Revised Heroes of Krynn UA

 While the cat wasn't ever quite stuck in that bag in the first place (it's hard to misidentify hints coming from something called "Heroes of Krynn" if you know just a little about the Dragonlance setting,) the cat is now completely out of the bag and flying around on a Spelljammer with D&D Direct's confirmation that a Dragonlance product - a kind of hybrid D&D campaign with a war-game component - is going to be coming out some time this year (or, I'd hazard, some time next year).

Now, there's a second version of the "Heroes of Krynn" UA for us to pore over.

Anyway, Jeremy Crawford sat down with Todd Kenreck to talk about this second iteration of the UA. Notably, the Moon Sorcerer is something they feel is good enough to progress in development, so no fear if you liked that and were worried that it didn't show up in this 2.0 showing - the Moon Sorcerer is more or less confirmed at this point.

But, the main thing they were playing with is the backgrounds: Knight of Solamnia and Mage of High Sorcery. Essentially, these backgrounds came with extra, free feats. The new version, however, now establishes that for anyone in this campaign, you'll get a curated list of feats that you get at levels 1 and 4. Essentially, these backgrounds funnel you into certain feat choices, but if you pick any other backgrounds, you won't be left behind power-wise.

It's not the full feat list, but while Knights of Solamnia get the Squire of Solamnia feat at level 1 and Mages of High Sorcery get the Initiate of High Sorcery feat, any other backgrounds get to choose from the following list:

Divinely Favored (found in the UA), Skilled, or Tough.

Divinely Favored gives you a cleric cantrip and both Augury and a 1st level spell from a class list based on the deity that favors you - clerics for good gods, druids for neutral ones, and warlocks for evil ones. You also get to use a holy symbol as a spell focus for these.

So, basically, these are all relatively straightforward feats that don't add too much complexity to the character, and I think are solid level 1 choices.

At level 4, the list expands, granting the following:

Adept of the Black Robes, Adept of the Red Robes, Adept of the White Robes, Alert, Knight of the Crown, Knight of the Rose, Knight of the Sword, Mobile, Sentinel, and Warcaster.

The various Adept and Knight ones are all somewhat complex and I don't really have the time to write them all out here, but obviously these start to get a bit more advanced.

So, regardless of what this means for Dragonlance - other than that characters in this setting will be significantly more powerful - I do sort of wonder about the future of feats in D&D, especially regarding the 2024 5.5/6th Edition that will be coming out.

Most classes only allow a total of 5 ASIs over the course of a character's journey from 1-20. Aside from variant humans and custom lineages, feats are always competing with ASIs, and while I think a lot of the time those feats can be a better choice, it can make character building agonizing.

Looking at Starfinder - the most D&D-like RPG I've read the rulebook for - that game treats feats as a fundamental part of how you build your character. Honestly, I think it maybe overdoes it - and it turns a lot of things that could just be class features into feats (there's no "extra attack" because Starfinder does its action economy a bit differently, but imagine if Extra Attack was a feat that all Barbarians, Fighters, Rangers, Monks, and Paladins automatically got at level 5).

Still, I do sometimes think it would be fun if feats weren't competing as much with ASIs, and I wonder if this might model a way to do that moving forward.

We'll see.