Tasha's In-Hand!

 Well, that's probably the last time I'll be leaving my home other than to get groceries for a while, given the plague.

But I now have my special limited edition copy of Tasha's Cauldron of Everything! (Thankfully, my FLGS is very strict about masks and they have a giant sheet of plastic between the cashiers and the customers, so I think it was a relatively safe sojourn - less so the convenience store I hit up later where people couldn't seem to remember that the mask is also supposed to go over your nose!)

But depressingly 2020-relevant rants aside, we have our new major rules expansion for 5th Edition!

Much like Xanathar's Guide to Everything, I think the flagship feature here will be the new subclasses. Every class gets at least one brand-new one - even the Artificer - in addition to a few setting-agnostic reprints of subclasses found in SCAG, Ravnica, and Theros. Yes, we see a Gnome Spore Druid and a Dragonborn Order Cleric, as well as a Tiefling Glory Paladin and a Drow Eloquence Bard - I think they deliberately chose races that don't show up in those setting to show how things have changed (though the Tiefling's lion-skin "armor" is a clever nod to the Greek myths that inspired Theros.)

Of course, we also need to note that the Artificer has become a setting-agnostic class officially, which really welcomes them fully into the 5th Edition fold.

The next feature of the book that really drew my attention was the new magic items they've introduced. For one thing, there are a ton of class-specific spell foci - I always felt that casters generally had fewer exciting options until you got into the really insane stuff at high levels, but here we have things like planar shards for Sorcerers that each have a kind of theme to them, magic spellbooks for Wizards that are themed around the various schools of magic, as well as a couple of Rod-of-the-Pact-Keeper scaling items that can be used by particular classes - like +1, +2, and +3 variants on the All-Purpose Tool for Artificers, which can turn into any type of tool as an action, buffs your spell attack and spell save DC, and can also grant you access to any cantrip for up to 8 hours.

Essentially, there are way more things that DMs can feel pretty safe tossing to players without unbalancing the game that nevertheless feel tailor-made for the player character.

In addition, (and this is the really mind-blowing part) are the artifact-level magic items. This includes Mother Luba's Tarokka Deck, the Demonomicon of Iggwilv, and the Servant of Leuk-o - the last of which is a gods-damned mech that your party can pilot. Each of these has a mind-blowing feature that has a hell of a downside.

For example, the Servant of Leuk-o can be set to self-destruct, but it requires two creatures that are attuned to it to spend three turns putting the sequence into action, during which the mech tries to charm them into fighting each other instead, and then when their third action is completed, at the end of that turn, the mech explodes, dealing an average of 262 damage (a mix of force, lightning, and thunder) in a 100-ft radius and utterly destroying anyone inside - so naturally, I've been trying to figure out how one could game it so that the pilots could survive - my best option is a Sorcerer uses metamagic for a quickened Dimension Door right after the last action is made, grabbing their co-pilot and getting to a safe distance right as the thing blows. The best part is that the self-destruct doesn't actually permanently destroy it - the parts of the mech rain down 2d6 days later.

So I could totally see an early part of a campaign having the party witness a giant mech arm (the whole mech is huge in size) land on some village where they're questing, and they have to find the pieces to build it and then maybe deal with whatever threat caused the previous users to self-destruct it.

What makes these artifacts so cool is that they seem to come with a story attached to them, and there's incredible power mixed with serious downsides.

I need to do a more thorough read of the Group Patron chapter, though I've found my campaigns often kind of develop something akin to that anyway. Likewise, I'm curious about Sidekicks, though my current campaign has six or seven regular players, so I don't think they really need any helpful NPCs (a small-party campaign could totally use them, though.)

You're not going to find nearly as many spells in this one as in Xanathar's Guide to Everything, but the array of Conjuration (well, one is Necromancy) spells found within it are really solid, strong, and thankfully consistent - if your Druid keeps conjuring some bizarre mix of woodland creatures, maybe see if you can get them interested in Summon Fey, Summon Beast, or Summon Elemental, which conjures just a single creature, but one that is quite powerful. There's stuff from just about every planar setting here - from Aberrations to Celestials to Fiends to Constructs - that are spread out over, I believe, every spellcasting class (unsurprisingly, Wizards get access to the most - but even half-casters get some.)

The structure of these spells is consistent - there's a stat block that shows how the creature's health, armor, and how many attacks they get all scale with the spell's level, and their attack bonus is just your spell attack bonus, so there's not too much to remember. Each also lets you choose a variation on the summoned spirit - for instance, your Undead Spirit can be Ghostly, Skeletal, or Putrid, with different traits and attacks based on its form (with stuff based on ghosts, skeletons, and ghouls), while its ability scores, armor, saving throws, and other such things remain the same.

There's also an extensive section on magical environments, which I think holds a lot of promise. These are largely sort of loose guidelines, but there are tables to roll on for things to happen in these environments, which can be a place touched by the Far Realm, a Haunted area, or a place overcome with swarms of bugs, etc.

Again, like Xanathar's, the main takeaway from this book is a big expansion of rules. Probably the most directly relevant to most players will be the new subclasses, the artificer, and the new rules options for older classes.

For most classes, this simply includes ways for you to swap out choices you might have made while leveling - maybe you regret picking up a particular cantrip, or now that you've got a super-cool two-handed weapon, you wish you hadn't gone with the duelist fighting style.

Notably, Rangers can take new options that replace Natural Explorer and Favored Enemy, both of which give them more generalized abilities. The Beast Master also gets new ways to have their battle pet, using a standardized stat block and mechanics to more easily get them back if they die (I just think about all the times Vex was hesitant to use Trinket given how important the pet was to her character - though he got a super-epic moment in the Search for Grog one-shot that practically made up for it.)

Barbarians get a couple pure bonuses - gaining an additional skill at 3rd level and the ability to move up to half their speed as part of the bonus action when they rage - which is pretty cool.

Those classes with Fighting Styles get more of them, Warlocks get new Invocations and even a new Pact Boon (The Talisman.) Most of these are just "more stuff to choose from," which is always fun.

There's more to the book, but I think it'll be most interesting to just see how its content is integrated into the overall game. Lots of quality-of-life fixes here, and some really cool concepts. Hey, you want to grow to the size of a giant while you're fighting? Go with the Rune Knight Fighter. Want to be a creepy plague-doctor who can also heal in the midst of handing out pain? Go with the Way of Mercy Monk. Want to be Iron Man? Go with the Armorer Artificer.

It's so great to see all this stuff become official, and I can't wait for my players to unleash this stuff upon my monsters! (Also, I'm totally going to have evil spellcasters use those new spells.)