Dungeons & Dragons Releases New Unearthed Arcana Subclasses, Strongly Hinting at Dark Sun

Wizards of the Coast has released four new D&D subclasses for playtesting, all of which have heavy thematic ties to the post-apocalyptic Dark Sun setting. The four subclasses, released as "Apocalyptic Subclasses," include the Circle of Preservation Druid, the Gladiator Fighter, the Defiled Sorcerer, and the Sorcerer-King Patron Warlock. Although not stated outright, the Gladiator and Sorcerer-King Patron are explicit nods to the Dark Sun setting, set in a ruined world ruled by Sorcerer-Kings where gladiatorial fights were common.

The Circle of Preservation Druid creates areas of preserved land that grants buffs to those who stand upon it. The Gladiator adds secondary Weapon Mastery properties to their attacks, with bonus abilities. Notably, the Gladiator uses Charisma as its secondary stat. The Defiled Sorcerer can expend its hit dice to amp up damage to its attacks and can also steal the life of its targets to deal additional damage. The Sorcerer-King Patron gains a number of abilities tying into tyranny and oppression, with the ability to cast Command as a Bonus Action without expending a spell slot, causing targets to gain the Frightened Condition, and forcing those who attack them to re-roll successful attacks.

The survey for the subclasses goes live on August 28th.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

RAW in 2024 Warlcok does not and cannot know who their patron is before level 3

False. Before level 3 the default is that your patron isn’t specified, but no actual rule prevents deciding your patron up front.

and DM is not allowed to have them directly interact with the patron before level 10, because level ten feature specifies that before Warlock reaches this level, patron can only communicate through agents, never directly.

That is a misrepresentation of the feature.

Taking into account most games end around level 10, this pretty much removes patron from the game and turning Warlock into set of mechanical benefits, with no roleplaying consequences or expectations the patron carried with them in 2014 version.

The 2014 had no mechanical weight for the patron at all, while the 2024 version does.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

That doesn't mean it's a bad rule and as designed and thus intended by the designers, the Patron is a non-entity who bears nominal effect of the plot if at all, not an NPC Warlock could interact with (tbh best part of being a Warlock).

The feature, by the way, says that “you usually contacted your patron via intermediaries”. It DOES NOT say that the patron wasn’t completely capable of waking you up in the middle of the night for an argument about the ethics of burning down a shop in the middle of Luskan because the owner was evil.

It also doesn’t say that you could not contact the patron directly before level nine. In fact, it directly allows for you to be able to by using the word “usually”. That literally means there are possible exceptions, ie that you could contact them directly, but the means to do so relied on the story/DM/your ingenuity. Just like before.

What’s more, the only thing I can find that suggest that you don’t know who your patron is, is one line in the Pact Magic feature that you are making way too much of.

It says the patrons identity is unclear, sure. The introduction says that you learned forbidden rituals and studied the nature of a type of otherworldly being in order to perform occult rituals to gain power from them. Both are flavor text, not rules.

Nothing in any of that means that you cannot know your patron at level 1, nor that your dm “isn’t allowed” to do anything at all, ever.