Continuing in this series, we now know that the 2024PHB will give each class four subclass options, which means that most classes are getting expanded, while Clerics and Wizards will have their options slimmed down. Once again, all existing subclasses from all of 5E will still be available - it's up to players and DMs to decide whether one can play subclasses that don't get updated in the new Player's Handbook, but the intent is to err on the side of letting them.
We covered Wizards in the first of this series of posts, so now we're going to look at the two remaining Mage classes and see what we might do with them.
Not to be too repetitive, I nevertheless want to go over my thoughts and parameters for this discussion. 5E's approach to classes is to try to embody the broadest fantasy archetype tropes, the hope being that any future character concepts will fit within those categories (they tried initially to make the Artificer a type of Wizard, but I think wisely built another class for it when it didn't quite fit).
Subclasses, then, allow them to go in for more specific character tropes - if the classes are as broad as they can be, the subclasses zero in on more specific tropes that fall within that archetype, a sort of sub-archetype. Sometimes these subclasses are defined more along the lines of their mechanics, but they should also have distinctive fantasy identity. Even within subclasses, there needs to be enough flexibility to allow players to make the character their own and to fit it into the setting of the game (while I have a ton of respect for Matt Colville's ideas about D&D, I disagree that character classes should be deeply and specifically linked to the setting, at least in a game like D&D where part of the promise of the rules system is that you can use it to tell stories in your own, original setting).
As another note, in the previous posts (with the exception of the Wizard,) we have looked at classes where we've gotten the first look at their updated, One D&D versions. With this, we step into the unknown.
Given One D&D's conservative approach to this redesign, and WotC's insistence that this is not truly a new edition, or even a 5.5, I will assume that the basic structure of these classes will remain the same. That is to say:
I think we can assume that Sorcerers will remain a full spellcasting class that gets a lot of its uniqueness from the use of Sorcery Points to alter spells via Metamagic. And I think we can assume that Warlocks will remain unconventional full casters with a small number of easily-regained spell slots and a great deal of customization through Eldritch Invocations that allow them to trick out unlimited options like Eldritch Blast and weapon attacks to make them capable of consistently pouring out damage and utility effects even if they can only cast a small number of leveled spells in any given moment.
So, let's look at the classes.
Sorcerer:
The Sorcerer only gets two subclasses in the PHB. Draconic Sorcerers are more straightforward, and while I might argue that the connection to dragons is just a smidge too specific for a PHB subclass (though perfect for a secondary supplement like how the Rune Knight Fighter ties them to Giants), the game is called Dungeons & Dragons, and so I think there's a fair assumption that no matter the setting, dragons have some major role to play in the fantasy world no matter where you're playing.
However, if there's a subclass that I think sees more play than any other, it's Wild Magic. The Wild Magic table is so iconic that there are actually a lot of effects that tend to refer to it even if you don't have one of these Sorcerers in the party.
To take a step back, D&D is rather unusual in distinguishing Sorcerers and Wizards, and the definitions it provides are certainly not universal - in Marvel comics, Doctor Strange is the Sorcerer Supreme, despite the fact that he's 100% a Wizard in D&D terms. The Sorcerer in D&D is someone who has magical powers that are inherent to them - whether through ancestry or because something happened to them. It's even possible that the Sorcerer intentionally did something to themselves to imbue them with this power. I'd even say it's possible that a Sorcerer could have made a pact with some powerful entity to do this to them, which, yes, puts them very, very close to a Warlock's wheelhouse.
Still, ultimately, Sorcery in D&D is basically like having a superpower - and it's more like the X-Men than Doctor Strange. And because I'm using superhero comic books as a reference point, it's clear that there are a massive number of ways that you can conceptualize flavors of Sorcery.
So, perhaps the challenge here is not finding four subclasses, but rather, limiting ourselves to just four that will mark out the creative boundaries of the class.
In point of fact, I actually think that the Runechild subclass from Tal'dorei Campaign Setting Reborn works quite well to be a "standard" Sorcerer subclass, but that's from a 3rd party company, so that's right out.
Instead, I expect the Draconic Bloodline subclass will likely be presented as the "default" subclass when we get the playtest document, in part because the Wild Magic table is very cumbersome, but also because, while extremely popular, Wild Magic as a subclass is almost a "joke character" option, built less for power than for chaos at the table.
Make no mistake, though: the Wild Magic Sorcerer will also very much be printed in the 2024PHB.
So, what other space do we have to explore?
As I see it, we've got one subclass that feels like it draws its power from an ancient tradition/heritage/ancestyr, while the other feels very planar in nature - I can imagine reading Wild Magic as being the influence of the Chaotic Neutral plane of Limbo on the rest of the universe. The Clockwork Soul, from Tasha's, gives us its opposite number in a Mechanus-dervied magic.
But I think that we're not just looking for balanced symmetries here. We want to see what Sorcerers can be in a broader, multi-axial sense.
So, if we've got a planar sorcerer and a bloodline sorcerer, what next?
The elements are often tied up with magic, especially the quasi-scientific Arcane branch of magic, and so I think an elemental sorcerer makes a lot of sense. And, wouldn't you know it, we have an elemental sorcerer already in the Storm Sorcerer, which has already been printed twice. I think that's an obvious slam dunk (I also happen to be running a campaign with two Storm Sorcerers who have very different vibes, and it's a cool subclass without being overpowered - though ask me again when we hit tier 4 and both have hovering fly speeds and full immunity to lightning and thunder damage).
So, if we have a bloodline sorcerer, a planar sorcerer, and an elemental sorcerer, what does that leave us?
My initial instinct is to go dark with the Shadow Sorcerer - the token "creepy" sorcerer, but I think we cover that a lot with Necromancy Wizards and basically most Warlocks (we'll take a look at them next, of course). Shadow Sorcery would be a reasonable option, and I honestly don't put its chances far behind what I'm actually going to propose, but we're going in another direction.
Now, if you've been reading this blog regularly, you'll know of my obsession with the game Control, and its broader genre of New Weird. But there's a kind of broader trope in New Weird, Cosmic Horror, but also Stephen King-style horror, including Stranger Things, where altering the brain through scientific experiments can unlock powers that they don't fully understand, but seem to place the primacy of mind over reality. That means Psionics, and the Psionic Sorcerer is the Aberrant Mind.
The biggest mark against this is that the Aberrant Mind is relatively new - it's one of the two most recent officially published sorcerer subclasses (EDIT: forgot about Lunar Sorcery from Dragonlance). And it does also play in that dark space that the Shadow Sorcerer does, as well as being less "pure fantasy" than Shadow.
But I think you could argue that Shadow Sorcery is really a planar sorcerer in the same way that Wild Magic is. The Aberrant Mind carves out a new corner for the Sorcerer to explore (while Aberrations are affiliated with the Far Realm, that place is not precisely a plane, per se, and aberrations are certainly not inherently bound to it). So, while it may be a controversial choice, and a risky bet, I'm going to put my chips down on Aberrant Mind (with perhaps a hedged bet on Shadow Sorcery).
Sorcerer subclass predictions: Draconic, Wild Magic, Storm, Aberrant Mind (or possibly Shadow)
Warlock:
The Warlock is maybe the most successfully flavorful class in all of D&D. It oozes personality, and it sort of comes with an inherent backstory and even an inherent NPC to build into the game's story.
A Warlock's subclass merely represents their patron, and so our options are pretty much any kind of creature that is powerful enough to lend magical power to someone that strikes a bargain with them.
I'll say right now that I already know what my four are without having to think about it much.
But let me walk you through it.
The 2014PHB options for the Warlock are the Fiend, the Archfey, and the Great Old One. All of these are, I think, perfect and wonderfully illustrative of the overall vibe of the Warlock.
The Fiend is, of course, the classic - the dangerous creature who offers power in an effort to corrupt. Media is saturated with people who have made deals with the devil, or other demonic entities, with Faust as the trope codifier, but also with plenty of heroic figures who have got one over their dangerous patrons, like John Constantine, who made deals with three different demons to ensure that no two wanted the other to actually be able to claim his soul (Liliana Vess, from MTG, tried to pull that off but Nicol Bolas, the elder dragon who brokered the deal, was a step ahead of her). The fiend is so much the "classic" warlock archetype that I can only imagine this will be presented as the default subclass, and well it should be.
The Archfey is another absolute classic banger of a patron, and we have tons of literary precedent - this could be anything from a benevolent fairy godmother to something a lot more sinister like a coven of hags or like The Man with the Thistle Down Hair from the excellent Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, who is not so much malevolent as just utterly different in his moral and ethical worldview to the point that he becomes an utter menace, and is worst to the people he does his biggest kindnesses to.
The Great Old One is a less personable patron, but perhaps no better patron represents the ways in which the price of making a pact with a patron might not actually be anything the patron demands, but merely the danger of dealing with entities so much larger and more powerful than oneself. Of all the warlocks, I can see this as the most "scholarly" of the subclasses, but it doesn't have to be this way - it's up to the player writing their backstory to see how personal the relationship is (again, to reference Control, I think Jesse Faden is basically a Pact of the Blade Great Old One Warlock with The Board as her patron and the Service Weapon as her pact weapon).
So, to put it simply: the 2014PHB options are all great and should see revisions and reprinting.
That leaves the question of what the fourth subclass should be.
So, first off, let's talk tone. Of our existing subclasses, we're skewing pretty dark - Fiends and Great Old Ones sort of can't help but have a sinister tone (I'd argue that you can play a Great Old One as perhaps not so much malevolent as just weird, but there's a definite feeling of danger even if it lacks malicious intent). And Archfeys, while they can be happy and bright and friendly, are also just as capable of being evil, dark, and scary, whether with the sort of obviously sinister forms of Hags and the like, or just the capricious archfeys in the vein of Jareth the Goblin King from Labyrinth (Jareth is definitely canonical in any D&D campaign I run if players want him to be).
So, you could argue that we need a more benevolent or at least morally balanced patron. In the former case, the Celestial makes a lot of sense, while in the latter, the Genie can play in a lot of moral positions, and its evil typically not going to be the sort of soul-endangering style so much as just being some magical tyrant.
These options would certainly expand the conceptual design space for the Warlock, showing that you don't have to go dark and sinister to play in the class. Much as I talked about how Paladins shouldn't all have to have a default alignment of Lawful Good, Warlocks should also have an opportunity to not be a sinister, "dark spellcaster."
But I'm not going to go with either of those options.
We also need to address the elephant in the room, which is the Hexblade.
The Hexblade is a great, powerful subclass that really empowers a Warlock to play differently than it can with other subclasses. But I actually think it's a failure of design, or rather, in one aspect it's a failure in design while in another, it's a jarring band-aid over a flaw in the original Warlock design that I hope to see addressed in the One D&D version.
First, let's look at why I think the Hexblade fails in design on its own: The lore of the Hexblade is that it's supposed to represent a Warlock who has made a pact with a sentient magical weapon like Blackrazor or the Sword of Kas. But I don't think I've ever seen anyone actually play it that way. Fjord in Critical Role's 2nd campaign has a pact with Uka'toa, an powerful leviathan that is imprisoned beneath the ocean of Exandria, and the pact is sealed through his receipt of a magical falchion. In Dimension 20's The Unsleeping City, Sophia multiclasses into Hexblade Warlock by making a deal with the La Gran Gata, essentially the spirit of all bodega cats in New York City.
In both cases, the actual patron here is not a weapon (Sophia doesn't even really use a weapon, given that her main class is Monk). Uka'toa is very clearly a Great Old One, or even more accurately, a Fathomless patron (the Fathomless patron didn't exist when that campaign began).
Instead, basically every time I come across a Hexblade Warlock, what they're really trying to play is a Warlock who gets to act as a melee combatant. And literally, what it means to get that capability from a patron is what the Pact of the Blade option is meant to represent.
The Hexblade also feels a little garbled in terms of flavor. Most of its features are built around using its weapon, but then you have the ability to draw forth a Specter from a slain humanoid enemy, which feels like a kind of awkward nod to the way that the design of the Hexblade started with a "Raven Queen" patron subclass.
So, to sum it up, I don't think the Hexblade itself is popular as a patron - it's just that the mechanics of the subclass are popular.
But the solution is easy: just take the things that help make a Hexblade Warlock a capable melee combatant and fold them into the Pact of the Blade. If that makes Pact of the Blade a little too powerful, maybe consider bolstering the other ones. Namely, this would mean giving armor training in medium armor and shields, and then letting you use Charisma for your attacks with your Pact Weapon. Now, your Warlock can have a decent AC and can be as good with weapons as they are with spells, and you no longer have to pick this very wonky flavor background that you're probably just going to reskin anyway.
If we then eliminate the need to play a Hexblade, that still leaves us with a fourth slot.
And here, I think we need to look to iconic creature types and legendary monsters. And is there really any question?
What is the most iconic "big bad" in D&D? What monster is perfectly designed to be a terrifying and potentially recurring villain? It's the Lich. And isn't that the precise kind of creature you would make a sinister deal with?
The Undead Warlock from Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft has a lot of things going for it, not the least of which is that it's mechanically sound without being overpowered, and it covers a patron archetype that feels like it's been sitting there, waiting to be used for years before the book came out (and, yes, we can acknowledge that it sort of already did with the Undying Patron, but WotC clearly felt, and I'd agree with them, that the Undying Patron did not deliver flavorfully on the promise of an Undead patron, and it's good that they reserved the more straightforward name for a much better-designed subclass).
The Undead Patron is, I think, a total no-brainer. Yes, it does continue to put the Warlock in this kind of darker space, leaving only one option to give you a straightforwardly good patron (which can also be flavored in a sinister way,) but I think the strength of the Undead patron as a complement to the existing subclasses just makes far too much sense. So that's my prediction.
Warlock subclass predictions: Fiend, Archfey, Great Old One, Undead.
With that, we've done the Mage classes, which means our last post in this series will cover the Warriors - Barbarians, Fighters, and Monks.
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