Wizard Subclasses - Tasha's

 Holy crap. We've made it through all thirteen classes in 5th Edition D&D. Here, at the end, we get the sole brand-new subclass for Wizards to come out of Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. As we've seen with Wizards, there's a tendency for the level 14 capstone to be the real jaw-dropper, but the more powerful subclasses have some good features early on and in the middle levels.

I do still think that the primary appeal of being a Wizard is just getting access to the largest, most versatile spell list in the game. But some subclasses will bring a lot of extra juice to the table.

The Wizard's spellbook is a unique feature that kind of blends the prepared spells of divine casters as well as druids and artificers with the learned spells of everyone else. It introduces a new sort of minigame - finding and recording spells, which means a DM can have a fair amount of control over how much versatility a Wizard gets. While magic items like weapons, armor, or other things can be a big prize, having a Wizard in your party means that you can potentially reward players just by allowing them to discover a spellbook with unusual or powerful spells.

Order of Scribes:

So, for those of you who like the notion of a Wizard being someone who spends any spare time they have in the library, this subclass puts your focus directly on the spellbook. There are some amazing quality-of-life features here, and I think some pretty powerful abilities. Let's dig in.

At 2nd level, you get Wizardly Quill. As a bonus action, you can magically create a Tiny quill in your free hand. The quill does not require ink, and will produce ink of a color of your choice on whatever writing surface you use.

Additionally, the time you must spend copying a spell into your spellbook becomes 2 minutes per spell level if you use the quill for the transcription. To be clear, this reduces the time you spend copying spells by a factor of 60. If your 18th-level Wizard finds a book with Invulnerability in it, you would normally have to spend 18 hours copying that. Now, however, it takes just 18 minutes - less than a third of a short rest. While the quill does produce ink, I don't think this negates the gold cost of copying the spell (as you need other components to experiment with the spell and possibly fancy paper to add to your spellbook.) Though if your DM allows it, this could allow you to avoid a significant gold sink (which is actually why I think it's probably not the case.)

You can also wave the feather of the quill over any text your write with it as a bonus action to erase it if you're within 5 feet of the text.

So you always have something to write with, which is super convenient.

Also at 2nd level, you get Awakened Spellbook. Your spellbook has become sentient, and you gain a few benefits while holding it.

First, you can use the book as a spellcasting focus for wizard spells (which is just kind of cool).

Also, if you cast a Wizard spell with a spell slot, you can replace it with the damage type of another spell in your spellbook of the level of slot that you expended. So, for instance, if you have Fireball and Lightning Bolt in your spellbook, you can turn that into Lightning Ball or Fire Bolt (but... not the cantrip. You get what I mean.) If you upcast Lightning Bolt to 5th level and have Cone of Cold in your book, you can make it Cold Bolt. If you're in a campaign that has any creatures with damage immunities, this can be a great way to get around them. Fighting a red dragon? Swap out your fire damage for other kinds.

Additionally, once per long rest, you can cast a spell as a ritual without taking any extra time. So, say you need to cast Feign Death right now, but can't spare the spell slot, or you would really like to get that Leomund's Tiny Hut up as soon as you can while the Fighter and the Barbarian are holding off the horde of zombies at the door, this will let you do that. (I mean, the Hut still takes a minute, but ten rounds is way better than 110 rounds.)

The last, and maybe best feature here is that you can replace your spellbook using your Wizardly quill by writing arcane sigils into a blank book or a magical spellbook (such as a +1 Arcane Grimoire!) to which you're attuned. At the end of the rest, the spellbook's consciousness is summoned into the new book, instantly copying all your spells into the new book. The spells then vanish from your previous book. You can do this during a short or long rest, finishing at the end of it.

Perhaps the worst nightmare for a wizard is that all the spells they've spent their career copying spells into a spellbook only for some thief or disaster to take it from them. But now, you can just make a new one instantly, downloading it onto a new hard drive, as it were.

One thing I do wonder about is if you can have a consciousness in two separate books. I guess you don't really need it. The feature doesn't say anything about what happens if your old book is destroyed - do your copied spells still exist within the "save state" of a destroyed spellbook? I think I'd rule that it's a kind of disconnected consciousness that retains a memory of the spells, and so it'd bring them with it. Probably.

At 6th level (yeah, that was all level 2) you get Manifest Mind. As a bonus action while you have your book on you, you can cause the mind within to manifest as a Tiny spectral object, which hovers in a space of your choice within 60 feet of you. The mind is intangible and doesn't occupy its space, and sheds dim light in a 10-foot radius. You can choose its appearance.

While it's manifested, it can see and hear, with darkvision out to 60 feet. It can telepathically share what it sees and hears with you, no action required.

When you cast a Wizard spell on your turn, you can cast it as if you were in the Mind's space instead of your own, using its senses, though only a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus per long rest.

As a bonus action, you can cause the Mind to hover 30 feet to an unoccupied space that you or it can see. It can pass through creatures but not objects.

If the Mind is ever more than 300 feet away from you or if someone casts Dispel Magic, or if your Awakened Spellbook is destroyed, or if you die, the manifested mind vanishes. You can also dismiss it as a bonus action.

You can conjure this mind once for free per long rest, or you can spend a spell slot of any level to conjure it again.

So basically, this is really great. While this thing is not going to be stealthy at all (it literally glows,) it can still be used to scout out locations and potentially fry bad guys who are lying in wait for you. Given that it's intangible, even if your foes spot it, they can only deal with it if they have dispel magic or can attack you. And it's very cheap to get it back up and running.

On top of this, I think you can give the mind a lot of personality with some creativity. The suggestions the entry gives are that it could look like a ghostly tome, a cascade of text, or a scholar from the past. I'm going to suggest two shoutouts for kids who grew up in the 90s, citing the books from the Pagemaster, and also Ghostwriter from the PBS show, which appeared as a kind of weird little dot. I feel like you can go super whimsical on this one.

At level 10, you get Master Scrivener. When you finish a long rest, you can touch your Wizardly Quill to a blank piece of paper or parchment and copy a spell from your Awakened Spellbook onto the scroll (the book must be within 5 feet of you when you do this, yadda yadda yadda.) The spell must be of 1st or 2nd level and have a casting time of 1 action. When in the scroll, the power of the spell is enhanced, counting as one level higher than normal. You can then cast the spell from the scroll by reading it as an action. The spell is illegible to anyone else, and once used, the spell vanishes from the scroll when you cast it or when you finish a long rest.

Also, you can craft spell scrolls using half the gold and time if you use your Wizardly Quill (weirdly the DMG doesn't actually seem to provide rules on crafting them, though Xanthar's does, on page 133.)

Breaking these two down:

The limit to 1st and 2nd level spells is a significant one, but on the other hand, getting a free 3rd level Invisibility once a day is pretty decent (at 3rd level you can get two people with it.) This is mostly just a little extra utility that won't expend spell slots. Also, I believe that when you cast a spell through a scroll, you won't need to provide material components, so you could get off a 2nd level (not that it scales) Protection from Evil and Good without needing a vial of holy water.

As for crafting spell scrolls - Spell Scrolls always suffer a bit from the eternal consumable problem - players never want to use up their consumables. They're either not a powerful enough effect, or they're so powerful that they're sure they'll want to use them later. How many Red Essences did you finish your run of Super Mario RPG with? But if you have the gold and the time, crafting a huge number of spell scrolls can be super useful in a long dungeon. Resource management is one of the only ways for a DM to challenge higher-level players, and this is a strategy you can take to alleviate some of the pressure. While it'll take a week and 500 gold to get just two Fireball scrolls (normally you'd only get one,) that could be a real lifesaver - but again, will require a campaign with some downtime.

Finally, at level 14, you get One with the Word. While your Awakened Spellbook is on your person, you have advantage on all Intelligence (Arcana) checks (the book is effectively using the help action.)

Additionally, if you take damage while your spellbook's mind is manifested, you can prevent all of that damage to you by using your reaction to dismiss the mind. You then roll 3d6, and the spellbook temporarily loses spells of your choice that have a combined level equal to that roll or higher. If there are not enough spells in the book to cover this, you drop to 0 hit points (and I just realized that that would happen even if you didn't take enough damage to go to 0!)

Until you finish 1d6 long rests, you are incapable of casting the lost spells, even if you find them on scrolls or in another spellbook. Once you finish the the requisite number of rests, they reappear in your spellbook and you can cast them as normal.

Once you use this reaction, you cannot do so again until you finish a long rest.

This is the big red emergency button. This is what you do when the foe hits you with a Finger of Death that will kill you, or a Disintegrate. This is your "if I don't do something, I'm dead" button. It's a hefty price to pay (though at this level you can hopefully get your 3-18 spell levels using weird utility spells like Nystul's Magic Aura, Simulacrum, Mirage Arcane, and such - things you can definitely live for a few days without casting). But also, this does not just drop you to 1 hit point. It fully prevents the damage. If you fall off a cliff hundreds of feet, you can use this to survive damage that would have flattened a raging barbarian. Technically, if a star exploding counted as a single instance of damage, you could survive it with this.

And that is the kind of over-the-top feature I want to see in a subclass capstone feature.

So, the overview the Order of Scribes. I'll confess that when I first read this one back when Tasha's came out, I was kind of unimpressed. But the massive quality-of-life features here, along with some really powerful abilities (Manifest Mind is really amazing for safely peeking around corners, for example,) I actually find myself really interested in playing one of these.

Wizards have a whole lot of options, and I actually think that there are only a handful of "bad" choices. It's a solid and good class, and there's a reason it's so popular. And while I think that Divination probably gets a little extra exposure thanks to the power of Portent, you've got a lot of great possibilities with plenty of others.

And so we have it. A review of... holy crap, 114 subclasses (actually 115 - I did the Way of the Ascendant Dragon. Guess I should go back and do the Drakewarden Ranger.)

It has been really interesting to see how these subclass options can complement a class' capabilities, but also how they can sometimes create an entirely different style of gameplay. You can see how the design philosophies have gotten bolder over time, generally speaking, though plenty of PHB subclasses still hold up (perhaps by carving out really big design space that other subclasses wish they could tap into.)

Of course, we already know about two new subclasses coming in Fizban's Treasury of Dragons, and one can assume that there will be more to come later.

It's been fun to walk through all of these and do a comprehensive review. It also certainly reminds me of the fact that I will never be able to play every character concept that I have. Oh well.