Faction Division and World of Warcraft D&D

 I've been following the WotC-produced "Dungeon Masters" series, which does short (like, less than ten episodes a pop) campaigns with a consistent group of players (including a couple of Baldur's Gate 3 cast members and also someone who is a friend of a friend), basically acting as promotion for the latest D&D book, with a series based in Ravenloft, then one themed around the arcane magic of Arcana Unleashed, and coming up, an Azeroth-based World of Warcraft adventure.

Now, WoW is a game that was built at least initially around a factional divide: the Alliance versus the Horde. While the world of Azeroth is threatened by villains that both Horde and Alliance are equally investing in stopping, the bad blood between these two groups created a perpetual engine of conflict, driving some of the drama and even taking center-stage with the Battle for Azeroth expansion (though that expansion was sort of half-invested in this divide and half in the machinations of the Old God N'zoth).

Starting with 2022's Dragonflight, the barriers between the factions have been loosened and made more permeable, with the resolution of 2018's Battle for Azeroth seeming to establish an enduring peace between the two sides (such that in the current expansion, Midnight, the central capital city is Silvermoon, which is the historical capital of the Blood Elves, a member race/nation of the Horde. The fact that there are still Alliance-aligned High Elves and Void Elves who are essentially the same people as the Blood Elves except for different politics and perhaps a bit of an infusion of different kinds of magic into their physiologies both stirs tension but also gives the Alliance a slightly more reasonable foothold to justify their presence here - something that the Blood Elf NPCs of Silvermoon have very conflicted feelings about).

Generally speaking, I'm a strong advocate of letting players play what they want to play. But I do think it's an interesting and worthwhile session zero discussion to have if you're going to play a Warcraft D&D campaign as to whether you want to make a party that is firmly affiliated with just one faction.

While there are some exceptions - the Pandaren, Dracthyr, Earthen, and Haranir - generally the race (or species, to use D&D's newly preferred term) determines your affiliation. When WoW first came out, the Alliance was Humans, Dwarves, Gnomes, and Night Elves, while the Horde was Orcs, Trolls, Tauren, and Undead (presented in the book as Forsaken, which is the term they use to distinguish themselves from mindless servants of the Lich King in the Scourge).

The first two games only had the Alliance and Horde as factions (actually, in the first game it was more accurately just Humans versus Orcs. While the Orcs had formed their Horde, the kingdom of Stormwind stood alone against them, with the Alliance not actually forming until the Second War, aka the second game). Thus, all conflict in those first two games was primarily through the clashing of these two factions (though I think there were opportunities to have Alliance vs. Alliance and Horde vs. Horde thanks to the traitorous human kingdom Alterac, secretly taken over by the black dragon Deathwing, and I believe the divide between the demon-worshipping forces loyal to Gul'dan in the Horde versus the more independence-minded faction under Warchief Orgrim Doomhammer).

While most of the world has always been available to both sides, there have always been territories where one side is welcome and the other is not, especially the major cities, where powerful elite NPCs are there to protect it, and player characters get flagged as valid targets for PvP even if you're on a non-PvP server (or, in more recent years, simply not in "war mode.")

Again, even though both factions are generally heroic (though I do feel that the Horde seems to slip into villainy a little easier) through much of the game's history, there has been a simmering hostility when there isn't outright warfare breaking out between them.

In a lot of ways, though, I think that the exciting possibility of a WoW D&D campaign would be to be able to do the things you can't usually do in WoW. That could as simple as having an Orc Druid (which is honestly probably the best way to realize the more spellcasting-focused Shaman specializations) but it could also mean having the party need to advocate for allowing their Forsaken party member to be allowed to enter Stormwind without being immediately cut down.

The faction conflict could be an interesting source of drama and tension within a party - rather than just assuming a total incompatibility, perhaps lean into the idea that we do, in fact, need to band together to face graver threats.

To be clear, NPCs have often and frequently reached across the factional divide. In Cataclysm, we were introduced to a pair of young paladins, Tarenar Sunstrike and Gidwin Goldbraids, a Blood Elf and Dwarf, who traveled the Plaguelands hoping to join the Argent Crusade (a faction-neutral force dedicated to protecting the world from the Scourge). Or we have Tehd and Marius, a Forsaken Warlock and Night Elf Demon Hunter who go around looking for powerful demons to slay.

The freedom, I think, of running a WoW-based D&D game is that you can really mix things up. Sentinel Hill is the central "town" of the rural realm of Westfall, basically the Kansas of the kingdom of Stormwind, and is basically the second zone that human players are expected to go in the natural quest flow from the human starting area - back in the day, you'd head there around level 10 (remember that WoW originally had a max level of 60, so 10 was really just getting started - I'd say it's basically the equivalent of level 3 in D&D. You started to get talent points/pick your specialization at 10, much as in D&D you get your subclass at level 3). 

But there's nothing saying you can't have an adventure set in Westfall that is far higher-stakes than anything that we've seen in the zone before (ok, to be fair, during the Legion pre-launch event in 2016, there was a full-scale demon invasion, a tier 4 challenge if ever I heard of one).

In other words, if your party is a mixed-faction group, that doesn't mean that firmly Alliance or Horde areas are necessarily going to be safe for everyone, and even if you've got some in-narrative explanation for why that Worgen is allowed to walk around Thunder Bluff without issue, it doesn't mean that hostile factions in your campaign's story aren't going to make these "safe" territories a bit dangerous.

While I don't know that it tells it with profound nuance (it does have its moments,) the overall "message" or "theme" of WoW is that these divides leave lasting scars, but at the end of the day, we're all just people, and when we can recognize that, we can work together toward a common goal (is that goal usually fighting some different "other?" For sure. It is Warcraft, after all).

But also, conflict is where we get drama, and while you want a party that can ultimately find a way to work together, I think having inherent resentments and grievances in a mixed-faction party could make for some really interesting roleplay.

As We Periodically Do: Asking What We Want for 5.5 Books

 Arcana Unleashed is, I think, maybe the most successful supplement to come out for D&D since the debut of 5.5 edition, other than the core books.

For the main book, we have a big influx of spells, feats, subclasses, and I think we have a pretty good hit to miss ratio.

I think it's likely that the impetus for this book was first to reprint the four Wizard subclasses that had been in the 2014 PHB but not the 2024 one, given the standardization of 4 subclasses per class in that book.

Even if it wound up reducing the number of updates for Clerics and Wizards, I actually applaud the "4 for everyone" approach that we got in the PHB. The funny thing, though, is that the books we've gotten since haven't taken the same even-handed approach.

5.5 is still relatively new, though we're now two years out, so it's not brand-new. In that time, we've gotten a revisit to Eberron (a book whose purpose I think was to get the Artificer updated to catch it up with the other 5.0 classes,) an adventure anthology in Dragon Delves, the Forgotten Realms books last year, Horrors Within, and the these two with Arcana Unleashed, with Deadfall giving us our first full campaign book of 5.5 (which, interestingly, matches the last 5.0 campaign book's level range, at least roughly).

Now, I have all of the adventure books, because I'm a bit of a collector, but I don't really use them - to me, a big part of the fun of DMing is building by own campaign. Thus, I'm more likely to borrow ideas from them, or monsters. But I recognize this isn't necessarily the typical thing: plenty of groups and players run these adventures, even exclusively.

In 5E's early days, we'd get a lengthy adventure book at least once a year. But they seem to have leaned away from that model. I don't know if it's just that most players don't make it through all those adventures (the only one I finished was part of Adventurer's League, with a lot of players who were not there for the RP, and my friend who was DMing was keeping things moving quite fast).

What I find interesting is that the early days of 5E - and actually, not even that early - some of the big supplements we got were sort of universal rules expansions.

Volo's Guide to Monsters was something of an expansion to the monster manual, and while it had pretty extensive lore chapters (a fair degree of which seemed to be retconned away) it was also the biggest influx of monsters for DMs to use, as well as new playable races.

Then, we got Xanathar's Guide to Everything, which provided at least two subclasses for every class other than the Wizard, along with the biggest addition of spells and, for DMs, a far easier encounter-building system than what we had gotten in the DMG (it was a big improvement, and one I used for a long time, though I think the 2024 DMG one is what I currently find most effective).

Later, we got Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, which provided another good influx of monsters to use, along with some more playable races (a little less broad in scope).

And then, finally, Tasha's Cauldron of Everything gave us more subclasses and, I think pretty crucially, new variant rules that divorced ability score bonuses from races - something I, frankly, think they erred in then stapling to backgrounds in the 2024 PHB and would not mind seeing a similar corrective.

Tasha's did do a fair amount of consolidation: giving us setting-agnostic versions of the Artificer as well as several subclasses. In other words, WotC has always done a fair bit of reprinting (even Xanathars repeated some options that had shown up in Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide).

Toward the end of 5.0, WotC released a "Rules Expansion Box Set," which included Xanathar's, Tasha's, and the new Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse. This latter book effectively cut out much of the length lore chapters from Volo's and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, and included nearly all of the monsters in the books, plus most of the playable races that had shown up in either (along with some that had shown up in setting books,) with a few revisions.

This box set, if you didn't already have those books, was the obvious "next thing to buy" if you were getting into 5E and had only gotten the Core Books. Truly, with those six in your collection, I'd say you were basically covered when it came to having what you needed for a decade of games.

This might appeal to me more strongly than other players/DMs, but I really prefer rules expansion books over just about everything else. As much as I love, say, the Ravenloft setting (and wish the Planescape set had been better,) and I truly think Van Richen's Guide to Ravenloft is my favorite 5E supplement they came out with, the books that provide the most utility are, in my opinion, these ones that sort of get out of the way of the people trying to come up with original stories (aka, DMs and players) and just gives them more stuff to work with.

I thus rank a broad expansion of player options and/or monsters as the best thing that WotC can release. Next, I'd probably put campaign setting books, maybe at an equal footing with thematic monster books (the latter being stuff like Fizban's or Bigby's).

Arcana Unleashed (the main book, of course) is thus sort of in that first category. There is some extensive stuff about the various magic-school-affiliated factions, that's all well and good and probably something I'll never touch in any of my campaigns. But the crux of it is player options, and that, to me, feels like fuel for player creativity.

The slightly narrower focus on the Arcane theme kind of pushes it toward that second category.

What I wonder, though, is if WotC has shifted their philosophy against "of Everything"-style books. Truly, Xanathar's and Tasha's have no singular thematic throughline, other than cheeky little commentary written in the voices of their title characters.

But what they ultimately gave us was just more stuff to use, and they wound up being, I would think, the most popular supplements in 5.0.

Given the UAs we've gotten in recent months, I suspect that we're going to have themed supplements for the forseeeable future: the announced Dark Sun book, some kind of "villain" book, now probably some Underdark book. Oddly, the revisits to older subclasses from Xanathar's seems to have been preparation for the Warcraft book (a game/franchise that can play different tones of fantasy about as well as D&D can).

But I was thinking: between Heroes of Faerun, Horrors Within, and Arcana Unleashed, we have still not gotten a new Druid subclass in 5.5 since the PHB.

There was something kind of nice about how the of Everything books really touched on each class and gave them cool stuff.

Some More Critical Role Campaign Four Theories

 As a longterm fan of both Critical Role and Dimension 20, I've been keeping up with CR's fourth campaign, with its new world and new DM.

Brennan Lee Mulligan likes to weave complex mysteries in his campaigns - more or less every Dimension 20 is a mystery for the players to solve amidst all the monsters. While I think Matt Mercer's style has certainly contained mysteries, I think that the idea of investigating and discovering what the bad guys are doing is less of an emphasis than simply trying to survive their plots and bring the fight to them.

The broad goal of the extended party (meta-party?) in Campaign Four is to subvert the power of the Sundered Houses, noble families whose nobility is kind of defined by their sorcerous capabilities, and who have sought to hold ultimate power within the world after the death of the gods. Arguably "noble" is underselling them, as they occupy a position higher than, say, King Augustus "Gus" Valian of Timmony (who seems about the best-case scenario for royalty - someone who was lost as a child and grew up among the common folk, and only discovered royal lineage in adulthood, but has retained his "man of the people" values).

The houses, Halovar, Tachonis, Einfasen, Royce, and Cormoray, are each associated essentially with a different source of magical power and creature type in D&D terms - Halovar with Celestials (though eyebrow-raisingly, also fiends - something that I'll be focusing on mostly here,) Tachonis with Undead, Einfasen with Giants, Royce with Fey, and Cormoray with Elementals.

I don't have any new evidence for this, but I think it's notable that Azune, Luis Carazo's Paladin/Sorcerer, speaks a native language we now know to be Araman's version of Draconic, and that the only other Sorcerers we've encountered have been members of the Sundered Houses. Not only do I guess that Azune's Sorcerer subclass (not sure if he has one yet, as I think the party is only level 5 currently, and he might have put 3 levels into Paladin) is Draconic, but I do wonder if there's some "lost sundered house" that he belongs to that had the power of dragons.

But let's talk about a different Sundered House: Specifically, Halovar, and specifically, the house matriarch, Yanessa Halovar.

Yanessa is, pretty explicitly from the audience's perspective, a conwoman. Not only did Wick come into the campaign falsely labeled as a Cleric (because Wick thought he was,) only to turn out to be a Sorcerer (evidently a Clockwork sorcerer rather than Divine Soul, a I'd guessed. Not sure what to make of that other than just that Divine Soul hasn't gotten a 5.5 update yet,) but I noted that the voice that Yanessa uses with family is a decidedly working-class one.

While I had perhaps thought that this was just Mulligan's way of showing duplicity, the idea that Mulligan, famously an old-school leftist preaching working class solidarity, would invoke the trope of using lower-class accents to denote wicked and villainous characters seemed unlikely.

So, in the most recent episode, we got another little detail that seemed pretty important:

After Hal puts on his play Kotherai without making any of the Candescent Creed-mandated edits (that would have turned it from a stirring tribute to the proud history of the orcs rising up against their oppressive creator god into a piece of anachronistic Creed propaganda,) Yanessa shows up at his home to threaten him.

As part of her threat, though, she puts on a false face of civility and makes him breakfast with his own food in his own kitchen. And Hal notices that the food is cooked expertly - a stark contrast when Aranessa Royce, Hal's once-sister-in-law, tried to cook and was an utter disaster because, as a member of a Sundered House, she had always had cooks to prepare her meals.

The very strong implication here, I think, is that Yanessa was not always a member of such an august house. But how did she become the head of one, in that case?

Well, it could be as simple as the idea that she married into it. But if that were the case, it seems strange that she would be the family's leader. While she's worked hard to redefine House Halovar as simply the stewards of the false religion she's cooked up, the basis of their power is that family history.

We know that they have a celestial locked away in their family estate, from which the Filament that fuels their Luxes' powers (and Wick's... maybe?) is harvested.

But Yanessa is not a sorcerer - in an act of intimidation and maybe frustration, she shatters two mugs of Hals that were made by his daughters with Eldritch Blast, a spell only Warlocks have access to.

We also know that the demons, like Tyranny, who have been pledged to serve the Candescent Creed, are not, of course, actually reformed, but simply there as part of a contract with the demon lord K'sharavi (Tyranny's "dad"). I think the demons are more complicated than just "evil," (I think that Tyranny is a reskinned Tiefling, and they retain the concept of a "virtue name." Tyranny believes wholeheartedly that there must be a strong tyrant to lead, but wants someone as kindhearted and goodnatured as Wick to embody that role - a kind of extreme lawful position. (Ok, parenthetical inside a parenthetical, I have thoughts about how you can think of law as institutionalist and chaos as personalist, in which case this would actually be the chaotic position, but I'll set that aside for now).)

So, presumably, Yanessa is a Warlock, and might have K'sharavi as her patron. But is there something deeper going on?

See, Warlock powers are great, but making deals with demons and devils often involves some life-transforming change - the powers could be just a means to accomplish that. So here's my big theory:

Was Yanessa just a common woman before all of this? We're told the Halovars were originally the priests of Tonsul, the human-aligned god of the sun. But what if she's not actually a Halovar at all? What if the Halovars were all killed off, and Yanessa came with the claim of being the House's last scion (this is admittedly even bigger than my initial pitch, so let me get back to that)?

What if she sold her soul for power and influence, to become a high aristocrat of the Sundered Houses, to escape what she at least saw as her wretched state of poverty and irrelevance?

We know that Wick is an Aasimar - though we're not totally clear on whether he's truly directly descended from the celestial in the Halovars' basement or if this is the longterm effect of being pumped full of Filament (I'm leaning the former).

But it is really interesting: if Azune is secretly a member of a lost Sundered House, or at least some equivalent thereof, it does mean that these families may not be as immutable as they'd like us to think.

D&D Characters I'd Be Excited to Play

 One of the challenges of being a D&D obsessive is that, even as we sometimes bemoan the slow pace of content, the truth is that it comes out at a far faster rate than I imagine most people make enough characters to keep up with.

As a player, I haven't actually started a new campaign or even one-shot since the 5.5 Core Rulebooks have come out. I was able to convert my Wizard to the new rules, but the Rogue I was playing in Wild Beyond the Witchlight was not allowed to given that our DM was inexperienced and not eager to learn all the changes to the rules mid-campaign (he had hoped that the light tone of Witchlight and fewer combat encounters would make it easier to run. As a DM with over a decade of experience under my belt, I warned him that combat is the easiest thing to run in D&D).

Anyway, the result, of course, is a big character pile-up.

I've actually had a number of characters waiting in the wings since before 5.5 dropped, but I've perhaps re-ordered them based on which have gotten updates and how my priorities have changed.

I'll also say that these priorities really aren't hard and fast rules: my Wizard was something created a little spur-of-the-moment based on the campaign we were doing. While I wasn't sure the Scribes Wizard was the subclass I was most enamored of, I came up with a fun hook for my character, which was that he was a junior archivist with the Cobalt Soul who discovered the spirit of an Age of Arcanum Wizard who had put himself into a book. I will note here that the campaign was already in full swing for over a year before Emily Axford's guest character on Critical Role's third campaign arrived with almost an identical premise - I will not be accused of plagiarism! (Nor do I think she's ever heard of me or my character, so no accusations either way, of course.)

My background is in writing - I'm very lazily hoping to eventually get a novel or two published - and so I just have a lot of fun coming up with character backstories (it is kind of the cheapest high you can get as a writer - coming up with a premise without having to resolve anything). So, honestly, writing the backstories is a fun exercise in and of itself, likewise fleshing out my homebrew setting (though I do think it helps to have all that material to draw from once the players start interacting with said world).

So, I've got these following ideas:

Conrad, the Great Old One Warlock:

This was the first character I came up with when I got the 5.0 core books back in 2015. I did actually get to play him, but only in a brief adventure my best friend ran for the group from my original campaign when he wanted to give DMing a try. We only hit level 2 near the end of that adventure, so I didn't really get a ton of time with him.

I will say, I'm not entirely sure that I'd be so excited to play him - not because of any underlying flaws to the character concept, but just because I did already play an Eldritch Blast-focused Warlock in Descent into Avernus, and I don't know that he would necessarily play all that differently. Conrad is a very "dark powers, good person" kind of character, and I think after several years playing my very innocent Wizard, I don't know that this would be the next one on the list (though unlike the Wizard, for whom things are basically going ok other than the world-ending dangers of the campaign, Conrad is allowing is patron to change his body and mind in ways that might not be healthiest if he wants to stay human).

Hack, the Elements Monk:

This was the one that emerged after the 5.5 Player's Handbook came out. The Warrior of Elements is such a massive upgrade over the godawful Way of Four Elements that I was eager to try it out. An aeronaut from a flying town (this is something that I'd need to run by my DM) who got shipwrecked on an island with a monastery, Hack's trying to get home and blend his bar-brawling skills from his days as a sailor with the more focused martial arts the monks have taught him while also tracking down the massive flying dreadnaught that blew his ship out of the sky.

The new Monk might not be strictly super-powerful, but it did improve significantly with the 5.5 update, and I think you could play some very interesting games with a Grappler build that takes advantage of the Elements' Monks longer reach on unarmed strikes.

Jax, the Eldritch Knight:

This is actually the character I've played longest other than the Wizard. But while my whole gameplan in the game that ran from about 2019 to around 2022 was to make him nigh-impossible to hit, I'd like to rebuild him as a Great Weapon Master and lean into the high damage output (the Shield spell and Plate is still pretty good for survival, even without a +1 Shield).

Also, the campaign fell apart when we were trapped in Avernus without any of the gear we'd acquired (we were level 12, so we had a fair amount). I'd love to just have an opportunity to think that they're doing better now.

Aldric, the Undead Bladelock:

Another character I actually did briefly get to play. This was in 2024 right after the PHB had come out, so the DM (a friend of my sister's in New York - I was there for a little over a month after my nephew was born to help out because my brother-in-law had to work) was keeping things with the 2014 rules.

But between the improvements to Pact of the Blade and the admittedly minor updates to the Undead Warlock in Horrors Within (though notably, the change from an Expanded Spell List to Patron Spells is a pretty big bonus) I felt it was a good opportunity to have my Reborn guy working as essentially a fixer for an order of Death Knights who are all trapped in a crumbling, ruined castle to go in that direction. Aldric isn't bad per se, but is far less idealistic and generous than Conrad.

Name and Backstory TBD: Necromancer:

Yeah... I'm yearning to play a somewhat sinister character. And the Arcana Unleashed Necromancer has been on my mind now quite a bit. It's a character concept that needs a lot of coordination with the DM (primarily just seeing how practical it is for you to maintain a group of undead minions when traveling from town to town). Obviously, the issue is that I've already been playing a Wizard for quite a while, and while the vibe would be very different (though my innocent young Triton does dabble in a bit of ethical necromancy here and there) Wizards' biggest asset is their spell list. Could I really resist the urge to take all the same really good spells?

Abram, Armorer Artificer:

Broadly, I'm of the opinion that the Forge of the Artificer... er, Artificer is stronger overall than the one from Rising From the Last War. But I can also understand why the player in my Ravnica group chose not to convert at level 19, because the old level 20 capstone is so very, very good.

But if I were to play one from level 1, or level 3, I'd want to revisit the one I very excitedly started up in a Spelljammer game that lasted all of two sessions before the DM got busy (this was the same DM who had run the campaign with my Eldritch Knight for years, but a lot of the plot was built around the Paladin PC whose player became a dad and moved to the East Coast. Advice to DMs: building plots around your PCs is great, but be sure to evenly distribute this across the party, with threads that can be picked up even if a key player leaves).

Anyway, I'm pretty thoroughly convinced that the Battle Smith is the current best subclass, but I really like the Armorer concept (I just wish that the 5.5 one would make it explicitly clear that we could separately Replicate magic versions of the built-in weapons and magic armor, which the 5.0 one did make very clear).

The Artificer feels like a fun toolbox class in similar way to the Wizard, and I think some of the magic item shenanigans in the 5.5 version could be very fun to play around with.

Unnamed Mystic Arts Monk:

Look, the Elements Monk got such a massive glow-up. But also, the Mystic Arts Monk has got to be the best Monk subclass now, right?

Beyond power, I do think that getting spells, even as a one-third caster, opens up such possibilities for your character that it's really had to turn down.

    And that is, I think, the big list. Obviously, there are ideas I'd be eager to try with other classes (actually, while I'd love to see how the Oath of the Ebon Blade Paladin replicates WoW's Death Knight class, I'd actually be pretty tempted to play the build I made for my Undead Subtlety Rogue, as seen in a recent post.)

Realistically, I'll be happy if I get to play any of these characters. And by the time I do, we likely will have a bunch of new options come out that will excite me more.

See the name of the blog.

Power Gaming and the Will to Self-Nerf

 After a few weeks of canceled games, we finally got to play my Wildemount game two days ago. (We were still missing one player, but with the other four we felt we could continue.) After we had teleported into what was apparently some kind of weird illegal trap set by a greedy man, we engaged in combat with him and our Fighter/Rogue was subjected to Befuddlement. While the only character in the party who didn't have spell slots, the spell still does prevent him from using the Magic action, which included preventing him from using certain magic items and some of his High Elf innate spells.

Without a Cleric or Druid in the party, even at level 11 we don't have someone with Greater Restoration (we determined that Dispel Magic wouldn't work because Befuddlement's actual spell is instantaneous) so we went to the Temple of the Knowing Mentor (we're in Vasselheim currently) and sought out help from the local priest, but the fee for a 5th level spell (with component) was too pricey (I'm hoping we'll have a well-paying adventure soon, because Wizard Needs Gold Badly - I truly don't think we've gotten any significant amount of loot in, like, a couple levels).

Anyway, the priest came up with a side quest for us - a dinosaur that was menacing a nearby village (we wanted to go out of the city given that a bunch of us are arcane casters, and Vasselheim doesn't allow such magic) that the Slayer's Take had been unable to deal with.

So, we went out to a farm, where we saw signs of the beast, only for it to show up and attack us. The thing was a Regisaur (from Bigby's Glory of the Giants) - by far the largest creature we'd encountered in the campaign so far (I think it was like 40x40 on the map, one of those "gargantuan is 20x20 and up" monsters).

We got some good attacks in, though our Paladin/Warlock got swallowed.

And then I annihilated it with a combination of Conjure Minor Elementals and Scorching Ray.

I used my Scribes Wizard ability, Manifest Mind, to send the ancient Age of Arcanum Wizard spirit living in the book I carry around over to the Regisaur, then cast Conjure Minor Elementals as if I were in its space, upcasting to 6th level. Then, from way back and safe, I cast a 5th level Scorching Ray, doing 6 beams, but could still hit the target while it was inside the spell's emanation.

Only half of them actually hit, because I rolled pretty poorly, except one of them crit, so it was as if I had hit with 4. The damage rolls went better, and I think I wound up doing something like 125 damage (quite good, as each beam, doing 4d8+2d6, should have been doing an average of 25, so with two hits and a crit that should have been about 100) and killed the dinosaur before it could get a second turn and before the swallowed party member took any acid damage from being in its guts (which... I think you could argue that a dead creature's stomach juices don't immediately neutralize on death, but given the damage I dealt, it was also reasonable to say that I had made a giant hole in this thing's abdomen).

Here's the thing:

I love doing good damage as a D&D player. I love having that feeling of system mastery, especially if I can do it without compromising on the vision for the character that I've got. This wasn't some insane multiclass build that would stretch the narrative. This is a Wizard doing pure Wizard stuff. And I'd even argue that using clever spell combinations like this is in-keeping with a Wizard's modus operandi.

The danger, I think, is that you can fall into patterns. I'm not sure that there is a better single-target damage strategy that even exists in D&D that outdoes this spell combination. And it just keeps getting better the higher the spell slots you use. If you were to do a 9th level CME and an 8th level Scorching Ray, you're talking about 9 beams that each deal 2d6+7d8 damage, so 38.5 apiece, meaning that that's potentially 346.5 damage, which will kill all but the very toughest high-CR legendary monsters.

There are a lot of things that can be useful in combat. But few things are as directly linked to victory as blowing away your foes as quickly as possible.

My best friend, our DM, seemed to be in shock, and lamented that his big scary monster only got a single turn. And like, I've DM'd longer than I've ever been a player. This is a feeling I totally get. 

It also means that he's likely to feel we need tougher encounters, but that will put added pressure on me to continue doing this maximal damage output strategy.

And part of the real joy of playing a Wizard is that you have so many different things you can do.

So: the solution?

I'm resolved to only bust out this spell combination occasionally. The DM had perhaps oversold how deadly and dangerous this particular foe was (though it had hit the Paladin for 40 damage with one attack, so maybe not?) But I'm eager to approach each fight differently.

Certainly a fight with widespread enemies, and lots of enemies, will see me adjust what I do. We've actually had a Wand of Fireballs lying around in party loot for a long time that I finally claimed, and I think we'll start using that once we have some multi-target fights.

But I also want to play around with more spells. I love Summon Undead (actually, as you can probably tell from this blog, I'm kind of itching to play a Necromancer now that the subclass is updated) and all these other things I can get my hands on.

The way I see it, this is maybe something to reserve for climactic moments. Or... maybe reserve for side quests where getting it over and done as quickly as possible isn't going to negatively impact any of the other players' desire for high stakes and drama.

UA Species: Deep Imaskari, Drider, Illithidkin, Kuo-Toa, and Myconid

 In case you had any doubts about a big Underdark sourcebook based on the recent UAs, we're also getting a healthy 5 species options. Three of these are straight-up creatures from the Monster Manual. One is almost but not quite one of the classic, iconic D&D monsters, and the last (well, first) is I believe a new concept. Let's take a look:

Deep Imaskari:

The Deep Imaskari are the descendants of humans who once had a powerful magical empire, but fled its ruin into the Underdark. Using the Great Seal, their false underground sun, to provide them with Unlight to nourish crops and get some Vitamin D, they've been mutated and warped by its power, with colorless glowing crystals that protrude from their skin.

They're humanoid, and like normal humans, can be Small or Medium with a speed of 30 feet.

Photoresistant gives them resistance to radiant damage.

Resourceful, like with humans, gives them Heroic Inspiration when they finish a long rest.

Unluminescent lets you do the following: an action, you can cause your crystals to glow, shedding bright light in a 5 foot radius until you take an action to stop the effect. They also stop glowing if you die or are unconscious.

Aura of Unlight: At level 3, you can use a bonus action to shine bright light in a 10 foot emanation. This aura lasts 1 minute or until you choose to end it. When you use this, you choose an option from the following:

Abjuring Unlight gives you and your allies in the aura a bonus to their AC equal to half you proficiency bonus (rounded down).

Brilliant Unlight causes creatures other than your allies that start their turn in the emanation to have to make a Con save (DC based on your Charisma modifier) or be blinded until the end of your next turn.

Corrupting Unlight lets you change the damage when you hit with an attack to Radiant. Also, you can roll one of your unexpended hit dice and deal extra radiant damage equal to the number rolled, expending the die.

    Big note here, and I don't know if this is intentional: There is no limit on the uses of Aura of Unlight. Now, it does take an action and only lass a minute, so it's unlikely you can use this before combat breaks out, meaning it's a round of set-up. But getting a +1 to AC for you and any nearby allies, and eventually growing that to a +3, is not too bad. Because the DC for Brilliant Unlight is Charisma-based, you'll probably want to play a Charisma-focused character or a Paladin, but that is, also, actually a very strong option.

    Honestly, some pretty strong features here, and while we don't get the Human's bonus origin feat, which is tough to beat, we get a little connection to them with the free Heroic Inspiration feature.

Drider:

Yes, it's everyone's favorite drow spider centaurs. Despite the fact that they take on a form similar to the preferred form of the evil demon goddess Lolth, this is apparently a punishment for Drow, which is sort of odd. Could be kind of fun to play as an outcast of Lolth-worshipping society.

You're a Medium monstrosity with a speed of 30 feet.

    Real quick, I know that WotC never makes species that aren't Medium or Small, which I find to be a bit of a shame. Let us have a Large species! Let Fairies be Tiny (as they've flavored Thimble in Critical Role Campaign 4)! Still, good to have another playable Monstrosity like the Thri-Kreen.

Arachnid Build: This is basically Powerful build, letting you carry more.

Darkvision: 120 feet of Darkvision, pretty standard for subterranean species.

Spells of the Spider Queen: You get Dancing Lights, and then Faerie Fire at 3rd level and Web at 5th level. You can cast each for free once per long rest without a spell slot, or use your spell slots to cast them again, and you pick Int, Wis, or Cha as your spellcasting stat.

    These are good spells. Dancing Lights is maybe not game-changing, but Faerie Fire is a fantastic debuff and Web can be very powerful when used well.

Spider Climb: You have a climb speed equal to your speed. At level 3, you can move up, down, and across vertical surfaces and along ceilings while leaving your hands free.

    So, just like the Dhampir. Good stuff, and could be very fun as a sneaky infiltrator.

Web Walker: You ignore movement restrictions caused by webs, and you know the location of any other creature in contact with the same web.

    This is obviously very niche except that we can make our own webs with the Web spell.

    Overall, I think this Drider, with the exception of being shrunk down to Medium size, delivers on the fantasy of being a Drider, and seems like a perfectly solid, even pretty good species option. Thumbs up.

Illithidkin:

Hey, do you want to play as an Illithid? Well, there are those feats that they presented in the last UA that let you become one. But do you want to just go for the aesthetic of being a Mind Flayer without actually being one? The Illithidkin are evidently the result of weird Mind Flayer experiments to create a kind of middle-ground of ceremorphosis, where you have the tentacles and purple skin and psionics of a Mind Flayer but retain some of your old features.

Illthidkin are, bafflingly, humanoids (surely if a Kalashtar is an Aberration, these would be, right?) and can be Medium or Small, and have a 30 foot movement speed.

Darkvision: you have 120 feet of darkvision.

Psionic Aptitude: You have Mage Hand, and can make the hand invisible. When you reach 3rd level you get Command, and at 5th level, you get Levitate. You can cast each for free once per long rest, or spend spell slots to cast them again. You pick Int, Wis, or Cha as your spellcasitng ability.

    Command is fantastic - steal a creature's action without worrying about charm immunity, and potentially get them to do something that helps you. Levitate is a little less broadly useful.

Sharpened Mind: You have resistance to Psychic damage, and you have advantage on saving throws against the Charmed condition.

Telepathy: You have telepathy out to 30 feet.

    Here's my one issue: where to the tentacles come in? Can I not make unarmed strikes with them? Can I not deal damage and grapple with them? We might not have a full-on Extract Brain feature, but I don't really see this as feeling all to different from one of the many creatures that the Illithid altered.

Kuo-Toa:

I adore the Kuo-Toa, though in part because I always imagine them as the D&D antecedents to Murlocs from World of Warcraft. Truly, they're more akin to the Deep Ones from The Shadow Over Innsmouth (though there are a few other monsters, like Sea Spawn or Deep Scions, that also kind of fit that niche).

Honest, the UA kind of nerfs their lore: it's supposed to be that the bizarre gods they make up actually manifest as very minor deities, whereas this one says that they are simply forgotten gods that no one agrees on. Boo!

Also boo to them being Humanoids, after getting upgraded to aberrations in the Monster Manual. While I get that in some cases the change from humanoid to other creature types was a perhaps overzealous attempt to avoid implying that any humanoid peoples are defined by their species, I actually thought that the change for Kuo-Toa felt appropriate (certainly more than Lizardfolk being elementals).

Anyway, they're Medium (not small?) humanoids with a 30 foot speed.

Amphibious: You can breathe both air and water, and have a swim speed equal to your speed.

Slippery: You have advantage on saving throws to avoid or end the Grappled or Restrained conditions.

    Note that thanks to a lot of monsters auto-grappling on a hit with attacks, this isn't quite as good as it would have been in 5.0.

Deific Manifestation: You get Find Familiar and can cast it without material components. You can cast it once per long rest without a spell slot. When you cast the spell, you can choose a normal form or you can pick the Homunculus or Myconid Sprout. The creature is a Celestial.

Additionally, the familiar is a mix of creatures, so when you cast the spell, you can choose a secondary form from your available choices, and the familiar gains one action, reaction, or trait from that second form.

    I love this. Not only is Find Familiar a nice spell to have (even if in most games we mainly use it just for flavor and roleplay, or some scouting,) but this mix-and-match system could potentially create some really interesting options. Also, we save on gold by never having to have a brazier or incense.

Myconid:

Myconid are the mushroom people! The very weird, sometimes friendly, but deeply different fungal folk of the Underdark. Sadly, individuals rarely live past 25.

Gloriously, this is the first playable Plant species (yes, I'm aware that fungi are more closely related to animals than plants, but that's how D&D treats them). I hope this leads to more! You can be Medium or Small, and get a 30 foot speed.

Darkvision: 120 feet of darkvision, standard for underground.

Telepathy: You have telepathy out to 30 feet.

Rapport Spores: As an action, you can expel spores in a 30 foot emanation. Creatures in the area with an intelligence of 2 or higher that aren't constructs, elementals, or undead gain telepathy to a range of 30 feet for one hour. You can do this once per long rest.

    It's not super-long-range telepathy, but this could come in handy, especially if you're about to go into some tight social situation so you can strategize with your party without speaking out loud.

Skill Meld: When you finish a long rest, you can choose up to six allies (you can include yourself) within 30 feet of you to take part in a ritual. Pick a skill that at least one participant has proficiency with. Every participant gains that proficiency until they finish a long rest.

    This one's fun! The most obvious use I can think of is granting everyone Stealth if you need to sneak in somewhere, but this could be a way to grant Perception, Deception, Athletics - just any skill that you'll be making group checks with.

Yeah, I really like the Myconid!

    So, overall, I think we have some cool and solid options. I think the Illithidkin is the only one I find truly disappointing.

UA: Faerzress Sorcery

 Now, the biggest challenge to playing this subclass is pronouncing it.

The Faerzress is a chaotic, demonic radiation found in the Underdark (at least in the Forgotten Realms) that acts like a weird magical electricity and drives people crazy (in the Acquisitions Incorporated game were I first heard about it, they had to subdue a maddened Drizz't Do'Urden).

Anyway, this is a weird subclass, in part because it also includes a description of what Faerzress does in general, which the subclass then has to refer to.

So, before we get into any subclass features, we need to go into what the radiation does:

Creatures within an area affected by it automatically succeed on saving throws against Divination effects. Magic sensors and invisible eyes (like from Clairvoyance or Arcane Eye) can't enter areas affected by Faerzress.

Creatures teleporting a distance of a mile or more can't teleport into or out of Faerzress (so, Misty Step and Dimension Door are fine, not so much for Teleport.)

An area of Faerzress is illuminated by Dim Light, but creatures with Darkvision within such an area can see in color and have Advantage on Wisdom (Perception) checks relying on sight (I thought that you only couldn't see color if it was totally dark and you were relying on darkvision. Hm.)

Ok, got it? Now let's get into the subclass.

Faerzress Spells:

1st level: Faerie Fire, Witch Bolt

2nd level: Magic Weapon, Misty Step

3rd level: Nondetection, Sending

4th level: Arcane Eye, Stone Shape

5th level: Passwall, Scrying

    You might think some of these choices are quite odd given that a lot of them won't work in the environment that this subclass is built around. We'll get to that. But broadly, we have some solid ones here and some that are very situational.

Level 3:

Faerzress Zone:

As a Magic action, you can spend 3 Sorcery Points to fill an area within 120 feet of you and no larger than a 40-foot cube with faerzress, causing the effects described earlier. The area lasts for 24 hours, and if you fill the same area with it every day for 365 days, the effect becomes permanent.

    Now, obviously, this is costly at level 3, but it's a very long persistent effect, and the ability to thwart divination and teleportation into an area could be really powerful if you need a secret place to plan things out with your allies. This could be a really great thing for lengthy periods of downtime if you're in an intrigue-heavy campaign.

Immunity to Faerzress:

You ignore the detrimental effects of Faerzress. Specifically:

Creatures within an area of Faerzress don't automatically succeed on saves against your divination spells, and your magical sensors from spells like Clairvoyance and Arcane Eye can enter areas of Faerzress. When you teleport yourself or other creatures, the teleporting creatures can teleport into or out of an area of Faerzress at any distance.

    Great. That solves that problem. Now, you love Faerzress and are happy to hang out in there as much as you like. Note that if your allies try to do some of this stuff, it won't work. Thus, even if Sorcerers lean a little more into the blasty side of things, we might consider taking some more utility spells to aid the party if we assume the campaign is going to involve areas of Faerzress. And obviously this makes our Faerzress Zone feature much better for us.

Level 6:

We gain resistance to Lightning damage. We also gain Darkvision out to 60 feet, or an extra 30 feet of darkvision if we already have darkvision. We can discern color in areas of Darkness unlike most darkvision.

    One quick note: it's weird that we don't get an extra 60 feet if we already have darkvision. Otherwise this is fine and reasonable.

Also, we have advantage on Perception checks we make to see in Dim Light or Darkness.

    Let's quickly run this down: In dim light, a creature without darkvision has disadvantage on perception checks to see, but with darkvision, it basically gets treated as bright light, so we'll get full advantage. However, darkvision only treats total darkness as dim light, so we'll have disadvantage, but this gets cancelled out. So, there's still some benefit to illuminating an area here, but weirdly only with dim light, as we don't get advantage if the light is bright. Bit weird.

Finally, our immunity to Faerzress feature extends to any allies within 30 feet of us.

    Ok, that's interesting. Guess we can let the Wizard handle the utility teleportation spells and such once we hit level 6.

Level 14:

Faerzress Spell:

When one or more creatures fail a saving throw against a spell we cast, we can spend 1 SP to lace the creature with Faerzress. For 1 minute, they have the following effects on them:

They can't teleport. They can't cast Divination spells. And they have disadvantage on saving throws against Divination spells.

    Anti-teleportation could really shut down a slippery enemy spellcaster. I guess it's a question of how frequently you're casting divination spells.

Faerzress Step:

You always have Teleportation prepared and can cast it once without expending a spell slot per long rest. Also, when you roll on the Teleportation Outcome table, you can choose any outcome available for your familiarity.

    Nevermind! You'll be the teleporter for the party, with effectively a free extra 7th level spell slot! Now, as for the available outcomes, this means you'll always arrive where you want to go as long as the location you're trying to get to is real. If it's a false destination, you can arrive at a similar area, which is the best you can hope for. But yes, this basically makes Teleport foolproof for you. Pretty nice.

Level 18:

Faerzress Form:

When you use Innate Sorcery, you can turn yourself into pure Faerzress energy. You retain your general shape, personality, etc., and while your equipment doesn't transform, you can continue to wear/carry it. You get the following benefits:

You become immune to being Grappled, Paralyzed, Petrified, Poisoned, Prone, or Restrained.

    Pretty good, and again, very good for high-level titan-like monsters that might swallow you.

You gain resistance to every damage type except Force or Psychic.

    Now, you might encounter some psychic damage, especially in the Underdark, but these "every damage type except X and Y" features are going to be pretty great most of the time.

You have a fly speed equal to your speed and can hover. You can also move through other creatures and objects as if they were difficult terrain, but take 1d10 force damage if you end your turn inside an object.

    Little late for a Sorcerer to get a fly speed (Storm Sorcerers get an always-on fly with hover equal to 60 feet at level 18, and Aberrant and Draconic Sorcerers get concentration-free flight at level 14). I guess the incorporeal movement is nice? (I think the stipulation that your equipment doesn't transform is there more for flavor, but this could be a sticking point with a very strict DM).

You revert to your true form after 1 minute, if you choose to end it early, or if you die.

You can do this once per long rest, but you can spend 7 Sorcery Points to restore your use of it.

    I think the damage resistance is the best part of this, and the condition immunities are very nice. Is it worth the equivalent of a 7th level spell? Maybe? Innate Sorcery itself is also a somewhat limited resource, and we need to spend more SP to use it more than twice a day. Though that said, by the time you're this high-level, you might be burning a lot of your low level spell slots to just recoup SP. So maybe it's fine.

Overall Thoughts:

    I think this subclass works for very particular kinds of campaigns. It could be great in an intrigue-heavy campaign with lots of enemy spellcasters. But some of these features might have no impact if you're just fighting big burly monsters.

    I think I hold a view that is contrary to some other prominent thinkers when it comes to TTRPG design, which is that I think specificity can sometimes be a detriment: the appeal, as I see it, of TTRPGs is for players to make things their own - their own characters, their own worlds, their own stories. And this is one of those subclasses that feels not only tied to a very specific setting but a very specific part of that setting, which makes me feel far less likely to get excited about making a character with this subclass.

    Anyway, that's the three subclasses for this UA. Next, we'll look at some of the species.

UA: Circle of Spores Druid

 I love a creepy Druid.

Indeed, I think basically the only Druid concepts I've ever been drawn toward are those that lean into the "scary pagan in the dark forest" vibe. The Circle of Spores, more than any other (and yes, I'd include the "villainous" Titan Druid) leans into that idea, with a good deal of necromancy mixed in.

In my Ravnica campaign, two players who ultimately exited both went for Spores Druids (one was full Golgari Swarm while the other was a House Dimir spy embedded within the Swarm who likened the mycelial network to an intelligence network.

The Spores Druid is cool, but it's also one that has always been a little tricky to really make work - it's one of the few non-shapeshifting Druid subclasses that strongly encourages you to fight in melee.

I won't be comparing this with the Ravnica/Tasha's versions, though at first glance, it's relatively similar, with a few tweaks and changes.

Circle Spells:

Cantrip: Chill Touch

1st: Charm Person

2nd: Blindness/Deafness

3rd: Animate Dead

4th: Confusion

5th: Contagion

    Note that Chill Touch is now a melee spell, so you might want to pack a Starry Wisp or other ranged spell with you. I do think, though, that overall you might be inclined to fight more in melee, and thus might choose to take the Warden Primal Order here for a better AC and potentially better weapons (though Shillelagh might be the best weapon option for you unless you can get True Strike through Magic Initiate Wizard). For other spells, Animate Dead got buffed with the buff to Skeletons' Dexterity. Confusion is also a spell that I believe works even against Charm-immune foes.

Level 3:

Halo of Spores:

You have a 10-foot emanation around you of invisible spores. You have telepathy within 10 feet of you, or if you already have telepathy, the range increases by 10 feet.

    This is new, I believe, and a nice little perk.

When a creature you can see starts its turn within your emanation or enters it, you can use a reaction to infect them with your spores. They make a Con save. On a failure, they take 1d4 Necrotic damage. On a success, they have disadvantage on the next attack roll they make before the end of their turn.

The damage increases to 1d6 at 6th level, 1d8 at 10th level, and 1d10 at 14th level.

    This is a little cleaner than the old version, which let you kind of take your reaction at any time (though maybe I'm thinking of how Emily Axford played Moonshine on NADDPOD, which was based on the original UA version of this subclass). The weirdness here is that, given how relatively light the damage is, you might actually prefer that the target succeeds on their saving throw. Maybe just make the disadvantage go through on a success or failure? That's really not much more powerful, as it's kind of the Protection fighting style plus some damage.

Symbiotic Entity:

As a bonus action, you can expend a Wild Shape usage to awaken your spores. You gain Temp Hp equal to 4 times your Druid level. This lasts for 10 minutes or ends early if you choose to do so or become incapacitated (or use the feature again). While your spores are awakened you gain the following two benefits:

You can roll two dice rather than one when you deal damage with Halo of Spores.

Once per turn, you can deal an extra 1d6 Necrotic damage when you hit with a melee attack using a weapon or unarmed strike.

    Ok, I said I wasn't going to compare it to the old version, but it's a big deal that this is a bonus action, making it easier to get into the fight. But how do we like it?

    Well, it's a solid number of Temp HP. And the Halo of Spores bonus starts to make the damage feel at least a bit impactful. Also notable that this should persist even if we chew through our Temp HP now. But...

    Is that extra d6 of Necrotic damage enough to get us to fight in melee? We sort of have to, actually, also to use Halo of Spores (technically we don't have to, but we need to be within 10 feet). This is certainly less than the damage bonus that, say, a Berserker or Zealot Barbarian would get.

Level 6:

Fungal Infestation:

When a beast or humanoid that is Small or Medium dies within 10 feet of us, we can use a reaction to reanimate it, causing it to stand immediately with 1 HP. If we have Symbiotic Entity active, we can transfer any number of Temp HP we have to the reanimated creature as part of the same reaction.

The creature uses the Zombie stat block, and remains animate for an hour. We can end it early with a bonus action, and the animation ends if the zombie drops to 0 HP.

The zombie is an ally that will act on our initiative immediately after our turn. It will obey our mental commands (no action required) and will dodge and move away from danger if you don't issue it commands.

You can do this Wis times per long rest.

    The nice thing here is that this thing can actually become somewhat resilient, and in theory, especially with the changes to healing spells, we could theoretically heal it up to a Zombie's max HP. The problem, though, that this has always had, is that a Zombie is not a very powerful minion. Its attack bonus doesn't scale, and so will just be a +3, which is going to struggle to hit even low-CR targets. Its best use is probably just standing in the way of things.

    Again, I love the flavor, but I'd love some scaling with the stat block to keep this relevant.

Level 10:

Explosive Blast:

When an undead creature you created dies, it explodes in a burst of spores. Each creature you choose within 10 feet of it makes a Con save, taking 2d8 Necrotic damage on a failure or half as much on a success.

    Notably we don't need to use a reaction to trigger this explosion, and it avoids friendly fire. Thus, I would recommend getting a real army of undead via Animate Dead and then swarming a foe. A single minion dying is not going to do a whole lot of damage this way, but the bigger your army, the better this scales.

Level 14:

Fungal Body:

You are immune to being Blinded, Deafened, Frightened, or Poisoned. Any critical hit against you is a regular hit unless you're incapacitated.

    Before we continue, this is pretty big. Note that being in Darkness or areas that are Heavily Obscured gives you the Blinded condition, so being immune to blindness is roughly like having blindsight, though invisible creatures will still benefit from that against you. But also: crit immunity? That's going to really help prevent any massive spikes of damage that could cause you to auto-fail concentration.

Also, if you are Unconscious, your spores take over your body's movement, so your speed while unconscious is no longer reduced to 0. Your spores will direct your movement to stay near allies and away from danger.

    That is, frankly, really silly and fun. At level 14, we really want to avoid going unconscious, of course (we always want to avoid it, but it's easier to avoid at higher levels) but this... it's very fun.

Overall Thoughts:

    I want to love the Spores Druid. On a conceptual level, I adore it. But I do think it has some flaws: minions that don't scale very well, an emphasis on close-quarters combat without really enough to compensate you for getting in close.

    I actually think in some ways the older version might be better, as you could throw your spore cloud once you got to higher levels and play more as a "safe in the back" spellcaster.

    Basically, I think the subclass could stand to focus a bit more on what it really wants to be: is this the weapon-using melee Druid? Let's maybe beef up that melee damage then? Is this the Druid Necromancer? Give us some better-scaling minions.

UA: Freedom Domain

 Freedom is a pretty popular value, though it's one that can manifest in varied, sometimes even opposing ways depending one peoples' perspective on it (see: American History). In a place like the Underdark, tyrannical regimes like Menzoberranzan (did I spell that correctly? No clue) might inspire a desperate faith in the notion of being free from oppression. But "Freedom" might also be something someone craves to be unshackled by obligations to others or to uphold a sense of shared moral responsibilities (the "how dare you take my freedom to murder and maim as I wish?" attitude).

I imagine most people would lean more toward the positive sides of Freedom, but it is a deep and complex concept that can be really interesting to explore.

Let's talk subclass features:

Domain Spells:

1st: Expedition Retreat, Jump

2nd: Knock, Misty Step

3rd: Fly, Gaseous Form

4th: Dimension Door, Freedom of Movement

5th: Passwall, Tree Stride

    Some real solid spells, especially early on, that Clerics don't normally get. I think Misty Step and Fly are both potentially fantastic, and Freedom of Movement is one of those spells that can start to be absolute life savers when you're fighting giant monsters that like to swallow party members (we actually fought one last night in my Wildemount game, though I didn't have the material component to make a Tasha's Bubbling Cauldron full of Oil of Slipperiness, so instead I nuked the thing with a 6th level Conjure Minor Elementals and a 5th level Scorching Ray).

Level 3:

Invoke Liberty:

You can use an action and channel divinity to affect any allied creatures in a 30-foot emanation, allowing them to end one of the following of their choice: Frightened, Grappled, Paralyzed, or Restrained. They can then use their reaction to move up to their speed without provoking opportunity attacks. When you hit Cleric level 9, you can add Charmed and Petrified to the list.

    This is quite good - while you might not frequently have more than one ally to help with this, it's going to handle a lot of problems you might encounter. Furthermore, at level 9, getting to clear Petrification is kind of massive, because that would normally take a Greater Restoration. You're not going to use this every combat, but it'll be nice when you need it. Note, though, that you are not in your Emanation unless it states otherwise, so you can't use this on yourself.

Unencumbered Grace:

While not wearing armor, your base Armor class is equal to 10 + Dex + Wis. You can still benefit from a Shield along with this.

    There' more, but let's unpack this: It's going to be hard to reach the AC you normally can with just a +2 to Dex as a Cleric this way. If you start off with a +3 to Wisdom and +2 to Dex, this is going to give you 15 (or 17 with a Shield,) but while Clerics don't start off with Scale Mail anymore, you could pretty easily get your hands on some, which would give you 16. Really, if we want to lean into this, we need to try to start off with a +3 to Dexterity, and then unless we can get Bracers of Defense, we're going to still fall behind if we find any +X armor. So... it's ok, but nothing that exciting.

You also get proficiency in Acrobatics, or if you already have it, Expertise.

    Acrobatics is one of those skills that I think really varies. If your DM lets people kind of pick between Athletics and Acrobatics to, say, jump over a gap or climb something, this is great. But I find that if you're really strict about what each is used for, Athletics comes up far more.

Level 6:

Unstoppable:

Your movement is unaffected by Difficult Terrain. You also get proficiency in Dexterity saving throws, or if you already have that, you can pick a different saving throw to gain proficiency in.

    This is nice. Dex is one of the most common kinds of saving throws, and as a Cleric, you already have Wisdom, which is another. The Difficult Terrain thing is nice, but will of course depend a lot on the encounter. Not the most exciting 6th level, but the Dex save this is quite impactful.

Level 17:

Avatar of Freedom:

As a bonus action, you can manifest a 30-foot emanation that surrounds you for 10 minutes (ends if you become incapacitated, or if you choose to end it for some reason). It grants the following:

When an ally enters the emanation of starts their turn there the first time on a turn, their speed increases by 30 feet until the end of their next turn.

    Note that we don't get this benefit. But one thing that's kind of interesting is that if an ally enters the emanation and then ends their turn there, then starts their next turn in the emanation, they should get a 60-foot speed bonus because the first one didn't end yet. I seriously doubt this is the intention, but a 30-foot speed boost to your party could be helpful, though they'll outrun you if you're trying to run as a group. (You could cast Expeditious Retreat on yourself if you want to keep up.)

The movement of allies within the Emanation is unaffected by Difficult Terrain.

    Again, situationally great, but if most of your fights don't involve difficult terrain, this won't do antyhing.

Allies within the emanation have Advantage on Dexterity checks.

    Weirdly, this might come up more outside of combat. Using this could give you a sort of poor man's Pass Without Trace. Otherwise, it could help people escape grapples or restraints. For DMs: if the party is on a storm-rocked ship or crumbling temple roof, would you call for Acrobatics checks or Dexterity saving throws to keep them from falling? Because this only affects the former.

Once you use this ability, you can't do so again until you finish a short or long rest.

    I think the short rest rescues this - I'm surprised it doesn't instead let you recharge it with a spell slot of, say, 5th level or higher. But at least you can do it more than once per day. However, I don't see using this outside of combat because of this restriction.

    I also feel like it would be nice if this benefited us as well as our allies.

Overall Thoughts:

There are plenty of things here to recommend it, but I find some of the design here frustrating: so many features neglect to actually help the Cleric themselves. Perhaps a little revision would fix this right up.

That said... is it... kind of boring? Like, I'm not really feeling super inspired by any of these features - maybe speeding up all our allies could be fun... but... yeah, I just think this is one of those solid but kind of forgettable subclass options.

More Underdark UA Options: Subclasses and Species

 I'll confess here that I'm not super into the Underdark as a setting. I get that it's an unusual and original aspect of D&D's lore. It's also funny because it's one of these things that is maybe more specific to the Forgotten Realms setting, but there's so much in the game's rules and assumptions that it feels like you're sort of obligated to have an Underdark or equivalent in your own homebrew world.

My homebrew setting is a planet that houses, or at least housed, a consciousness that was something blurring the lines between an ancient deity and a Great Old One, though with something of a neutral alignment leaning toward benevolence. That entity was shattered by contact with the Far Realm, but before it was, aberrant corruption running through the original surface of the world caused it to create a whole second surface to grow over the original, which is what is known as the world's surface today. The old, original surface of the planet now exists as a vast subterranean realm that is utterly chock-a-block with Mind Flayers, Aboleths, and other ancient aberrations, but with areas at least that were clearly once exposed to the open air and sky.

Anyway, the Underdark is a storied part of D&D, so it makes sense that WotC seems to be hinting toward some kind of Underdark sourcebook, with several subclasses and now, evidently, a lot of new species - most of which will look familiar from the Monster Manual.

The options presented are:

The Freedom Domain Cleric, a revised Circle of Spores Druid (which was originally released as the Golgari Swarm-themed Druid in Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, a guild that does live in Ravnica's Undercity, which is sort of its Underdark but also its "Swamps" in MtG terms,) and the Faerzress Sorcerer (a term I first learned during the Acquisitions Incorporated game that came out I think when Out of the Abyss was either coming out or had just come out).

We'll also get a look at the Deep Imaskari, a species of mutated humans who have lived underground for generations, and also the Illithidkin, who are humanoid/illithid hybrids (basically as close as you can get to playing a Mind Flayer without taking that whole feat path,) and then the familiar Drider, Kuo-Toa, and Myconids.

Lots to cover, so we'll see how quickly I can get the various posts out!

Ok, Fine. Necromancer vs. Wyvern

 Yeah, I've got Necromancers on the mind. For one thing, I've been playing such a sweet and innocent Wizard for several years (though he does use Summon Undead as one of his frequent concentration spells) that I'd like to make a dark and sinister character. I went... pretty extensively into how I might approach one in a recent post.

But here we're going to narrow down to a battle plan. Wizard, it should be said, are a class that can do a massive number of different things. But I assume if we're going with the Necromancer subclass, we're going to try to command an army of the undead to face our foes.

So, to narrow this down, we'll look at feats, a concentration spell, and other spells we'll be using.

But let's start by addressing the elephant in the room:

Animate Dead doesn't have a hard limit on how many minions you can create/retain control over beyond how many 3rd or higher level spell slots you've got. While we do get a free casting of this once a day, meaning we should ideally be able to have three minions (from this spell) at any given time. Bu we can spend more spell slots on it to get more.

Let's assume for the sake of this model that we A: do get to have some undead minions that the DM hasn't contrived to get rid of (do talk with a DM before making a Necromancer. It's reasonable for the DM to limit how many minions a single player is controlling, but also, DMs, if you are going to let your player play a Necromancer, don't take away the thing their character concept is built around) and B: we're not going to spend all of our spell slots on it.

As these are done at level 10, we're going to have two 5th level spell slots. I think we'll be casting Animate Dead for free at 3rd level (which gets effectively upcast at 4th level from our Undead Thralls feature) and then again at 5th level (which gets upcast to 6th automatically). That means that we'll have a total of 10 from these two castings of the spell.

We will grab Skeletons - while Zombies to have their place, they got a little nerfed in terms of HP in 5.5, and didn't really get any compensation, while Skeletons now have a pretty healthy +5 to hit and can also attack at range (we'll assume that they've got, like, "bone bows," or screw it, maybe we just carry around a bunch of shortbows for them).

So, 10 Skeletons. But we also get a skeleton via our Find Familiar. We'll have to see if it's worth using our action to get this eleventh attack (I suspect no because of the lower hit chance).

We will need to use a bonus action to command our Animate Dead skeletons, but this command can be an ongoing directive like "kill wyverns you see." The DM might argue that this doesn't let you pick the targets, so you might be spreading your damage. But I'm going to guess that these guys are going to be dealing a lot of damage in total.

Ok, next, a concentration spell. And the one I want to use is... Danse Macabre. This is kind of a souped-up Animate Dead, but it's shorter term, takes concentration, and does also require that "general command" as a bonus action. I think we'll want to prioritize the Danse Macabre minions, even if they're going to be only have as many, because they will both hit harder and more accurately.

By turn two, though, we should have our action left over. If we want to conserve spell slots, we could just shoot a cantrip, and perhaps just Fire Bolt (while I like my Necromancers cold like the grave, we might get a little more "hellfire" theming here). Certainly we could cast other, more powerful spells, but again, Wizards are so versatile that we can just assume that we're doing things like fireballing groups of minions or helping friends out with Vortex Warps, Dispel Magics, and the like.

Ok, now: feats.

I mean, we really ought to grab War Caster. The question then, though, is if we want to just cap Intelligence at level 8, or grab another feat. There are a lot of quite-good feats in Arcana Unleashed. Here's a bit of a nutso option:

Healing spells now work on undead and constructs, even when they didn't in 5.0. If we grab Abjuration Savant, we can cast Mass Cure Wounds, potentially hitting a bunch of our minions. Undead Thralls doesn't grant Temp HP, but actually raises the HP of our minions (I had initially thought it was the other way around,) which gives them more of an opportunity to survive some damage and get healed up.

We'll assume we have a 19 Int by level 10, so a +4. Skeletons have 13 HP, but the ones we get via Animate Dead and Danse Macabre will get 9 extra (our familiar doesn't, as it's created via a Conjuration rather than Necromancy spell). So, 22 HP per skeletons, which means they... might survive long enough to benefit from healing (at 14 we can buff them with temp HP as well).

Ok, so, let's figure out damage:

Skeletons have a +5 to hit with both their shortswords and shortbows, and deal 1d6+3 with either by default. Each deals an additional 4 necrotic damage thanks to Undead Thralls, so the Animate Dead ones (of which there are 10) will have a +5 to hit and hit for 1d6+7 each.

The Danse Macabre ones, though, get additional bonuses from the spell itself, adding our Int mod (+4) to attack and damage rolls. This should stack with Undead Thralls, so these will get a +9 to hit and deal 1d6+11 on a hit. There are 5 of these.

Again, I suspect that, especially because of the better hit chance, we'll favor Danse Macabre minions first, but we'll do the math for each, of course. But we'll start with Danse.

Ok, so, against an AC of 14, we hit on a 5 or more, so that's an 80% hit chance. On a hit, we're doing 1d6+11, or 14.5, and then an extra 3.5 on a crit. So, 80%x14.5 is 11.6 and 3.5x5% is .175, so that's 11.775 on each of 5 attacks. Multiplying it together, we're getting 58.875 damage.

That's... a freaking lot.

Well damn, ok. Let's get the Animate Dead guys in.

These guys only have a +5 to hit, so they need to roll a 9 or higher to hit (60% hit chance). On a hit, they do 1d6+7, or 10.5 damage average, with that same crit damage of .175. 10.5x60% is 6.3, so we'll be getting 6.475. And then... well, there are ten of them. So... that's 64.75 damage. (Ok, I guess we actually command the Animate Dead ones first).

And I mean... do we even freaking care about what we're doing with our action on subsequent turns?

I mean, Fire Bolt with a +8 to hit is doing like 8.8 extra damage.

So, by turn two, our 15 minions are doing a total of 123.625 damage.

We're... yeah. We're good.

Bringing Out the Dead: Conceptualizing and Building a Necromancer Wizard

 As readers of this blog will know, while my aesthetic has always been a bit more 1990s slacker (an aesthetic that I have maintained since the actual 1990s, a decade in which I just barely made it into teenagehood with like six months to spare) I have a secret spooky goth underneath it all. When I started playing World of Warcraft... dear lord, 20 years ago (like, as of this month,) and encountered the Undead Scourge, I became particularly enamored of the undead specifically when it comes to spooky monsters.

I don't actually love gore as an aesthetic, but dusty crypts and skeletal warriors are totally my jam.

Anywho, the Necromancer is one of the great classic "evil wizard" archetypes, and in particular in D&D, among whose most iconic monsters are the Lich (I'd argue it's the single most wide-reaching contribution to the fantasy genre the game has made, such that it's sort of a surprise that the concept or at least the term "Lich" to mean that, as far as I can tell, didn't exist before D&D,) Necromancers are a very solid choice for a major villain.

Death, of course, carries with it countless taboos. Reckoning with death is a universal human experience (and I suspect it would be of any sapient species that isn't somehow immortal,) and the idea of reanimated corpses triggers a ton of different fear responses. We're hard-wired to find dead bodies, especially those that have undergone decay, repulsive, because that fear protected our ancestors from dangerous bacteria and fungi that might grow in a dead body and spread to the living. And then, on another, more intellectual level, there's something deeply unsettling about the idea of a corpse that is moving: not just in an uncanny valley way, but also as a reminder that one day, we too will be pallid corpses (though probably not shambling ones).

D&D characters need not be good or heroic figures - the concept of the game initially was that people of widely varying motivations and methods would band together to plumb the depths of dangerous dungeons. But I think in modern times, the tendency is for D&D parties to generally do heroics for their own sake - gold and treasure is more of a means to the end of being capable of taking on graver threats, rather than the inverse. (As the folks at MCDM have pointed out, especially in the design of their new game, Crows, D&D originally made gold and XP the same thing - the more gold you hauled out of a dungeon, the faster you leveled up your characters, a mechanic that Crows brings back).

Still, I think it's a good rule, especially if you're not just playing an old-school dungeon crawling campaign, to try at least to build a character who can play well with others and perhaps exist in society (they don't need to be popular.)

Necromancers have a huge advantage as a subclass, which is that they're Wizards, and Wizards are amazingly useful to have in any D&D party, providing a lot of utility to the group. That level of capability and expertise can also justify why your party is willing to tolerate the kind of messed-up stuff you do.

I think we're going to be building this to really conform to the archetype of the Necromancer. We may not be evil, but this is the Wizard who delves into forbidden knowledge and practices that might make them shunned by polite society.

Note that I think you can do similar things with a couple other classes and subclasses. Undead Warlocks and Reanimator Artificers are probably living in a very similar space, and nearly any of the subclasses out of Ravenloft: Horrors Within can exist in similar spaces.

But if we're really going into the notion of someone specifically delving into dark and hidden knowledge, this is really the ultimate subclass for that (though I'd argue Reanimators vie for that position as well, it's just that Reanimators are doing experimental research while Necromancers are perhaps more theoretical).

So, first question: is our Necromancer's research sanctioned or no?

It's a funny thing: in D&D, Necromancy is understood as one of the eight schools of magic, despite the fact that you could argue a lot of its abilities could be described using other schools: like, isn't raising the dead kind of Transmutation? Technically a corpse is an object that you could target with Animate Objects, after all.

But does this recognition of Necromancy as its whole own type of magic mean that magical institutions need to sanction its study and practice? Perhaps it's known, yes, that this eighth school exists, but it's the one you're not supposed to actually use.

I like the idea of a scholar who has been cast out of whatever institution they were a part of because of their pursuit of forbidden knowledge. You often need a reason why someone set aside their civilian life to pursue an adventuring career, and having your former career come crashing down around you is a pretty good reason.

So, I think our Necromancer was once basically a magical professor. Maybe they taught at some institute of arcane learning, a prestigious place. Professors generally have two tasks, teaching and research (with a lot of them far preferring the latter and teaching only because their college or university requires it,) but perhaps we give our character a somewhat more sympathetic characterization: they actually love the teaching side of it, and had some really meaningful connections with their students.

If this institution was one that banned the study of necromancy, what might have driven them to it, then?

Well, Necromancy, at least as practiced by Wizards, can't bring someone back to true life, but a Wizard might not be aware of that particular nuance. Let's suppose that our good professor had a favorite student. I'm going to say just to avoid any real ickiness we're going to say that the relationship was platonic, but it was the kind of relationship between a professor and student where they'll probably wind up lifelong friends and colleagues once the student earns their degree (my dad's closest friends are mostly his former PhD advisees from the 70s and 80s).

But tragedy strikes, and the student dies in some violent manner - it's not a natural cause, but maybe a magical experiment gone wrong or a random act of criminal violence. Our good professor feels somehow responsible - maybe they encouraged said experiment, or perhaps they sent the student on a task that put them in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The point is, their entry into Necromancy as a practice begins with noble intentions: to give life back to someone who lost it too soon.

But things don't go very well: first off, the attempt to bring their student back instead brings them back as an undead creature: here, the student actually becomes our undead familiar through the Necromancy Spellbook feature.

Someone at the university discovers the paper trail of banned books and finds the good professor's secret ritual space. They're not just fired - the school calls the authorities to have them arrested, and potentially executed for these crimes.

But our good professor A: doesn't want to die and B: still wants to figure out a way to bring their student back from the dead, so they go on the run.

If they want to accomplish their goal, setting things right and restoring their student to true life, they'll need to protect themselves and learn more. That means finding deeper, more forbidden lore and having the means to fend off the well-meaning but dogmatic forces trying to bring them to heel.

And thus, an adventurer is born.

Now, let's talk mechanics:

I think our pretty clear background here (class and subclass is obviously already spoken for) is probably Sage. While you might think Magic Initiate: Wizard on a Wizard is redundant, it mainly translates to an extra spell per day and some bonus preparations. Shield is a great option here (one of those spells you take on any character who can get it) given that Find Familiar comes with our subclass. For cantrips, I think any spellcaster is going to want to have one really solid damage cantrip, though this broadens our options a bit to allow a second one (we can also swap cantrips on a long rest now as a Wizard, so the one from this feat should be one we really always want to have). I might grab a utility cantrip with the feat like Mage Hand, as we're probably never going to want to swap that out.

But what about that main damage cantrip? There are only two necromancy cantrips in the 5.0 PHB for Wizards. Chill Touch is now, appropriately, a touch-range spell, which makes more sense with the name (though it still does necrotic rather than cold damage) but makes it less, you know, good as a primary damage option. Toll the Dead is actually not a bad choice - as a saving throw cantrip, it's equally effective in melee as it is at range, and it's also the highest-damage-potential cantrip if the target has taken any damage (which will be the case the vast majority of the time). Saving throw cantrips can't crit, though, and monster saving throw bonuses scale better than their AC, so it's not always going to be the best option, but it's a solid choice. If we want to go off-theme, I of course think that the new True Strike is fantastic, though it's not a classic Wizard aesthetic. Perhaps because of Warcraft, I often think of necromancers as using a lot of cold magic, so I think something like Ray of Frost would actually be a pretty on-theme choice even if it's an evocation spell. Oh, actually, Poison Spray is a necromancy cantrip, and it's certainly a lot better than it was in 5.0 (it's now a ranged spell attack with a 30 foot range,) but it does do Poison damage, which is great unless you're fighting undead, fiends, elementals, constructs, maybe celestials, some monstrosities... it's the least reliable damage type in the game.

Now, Wizards get a lot of spells, and you can even get plenty of spells for your spellbook in the course of your campaign depending on how easy your DM makes it for you to find more spells.

You're going to want to take a lot of the classics, especially any good utility ritual spells.

But to narrow our focus, let's talk about what we want to take every other level via our Necromancy Savant feature.

Note that we don't have to take a spell of our highest level spell slot with this feature, and perhaps as choices narrow at high levels, we might decide to grab some we had skipped earlier. But I'm going to assume that it's not impossible for us to find spell in the world, and so we'll go for the greatest efficiency in taking high-level spells and saving on gold and time copying.

So, what are the best Necromancy spells for us to take at each spell level?

At 1st level, our only choices are False Life and Ray of Sickness - though I'll note that when we get this feature, we can actually get two second level Necromancy spells. Of the two, I'm inclined to like False Life a little more, for similar reasons that I'm avoiding Poison Spray. But we'll only grab it if we can't find two second-level spells we want.

At 2nd level, Gentle Repose and Ray of Enfeeblement are our PHB options, but expanding outward, we also have Wither and Bloom and Death Armor. Gentle Repose can be very helpful if we don't have access to resurrection magic yet, so we can keep someone in the Revivify window long enough to get them to a healer. I'd then say perhaps Wither and Bloom is another option if we want a bit of light AoE (it's less damage than Shatter, but avoid friendly fire and can allow for a little quasi-healing (friends have to expend hit dice to get the healing,) which could honestly be pretty clutch.

For 3rd level spells, obviously we'll skip over Animate Dead given that we get it at Wizard level 6 automatically. We actually have a fair number of options here: Bestow Curse, Feign Death, Speak with Dead, Summon Undead, and Vampiric Touch are all in the PHB. Life Transference is in Xanathar's, and we have Spirit Shroud from Tasha's. If we want to go all in on summoning undead, I think Summon Undead is a pretty solid option. Spirit Shroud can act as a poor man's Conjure Minor Elementals if we want to go supernova with Scorching Ray. Bestow Curse can have some nasty effects, though we need to get in touch range to do it. That said, with our familiar, we can potentially send our poor old student we're trying to help to go do it (we might choose to flavor the familiar differently - maybe we just started studying necromancy to figure out how to raise our friend, but we didn't actually get a chance to try it on them yet). I think if we want to go all in on an army of undead minions, Summon Undead comes with some really powerful utility, like inflicting fear on a hit, or if we're a bit lucky, paralyzing on hit. Indeed, if we do pick up Ray of Sickness, we can potentially poison a target with our own action and then have a Putrid Spirit paralyze them with a hit, which can be a truly nasty combo assuming the target can be poisoned and paralyzed. Summon Undead and Animate Dead occupy similar conceptual niches, but they're actually compatible with one another, just as long as your fellow players don't get frustrated when you're commanding a ton of different creatures each turn.

For 4th level spells, skip Blight, as it doesn't do nearly enough damage for a single-target spell, which is rough because it's the only 4th level necromancy spell in the 5.5 PHB. Looking elsewhere, our only other option here is Festering Blast from Arcana Unleashed, which is a line spell that does necrotic damage initially and can poison, with the poison doing poison damage over time. Again, sucks if our foes are immune to poison, but this could actually be a great option to inflict poison on a bunch of targets and then paralyze them with a putrid spirit from Summon Undead. Festering Blast only does 4d10 damage initially (though it's a 10-foot line rather than a 5-foot one) but I think it's at least much better than Blight. Though honestly, we might dip back and grab a 3rd level spell when we hit level 7 because the options are so limited here.

For 5th level, there's not a single Wizard necromancy spell in the PHB at this level. But we have some good options elsewhere. In Arcana Unleashed, we have a bevy of options, with Enervation, Grave Ground, Negative Energy Flood, Spirit Lantern, and Waves of Exhaustion. From Xanathar's, we have Danse Macabre (and older version of some of the ones from Xanathar's). Now, I actually love Danse Macabre, especially with the buffed Skeleton stat block in 5.5. This lets you raise five undead minions, who use the zombie or skeleton stat block, but crucially, they get to add your spellcasting ability modifier to attack and damage rolls. A skeleton with a +5 to hit is going to start struggling when you start fighting creatures with 20 AC or higher, but if that becomes +10 to hit, and each hit doing 1d6+8 (5 times,) this starts to mean a lot of damage. (Actually, thanks to our Undead Thralls feature, make that 1d6+13!) If you have the raw materials (aka, a bunch of bone piles) this spell actually puts out an insane amount of single-target damage. Unlike Animate Dead, it only lasts for an hour, takes concentration, and also eats up your bonus action to command your minions, but I just have to advocate for this profoundly on-brand spell. (Also, the rule is that the verbal component is the entire Vincent Price "rap" from Thriller, which you must say in its entirety at the table the first time you cast this.)

Ahem. Again, I think this is a very good option, but if your DM is stingy about providing you corpses to reanimate, let's look at other options. I'm skeptical about Waves of Exhaustion: while you can potentially debuff foes to up to a -8 for all their d20 tests, doing so takes several turns. Spirit Lantern is conceptually cool, but works best if you're in a target-rich environment, when you might want to be casting Fireballs or the like. I actually really like Grave Ground conceptually and aesthetically, though I think it's more likely to serve as good battlefield control rather than a source of damage (which might be what you want it for). Particularly good in fights with bottlenecks you can block off. Negative Energy Flood does ok damage for a single-target spell, but can be a bit versatile as a way to heal up an undead minion (likely only your Summon Undead spirit is worth it, if that). I'd really go Danse Macabre or Grave Ground as a backup if you can't use 5.0 only content.

(Oh, one problem: Animate Dead also requires a bonus action to command our minions. The minions from Danse Macabre will hit much harder and more accutrately, so it's still potentially worth using anyway. Likewise, our commands can potentially carry over between turns, if we tell them to "attack that creature," they should continue to until it's dead, and I guess even afterward. So, while there might be an action economy pile-up, we could in theory get both the minions from Animate Dead and from Danse Macabre to work in tandem, but with a turn of ramp-up.)

At 6th level, we have a few options. From the PHB, we've got Circle of Death, Create Undead, Eyebite, and Magic Jar. I... think Soul Cage from Xanathar's is the rough equivalent of Magic Jar (checking... actually not really!) So, right off the bat, I think we'll skip Circle of Death, which is basically the same damage as Fireball but on a wider area. I don't know that that utility is really that useful given how huge a Fireball typically is, and it's hard to avoid friendly fire with Circle of Death, on top of the damage being low for a 6th level spell.

The math on Create Undead is interesting: naturally, we'll be able to raise more creatures with Animate Dead, especially with our Animate Dead feature. At this level spell level, Animate Dead can give us 9 skeletons/zombies, compared to just 3 ghouls with Create Undead. If we don't have the corpses to do 9 with animate dead, obviously we'd grab the ghouls. But with only a +4 to hit and slightly higher damage than skeletons, for pure damage, Animate is better. However! Ghouls can paralyze a target on a hit (there is a Con save involved, and it doesn't work on undead or elves,) and while the save DC is quite low, that can be massive utility. I think the larger army of skeletons or even zombies (though I'd say go for skeletons any time you can) is probably the better call, given how the damage bonus from our Undead Thralls feature will scale really well with the size of our army.

The other spells (other than Circle of Death) are weird utility and debuff spells. Eyebite can put out various quite nasty debuffs, though it takes our concentration and action each turn. Soul Cage is a weird one that does require a humanoid soul to trap, so it might be tough depending on the kind of campaign you're in. Magic Jar is maybe the weirdest of the bunch, which lets you separate your soul from your body so you can go and possess another humanoid. The use cases here are... profoundly varied. If you can figure out a great way to use this, by all means go for it. I think I'd go with Eyebite or Create Undead as more straightforward options.

Onto 7th level! Finger of Death is our only PHB option here. And it actually, genuinely, might be the only 7th level Necromancy spell for Wizards, as I just looked through Heroes of Faerun, Arcana Unleashed, Xanathar's, and Tasha's (I realize I'm leaving out a few scattered other sources). So pick that, I guess. Finger of Death isn't bad - it does less damage than Disintegrate, but it's a save-for-half spell and can potentially get you yet another permanent undead minion.

Now, 8th level: In the PHB, we've got Clone. Our only other option is Abi-Dazim's Horrid Wilting from Xanathar's. These are very different spells for very different purposes. Horrid Wilting does 12d8 necrotic damage in a 30-foot cube, with a Con save for half. A 30-foot cube is actually a little smaller than a Fireball. And 12d8 is an average of 54 damage, whereas an 8th level Fireball would do 45.5, so it is a step up in terms of damage.

Clone is a super weird one. It basically lets you avoid death, but it takes a long time (120 days) for the clone to reach a point where it can work. Then, you're also going to wake up without any of your gear, which has been left behind with your original body. You can use something like Drawmij's Instant Summons (though make sure you do so right away, as if the people who killed you pick up your gear, Instant Summons will just tell you where your stuff is, which you already know, presumably). Clone is very cool, but I think it's more useful as a kind of "campaign epilogue" spell, where you might go on to live for thousands of years by just slipping into your cloned body after you die of old age.

Finally, 9th level spells: Bizarrely, Astral Projection is actually considered Necromancy, and is the only one in the PHB. But Arcana Unleashed gives us Wail of the Banshee.

I love Astral Projection, but it's possibly a bit redundant given that you could have already gotten Plane Shift, and while it makes it safer to traverse the Astral Sea (unless you fight things that can cut the thread, which, like, most monsters in the Astral Sea can) I don't know that it's super practical. (Again, we can just Wish a Plane Shift if we lack the correct tuning rod).

Wail of the Banshee... is interesting. It can instant-kill any creatures of your choice within 60 feet who hear it if they have 50 HP or fewer. At tier 4, that's really marginal for most monsters you'll face. In the far more likely case that they have over 50 HP, though, they make a Con save, taking 12d10 psychic damage on a failure and being deafened, or half as much on a success without the condition.

I... I love the flavor here, and the fact that you can avoid friendly fire is genuinely a real selling point. But any 9th level AoE damage spell (and this is effectively that - even the instant kill function is effectively a flat 50 damage) is going to need to compare to Meteor Swarm, which does a whopping 140 damage on average. You know what would auto-kill a bunch of monsters with less than 50 hit points? A Meteor Swarm that does 70 damage even if they succeed on their saving throw.

    Phew! That was a lot!

So, how do we play this?

Well, one of the joys of playing a Wizard is that you have so many options on how to approach each challenge, whether they be combat encounters or other things. But if we want to really lean into the subclass fantasy, we're primarily going to act as a battlefield commander for a legion of undead troops.

Talk with your DM extensively about how practical it will be for you to command a bunch of undead. While Summon Undead and Danse Macabre make temporary undead minions, remember that Animate Dead and Create Undead create undead monsters that don't die when the spell ends - they're just no longer under your control. This means you effectively need to re-cast the spell on the same minions to keep them leashed, perhaps supplementing fallen minions with new remains (though again, talk with your DM about whether a dead zombie is now a humanoid corpse that could be reanimated with such a spell).

It's also a really important thing for you to hash out with your DM what you have to do with your undead minions when you, say, go to town. Is this a setting where people understand that you're "one of the good guys," and thus your marching force of undead minions are allowed to come into the general store with you? Or, more likely, would people run screaming if they saw you at the head of an undead host?

The main reason I think DMs will "railroad" or "shut down" players' ideas is more about keeping the campaign manageable. If you're going to play this subclass, see if they're willing to make ample corpses available for reanimation in the game's world, and maybe if they don't, see if they'll agree to letting you endlessly "recycle" fallen undead.

One of the biggest challenges to a minion-commanding character in a TTRPG is that your turns might go on forever. While the Berserker Barbarian resolves their entire turn in like, a minute, rolling two attacks and then moving, if you've got a dozen minions that are all moving and attacking, on top of whatever spell choices you're making for your turn, it could get out of hand.

Consider whether some limitations might be helpful to keep the flow of the game going. Maybe, for example, you can only maintain a number of minions from Animate Dead that you'd be able to get from a single cast. As written, a 10th level Necromancer could blow all 3 3rd, 4th, and both 5th level spell slots to raise (er, 3x3 plus 3x5 plus 2x7, so that's...) 38 minions. That could be hilariously funny (and even with only a +3 or +5 to hit, that's going to wind up being an insane amount of single target damage per turn) but it makes the combat encounter the Necromancer show.

Limiting it to just one Animate Dead's worth of minions means just 7, which is still a lot but more manageable. Alternatively, we could look at Draw Steel for inspiration on how to handle minions.

The Draw Steel Summoner is entirely built around having a bunch of minions on the board, and groups these minions into squads that have essentially a shared health pool, with thresholds where individuals are killed and reduce the overall damage they do.

I'd be tempted to go a step further and make them move together as well. Here's an idea I'd propose:

Every time you get a square number of minions, you group them into a squad. So, say we cast Animate Dead at 5th level. We have 4 in a squad and then the remaining 3 act individually. This is only if they're the same creature choice.

If we have four skeletons, we group them into a Large Swarm of Medium Undead. They make a single attack together, pooling the damage they'd normally do so that it would be 4d6+12 (and then an additional 4x our Int modifier for Undead Thralls' necrotic damage). We likewise pool their HP and Temp HP, multiplying the usual totals by 4. Now, the math actually makes them a little tougher, but what we do is that when their HP drops to thresholds equal to the skeletons' individual max HP (so, we have 52 total, but at 39, 26, and 13) the swarm is diminished, subtracting one minion's damage from the total.

Again, the math makes them a little tougher because the monsters have to chew through all four minions' temp HP before any start going down, but I think that's fair. We might even nerf their damage by forcing them to take the average damage even on crits (which would also speed up combat).

Alternatively, to keep your fellow players engaged, try relinquishing control. Maybe you divide your undead minions and allow your friends to control them.

It's common wisdom in D&D that putting more bodies on the board is often very powerful, and Necromancers can put a lot of bodies on the board.

Again, I've been playing a Wizard for I think almost 5 years now, and so I'm eager to try other classes in some new campaign. I still haven't played a 5.5 Monk, and I'd love to get my hands on the new Artifcer as well.

But I've got to say, I would not hate playing a Necromancer.