You know, just a week or so back I pontificated in the New Dragonlance Novel thread about how just because a novel was coming under the 'Dragonlance Classic' banner didn't mean that 5e DL was on the agenda any time soon, when clearly WotC was showing more interest in Spelljammer and Planescape.
And this time last year I was lecturing people about how 5e Ravenloft had already been done in CoS and how there's NO WAY WotC would revisit it in a campaign setting so soon and that surely a planar/Planescape setting would be next.
Given that predictive record on my part, there is clearly one thing that needs to be said urgently.
THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO WAY THAT 5E DARK SUN IS COMING, NO WAY AT ALL, DO YOU HEAR ME WOTC???!?
As for the actual UA ... I actually suggested re-inventing kender as trickster-fey on these boards a long time ago. If you're reinventing the setting (and clearly with VRGtR WotC have demonstrated that they intend to re-invent legacy settings from the ground up rather than simply update them) then it makes a bit of thematic sense. There IS a lot of, for instance, Peter Pan about kender. While I personally am fed up to the back teeth with the feywild relentlessly being shoved everydamnwhere it doesn't belong (hobgoblins ffs...), but this is one case I can grudgingly accept that as a concept, it might work. However, it's not really how kender have ever worked in the books. Tasselhof doesn't accidentally find a handful of gp or a piece of string or whatever in his belt pouch - he finds a plot-critical important item belonging to someone else. I'd prefer some sort of narrative-control way of making this happen. Perhaps in addition to the rule as presented, the player of a kender PC can spend an inspiration point to declare retroactively that they 'borrowed' thing X from character Y? Making it so that it's not something kender can use CONTINUALLY and disruptively, but making it a bit more reflective of the lore (and it's quite a fey-ish mechanic, too). WotC have historically been very shy of using 'hero points' of any kind to give players any degree of narrative control like many other systems do, rather than just dice bonuses or re-rolls, but this is a case where it could work and be warranted i think, so i reckon it'd be worth dabbling a toe in that water.
I'm not thrilled about Taunt as a racial ability, though if you lean hard into a new kender-are-fey interpretation then it could fit. If you're not going all-out on that front though, it should be a feat, not a racial ability. Personality traits (even, and perhaps especially 'very annoying'!) should not be tied to race.
Moon sorcerer looks interesting, and I'm glad that WotC have finally decided that an expanded spells known list should be a feature of every sorcerer subclass. However, I'm kinda against letting PCs simply CHOOSE their preferred phase of the moon? It takes a bit more effort and record-keeping and decreases the flexibility of the subclass, but I just much prefer the phase of the actual moon to determine what they can do, rather than having people channelling the dark moon under the full moon, and the like.
If background feats mean we're heading towards a model where every PC gets a feat at first level, I'm all for it. 5e has too few choice points when it comes to character customisation. While it's not ideal to add our new frontloading choice point at level 1 where all the choices already are being made, it's better than nothing.
Feat chains in general aren't wonderful given how few feats 5e PCs get. If you want to progress up a feat chain, you have to design your whole PC around that. But on the other hand, the ones presented here are no worse than, say, Heavy Armour Mastery. Like that feat, there's a reasonable way to get the prerequisite feat at level 1, and the chains never go on longer than 2 feats. So it's not quite at the sort of nightmare level that 3e got to.
A problem i see with the Robe Adept feats however, is that there's no way to wind them back. Mages changing their robe colours (after suitable character-building revelations and experiences...) is a BIG part of being a Dragonlance arcane caster and of the whole Towers of High Sorcery thing. But here, once you're at 1st level, you're committed permanently. I hope the book has a sidebar or something talking about how to mechanically represent switching allegiances, even if it's as simple as a feat swap. Similarly, it might be warranted to include a note saying that just because you took the Knight of the Rose feat, doesn't automatically make you a Knight of the Rose. It gives your PC abilities that the Knights of the Rose traditionally value and look for, but you still have to earn your knighthood, get knighted etc in play.
Grammar is unclear in the Divine Communications feat. Can you cast augury and commune once each per 1d4 long rests, or one of those spells once per 1d4 long rests? And jeez, commune even a couple of times a week can be a real mystery-plot-killer at low levels especially.
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