Dungeons & Dragons testing out even more Underdark subclasses and species

Another new Unearthed Arcana featuring Underdark options was just released, this time highlighted by three new subclasses and several interesting new species options. The new Underdark Options 2 PDF was just released, featuring three new subclasses – a Freedom Domain Cleric, a Circle of Spores Druid, and a Faerzress Sorcerer. Additionally, five new species were presented for playtesting: the Deep Imaskari, Drider, Illithidkin (creatures experimented on by illithid), kuo-toa, and myconid.

The Freedom Domain cleric is a high-Dexterity Cleric with a spell list full of movement related spells. The Freedom Domain Cleric’s Channel Divinity ends various conditions on all allied creatures within 30 feet and additionally allows those creatures to move up to their Speed by using their Reaction without provoking Opportunity Attacks. The Circle of Spores Druid is reworked from 5th Edition and includes buffs to the Halo of Spores, Fungal Infestation, and Fungal Body abilities, as well as a new feature called Explosive Burst, which causes the fungal zombies the player animates to blow up when they die. The Faerzress Sorcerer is a sorcerer mutated by faerzress, a radiation created by Lolth to shape the Underdark. These sorcerers can create Faerzress zones and can eventually laces their spells with faerzress, which prevents targets from teleporting and prevents them from casting Divination spells.

Of the five new species, the most interesting are the drider (which drew heavy inspiration from the Centaur species) and the Myconid. The drider is a Lolth-associated monster that’s a combination of a drow and a spider, while the Myconid is a sentient mushroom person. The Myconid, notably, is the first Plant species playable in 5.5E, while this marks the first time that a drider has been a player character race in official D&D books (at least from my cursory research.)

You can check out the full playtest here.

 

[bedir than]

A horse does not occupy very much of a 10 foot cube!

Notably, this is only relevant when fighting or for carrying capacity. The game does not insist that Large Creatures are 10' cubes

 

[Keith Langley]

The other choice is to make them large but just handwave the logistical issues of stairs and narrow corridors, etc.

D&D has gotten so high fantasy at this point that it starts having trouble with making it highly simulationist.

I prefer leaving them large. Let them have one die size higher for melee, and disadvantage in a narrow space. Minotaurs and centaurs. And yes, a centaur can carry a medium or small rider.

 

[Dessert Nomad]

Personally, I think the issues of large characters having a larger footprint on a combat grid is more of a potential balance concern than stairs and narrow corridors.

A medium character without a reach weapon threatens the 8 squares immediately surrounding them with opportunity attacks. A large character threatens 12.

Anything that works off the "X foot emanation" or "within X feet of you" type language gets a significant boost in effective range simply from the grid footprint of a large character.

You can already do that if you want to - the enlarge spell makes someone a size category bigger, and moon druids routinely fight as a large or huge creature. It doesn't really cause that big of an effect in the game. I think the problem comes in the other direction - large creatures don't fit right on a lot of maps, and plenty of published adventures have bits where you need to ride on a large creature or have a passage that only an X or smaller creature can get through. Think about a 20x20 or 30x30 room. With all medium PCs and monsters, you can run a reasonable fight there where people move around. Make 2 creatures large on each side, and it's completely jammed up.

I think WOTCs aversion to always-large PCs is because they don't want to make a situation where someone running a published adventure or book RAW ends up with 'this PC cannot participate because they can't ride the griffin to the destination' or 'this simple fight turned out really weird because the large creatures packed the room too much'. It seems a little silly since the usual experienced DM response is to just work around those issues as needed, but with the amount of new players and DMs they have coming in I think they don't want to rely on that.

 

[Remathilis]

Personally, I think the issues of large characters having a larger footprint on a combat grid is more of a potential balance concern than stairs and narrow corridors.

A medium character without a reach weapon threatens the 8 squares immediately surrounding them with opportunity attacks. A large character threatens 12.

Anything that works off the "X foot emanation" or "within X feet of you" type language gets a significant boost in effective range simply from the grid footprint of a large character.

This is exactly the reason. Large creatures on the grid control too much territory, to the detriment of medium sized ones. A large-sized paladin is strictly superior to a medium one in most situations unless you are always using 5 foot wide corridors to negate them.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

“Large” is double “medium” in all dimensions, which means it should be around 11 ft. Tall and have a mass of around 600 kg.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

The deep imaskari being the human equivalent of duergar, drow and svirnefblin make it really apparent how badly we need underdark halflings.

Spoiler: they all look like Gollum.

 

[SteveC]

5.5 gave the designers the option to have a character's species give abilities at higher character levels. They could have picked levels where there are fewer class abilities, and plugged in an extra species ability, or even given choices. The people who came over from Paizo should be familiar with this because that's PF2.

 

[Tigris]

5.5 gave the designers the option to have a character's species give abilities at higher character levels. They could have picked levels where there are fewer class abilities, and plugged in an extra species ability, or even given choices. The people who came over from Paizo should be familiar with this because that's PF2.

Pf2 s every 2 level get class thing every other level get feat is from 4e.


PF2 just changed/partially renamed class powers to class feats and split up feats between race and general (and skill).

In 4e every odd level you got a power from class every even level you got a feat which could have been general feat or race feat etc.


Still I agree in 5e it would make much more sense to get the race upgrades at level 3 and 4 where normally less happens than 3 and 5.

 

[Zardnaar]

Pf2 s every 2 level get class thing every other level get feat is from 4e.


PF2 just changed/partially renamed class powers to class feats and split up feats between race and general (and skill).

In 4e every odd level you got a power from class every even level you got a feat which could have been general feat or race feat etc.


Still I agree in 5e it would make much more sense to get the race upgrades at level 3 and 4 where normally less happens than 3 and 5.

I kinda prefer race stuff 1, 3, 5 as 4th is a big upgrade level with feat.

That being said.

3,4,5,6 seem to be key upgrade
levels. Makes sense peak levels played I suppose.

 

[SteveC]

Pf2 s every 2 level get class thing every other level get feat is from 4e.

In PF2 you get an Ancestry feat at level 1 and every 4 levels afterward. That's in addition to class and skill feats. I don't know that I was suggesting quite that many, but 1 feat per Tier of play, on top of everything else, would be a solid design choice to me. But that ship has sailed until 6E