster feat, however, make sure to fill that suddenly free hand with a shield for a tasty +2 AC bonus.
As for weapons we’re firmly going for finesse weaponry which means we want the rapier as the best damage dealing finesse weapon.
The sorcerer fighter multiclass has some very specific spells we want to focus on, namely the melee cantrips and the 2nd level spell shadow blade. Though, with those locked down most of the arcane spell lists are open to us and you should feel free to pick and choose other powerful spells from the sorcerer spell list.
I’m lumping these two arcane spells together because they’re functionally similar and we’re going to be abusing the heck out of both of them a LOT. Both of these cantrips use a melee attack roll “as part of casting the spell”. This means we’re stacking the damage these cantrips do on top of whatever damage we do with our melee attack.
Note that this counts as “casting a spell” rather than taking the “attack action”. This is an unfortunate interaction with the fighter extra attack feature, since we can only use that extra attack when we take an “attack action”. But it’s a wonderful interaction with the sorcerer’s quickened spell. Very strangely with the rules as written, we can cast booming blade or green-flame blade making an attack as part of the spell, then quicken another one with the melee attack and all!
As for the actual effects of the spells, when you hit with green-flame you deal extra fire damage to another target adjacent to them. And when you hit with booming blade you force the target to stay still on their next turn or take 1d8 thunder damage if they move. Both spells improve drastically at 5th level, with green-flame in particular adding 1d8 fire damage to both the initial target of your attack and also to the extra adjacent target.
We plan on being in melee anyway so shocking grasp is a no-brainer. As a melee spell attack, we deal 1d8 lightning damage (with cantrip scaling) and we get advantage so long as the target is metal or wearing metal armor. AND if we hit, they can’t take reactions for a turn, making this the go-to for hit and runs if we need to get out of dodge.
Underutilized but quite tasty for us as a martial spellcaster. Sword burst hits everything next to you for 1d6 force damage (with cantrip scaling improvement) and is worth considering as an answer to getting swarmed.
As a martial caster we really need to block the big hits. Shield grants us +5 AC until our next turn as a reaction making this a relevant spell to have in your back pocket at any level.
This one feels like cheating but ever since silvery barbs was introduced in Strixhaven it has cemented itself as one of the strongest reaction spells in the game. As a reaction you can impose disadvantage on something and grant advantage to someone as both a clutch anti-crit tech and as a party buff.
A great option for us as a martial caster, thunderwave blasts everything within 15 feet of us and pushes them back. We’ll want to be using our sword most often, but this is a great option if you get overwhelmed and need some breathing room.
You’ll often need to position yourself carefully as a martial caster or get out of danger quickly after taking a few licks. Misty step is an essential mobility spell for us as it lets us blip up to 30 feet to where we need to be as a bonus action.
This creates a set of illusionary duplicates that also occupy your space and essentially gives you several “free hits” that absorb your duplicates instead of hitting you. A great defensive buff and one of the few that doesn’t use concentration which is vital for us.
This spell is the main reason to do this multiclass build in the first place. As a bonus action we can conjure a magical shadow blade that works as a proper weapon we can make attacks with. We’re proficient with this weapon, it has the finesse, light, and thrown properties, and it deals a whopping 2d8 psychic damage. Assuming we get to make multiple hits with it, this makes shadow blade one of the most damaging spells or abilities in the game rivaling even divine smite or sneak attack. You also get advantage on attacks with it so long as you’re in dim light or darkness, which is damn near every dungeon environment ever. This is so strong that I still recommend using it at later levels and just upgrading the spell slot, since it adds 1d8 for every 2 levels above 2nd.
What makes this so absurd for us is not only do we have this fantastic finesse 2d8 weapon, but it’s also just straight up a weapon we can use not as casting a spell. This is why we want to use shadow blade instead of the similar flame blade that uses the sword like a spell attack.
As just a “weapon”, we can use our shadow blade to make the melee attacks that we use in casting our melee cantrips like green-flame blade and booming blade for absurd amounts of damage.
The only catch here is that shadow blade uses concentration, which means we can get hit and lose our essential blade, but we can take war caster to help offset that.
There’s a single feat that you’re really going to want with any build of these classes and that’s War Caster. This is the quintessential martial caster feat, and it has three components:
All of this battle caster nonsense is amazing for us. Concentration spells can get fizzled if we fail a check and advantage on concentration makes it much more likely that we can hold onto our shadow blade. Performing somatic components with a sword lets us ditch the arcane focus and put a shield in our now free hand. Finally green-fire blade and booming blade are “spells” that we can use for our attacks of opportunity for all that shadow blade damage goodness.
There is a very short and easy answer to this one and that’s you should be starting out as fighter. Sorcerers don’t gain much in the way of proficiencies and starting as a sorcerer and moving to fighter loses us out on a lot of starting gear, martial saves, and also the heavy armor proficiency.
Ultimately the plan is similar for most of these builds, it’s just a question of how we want to get there and what we want to prioritize. Our goal here is martial spellcasting with a nasty magic sword and there are a few ways to go about it.
This is perhaps the best build to exploit the interactions between shadow blade and the sword cantrips. To make this happen we’re going to start with just a single level of fighter to pick up second wind and the blind fighting style, then the rest of our 19 levels go towards sorcerer taking the shadow magic origin. When you select your metamagics, make sure to pick out quickened spell, and make sure to choose the spells shadow blade and green-flame blade.
So how does this all work? Shadow blade attacks are made with advantage so long as we’re in dim light or darkness, and the shadow sorcerer subclass grants us darkness as a bonus spell and even lets us see through our own magical darkness with 120-foot darkvision. However, to do that costs sorcery points and we want to save those for more quickened spells. Thanks to that single level of fighter, we’re going to have blind-sight no matter how dark it is and without casting our own darkness first. That means in practically all situations we’ll be swinging with advantage.
After that it's just a matter of setting up the quickened shadow / green-flame blade combo. We start out each combat by using our bonus action to cast shadow blade, then use our action to cast green-fire blade using our shadow blade as the melee weapon. After the first turn, we can use our action to do this again, and we can also quicken out another green-flame blade using our shadow blade, and this gets around the spell limit issue since green-flame blade is a cantrip.
Let’s add all this up shall we? At 5th level, green-flame blade goes up in cantrip scaling and starts dealing extra damage to both the target and an adjacent creature. Assuming our Dexterity and Charisma are both at a +3, we attack at advantage with our shadow / green-flame blade combo for 2d8 + 3 psychic damage and 1d8 fire damage along with another 1d8 + 3 fire damage to a second target. Then we can quicken another attack at advantage using the same exact combo. That gets us an average of 33 (4d8 + 6 + 2d8) damage to the initial target and 15 (2d8 + 6) damage to the guy next to him for a whopping 48 damage a turn at 5th level!
Once again, we’re going to take a single level dip into fighter and take the rest of our levels in sorcerer to try and maximize the potential of our shadow / green-flame blade combo. But this time instead of taking shadow magic, we want to go with the newly released lunar sorcery, and instead of blind fighting we want to take the dueling style.
Lunar sorcery is a funky archetype, we get extra spells determined by the “phase of the moon” and every time we finish a long rest we swap from one phase to another. We also get an enhanced sacred flame cantrip that can hit multiple targets. What we really care about though is the 6th level features lunar boons and waxing and waning. Lunar boons buff spells from two different spell schools by reducing the costs of our metamagics for them down to 1 sorcery point. Waxing and waning lets us shift what “phase” we’re in at the cost of a single sorcery point.
The phase we want is crescent moon that boosts up illusion and transmutation spells. Shadow blade conveniently is an illusion spell, sadly this won’t let us reduce the quicken cost of our combo (since that’s technically casting green-flame blade which is an evocation spell) but it can let us make good use of another metamagic.
We can use the empowered spell metamagic essentially for free on our shadow blade while in the crescent moon phase. Empowered spell costs 1 sorcery point (reduced now to 0) and lets us reroll the damage roll while notably also working with other metamagics. This means we get to do everything we did in the shadow fighter build, but now we also get to reroll those 2d8 psychic damage whenever we happen to roll low!
This build is very similar to the shadow fighter build and we’re still going for the same combo, but this time rather than relying on higher shadow magic sorcerer levels for higher damage we’re going to rely on the battle maneuvers to take advantage of our fancy magic blade. We want our first level to be fighter taking the blind fighting style, our next 3 levels should be sorcerer taking shadow magic, and the remaining 16 levels should all go towards fighter taking the battle master archetype.
With this build we sacrifice the higher spell slots to use on shadow blade but we gain extra ways to use our 2d8 magic blade, we just have to be careful which options we pick. We want to go for maneuvers that let us swing our highly damaging blade more times but that don’t rely on the “attack action” so that at early levels we can still use the quickened blade combo as a “spell being cast”.
Firstly, brace is an excellent option that lets us smash that shadow blade into whoever steps up to us with extra damage equal to the maneuver die to boot. Riposte works similarly except we’re making that extra swing when they miss us with their own attack. Note that for these we won’t be able to use the cantrips, but we’re still essentially getting bonus swings with our bonkers 2d8 sword.
Alternately, this build also functions fairly well changing out the shadow magic for the divine soul sorcerer subclass for healing capabilities. The divine soul gets you access to about the same amount of healing as if you took a paladin level or had access to channel divinity.
Want to play a lethal ninja? Dance the blade's edge with our Monk Rogue 5e multiclass guide
Become Kung Fu Panda with our Monk Druid 5e Multiclass Guide
]]>Clerics are masters of divine magic, versatile enough to fill any role on the battlefield with access to countless spells and holy blessings. Wizards are the masters of arcane magic, powerful spellcasters with the widest range of spells including the most useful of utility spells and the most devastating damage spells that can delete your enemies from existence. Put them together and you get a versatile magical powerhouse with access to practically every form of magic players can get in 5th edition dungeons and dragons. Ready your spellbook and your holy symbol as we go through everything you need to know.
With full access to both class spell lists and with divine spells and arcane spells these mages essentially have about 90% of the game’s spells at your fingertips. No other dual-classed character gets you this much access to additional spellcasting options. Clerics also sneakily gain quite a bit of resilience that the wizard typically lacks, and the dnd wizard class gains the powerful mid-level damage spells that usually leave the cleric lacking in raw spell DPS. Wizards are often stuck in either just their robes or light armor while cleric levels give us medium armor or even heavy armor. And, even just as a level dip, giving a wizard access to cure wounds and heavy or medium armor is worth considering.
Beyond that, both classes are considered “full casters” for the purposes of our multiclass character. We aren't arcane tricksters or a magic initiate getting a touch of spellcasting in our martial character. This means that while our spell level progression can be slowed with multiclassing, our spell slot progression still goes full steam ahead regardless of our level investment. So, while we still dip on reaching higher level spells, those higher slots will mean we can still be casting full value fireballs with the best of them.
The main problem here is our multiclass cleric wizard needs to meet both Cleric multiclass requirements and wizard multiclass requirements, meaning you need both Wisdom and Intelligence. To make this build work we’re going to have to maximize two mental ability scores which means we’re going to be pretty darn wimpy on the physical scores, potentially making your melee attacks weaker. We also get tripped up when it comes to holy symbols vs arcane foci. The rulings get complicated but unless we take the war caster feat, we’re essentially stuck using an arcane focus in one hand while keeping the other hand empty for somatic components.
A single-class character will usually have stronger abilities but fewer options than a dual-classed character. And as with every other multiclassed character, you give up on late game class features like their 20th level capstones and 9th level spells by multiclassing and you reach the mid-tier features far later.
There aren’t any specific features we’re looking to synergize (except for a couple of the weird builds) but you’ll feel the difference as early as 2nd level with only a single level in each class. However, we get our wizard archetype with 2 levels, so we’ll feel most of the way kicked in at 3rd level with 1 level in cleric and 2 levels in wizard.
We’ve got a few key features every build is going to care about and then a few that only the wackier builds will want. But here’s everything you should be paying attention to.
Every multiclassed character has to deal with a bit more than a single-class character when it comes to ability score increases. We’ve got two mental scores to worry about, Wisdom and Intelligence that should get most of our ability score increases. With wisdom powering our cleric features and intelligence powering our wizard features. For some of our builds we’re going with essentially an even split and we’ll want to use our ability score increases to maximize both scores. For a few builds however we’ll only be dipping into cleric, so we only need to meet the minimum requirement of 13 Wisdom.
Beyond that we want our tertiary score to be Constitution to help offset our otherwise flimsy hit points.
We aren’t using weapons and we’re using heavy armor for our AC, so Strength, Dexterity, and Charisma are all largely irrelevant to us and we can use them as dump stats.
We’re going full spellcaster mode here, but thanks to our cleric levels we get heavy armor proficiency and should put on the best heavy armor we have access to. Note that the Strength requirement on heavy armors doesn’t stop us from wearing it, our movement speed is simply reduced by 10 feet if we don’t meet the Strength requirement. As a caster we don’t need to be terribly fast and can waddle our tanky butt around a bit slower if it means a high AC. If that doesn't work for you medium armor is still an option, but I'd definitely take the speed reduction if plate armor is available.
Now unfortunately, we must deal with our spellcasting foci. To cast our wizard spells we need to use an arcane focus, and to cast our cleric spells we need to use a holy symbol. There’s some awkward rulings, wordings, and niche rules at play here but we can shortcut all the minutiae. To effectively cast all our spells, we need to have our arcane focus in one hand, keep the other hand empty for somatic components, and then wear our holy symbol or otherwise have it displayed on us somehow.
This will remain your setup until you get your first feat (more on that in a second) which should be war caster. War caster among other things lets us perform somatic components even when our hands are full, which will let us fill that empty hand with a handy shield for some extra protection.
As for weapons, we'll have access to simple weapons no matter what, and also access to martial weapons depending on our cleric domain. I don't recommend trying to use this build to create a battle ready intelligence-based front-line character with martial weapons but you can. Bladesinging wizard + war domain can work as a sort of melee damage fighter, but I doubt its effectiveness against the single class options and recommend you stick to spell slinging.
The short answer here is that for practically any Cleric and Wizard multiclass build you should strongly consider taking the War Caster feat. War Caster should be familiar to most players who’ve messed around with the spellcasting classes, and it has three components:
All of this is a fantastic buff and tactical option for us, but we especially care about the somatic components part. We won’t be stuck keeping a hand empty and can use it on a shield instead. It's a solid force multiplier to our level of spellcasting and even if we're trying not to get into melee it's worth it in place of the extra ability score increase.
You’ll gain all the important skill proficiencies and tool proficiencies no matter what, but you should still start with your first class level as a wizard for a strange reason. Spellbooks are expensive in the early game, and by starting out as a wizard you get yours for free. If you start out as a cleric, you’ll need to cough up 50 gp for your spellbook and depending on the campaign that can be a prohibitive amount of money. If money isn't an issue, then feel free to start as either since their core proficiencies are very similar.
When you mix spellcasting classes things get a little messy. The easy part is the spells you know. Your known and prepared spells don’t mix whatsoever. If you’re a 3rd level wizard and a 4th level cleric, you’ll have all the spells of a 3rd level wizard and a 4th level cleric.
The spell slots are the confusing bit. In the back of the basic rules, you can find a table called “Multiclass Spellcaster” that shows you your pool of spell slots by your combined levels in spellcasting classes. Thankfully both cleric and wizard are “full” spellcasters, so you don’t have to recalculate anything, and your effective level of spellcasting is just your character level. Essentially, you’ll have the same amount of spell slots as if you were fully leveling up in either class, we just take a roundabout way to get there.
When it comes to actually casting your spells, you’re going to have to keep track of your spell attack modifiers, attack damage, and the spell DCs of each class. Your cleric spells will all run off your Wisdom, and your wizard spells will all run off your Intelligence.
Finally, you need an arcane focus (orb, staff, whatever other magical thing you feel like) in your hand to cast your wizard spells. The cleric spells are a bit easier, you need a holy symbol (literally anything that represents your god) but you can thankfully just be wearing or displaying that so you don’t need to be holding it. You do need to keep a hand completely empty though to perform the somatic components of spells due to some wonky rulings about spell foci, but thankfully it can be the same empty hand for both your cleric and wizard spells.
Your proficiency bonus is based off of your total levels, not your level in your class.
Any build of this multiclass has access to a whole host of magical options but there are a few fun synergies we can also strive for. Take a look at the following builds to get the most out of your level dip or full multiclass.
I couldn't find any specific synergies with the following archetypes but there are a few you should keep your eye on for value or extra skill proficiency alone.
The 2nd level chronal shift from the chronurgy magic wizard allows you to force a reroll for any attack roll, ability check, or saving throw twice per long rest. Chronurgy wizard is a powerful anti-crit tech that can justify the level dip all on its own as a tactical option. And as a nice little perk a chronurgy wizard gets to add their Intelligence modifier to initiative rolls.
The arcana domain gets an extra skill proficiency and two bonus wizard cantrips instead of heavy armor proficiency. The extra non-combat options and particularly the cantrip make this a tempting option over wizard as a single class. Being stuck with medium armor ensured this was stuck as only an honorable mention but having extra proficiencies, bonus cantrips, and some of the better utility options always prepared as your cleric spells can potentially be worth a single level dip.
It's for a drastically different build taking the nature druid can essentially function like a druid class level since it gives us access to the druid cantrip shillelagh. If you're trying to use this multiclass combination for melee this guardian of nature is one of your best martial options since shillelagh lets us, make weapon attacks using our spellcasting ability. Or you could just take a druid class level but that gets into a much weirder multiclass.
The go-to cleric offensive option but only really useful for this build if you want to stretch it into martial options. You get to add your Intelligence to initiative rolls and essentially get a free "shield" as a reaction which is a great defensive buff and a tempting option. We're both an intelligence-based character and a wisdom-based character so it's rough to try and roll up with martial weapons but if you're shooting for intelligence-based front-line characters this domain is a good place to start. But that's a tangled mess of other class levels like a barbarian class level for rage. 5 levels of fighter gets a fighting style and an extra attack, a level of rogue gets sneak attack, a level in paladin for divine smite, a level of armorer artificer for battle smith. Unless you're interested in a monstrous multiclassed character with 5 classes by 10th level I recommend leaving war domain behind even if it seems like a tempting option.
Starting with a simple defensive option, we’re just taking a single class level as cleric and selecting the forge domain, alongside with the rest of our levels in abjuration wizard as our primary class. Our goal here is essentially just to play a normal intelligence-based character wizard but also to make them as survivable and tanky as possible.
Whenever an abjuration wizard casts an abjuration spell, they also get to generate an “arcane ward” around themselves that can soak up an amount of damage equal to twice your wizard level + your Intelligence modifier. The arcane ward's functions are almost identical to temporary hit points but aren’t actually temporary hit points so we can stack them using spells like false life. False life only uses 1st-level slots and together each defensive buff is a bit weeny, but together you can actually take a few hits as a wizard. If you want to go a bit further into cleric levels I recommend also going for the 2nd level spell aid. Aid also provides hit points that aren't technically “temporary hit points” so they can all stack up together.
What we get for our single cleric level dip is access to heavy armor and shield proficiency, healing spells, and a magical +1 bonus to our armor for good measure. Plate armor, a shield, and that +1 magical bonus means we can easily strut around with 21 AC, and two layers of temporary hit points, healing spells, and full access to the wizard’s deadly spell arsenal!
Our goal here is to firmly and confidently tell our enemies what to do and have them listen.. To accomplish this, we want to start with 1 level of wizard, followed by 2 levels of order domain cleric, going back for 5 more levels of wizard selecting the school of enchantment, and then 4 more levels of cleric. We should have 6 levels in each class, after which we want to push our wizard levels up to 10th to pick up split enchantment.
From our 6 levels of enchantment wizard, we get the feature hypnotic gaze which we can use to charm a creature indefinitely so long as we don’t damage them and maintain eye contact. We also get instinctive charm which lets us divert one attack from every enemy every day to another nearby target if they fail a Wisdom save.
From our 6 levels of order domain, we get the voice of authority which lets our allies make an attack as a reaction when we buff them with our spells. We also get the channel divinity feature order’s demand that can charm a creature indefinitely until they take damage. Finally, we get the embodiment of law feature that lets us cast spells from the compulsion school using a bonus action instead of an action.
So, what have we accomplished here? Essentially a fantastic buff/debuff monster with multiple sources of creature control at any given time. Anything that gets in your grill is one failed save away from being your puppet and worst case you can likely divert their attacks away from you using instinctive charm. Your buff spells are also giving your allies extra attacks due to voice of authority, and you can rely on them to actually finish off the targets you don’t charm or hold into submission.
Our goal here is to cast the most devastating lightning bolts known to man by focusing on the lightning damage type and dealing automatic damage. To become the biggest weapon of all we want to start with 1 level of wizard, followed by 2 levels of tempest domain cleric, going back for 5 more levels of wizard selecting graviturgy wizard to get up to a 3rd level spell, and then 4 more levels of tempest cleric. We should have 6 levels in each class, after which we can evenly level up either class.
At 5th level wizard we get access to the classic wizard spell lightning bolt along with some other powerful early lightning spells like shocking grasp for our cantrips, witch bolt for our 1st-level spell slot, and dragon’s breath for our 2nd- level spell slot. Graviturgy also uniquely lets us overcome our heavy armor speed issue using adjust density to lighten ourselves up as needed. Our 6th graviturgy level also gets us the feature gravity well, that lets us move targets of our spells by 5 feet whenever we hit them, or they fail a save.
From our cleric levels we get call lightning, which is our secondary source of lightning elemental damage, wrath of the storm which retaliates on our attackers for 2d8 lightning damage, and the channel divinity feature destructive wrath. Destructive wrath is the real kicker here, as it lets us MAXIMIZE the damage of a lightning or thunder spell. Maximizing a spell means you don’t roll for attack damage, and instead you simply deal automatic damage of whatever the highest possible die result could be. And finally at 6th level we get thunderbolt strike, which lets us move enemies 10 feet away whenever we deal lightning damage to them.
Putting this all together, at our 12th effective level we’ll have access to 6th level spell slots for a huge pileof damage. If we cast a 6th level lightning bolt and use destructive wrath to maximize it we get to launch a 100-foot line of 70 flat damage (assuming +4 Int) that also moves each target that fails up to 15 feet back. We’ll be able to fire two of these maximized bolts per short rest. That’s essentially a flat 140 damage per combat multiplied by however many targets you can line up! Past those we won't have as many high-level spells, but we can still use all our "extra spell slots" on elemental damage spells that can bounce our enemies around and into hazards.
Want to always get your sneak attack? Check out our Artificer Rogue Multiclass Guide for details on how to make this happen
]]>Triumphant Reboot or Shameless Cash Grab?
We’re finally returning to Dragonlance and the world of Krynn in 5th edition DnD with the release of Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen. The red dragon army is on the march and the undead legend Lord Soth seeks something sinister amidst long forgotten Istarran ruins. The players must help defend Solamnia, rally their forces, and foil Lord Soth’s efforts to turn the tide of war. But is this adventure path worth playing? Claim your Dragonlance and face the oncoming hordes as we go through everything you need to know.
Dragonlance is a beloved setting that dates all the way back to the 1st edition of D&D with countless books across D&D’s entire history. It’s also a full-fledged fantasy world with novels, video games, and a dedicated fanbase.
So full disclosure, though I’ve been DMing and playing D&D for over a decade and I’ve heard tons of wonderful things about Dragonlance I’ve never experienced the setting for a proper game before. But that does mean I’m coming into Dragonlance without any nostalgia glasses and with a fresh-faced perspective.
After reading up on everything in the Dragonlance setting I can tell you the lore here is deep. At a surface level it seems like a generic fantasy world but that’s only because so many settings stole directly from it. Dragonlance is the granddaddy, the originator, the source of many tropes we’ve come to think of as standard fantasy. I saw a ton of similarities in Matt Mercer’s setting with its cataclysm, multiple magical moons, and even some of the naming conventions. Legendary authors such as Tracy Hickman, Margaret Weis wrote books about charactes such as Rastilin and the kender Tasslehoff burrfoot.
Wizards of the Coast did something very strange with this book, they released a companion board game alongside it meant to be played in tandem with the adventure path. Before anyone freaks out you don’t need this board game to play the adventure and I’m not quite sure I’d even recommend doing so, but the product is there.
Throughout Shadow of the Dragon Queen there are 12 scenarios where armies clash, and you have the option to resolve those scenarios “normally” using the encounters found within the book or you can use the Dragonlance: Warriors of Krynn board game instead. The board game is designed specifically for Shadow of the Dragon Queen, and it has unique setups for each of the warfare scenarios found in the adventure path. You don’t control the armies in this board game, but instead control your hero and choose how they want to try and effect the course of the battle through rallying troops, fighting alongside them, or performing side missions. You can essentially think of the board game as an “auto-battler” game where the armies will fight regardless of what you do, but your actions can help potentially turn the tide. A dragonlance campaign
Shadow of the Dragon Queen is first and foremost an adventure path as part of a dragonlance campaign set in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 5e, but we get a few extra goodies here and there. The book is 224 pages in length and seems to be retailing for $49.99 at most places (though you can find some discounts) and is a bit on the short side compared to other releases at that price that are usually closer to 250 pages.
It’s worth noting that you can also find it packaged with the Warriors of Krynn companion board game as a “deluxe edition” and that seems to range around $120 to $150 for the book and board game together.
We’ll be focusing on the book itself which all told includes:
Dragonlance Lore
Speaking as someone who started unfamiliar with Dragonlance lore I felt this section did a great job of giving me the overview of Krynn and its history. This is NOT a setting book though. We get just enough pages worth of lore for the adventure path, but Dragonlance is just too vast and deep to get in fully fleshed out in the space allowed.
The Kender Race
Kender are (and I’m simplifying here) basically halfway between halflings and gnomes. Little mischievous folk who are excellent at stealing things and taunting people. Apparently in the past players have used the stealing habits to justify toxic player behavior so they’ve got a really bad reputation in some circles. This newest iteration of their lore downplays their sticky fingers and emphasizes their curious nature instead.
Dragonlance gives us two new setting specific backgrounds, Knight of Solamnia and Mage of High Sorcery. These remind me a lot of the Strixhaven backgrounds in that they tie the player to the setting and also include a bonus feat. These however are just generic enough to include in other campaigns as a “power boost” option but are strictly stronger than existing backgrounds.
Shadow of the Dragon Queen is a tough campaign, and it sets you up with some free bonus feats to balance it out. For the campaign you’re intended to take the skilled or tough feat at 1st level as a bonus feat, and one of 11 feats as another bonus feat at 4th level. 7 of those options are completely new feats, most of which involve joining a specific knightly order or donning robes of a magical order. I’m a fan of these. They conveniently worked joining those orders into the plot at about 4th level, joining the mechanics neatly with the plot.
This new archetype is one of the highlights of the book for me. It cleverly gives you different spells and powers to work with depending on the phase of the moon, and eventually lets you control your “phase” giving you almost 3 different archetypes in one that you can shift between.
We get a fire-breathing dragon wagon in the Boilerdrak, and the person catapulting Gnomeflinger. Notable just because siege weapons are so incredibly rare, they’re nice additions to the 5e library. I know I’ll definitely be launching my players with a Gnomeflinger in some of my upcoming home games.
We get the titular Dragonlances, two more rather interesting items, and a story specific item that’ll come into play in the final chapters. Great utility on these, but fairly sparse for a full campaign.
Dragons, dragons and more dragons! Well, draconians anyway. We get the formidable death dragons alongside the monstrous dragonborn-ish draconians, and the rideable dragonnels. There’s nothing too surprising here but dragons are a common enough theme that I suspect you’ll find good use of them in other campaigns as well.
A pleasant return to an underused mechanic, we get 6 fully fleshed out sidekick characters with unique sidekick stats and progression tables. Even outside of the adventure path these are wonderful additions to your own campaign with the flavorful character work already done for you.
Shadow of the Dragon Queen Adventure Path
So, enough mucking about, is how’s the adventure? Well, it starts off quite well with some session zero preludes for each player helping to tie the players into the main plot. These are absolutely wonderful, and I hope more WotC adventures use them, they’re non-combat or very combat light, but they force the players to ask some vital character building questions and ground the players in the plot before it starts in full.
The group is mourning a fallen friend and meet at their funeral, and their commiserations are interrupted by the encroaching red dragon army which forces the party to band together and take part in the larger conflict. This is a wartime campaign. The players are heroes, but they’re part of a much larger conflict. This is where the board game comes in and I’ll admit to only having reviews and videos to go off (I bought a digital copy of the book and not the board game) but the board game seems… Iffy.
The idea is that instead of resolving large-scale battles through role play in D&D, you instead shift over to the board game to determine the outcome of the battles. To the board game’s credit, it still puts you in the role of heroes (based on the 5e classes) and the game seems to manage the D&D feel. Paladins and bards can inspire the troops, rogues can go try to pick off the enemy characters, clerics can heal the fallen. But I have a hard time imagining shifting my playgroup out of their role play and sitting for a board game for 45 minutes in the middle of our D&D session.
Besides that, many board game reviewers have pointed out Warriors of Krynn’s poor-quality tokens, cards, and figures. The game itself seems pretty solid but it seems like they cheeped out a bit on production. The hero figures were meant to have a wash that makes their details pop but in most of the kits I’ve seen they just look dirty, with the wash still smudged on all the raised surfaces rather than nicely settled in the recesses.
But back to the adventure path. Players are in the middle of a continent spanning war and are working directly with an army. This is NOT a sandbox, and the adventure is fairly linear. I will say it does a great job of allowing for different outcomes and player decisions for each quest, but the overarching story beats and progress are locked in.
In the 2nd half we get a proper exploration section which I’m excited for, and depending on how earlier military actions go, the party will likely be exploring with an entire army which is definitely a departure from the regular roughing it most adventurers are used to. I would’ve liked to see a bit more interconnectivity between the exploration encounters but it’s still a strong section.
The many NPCs the players encounter are varied and fun. I particularly loved the bored kender vampire in the final chapters and the jerk noble that acts as an obstacle early on. Combats rely a bit on “fight a bunch of draconians” but it’s not repetitive. If fighting off dragon riders sounds exciting to your players, you should have plenty of combat to appease your fighty players and enough character intrigue to appease your role players.
New character options, a solid campaign, and a callback to a beloved setting. I’m completely immune to the nostalgia for Dragonlance (since I never played in it) but I’ll say as a newbie I’m still intrigued. At the absolute least there’s plenty here to steal and repurpose for my own campaigns and at most this might well be the game I DM after my current game finishes up. The intro preludes are smooth, and it just does a lot of things right that add up to a solid campaign start to finish.
This is a linear war campaign and players who were hoping to explore Krynn or use this as a setting book will be sorely disappointed. There’s the one way forward and the other paths are blocked by rampaging dragon armies. Linear doesn’t equal bad though, and this railroad has a lot of exciting stops along the way.
Also, just as a nitpick, aren’t you supposed to ride dragons in Dragonlance? I combed through this book and found 0 opportunities for the players to ride some dragons. Perhaps I missed it, but it just seems odd to forego what I thought was a primary aspect of the setting.
If I’m interested in this setting without the nostalgia glasses, I can only imagine how exciting this will be for people who love Dragonlance. I’m not knowledgeable enough on the original source material to know if this book keeps true to it but it seems like a deep world with tons to explore.
But this isn’t a campaign setting, this is an adventure path.
The conclusion I keep landing on is that this adventure is solid and fun, but a bit bland. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this adventure path, but for me there’s not a whole lot that excites me about it either.
It seems like the selling points here are twofold: Dragonlance nostalgia, and the tie-in board game. I’ve got no nostalgia so what I see is a well-crafted war campaign that’s just a bit on the generic side. As for the board game, it’s not bad exactly, but it doesn’t work for me as a selling point. My group in particular plays online and even for an in-person session I’d have a hard time stopping a campaign to play a board game in the middle of it. Thankfully you don’t have to use the board game at all. Each of the sections that the board game “replaces” are still well fleshed out sections of the campaign and I’d almost feel a bit cheated if they were removed for a board game.
If you love Dragonlance or are just looking for a solid linear campaign, this is a great book. I’d probably give the board game a pass and just buy the book though. As a 1st to 10th level campaign, I was hard pressed to find a low point. Board game notwithstanding, this is a well-written adventure from start to finish and I think your playgroup will have a blast rallying the troops against the red dragon army across the lands of Krynn.
Final Score: 8 out of 10
Get your copy on Amazon here!
https://www.skullsplitterdice.com/blogs/dnd/what-is-dungeons-and-dragons
Our Complete Magic Item 5e Guide HERE.
Want to know how dice work? Check out our DnD Dice Explained Guide!
DM's strike terror into your party with our Red Dragon 5e BBEG Guide
Want to play a lethal ninja? Dance the blade's edge with our Monk Rogue 5e multiclass guide
]]>Fighters are the versatile masters of the battlefield capable of taking on any combat role that possess every sort of weapon mastery. Clerics are versatile holy priests that can suit any deity, able to pick and choose from all the divine spells and the widest range of archetypes in 5e. Put them together and you essentially have the most options to play with out of any class combination and we can sculpt some weird and powerful builds out of these two clays. Draw your sword and your holy symbol as we go through everything you need to know.
Fighter and cleric are debatably the most versatile core classes in 5e and by combining them you have possibly the widest range of options possible. Now putting those options together into something worth playing more than a straight fighter or straight cleric is its own issue but simply having all those options at your fingertips is a tempting prospect.
As a baseline adding access to cleric spells with healing magic and some magical utility to a fighter is potentially worth the level and adding a fighting style to a more combat-focused cleric build can also be worthwhile. This is a multi - class that works best as small level dips to augment a core focus and enhancing your strategy with only a level or two dip can be a major boost without much investment.
Want to grow your hoard? Check out our dice subscriptions!
The first thing you’ll need to ask yourself when building a fighter/cleric multi class is why not simply build a paladin? Paladins are already “holy fighters” and if you’re just looking to add a few divine spells and damage to your martial character that may be the better option than a dual class.
And like every multiclass combination, even a level dip means giving up on some late game class features like 9th level spells we'd get with a single class. We’re also combining a spellcasting and martial class whose features don’t really stack up in a meaningful way so our progression on either will be slowed down compared to straight cleric or straight fighter.
A few of our builds here are essentially only level dips so they’ll “kick-in” with only a single level in each class. Our more synergistic builds tend to require a level or two in cleric and the 3rd level fighter archetype feature so those will start working at total character level 4-5.
We’ve got several strategies to go for here so not all of the following fighter abilities and cleric abilities will apply to every build but they’re generally the features we’re going to care about.
Just like with a normal fighter build we’re going to need to pick between Strength and Dexterity as our primary damage ability. Next, we’ll want a high Wisdom since that’s our cleric spellcasting ability score. Finally, we’re likely going to be in the thick of combat so we want Constitution as our third highest score.
For our ability score improvements, we're not too stretched or too reliant on our spellcasting modifier so you're free to snag feats like polearm master or sentinel for classic fighter shenanigans
Intelligence and Charisma are largely irrelevant for us, and we can use them as dump stats.
The fighter class gives us full access to heavy armor and shields and we should be taking advantage of that. A one-handed melee weapon, shield, and the best heavy armor we can get our hands on is going to be the primary setup for most of our builds. With fighter we have full martial weapon proficiencies, simple weapons, and armor proficiencies so the sky's the limit on weapon style.
We can switch that up to a medium armor or light armor with a rapier if we’re going for Dexterity though, which should get us to similar ACs. Depending on the setting or original campaign you might even be able to swing firearms and get a shotgun preacher build going on so keep the Dex version on the back burner just in case.
A single level dip gives us access to cleric spells, many of which can be incredibly helpful for a martial strategy. Most of our builds aren’t pushing too high into the cleric levels so we’re mainly interested in low level spells like cantrips and 1st or 2nd level spells. 3rd level spells may seem attractive but it's unlikely worth that deep of a dip. We’re also planning on being in the thick of combat, so spells that require concentration are less valuable to us and we’re incentivized to look for spells we can cast in addition to our attacks.
This cantrip lets you grant an extra 1d4 to your own ability checks or the ability checks of your allies. The nice thing here is that since it is a cantrip, it’s essentially always going to be free in situations where time isn’t an issue. That means your entire party gets this 1d4 to practically anything they attempt to do outside of combat.
This cantrip is essentially the same as guidance except you get a bonus to saves instead of ability checks. A 1d4 bonus to saves is rarely ever good enough to use in combat but it can come in clutch when trying to avoid traps and you can essentially keep using it on yourself outside of combat to keep the extra 1d4 up for any surprises your DM might spring on you.
This cantrip is unique to clerics and is often forgotten about when picking offensive spells. You get to force any number of creatures within 5 feet to take a con save or take 1d6 radiant damage (with cantrip scaling increases). This is especially great for us as a martial build when we expect to be right in the thick of combat. It even allows you to pick and choose the targets so even though it’s sort of an area of effect around yourself you’re never at risk of hitting your allies.
It’s bog standard boring but cure wounds is a staple for a reason. It’s a 1st level healing spell that scales well and can keep you and your party alive.
Probably the most useful out of combat spell, detect magic essentially gives you a magic flashlight that detects craziness in the room. A bit dull, but one of the best utility spells in the game.
One of the best low level offensive spells in the game, guiding bolt is a ray of 4d6 radiant goodness that leaves an aftereffect granting advantage on the next attack against them. Even only using a 1st level slot guiding bolt is amongst the most powerful spells and will remain a relevant and useful attack into the 2nd and 3rd tiers of play.
Healing word does significantly less healing than cure wounds at the same level, but it has two differences that make it definitely worth taking. First, healing word has a range of 60 feet vs the touch range of cure wounds, which means with healing word you can save a downed ally even when you can’t physically reach them. Second, healing word only uses a bonus action, which means we can use it and still make our attack on the same turn.
Sanctuary forces enemies to make Wisdom saves if they want to attack you. I wouldn’t recommend this normally since it's a concentration spell but keep this spell in mind for one of our later builds that makes better use of it.
Aid increases the maximum hit points of up to three creatures by 5 and it lasts for 8 hours. This is better defensive boost than temporary hit points since the actual maximum is increased, and you can heal back up to that new limit. For us in particular it’s also a buff spell that doesn’t use concentration and those are few and far between.
This lets you heal up to 6 creatures for 2d8 + your spellcasting modifier, but it takes 10 minutes to cast. It’s the equivalent of casting 6 2nd level cure wounds spells but only uses one slot, at the cost of requiring essentially a miniature short rest. But in situations where you can take a breather but not an actual rest, this spell can refresh your entire party.
With this spell you conjure a big ghostly weapon and bonk your enemies with it every turn for 1d8 + your Wisdom modifier at the cost of your bonus action. We’re already not using our bonus action for much, so this spell typically translates to straight extra damage and is one of the best arguments for taking your cleric levels up to 3 just to get it.
There are minimal differences between skill proficiencies, saving throw proficiencies and weapon proficiencies you’ll have, but the big issue is heavy armor proficiency, and the short answer is to start as a fighter. If you start as a cleric and then multiclass into fighter you won’t have heavy armor proficiency unless you take one of the cleric domains that also gives it (which are forge, life, nature, order, tempest, twilight, and war).
Clerics are primarily spellcasters and fighters are absolutely martial so we’re not going to get far with an even split. Instead, most of the following builds focus on getting the most out of a small level dip.
For this build our goal is to royally hose a boss monster so that they waste their attacks every turn. To accomplish this, we want 2 levels of cleric taking the peace domain, and 3 levels of fighter taking the cavalier archetype. The levels in cleric are only a dip and the remaining levels should go towards fighter, giving us a final split of 2 cleric / 18 fighter.
At third level when we first gain the cavalier archetype we gain a bonus proficiency, a bonus to mounted combat, but more importantly we get the feature unwavering mark. Unwavering mark lets us mark any creature we hit with a melee attack, and while within 5 feet of a marked creature they make all their attacks at disadvantage unless they target you.
From our levels in peace cleric, we get another bonus proficiency and two prominent features, emboldening bond at first level and the channel divinity option balm of peace at second level. Emboldening bond works essentially like a super version of the guidance spell, letting us grant ourselves and some of our allies an extra 1d4 on all their attack rolls, ability checks, and saving throws for 10 minutes. Balm of peace gives us an odd sort of dash movement that doesn’t provoke attacks of opportunity, but every one of our allies that we run past as we do so heals 2d6 + Wis hit points.
So how do we do this? Firstly, we just run in and smack the big boss monster with our melee weapon of choice. When we hit the creature, we activate our unwavering mark for free, giving them disadvantage on every target that isn’t us so long as they’re in melee range of us. Next, using our bonus action we cast the spell sanctuary which is conveniently a domain spell for the peace cleric. Think of sanctuary as sort of a temporary truce, so long as you don’t make attacks, creatures that attempt to hit you have to succeed on a Wisdom save to do so.
You’ve now set up a scenario where the boss monster has to pass a save to attack you and has disadvantage on anything but you and is screwed either way. For your turns while this is happening you can either make your attacks and then simply cast sanctuary again, or you can use this time to heal your allies using any number of healing spells or the balm of peace as you keep locking down the boss.
Technically this is more of just a recommended dip than a full build, but you can gain add a lot of power to any fighter build with a single cleric level dip to take the light domain. The light cleric gains the ability warding flare at first level that can be amazing for a martial character. Whenever you’re attacked by something within 30 feet, you can throw up a flash of light to impose disadvantage on the attack as a reaction. You can do your flashbang a number of times per day equal to your Wisdom modifier and regain them on a long rest. Beyond that a single level is getting you 3 cantrips and 2 first level cleric spell slots ready for wound curing.
This one level dip adds survivability for any type of fighter build. Battle master is an excellent option for battle maneuvers, but I think it pairs best with the rune knight fighter archetype, specifically taking the cloud rune. The cloud rune lets you magically swap the target of an attack and force your enemy to hit their ally once per short rest. Put together this build has a ton of opportunities to swerve, deflect, and divert the nastiest attacks you run into with only a minimal level dip.
You can consider taking a 2nd level in light cleric for the channel divinity radiance of dawn feature for bonus radiant damage, but since it doesn't scale up, I wouldn't recommend it unless you know it will be a short low-level campaign.
Imagine you walk up, then your duplicate walks up, then your other duplicate walks up. One of your triplets casts a spell, another one swings your sword, and your enemies are left utterly baffled as their attacks seem to pass harmlessly through one duplicate and they’re beaten by the others.
To accomplish this, we’ll need at least 2 cleric levels taking the trickery domain and 3 fighter levels taking the echo knight archetype.
The echo knight lets us create a copy of ourselves as a bonus action, and though we can only have one echo at a time it’s essentially free. This echo has an AC equal to 14 + our proficiency bonus, has a single hit point, and on our turn, we can move it up to 30 feet at the low low cost of absolutely nothing. As a bonus action we can swap places with our echo, whenever we make melee attacks, we can make our attack using the echo, and we can even make attacks of opportunity using the echo. Also, at 3rd level we get the feature unleash incarnation that lets us make an extra attack through our echo when we make an attack, and we can do this a number of times per long rest equal to our Constitution modifier.
Now the trickster cleric gets their duplicate through the channel divinity: invoke duplicity feature. At the cost of our channel divinity use we can create a duplicate illusion as an action that lasts for 1 minute. Our duplicate illusion is less “real” than the echo and we can’t make attacks through it, but we can cast our spells through it and move it up to 30 feet as a bonus action. One of the best parts here is since the duplicate is just an illusion, it’s also essentially invulnerable and if you can get the enemies to attack it they’ll simply waste their attacks.
We can control the echo for free, and the illusion using our bonus action, so together we can move all three of ourselves every turn and just utterly confound our enemies while hitting them from multiple sides using your attack and attacking through your echo using unleash incarnation. Your echo is easy to poof but it’s just as easy to resummon as a bonus action and you should be able to waste a TON of your enemy’s attacks on your cackling counterparts. And if all else fails, you can consider taking just one more level of cleric to gain access to 2nd level cleric spells and mirror image, it’ll technically be easier to spot you (since you’re a triple and your echo and illusion won’t be) but man is it flavorful and useful for a fighter.
This build is more than a defensive boost, it's a whole unique strategy. It relies a bit on your DM ignoring meta knowledge and letting the enemies be confused by your copies, but with a decent DM you should have a ton of fun bamboozling your enemies every combat!
Fundamentally since the 1st level domain cleric powers along with access to basic healing magic makes a single level dip into cleric potentially worthwhile for an otherwise pure fighter build. The following options are decent enough to get an honorable mention for a single level dip. I also want to note that the popular death clerics really don't mesh all that well and they even missed this honorable mention list as the necrotic damage boost just isn't worth it.
This is also a combination that strangely invites even more secondary classes and can potentially benefit from level dips in things like beast master ranger, transmutation wizard, gloom stalker ranger, storm sorcerer, clockwork soul sorcerer, fey wanderer ranger, and a whole host of other strange combinations. We focused only on fighter/cleric combinations, but triple class combinations actually work here and that's not often the case.
By taking a level in the arcana domain you gain a whopping 5 cantrips (2 from the wizard spell list and 3 from the cleric spell list) access to healing magic, detect magic, and magic missile. Especially at tier 1, just one level dip into arcana cleric your fighter can be healer, utility caster, and frontline fighter for your party all in one.
You can essentially get "free" magical items by taking one level in the forge domain. Blessings of the forge gives you either some "armor of faith" (+1 armor) or a +1 magic weapon whenever you need it. At early levels guaranteed access to a magical weapon can be a big help especially in a campaign with low magic item acquisition. Magic items along with the base spellcasting can make this worth the level dip.
With one level of tempest cleric, you gain the feature wrath of the storm which lets you retaliate when hit for 2d8 thunder or lightning damage a number of times per day equal to your Wisdom mod. If you go one level deeper, you get channel divinity destructive wrath which lets you maximize lightning or thunder damage but other than that it doesn't scale so I really don't recommend this dip if you plan on playing up into tier 2. It does nothing for your normal attack damage rolls and the ability never scales higher. You do get searing smite though which is a decent way to add more damage to weapon attacks.
Want to knowOur Complete Magic Item 5e Guide HERE. how dice work?
Check out our DnD Dice Explained Guide!
Want more multiclass guides? Check out our giant list of 5e tools here
Want to wield two swords like Drizzt? Check out our Two Weapon Fighting 5e Guide!
Want to always get your sneak attack? Check out our Artificer Rogue Multiclass Guide for details on how to make this happen
Want to master holy and arcane magics? Check out our Cleric Wizard 5e Multiclass Guide!
]]>Confused about confusion? We'll clear the cobwebs for you here.
Confusion 5e is a mind-affecting spell that creates a chaotic environment of mental energy. It is a 4th level spell, and is on page 224 of the Players Handbook (PHB). By default, the confusion spell is available to bards, druids, sorcerers, and wizards.
Any creatures within the area must make a Wisdom saving throw or become confused for the duration of the spell. The difficulty of this save is While confused, a creature has disadvantage on attack rolls and ability checks, and can't take reactions. There is nothing specifically in the rules that states you lose concentration. Since it doesn't specifically state it, then the more specific rule takes effect, meaning that you don't lose concentration specifically from this spell.
Want to grow your hoard? Check out our dice subscriptions!
When a creature is confused, it becomes muddled and uncertain, making concentration difficult to maintain. The 5e confusion effect lasts for 10 rounds (one minute), which is typically an entire combat session. While the creature is confused, it must make a roll on a chart to determine what it can do each round.
Yes. For every additional level spell slot you use the radius increases by 5 feet. This is *really* powerful, the spell is centered on a point with a 10 foot radius sphere, an additional 5 feet, or two standard squares on a battle map in every direction is pretty powerful. Sure, it's no power word kill, but an affected creature is 80% likely to be consumed by their delusions and are basically not doing anything but standing still or running in a random direction. If cast on a clustered group this can change the tide of battle. So, if you've got the slots and you think they won't pass their saving throw, it's probably worth that 5th level upcast if you have the slots and are playing at higher levels.
Ah, the age-old question: does combat damage end confusion? The answer, my friends, is a resounding maybe. Again, the specific rule of it not being stated would take over. While there is no official ruling on the matter in the spell description, many experts believe that combat damage may indeed be enough to snap someone out of their confused state. After all, being hit by a giant sword or blasted by a fireball is pretty darn distracting. Given that you get a confused character gets a save at the end of every round, we'd tend to agree that combat damage doesn't end this.
One of the states causes the affected target to make a melee attack against a randomly determined creature. Well, we tend to use dice based on the number of creatures around. If there's only two, to make it extra spicy, we use odds for one creature and even for another.
This is spelled out in the spell description, and required you to use a d8 and use the number showing on the die face for the direction the confused character will go.
The spell description does not state that you are charmed, and "confused" is not a condition in the PHB. As such, we'd state that you're
According to the PHB, the material components are just three nut shells, which is..interesting. Are they intimating that you go nuts? There are also verbal (v)and somatic (s) for this spell. Because it does have all three, v s m, it may be hard to get off stealthily.
Confusion spell dnd has a casting time of one action, that translates to six seconds.
Our Complete Magic Item 5e Guide HERE.
]]>Monks are adept warriors of discipline and skill who have trained and honed themselves into perfected instruments. Rogues are agents of shadow and misdirection who can find the perfect opening to plunge the knife. Put them together and you get straight up ninjas! Monk rogues take all of the rogue’s stealth and power and combine it with nigh-superhuman martial prowess and skill. Sharpen your kunai and shuriken as we go through everything you need to know.
In a lot of ways, the monk class and rogue class are very similar in terms of combat abilities. They’re both primarily Dexterity based martial classes that thrive off mobility and speed. Many rogue talents are augmented and made better via the monk abilities. Where their martial capabilities differ is in their attacks. Monks are the attack spam class dealing out far more low-damage hits than any other class is capable of, while rogues focus on delivering a single powerful hit via sneak attack damage each turn. Together we can “double up” on a lot of the extra speed and mobility features to become incredibly fast and nearly untouchable, and between 3-4 attacks rolls each round, we can better ensure we get our single powerful sneak attack can off. These classes can really cover for the other's deficiencies in melee combat.
And because both classes line up on Dexterity, we don’t stretch much at all on the ability score increases (ability score improvement) and can even comfortably snag some feats. The result is essentially (if not thematically) a ninja, delivering the killing blow from the shadows before flipping back up into the rafters.
Want Endless Dice? Check out our Dice Subscription
Dnd Monks and DND rogue class features don’t line up seamlessly and your lawful rogue is going to clash a bit. Firstly, for a rogue’s sneak attack to function you have to be using a finesse or ranged weapon, and unless your DM is cool fudging the rules a bit there’s no mechanical way to turn all those monk unarmed strikes into finesse or ranged weapon attacks. Thankfully there are a few monk weapon options that fit the bill but we can’t fish for our sneak attacks with our flurry of blows.
Beyond that we have two classes that both really want to make use of their bonus action. As much as we’d want to, we can’t use our rogue cunning action to dash and then flurry of blows. You’re going to run into a lot of situations where just based on the action economy you can’t put all the pieces together. It’ll be nice having all those extra options, but we can’t have our cake and eat it too.
Finally, any multiclass is going to sacrifice late game features that you would get from a single class, and since the damage output of both classes scales up on a class level basis, and while we gain martial capabilities, we still take a hit on damage.
For the core of all our builds we get sneak attack with only a single level in rogue and most of the core features we want from monk with 2 levels, so the builds kick in most of the way at your 3rd character level. We typically want rogue as our base class or primary class, with a solid chunk of monk usually up to 6th level. Beyond that core concept most of our build ideas really want the initial 3rd level features of both the monk and rogue’s archetypes which means they really kick in at 6th level.
We’ve got a few ideas on how to bring the build together but in general the following monk and rogue features will be important to us:
Both the monk and the rogue have the same primary stat Dexterity and our multiclass does the same. The monk however also really cares about Wisdom which should be our second highest ability score. Finally, we’re going to be in the middle of combat quite a bit and having a high Constitution can help us survive so it should be our 3rd highest ability score. Thus, our primary abilities will be Dex and Wis, with a consideration towards Con for hit points. Since we're not hard up on points, feel free to spend your ASIs on bonus feats as needed.
The rest of the abilities, Strength, Intelligence, and Charisma aren’t terribly relevant to us and we can treat them as dump stats.
Your armor is simple since you won’t be wearing any, unarmored defense should be providing you with a better AC than any light or medium armors can provide, and we don’t have to worry about any stealth penalties.
Where it gets more interesting is in the weapon options. We don't get all martial weapons from rogue but we do get most of the ones we'd care about (access to finesse weapons). We need weapons that are either finesse or ranged to meet the qualifications for sneak attack and we need them to count as monk weapons for all our monk features. Normally, this would be a very short list of just daggers and shortswords but with the Tasha’s update to monks and the dedicated weapon feature gained at 3rd level our options open up dramatically.
With dedicated weapon, we can turn any weapon into a monk weapon over the course of a short rest so long as it doesn’t have the heavy or special properties. This opens up the rapier which doesn’t feel very ninja themed but is still the top-end finesse weapon for straight damage. It also opens up the hand crossbow and the shortbow for some really nasty ranged sneak attacks.
Additionally, thieves tools might be worth it to get, as disarming traps, and picking locks might get you into places that would other wise require you to be loud...
We shouldn’t be hard up for ability scores which gives us some wiggle room to spend ASIs on feats. We can also get bonus feats by starting as a variant human (if your DM allows it). The following feats don’t fit every monk/rogue, but they should be on your radar when an ASI level comes up:
Dual wielder does three things:
So, bonus AC makes this a decent defensive option, but the drawing/stowing thing rarely comes up unless your DM is being very picky with the rules. The big potential draw for us here is dual wielding non-light weapons. And since we want finesse weapons, that means double rapiers. It’s not necessary but upgrading your off-hand weapon to a 1d8 weapon is pretty appealing.
This feat lets you snag a fighting style without having to take a fighter level and there’s a few martial options that are very useful for us:
This is obviously only applicable if your game has guns in it, but our builds work pretty darn well if pistols are available, and this feat is very helpful for up and coming gunslingers.
Depending on how your DM rules it guns might be part of your martial capabilities to start with anyway, but this will still be useful regardless.
The lucky feat is good on any build and here it can help us push through a sneak attack. Very simply, you get 3 luck points you can use to reroll any d20s that recharge on a long rest.
This lets us snag a couple 1st level spells as additional spellcasting options from a class's spell list. We could technically take anything crazy like chronurgy magic, but the spellcasting ability modifier is determined by the class. So as a Wisdom based character, we want to steal from either cleric spellcasting or druid spellcasting without dipping into a cleric level or a druid class level.
Some interesting defensive options include cure wounds, healing word, and shield of faith. Our AC without spells should be pretty good already but +2 from shield of faith can't hurt. I recommend just taking this rather than arcane trickster if you're really hurting for some spellcasting.
Most of our builds want to run in and out of combat quickly and mobile speeds us up while keeping us safe from reprisal.
That last one is key for the hit and run strategies but keep in mind we can also get it from the swashbuckler rogue archetype. Both are good options, just don’t take them together unless you're really worried about difficult terrain since they won’t stack up.
Found in Tasha’s, this half-feat is one of the best things to happen for aspiring ninjas.
Without a level dip we can just straight up cast invisibility which is a godsend for any sneaky strats. This is particularly useful tactical option for any build making use of the assassin rogue archetype.
Pretty much only for our sniper assassin build but definitely worth it there.
Helps with any plan that involves sneaking around in the dark.
The short answer is that you should be starting with rogue as your first character level. Rogues have significantly better equipment proficiencies and extra skill proficiencies that you’ll lose out on if you start with monk as your first character level. The only “upside” of starting with monk is you’d gain Strength saving throws instead of the arguably worse Intelligence saving throws but starting with rogue is the clear winner here.
Monk and Rogue clash a bit on their action economy but their core features mesh surprisingly well. There are some powerful synergies we can accomplish with a bit more work though using different monk archetypes and rogue archetypes and you should consider some of the following strategies:
Your sword twirls as you sway in between your foes stabbing and prat-falling your way through combat unscathed. The idea here is to synergize the way of the drunken master and the swashbuckler rogue archetype to do hit and run style combat even against whole groups of enemies.
We want to start our first level in rogue, but we essentially want to get to 3 levels in each class as soon as possible to gain both the way of the drunken master and swashbuckler archetypes. Beyond that the order of levels is a bit looser, but we want to end up with 6 monk levels / 14 rogue levels.
For our weapon we want to use a rapier (turned into a monk weapon using dedicated weapon) and keep our other hand free to make unarmed strikes.
It’s also worth noting that both of these class archetypes care a bit about Charisma and the Performance skill, so it’d be wise to at least not make your Charisma a dump stat. You shouldn’t prioritize it, but it’d be nice to have a +1 in it or at least not a negative Charisma. You also get Performance as one of your extra proficiencies with these archetypes, so it doesn't take one of your options up.
So, what does this actually accomplish? Well, both of these archetypes are trying for hit and run strategies. The drunken master’s technique is better but costs ki, and the swashbucklers technique costs nothing, but doesn’t work if the enemies are all in a group. By having both together we can essentially guarantee that we can hit and run without ever getting attacked back for doing so.
Whenever you’re fighting a single enemy, you can simply run in, stab and slap them a bunch, and then run out using the swashbuckler’s fancy footwork to avoid attacks back. If your opponents are bunched up, you can run in and make your attacks using a flurry of blows. Then because of the drunken master’s drunken technique we gain the benefits of a disengage action and have our movement increased by 10 feet for the turn.
Damage-wise we’re doing pretty good as well, at 9th level (5 monk / 4 rogue) at 18 Dexterity we’re getting two stabs with the rapier, sneak attack, and two unarmed strikes a round for an average 39 (2d8 + 4d6 + 16) damage a turn. So long as you try and save your ki for flurries you can keep these 3-4 attacks and damage up regularly and it’ll only go up as you gain rogue levels and improve that sneak attack.
Imagine yourself darting between the rafters as you unleash a flurry of pinpoint accurate kunai before disappearing back into the shadows as a stealthy ninja cat. Ok so technically they’ll be daggers but if your DM is cool you should be able to flavor them as kunai.
To start with we’re going to be playing some keep away tactics, so picking a race that starts with climb speed will be a great help. Tabaxi are especially good here since they also pick up darkvision, they already get proficiency in Perception and Stealth, and the feline agility trait that lets them double their speed for a turn.
Next, we want to start with a single level in rogue to pick up all the proficiencies and 1d6 of sneak attack. Then we’re going to take 4 levels of monk. For our monastic tradition we take the way of shadows, and when we get that 4th level, we want to take the feat fighting initiate and select the thrown weapon fighting style.
After that we want to take 3 more levels of rouge to pick up the scout rogue archetype. The scout archetype gets us the skirmisher feature that allows us to dart away up to half our speed as a reaction when something steps up to within 5 feet of us. The build then finishes off with 2 more levels of monk to get the way of shadow feature shadow step and the rest of our levels will be rogue levels giving us a final split of 6 monk levels / 14 rogue levels. I don't think it's worth pushing monk all the way to 11th level for cloak of shadows. If you're really hurting for invisibility, I instead recommend taking the shadow touched feat.
So how does this work? Firstly, as a shadow monk we essentially get a spell list. As a shadow monk we can cast a ton of magical options using our ki points including darkness, darkvision, pass without trace, silence, and minor illusion using Wisdom as our spellcasting ability modifier. Put these additional spellcasting options together with our innate climb speed and speed boosts from our shadow monk levels we will be hard to catch and harder to find once hidden.
What we’re actually doing while playing keep away is throwing kunai (daggers). By taking the thrown weapon fighting style we can draw a dagger every time we make an attack, so we don’t need to worry about drawing weapons, and every thrown weapon attack deals an additional +2 damage.
Now we can’t use flurry of blows to throw daggers, but we can simply use our bonus action to make an attack with a light weapon in our off hand. Or, if we want to also add the Dex mod to damage (which you normally wouldn’t for an off-hand attack) we can spend a ki-point to make a ki-fueled attack. So, between our normal attack, bonus action attack, and extra attack (from our 5th monk level) we’re throwing 3 daggers a turn. And so long as we’re throwing our daggers at somebody surprised or already fighting our allies, one of those dagger hits will be a sneak attack.
So, let’s gauge how this will play at 9th level with 6 levels of monk and 3 levels. We’re making 3 dagger attacks and our sneak attack is 2d6. With 18 Dex we’re dealing 29 (3d4 + 2d6 + 14) damage at range each turn without spending ki points and with some of the best keep away play possible in 5e. We have a movement speed and a climbing speed of 45 feet per round, and any time somebody moves within 5 feet we can dart away 20 feet as a reaction. We have deflect missiles as well if they fire at us. And thanks to shadow step we can teleport 60 feet whenever we want as a bonus action so long as our destination is in dim light or darkness AND it grants us advantage when we do so.
You’ll have absolutely insane mobility, and it will take a LOT of work to even attack you while you continue pelting them full of kunai!
Become Kung Fu Panda with our Monk Druid 5e Multiclass Guide
Does your PC have a tragic backstory?Are they an orphan? Learn more about rogues in our Rogue 5e dnd Class Guide
Want to be a rugged frontier adventurer? Check out our Ranger 5e Multiclass Guide
Want to always get your sneak attack? Check out our Artificer Rogue Multiclass Guide for details on how to make this happen.
Thinking about other classes? Check out our giant list of D&D 5e Tools and Tips here .
Hungry for Adventure? Your group will love these D&D Game Night Snack Recipes
Need New Dice? Check out our Dungeons and Dragons Dice here.
New to find a D&D Group ? Check out our guide on How to Find a D&D Group
New to D&D? Check out our Beginner's Guide to D&D
Want to play a hunter with stealth? Check out the Ranger Rogue multiclass guide!
]]>
Barbarians are wild muscle machines fueled by adrenaline and wrath to smash everything and take any punishment. Warlocks are the favored servants of otherworldly patrons, instilled with eldritch power. Put them together and we get the loose cannon champions of otherworldly patrons fueled by both their patron and their undying rage. If you’re looking to make a barbarian + warlock multiclass in fifth edition, appease your patron and get mad as we go through everything you need to know.
Both barbarians and warlocks are very common multiclassed character picks in 5th edition since they both get so much of what makes their class tick in the first few levels. Even more so than cleric levels for channel divinity, rogue levels, or the old level of fighter dip. Even one level dip in dnd barbarian or warlock can be a major asset and that’s just not the case with most classes. DND warlock multiclass combinations are already easy to flip into a battle ready damage dealer like the martial classes and a frothing rage monster sworn to an otherworldly patron is a fun character concept.
With just one level of barbarian dnd you become significantly more durable with barbarian rage and unarmored defense. With just two levels of warlock dnd you gain 2 spell slots to use every short rest, 2 invocations, and the 1st level feature of a patron. Playing this multiclass is a game of dips, and you get quite a bit of value for a very small level commitment.
The barbarian warlock multiclass is arguably the least synergistic combination of 5e classes with only barbarian/wizard competing for it. The issue is mainly the barbarian’s rage, which specifically prohibits you from casting spells or concentrating on spells while raging. And access to spells is usually what you'd take levels in spellcasting classes for. We’re going to have to scrape the bottom of the barrel to get some actual synergies here. It’s not impossible to play this combination but you’ll be very locked into a couple specific options. We're also definitely locked into martial characters (mostly) as our spellcasting is literally turned off while we're in rage.
DND 5e Warlock is also fine as a martial class already, so it's not like barbarian is making up for some horrible deficiencies in melee combat. This is not a value build where you’re able to mix and match features to work together, this is a gimmick build that’s still likely not worth it but is technically feasible.
And as with every multiclassed character, you lose out on the capstone features of a single-class character like those gained at 19th level or 20th level. A multiclassed character always loses out on some of the effective level power of a single-class character for more versatility.
The warlock barbarian multiclass can go a couple ways and the answer to this question varies quite a bit depending on which class is our core class. If we’re only going for a dip of either class, we’re looking at level 2 or 3 for a “kick in”. The more involved build requires 5 warlock levels and 3 barbarian levels, so we won’t be seeing it in real action until level 8 and won't feel powerful until about 10th level.
Barbarian and warlock features do not line up that well but with some clever decision making we can make the warlock barbarian multiclass work for us.
You get some slightly different proficiencies and saving throws in multiclass builds depending on which class you start out with. In this case, the correct choice is pretty firmly that you should start with a barbarian class level. Taking warlock first means missing out on medium armor proficiency. You don't get any extra proficiencies by starting with one or the other, just different skill list options for skill proficiencies. The saves are arguable as barbarians get proficiency with Strength and Constitution saving throws, while warlocks get Wisdom and Charisma. I tend to value Con more than Wis but they’re both objectively good saving throws worth having and both options are valid since neither gains additional proficiencies.
Note, that the hexblade patron also provides you with medium armor proficiency, so if your build is taking hexblade you can start with either class without missing out.
Barbarians normally are all about the physical scores and care about Strength, Constitution, and to a lesser extent Dexterity. Warlocks are just adding the Charisma Score to this mix but that still means we have 4 ability scores to care about which is a bit of a stretch. You'll need to try and get maximum value out of the extra ability score increase from your race so make sure you get some combination of the above.
Each of our builds are going to need to drop or at least minimize at least one of these ability scores and it’s a different score depending on what build we go for.
If you’re focusing on barbarian and just dipping into warlock, you can drop Charisma all the way down to just 13 (or 14) since most of the features we’ll be snagging don’t actually use the casting stat.
If you’re focusing on warlock and just dipping into barbarian you can drop Strength all the way down to 10, I wouldn’t take a negative in it but you don’t need much for melee combat.
Now if you’re going for the deeper builds with 5 or more levels in each class, we’re going to be in a bit of a pickle. You’ll want to start with a 14 in Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma, with a 12 or 13 in Strength. When you gain your 4th level ability score increase, you’ll need to pump Strength up to at least a 16 or else your attack rolls will drop off. This’ll correspond fairly well to the shift from warlock to barbarian levels so just trust in the process for now.
We've got a few defensive options. Warlocks are normally stuck in light armor but we also get shields and medium armor proficiencies from barbarian. I've seen some people work to gain heavy armor proficiency on this type of build, but I don't see the value. Normally for barbarians I’d recommend rocking no armor at all using unarmored defense, and if you’re almost entirely barbarian that’s still the way to go. You can go with armor of shadows for a permanent mage armor, but mage armor works out to about the same as our AC without spells used. For most of our builds you’re best off just getting up to +2 Dexterity and wearing medium armor.
With the weapons we get all the simple weapons and martial weapons. It gets a bit trickier, but I can streamline it down. Any build that includes the hexblade patron is stuck using a one-handed weapon, which also means we’re better off using a shield as well.
Anytime we aren’t using the hexblade patron we get the big old two-handed weapons so greataxe, greatsword, and maul all work for us. You might be tempted by our access to finesse weapons like a rapier instead and while it's a tempting option for relying on dexterity for damage instead of strength. I find that it's not the strongest offensive option though for us.
If we’re going to try and take advantage of both barbarian rage and the warlock spell list, we have to deal with the fact that you can’t cast or concentrate on spells while in rage. Sadly that rules out practically all damaging spells. We can't even use the melee spells like booming blade or green-flame blade since they still count as "casting" even though they use a melee attack. This means we can really only be taking advantage of spells that we can cast outside of combat and offensive spells like the old go-to’s of eldritch blast and chill touch aren't much use to us. Most of these are utility and exploration spells, but there are a few spells on the warlock spell list we can use as an offensive option or tactical option and that can be cast pre-combat.
Not typically a warlock cantrip of choice, but potentially quite useful. This cantrip gives you advantage on charisma checks but afterwards the target knows you used magic to mess with them. Since barblocks can’t make much use of cantrips in combat this out of combat cantrip may fit the bill. Or if you're evil it makes for temporary friends and easy opportunity attacks.
This lets you create a spectral floating hand that can interact with things and even potentially trigger traps or “touch the evil thing” without risking your own skin. This is a solid utility option that’s always flexible and rarely goes unused.
This typically is used for making distractions but ultimately as useful as your imagination allows. Not typically in the barbarian’s wheelhouse but a well-timed goading distraction can make all the difference and when used right can be an excellent tactical option.
The prime example of the “creativity spell”, prestidigitation has a long list of very minor magical tricks it can perform that all depend on you to find a use for them. This is the best collection of extra non-combat options you can get for the cost of a single cantrip.
For an hour’s duration we get 5 temporary hit points and if anybody hits us in melee while we have any of those hit points left, we deal 5 points of cold damage to them. This doesn’t use concentration and lasts for an hour after casting, making us a slightly better damage sponge. Every spell slot increase boosts both the temporary hit points and the cold damage making it a somewhat viable counterstrike and HP buffer. Better value at 1st-level slots but still, it's both one of the few damaging spells and defensive spells we can cast pre-combat.
The classic out of combat control spell, this has myriad uses most of which should be happening before you go into a rage. And it doesn’t use concentration so your target should remain charmed even while you’re enraged.
Arguably one of the best defensive spells in the game and doubly useful when combined with martial options. Mirror image uses your action and doesn’t use concentration, so you can start your first turn in combat casting it and then raging up. There’s a bit of randomness thrown in, but this essentially gives you 3 “gimmie” hits for attacks that hit your illusionary duplicates rather than you. Not amazing if you’re facing numerous enemies with small attacks, but it can be a lifesaver against enemies with a low number of high-damage attacks.
This one takes a bit of setup, but it doesn’t use concentration and if you have the opportunity to set it up you can make quick work of a boss monster. You essentially ward a small area against a certain creature type and while you or your allies are standing in it they impose disadvantage on attacks from the chosen type and can’t be charmed, frightened, or possessed by the chosen type. Underused, fantastic buff, and worth your warlock spell slot.
Same as charm person but capable of hitting much nastier targets. If you’re going this high in the warlock levels, this is a good one to have in the pocket. It's good, but sadly about all we can use at the 4th level slot on the warlock spell list.
Similarly to the spells, we want to focus on invocations that don’t clash with raging. To do this we want to avoid the invocations that rely on casting spells in combat, go for the ones that give us extra non-combat options, or the invocations that provide us with magical abilities that don’t technically count as spellcasting.
This gives us the spell mage armor unlimited times per day. Now we’ve already got access to medium armor and unarmored defense so the odds of having already better or equal AC access is pretty high. If your build is stretched on ability scores this is a tempting option though.
Additional skills aren’t the most exciting use of an invocation. But two additional proficiencies are decent value. Getting skill proficiencies in Deception and Persuasion is a good place to start if you want to go more face of the party with the build as well.
It has a 5th level requirement so we can’t snag this on a dip, but cloak of flies doesn’t use concentration and it doesn’t count as spellcasting so we’re free to rage up with flies on. We get a 5-foot aura of buggy goodness that gives us advantage on Intimidation checks and deals bonus poison damage equal to our Charisma modifier to anybody who starts their turn in the aura.
Darkvision isn’t that unique or interesting, but this grants 120 ft sight that even sees through magical darkness which is an otherwise extremely rare ability.
Eldritch Sight
Warlocks don’t even get detect magic normally, but this invocation lets you cast it for free whenever you’d like. Detect magic is always useful and this is one of the better utility options if you’re trying to fit that role with your barblock.
Sadly, you need 5 levels of warlock to gain access to this one but it’s one of the only ways to directly convert your warlock spells into additional damage while in rage. Functionally similar to divine smite, this lets you convert your spell slot into 1d8 force damage per spell slot level (so 3d8 when you first gain this at 5 warlock levels). With two 3rd level spell slots this means you’re adding 6d8 extra damage output per short rest. Not worth missing out on 5 barbarian levels if you’re majority barbarian, but a great option for the primarily warlock builds.
This lets you cast false life on yourself for free which grants you 1d4 + 4 temporary hit points and very conveniently does not use concentration. Free bonus hit points whenever you have a moment to breathe seems like the exact sort of thing a barbarian build could use.
This requires a pact of the blade so the earliest you’ll have access to it is 3rd level. It opens up other weapons to be pact weapons, but mainly you snag this just to make your pact weapon a +1 weapon for extra damage output.
We’ve got 3 wildly different builds that can make this otherwise unwieldy combination come together.
It’s an odd dip but just 2 levels of warlock can give our barbarian access to a great big pool of healing to make us an incredible damage sponge. To start we need 2 levels of warlock, and we want to choose the celestial patron and make one of our 2 invocations fiendish vigor. From that point on we exclusively take barbarian levels, and we want to take the path of the ancestral guardian. This gives us a total class level split of 18 levels barbarian / 2 levels warlock.
So how does this work? Well, we can’t really use our spellcasting in combat, but there’s nothing stopping us from healing up ourselves or our party members after the fighting is done. The celestial patron's additional spellcasting options gives us cure wounds as a warlock spell, this means for every short rest we can use our 2 1st-level slots for healing. We also get the celestial feature healing light which in a very similar way to a paladin’s lay on hands feature gives us a dice pool of healing we can use to heal ourselves or our allies as a bonus action. We get a number of d6s in healing equal to 1 + our warlock level (so 3). These healing light dice are especially useful as they can be used at a 60-foot range, and since it’s not spellcasting we can still use it in combat essentially like a pool of 3 healing words we can use to pop up anybody who gets knocked out.
Next, we can make great use of the fiendish vigor invocation that lets us cast false life at first level on ourselves whenever we want without spending spell slots. A 1st level false life gets you 1d4 + 4 temporary hit points that you can use to “heal” yourself, and since it doesn’t use concentration, you don’t lose them while in rage.
Finally, by taking the path of the ancestral guardian we get all the smashy goodness of a barbarian but with extra defensive measures for our allies through the ancestral protectors and spirit shield features. Ancestral shield essentially forces enemies to attack you instead of your squishier allies and spirit shield lets you prevent incoming damage for them.
Let’s take a look at the build put together with 3 levels of barbarian and 2 levels of warlock. Our benevolent barblock is swinging his greataxe and tanking hits just like a barbarian should, but they’ve also got 2d8 + 4 points of cure wounds healing every short rest, 1d4 + 4 temporary hit points that can recharge at any time they’re not raged. 3d6 points of healing that can be used at range and as a bonus action while raged, and they can impose disadvantage to enemy attacks that can’t target them. Now that’s a tank!
This build is incredibly simple compared to the others because we’re only taking a single class level in warlock and the rest of our levels in barbarian as our primary class. If you want to pick up the invocations and another spell slot you can take an extra level in warlock, but that's a matter of taste. We’re doing this specifically to pick up the fathomless patron and the 1st level ability tentacle of the deeps. Tentacle of the deeps functions a lot like the spell spiritual weapon. We get to summon an ethereal tentacle as a bonus action and get to make a bonus action attack with it every turn.
Barbarians don’t have a lot of use for their bonus action after the first turn rage, and this one level dip gives us consistent damage every turn using our bonus action. Anybody we hit with the tentacle also has their movement speed reduced by 10 feet for a turn which gives us an interesting opportunity to keep enemies within reach. By reducing a creature's speed, we can essentially keep it in range every turn and we can often force attacks of opportunity.
You've got a few options for the barbarian archetype. Path of the totem warrior with the bear totem option is always a decent pick as it adds resistance to every damage type except psychic damage. And since psychic damage is pretty rare you can fairly confidently resist any attack damage. The beast barbarian is also a decent damage dealer option with a selection of fun natural weapons in beast form. The natural weapons don't do much more in terms of damage
Oh, we also get a 40-foot swimming speed and the ability to breathe underwater from the fathomless patron which may be useful depending on your campaign. With the form of the beast, we can also get a climb speed so we can remain mobile in any terrain in our beast form.
As a complete flip from the previous builds, we’re only dipping our toes into barbarian for a single barbarian class level with the rest going towards warlock levels as our core class. You’ll likely have seen these elements before, but you’ll want to take the hexblade patron along with the pact of the blade for a full martial warlock strategy.
We’re essentially just taking a level of barbarian for rage to solve one of the biggest blade pact strategies which is survivability. Resistance to physical damage keeps you swinging a heck of a lot longer than a full warlock build.
The tradeoff here is the lack of casting in combat. I recommend taking eldritch smite here so that we can just convert those spell slots into straight damage. Ultimately though this idea just sticks to the tried-and-true hexblade strategy, just make sure to pick the spells and invocations we previously discussed so that you aren’t losing utility in rage.
This one is a bit out there and maybe a bit inefficient but man it is fun. The core of this strategy revolves around the genie warlock patron and their bottled respite ability. Essentially, you’re a literal genie in a bottle and you can disappear inside it as an action. While you’re in there you can hear what’s going on outside, but you’re otherwise in a pocket dimension. The trick here is that while it normally takes a bonus action to leave the bottle, you also leave automatically if the bottle is destroyed. And don’t worry, our vessel just takes an hour-long ritual to replace at no cost.
What we want to do is choose a “vessel” that is particularly fragile, like a glass bottle, and then we can strap it to an arrow and have our allies fire “us” at the enemy like an explosive device with a barbarian inside! Note that if your DM hates fun they might put a stop to this, but rules as written even if they impose disadvantage for the bottle being attached to the arrow you should still be able to fire and smash the bottle wherever you’d like within a longbow’s mighty (600 ft!) extended range. Worst case scenario your vessel can still get lobbed like a grenade.
Ok, so we’ve turned ourselves into a projectile, now what? First, we can’t cast spells without our vessel, so all our spell slots should be used on buffs that last without concentration like mirror image or armor of agathys.
Beyond that we can make being near us lethal in a couple ways. Firstly, we can take the path of the storm herald and choose the desert option. That deals a few points of additional damage to everybody within 10 feet of us on the turn we rage and, on every rage turn as a bonus action. Next, we take the cloak of flies invocation which has a very similar but shorter range effect for bonus poison damage on everybody near us equal to our Charisma modifier.
We’re also chopping people up a bit better thanks to genie’s wrath that essentially adds extra rage damage equal to our proficiency once per turn. And once we get up to 6 warlock levels, we snag an elemental damage resistance and a flying speed!
To make this insane barbarian projectile work I recommend a split of 14 barbarian levels / 6 warlock levels. Is this a mathematically efficient build for damage output at its effective level? No. Is this a fun way to turn yourself into a rage bomb? Absolutely.
Click here to see our our full write up on the Barbarian 5e
Need a New Dice Set? Check out our DND Dice here. They are perfect for every gamer as a gift or just treating yourself!
Thinking about other classes? Check out our giant list of D&D 5e Tools and Tips here.
New to find a D&D Group? Check out our guide on How to Find a D&D Group.
Want to wield two swords like Drizzt? Check out our Two Weapon Fighting 5e Guide!
Want to play a classic mythological creature? Or one from Theros? Check out our minotaur 5e guide
Want to play a proud horse person? Check out our Centaur 5e Guide.
]]>The bard is an artisan of magic, knowledgeable and witty musicians and warriors capable of lethal arts. Paladins are champions of holy power, heralds of their faith and smiters of the unrighteous through divine favor and martial prowess. Put them together and we get a divine chorus leader who inspires their supporting singers while triumphantly smiting the wicked. Grab your songbook and put on some heavy armor as we go through everything you need to know.
Want to grow your dice hoard? Check out our dice subscription!
Bards and paladins use Charisma as their spellcasting ability, both classes care about buffing up their allies and depending what direction you want to take the build both classes care about dishing out damage. Bards are normally stuck with light or at best medium armor with strict combat limitations, by starting with paladin levels we can take heavy armor and shields from the start, and we have full access to martial weapons. We can also feed our bard spell slots into those sweet divine smites. What we can end up with is a powerful party leader, able to tank hits, heal themselves and others, do devastating damage with each melee attack, and all while seriously buffing any of our nearby allies. And since you’re Charisma based, you can still even serve as the face of the party. The combination works with either bard or paladin as a primary class or secondary class and feels stronger than purely taking levels in either original class. DND Paladin levels make up for the deficiencies in melee combat for bards, especially since you can add smites to your melee weapon strikes, and the bard levels grant spell slots and far more options in combat for paladins.
So, if this build can do everything, why doesn’t everybody do it? Well, the mighty paladin is already a partial caster with slower than normal spell progression, which means any multi-classing is going to slow us down considerably with our paladin spellcasting. With most of our builds you'll be waiting all the way until tier three before you can cast 4th level spells or 5th level spells. But if we plan on mostly smiting with those spell slots anyway, it’s less of an issue. From the bard’s side their key feature bardic performance only scales with bard levels, not character levels, that means our bardic inspirations are going to use a much lower die than a full bard of the same level.
And as with all multiclassed characters, you're forgoing later single-class character features like the 20th level capstones and 9th level spells for each class by mixing them together even if it's only a level dip. Level 20th features are rarely reached anyway though, so it likely won't cost you in the long run.
This isn’t a situation where we’re going to be aiming for one specific combination, rather the build works off the bat and builds up with more features as you progress. You can treat either as your primary class or secondary class with good results either way. We have some later features we want to use but the multi-class “kicks in” at as early as 2nd level with just one level in each class.
This multiclass build is loose on leveling order, but it’s very important that your first level should be paladin. We only gain heavy armor proficiency if our first level is in paladin not just by taking a single level, otherwise we’ll have to spend a feat to get it. We gain an extra skill proficiency anyway when we multiclass into bard, so we don’t lose out on much of anything and gain a ton of value taking paladin first instead of going bard to paladin, even if you want bard as a primary class.
While every original class feature has some utility, there are a few key features we’re “going for” when putting together a Bard/Paladin.
While you can build a Dexterity based bard/paladin, I really recommend sticking with Strength as your main physical ability since we can take advantage of heavy armor and don’t need to rely on Dexterity for AC. For most bard/paladins you’ll be doing basically the same spread of ability scores that you’d want for a paladin with a bit of emphasis on Charisma. You want your Strength and Charisma as high as possible (minimum 16) with Constitution as your 3rd-highest ability score. There's a feat we'll talk about in a moment you may need to prioritize, but beyond that all your ability score improvements should be spent on Strength or Charisma. Remember that your charisma modifier sets your paladin spell save dc/bard spell save dc . Your base spell save DC is 8- your profiencieny bonus + your charisma modifier.
Dexterity, Intelligence, and Wisdom can all be dump stats for you.
While you could technically do any of the normal martial/style feats with reasonable results, in my mind there’s one feat that should be on your radar as a bard/paladin and that’s War Caster. I recommend picking this up at 4th level with one of your early ability score increases, especially if you're going with the support plan.
War caster has several nifty benefits, each of which culminates to make martial/spellcasting function properly. All together you get the following extra features:
Now paladins can cast all their spells through their holy symbol that only needs to be displayed and doesn’t require a free hand. Bard spells though need to be cast through a musical instrument which does normally require a free hand. War caster not only lets us cast all our spells with our hands full, it also lets us lash out with cantrips as attacks of opportunity.
NOTE that you can also get around this issue by simply taking the college of swords bard archetype. At 3rd level as a sword bard, you gain the ability to cast your bard spells through your weapon, neatly solving the problem right there.
When you multiclass two different spellcasting classes, things can get weird as you determine your spell slots by combining your class levels.
Your spells known stay completely separate, so if you have 3 levels in paladin and 5 levels of bard, you’ll know the same number of paladin spells as a 3rd level paladin, and the same number of bard spells as a 5th level bard.
Where it gets funky is the spell slots. Rather than keeping spell slot progression of your two base classes, you instead combine them both into “multiclass spellcasting”. Multiclass spellcasters use their own special table (really just a generic version of what most full spellcasters already have) and they calculate your “level” on that table using the levels of your base classes. The “full casters” count as a full level, while the “half casters” count has half levels.
For our bard/paladins, this means that we count every bard level as a full level on the multiclass spellcaster table, but our paladin levels only count as halves. For example if your bard/paladin has 2 levels of paladin and 3 levels of bard, they’d count as a 4th level spellcaster on the table. Note also that this means there’s no difference between a “paladin spell slot” or a “bard spell slot”, you know the spells that you know and can apply the spell slots to spells from either class. It also means that the “correct” number of paladin levels is always going to be even, as odd paladin levels lose out on spell slots.
Level |
1st |
2nd |
3rd |
4th |
5th |
6th |
7th |
8th |
9th |
1st |
2 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
2nd |
3 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
3rd |
4 |
2 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
4th |
4 |
3 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
5th |
4 |
3 |
2 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
6th |
4 |
3 |
3 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
7th |
4 |
3 |
3 |
1 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
8th |
4 |
3 |
3 |
2 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
9th |
4 |
3 |
3 |
3 |
1 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
10th |
4 |
3 |
3 |
3 |
2 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
11th |
4 |
3 |
3 |
3 |
2 |
1 |
- |
- |
- |
12th |
4 |
3 |
3 |
3 |
2 |
1 |
- |
- |
- |
13th |
4 |
3 |
3 |
3 |
2 |
1 |
1 |
- |
- |
14th |
4 |
3 |
3 |
3 |
2 |
1 |
1 |
- |
- |
15th |
4 |
3 |
3 |
3 |
2 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
- |
16th |
4 |
3 |
3 |
3 |
2 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
- |
17th |
4 |
3 |
3 |
3 |
2 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
18th |
4 |
3 |
3 |
3 |
3 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
19th |
4 |
3 |
3 |
3 |
3 |
2 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
20th |
4 |
3 |
3 |
3 |
3 |
2 |
2 |
1 |
1 |
Both of these classes mesh fairly well and there aren’t many wrong ways to put it together so long as you keep a hand free for your musical instrument (or take warcaster or college of swords) and make sure to go for even paladin levels so you don’t lose out on spell slots. There are a couple even more synergistic builds we can go for. One that focuses on DPS and tanking, and one that focuses on support.
For this build we’re going to essentially play like a typical martial character paladin but we’re going to use our bard levels for buffs and extra spell slots to spend into our smites. We're going to try and grow that basic attack damage with as much potential damage as possible. Ultimately this will come together quite a bit like the more traditional sorcadin builds for maximizing combat potential which you can find here.
We want to start by taking 2 levels of paladin to gain access to divine smite and all our armor and weapon proficiencies. For our fighting style we want to go with defense, because we want both defense and dueling, and defense isn’t an option from our bard features. Next, we want to take 5 levels of bard which will pick up a ton of spell slots along with a font of inspiration boosted bardic inspiration. We specifically want to take the college of swords as our bard archetype here and take dueling for our bonus fighting style. Once we hit 5 bard levels, the rest of our levels go into paladin, giving us a final build split of 5 bard/15 paladin. For our paladin archetype, it’s a bit more flexible with several options but I find the oath of vengeance fits best here for a pure DPS strategy.
As for equipment, we want a one-handed weapon like a longsword, and we can ditch the medium armor for a shield and heavy armor. And thanks to the college of swords, we can still cast all our bard and paladin spells through our sword without having to worry about keeping a hand free.
Now let’s put all this together for an example at 8th level (5 bard/3 paladin) assuming at least a +3 in Strength and Charisma. To start with we should be rocking 21 AC due to plate armor, a shield, and the protection fighting style. Next, when we pick out our target, we can use our vow of enmity as a bonus action to gain advantage on all our attacks against a specific target. Now with our attack we can not only use a 3rd level smite by using a bard spell, but we can also make it a defensive flourish using a bardic inspiration die.
All together this melee attack has advantage and will deal our weapon damage with a +2 bonus due to the dueling fighting style (1d8 + 5), the 3rd level smite (4d8) and the damage from the flourish (1d8). We can also get some extra attack damage from spells on following turns using hunter’s mark. Hunter's mark lets us gain additional damage as a bonus action (an archetype spell for oath of vengeance for another d6) so long as we keep hitting the same target. All together our attack at level 8 is made with advantage for 36 damage (1d6 + 6d8 + 5) every turn. AND because of defensive flourish, we also get to add that bardic inspiration die as a massive boost to our AC until our next turn, meaning every turn our AC will effectively be somewhere between 22 and 29!
Thanks to font of inspiration getting our bardic inspirations back on a short rest, we can afford to use them for basically every attack, and while this damage output will decline as you run through your spell slots you still have far more of them to work with than a pure paladin and the build really elevates the playstyle with ridiculous amounts of damage. Even a smite using just 1st-level slots (which you'll have plenty of) is a serious threat.
It's a rough battlefield and somebody has to keep those squishy casters safe! For this build we’re going to try and keep our allies buffed and healthy with as much support as we can possibly do as the ultimate support class. Of the two multiclass paladin bard builds this one goes for more of a bard route than a paladin route but one that can still tank hits and dish out damage while providing all their buffs.
We want to start by taking 2 levels of paladin to gain access to divine smite and all our armor and weapon proficiencies. For our fighting style we want the newer interception style that lets us use our reaction to reduce hits on our allies by 1d10 + proficiency bonus. We want this over the similar protection because protection requires you wield a shield as opposed to interception that requires a shield or martial weapon. Next, we want to take 5 levels of bard and we want to select the college of glamor. The college of glamor gets us the ability mantle of inspiration which lets us grant our whole party temporary hit points at the cost of a bardic inspiration die. Next we take 5 more paladin levels taking the redemption paladin subclass. That gets us to 7 total paladin levels for aura of protection and oath of redemption with its 7th level feature aura of the guardian. After that we can spend the rest of our levels on bard for more spell slots, giving us a final character level split of 13 bard/7 paladin.
As for equipment, we want a one-handed weapon like a longsword, our bardic instrument in another hand, and because of or paladin proficiencies we can take heavy armor instead of medium armor. This’ll change however once you hit an ability score increase (ASI) and take the war caster feat. War caster will among other things let us cast spells through our sword which lets us use that free hand for a shield instead.
Now let’s put all this together for an example at 12th level (5 bard/7 paladin) assuming at least a +3 in Strength and Charisma. Assuming we have a shield now we should have a solid 20 AC with plate armor and a shield. In combat we now become the full party protector. Using our bardic performances, we can make sure our entire party has 5 temporary hit points essentially all the time. Whenever those hit points get knocked off, we can quickly reup them. Next, between aura of protection and aura of the guardian we provide huge buffs just for being near us. Aura of protection grants a bonus to ALL saving throws to us and any ally within 10 feet equal to our Charisma modifier. Aura of the guardian lets us straight up take a hit for an ally, taking all the damage if we choose to. Between aura of the guardian and interception we can prevent small hits and take big hits, keeping our party safe in bloody battlefield situations.
Beyond the buffs we spend all our bard spells either for smiting or healing ourselves after we take hard hits. You essentially get to tank for the whole party, all while still dishing out the damage!
Your base spell save DC is 8- your profiencieny bonus + your charisma modifier.
]]>