Unearthed Arcana Unearthed Arcana: Revenant Subrace, Monster Hunter, and Inquisitive

There's a new Unearthed Arcana up from WotC's Mike Mearls, and this month it looks at Gothic Options for your D&D game, supplementing the themes of the recently released Curse of Strahd. The Revenant is a new sub race which can be applied to any existing race, the Monster Hunter is a fighter archetype, and the Inquisitive is an archetype for rogues who excel at solving mysteries. "This month, Unearthed Arcana takes a look at a few new character options appropriate to gothic horror.The revenant subrace provides an interesting way to bring a character back from the dead—a useful option if you’ve lost a character in the mists of Barovia. The Monster Hunter and the Inquisitive are two new archetypes for the fighter and rogue, respectively, well suited to the challenges of Ravenloft or any other gothic horror campaign."

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[Saeviomagy]

IMHO the key could be in those new subclasses offer at least some non-combat use of superiority dice, while the Battlemaster being focused on battle would still offer only in-combat uses.

I'd much rather broaden battlemaster than create subclasses which are functionally identical to it, but with pre-selected choices. I think that adding new maneuvers and switching up know your enemy to have more of a monstrous focus would make a more useful addition than this. Either that or go way, way further in adding non-combat ability to the class.

The inquisitive is interesting: a wisdom based rogue. Ear for deceit heavily overlaps with reliable talent, and tends to not be great because I tend to use passive insight to set DCs rather than as a roll. Bonus action perception/investigation checks sounds ok, as long as you're making perception checks an action. Generally that makes little sense to me. The investigation bit does make these guys great at defeating illusions, but that means the best bit of a class ability for a wisdom subclass is intelligence based... Insightful fighting will do nothing most of the time, because as others have said: rogues basically sneak attack all the time. And I'm not keen on introducing in-combat opposed checks, because the randomness is so huge. Steady eye is interesting, but is going to lead arguments about out-of-combat perception checks.

Revenant is... hard to gauge. It's an interesting concept, but if I were to use it, I wouldn't bother mucking about with subrace stuff (and I wouldn't give out a con bonus either). The other features are relatively minor. Regenerating 1hp per round mostly makes a difference in that it encourages people to finish you off, and that's by far the strongest ability.

 

[Connorsrpg]

The problem (now that battle master is out there) is that yes, you need to do something unique with fighter archetypes. Problem is when you do, people just say, "Why don't you just add those as maneuvers to the BM?" When the whole reason for doing new subclasses in the 1st place is a for a play experience (ie rules) to be different than the BM. Having had a go at designing 5 fighter archetypes myself it is quite frustrating for it to always come back as 'just built it with a BM."

 

[Wednesday Boy]

The Revenant just sounds like trouble, just within the dynamics of party relationships.

What issues do you foresee? Conflicts with holy types because they're pseudo-undead?

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

*mostly because being a revenant is an acquired condition, so you would expect a character to first being a regular member of her race/subrace, then becoming a revenant... at which point you lose your subrace defining abilities (for some like Drow this would mean to seriously undermine their identity)? I don't like mechanics that undo your character, I don't think this plays well unless you are starting the campaign as a revenant.

Is the character more or less undone as a revenant than just staying dead and rerolling? Rising from your grave to walk the earth once more as a vengeance-seeking undead is going to mess with a character's identity.
I can see that some fine-tuning may be needed on a subrace-by-subrace basis, but it should be do-able for a DM to tweak it on the fly. I'd certainly expect something more complete if it appeared in an official book, but UAs are , as they say written in pencil for testing of the concept.

Monster Hunter is a very trivial concept IMHO. It's not a lot more specific than "monsters fighter" which is almost what every D&D character is, and it fact this implementation ends up having very generic features. But if you make it more narrow like focusing on one type of monsters, you end up with the good-old problems of Ranger's favored enemies. All in all, this is as bland as it is certainly playable, but I would have rather wanted some more original additions...

I think the name is from the Ravenloft ethos, where monsters are more often hidden in human form. Its from a horror genre rather than a "going down holes to beat up goblins" genre.
Thus, other than the generic attack- or damage-boosting abilities, you have the more unique, focused ones: boosting your ability to break out of or resist the mental effects that a lot of horror monsters use. Improving your ability to detect the deceptions of both human and supernatural monsters. Some slightly mystical rituals to help you hunt monsters, and a damage boost against the most unnatural beings.

While it has Superiority dice like a Battlemaster, it doesn't have maneuvers like the Battlemaster.

Inquisitive on the other hand is a very nice concept. Unfortunately the Sneak Attack boosts don't follow the concept. I would assume that this subclass should attract people who want to play an investigator/detective, so why offering combat boosts? The Rogue base class already provides good combat capabilities, it doesn't make sense to think that every subclass must be equally good in combat, because subclasses are exactly one of those areas which can provide a "dial" between the 3 pillars. Why throwing away a degree of design freedom?

Thematically its probably based from the Sherlock Holmes films, where he uses his insights into people from the little cues they drop to predict how they will react and where they will be vulnerable to plan the fight.
Most Rogue subclasses gain a bonus usable in combat at that point.[/QUOTE]

 

[Azurewraith]

Why does everyone keep saying this? It's not true. You can very easily keep that revenant chasing his goal indefinitely if you are even a halfway decent DM. And nothing's stopping you from expanding that goal, such that the original reason for it becomes ever bigger. Think creatively, and this subrace can drive entire campaigns forever.

Mainly unfinished story arcs I like my PC's to get closure on there own story

 

[sandvirm]

Implementing the Revenant as a subrace substitution is a good move. It strikes this weird balance of being both a potential penalty for dying and a potential reward for great roleplaying. Coming back as a Revenant should be a character-changing event, and losing part of what your character was in life is appropriate. So while one may lose a subrace feature central to the character (e.g. Drow), or one's stats are no longer totally optimized, the payoff is a Get Out of Death Free card for potentially the rest of the campaign. Subrace substitution also has an advantage over the top-down approach that 4e took in the event that any new races are published afterwards.

I don't think it is appropriate for every character, or every campaign even. However, I could see myself offering a player whose character met an untimely end the option of coming back as a Revenant. Likewise I could see myself petitioning the DM for the option of coming back as a Revenant on some, but not all, of my characters. The latter is a first for me; this is the first Revenant I've ever considered using.

 

[NiClerigo]

As for the Inquisitive being a nod to Eberron (best setting ever), I asked Mike Mearls on Twitter. He answered confirming that they "had Eberron 100% in mind" when writing about this inquisitive! Will we see Eberron 5e anytime soon? I hope so

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[sandvirm]

The Revenant definitely is not going to be appropriate for every character or every campaign. For this reason, I wouldn't allow a player to start a campaign as a Revenant.

 

[Tectuktitlay]

What if I want to play a wilderness survivor with weapons that aren't two-weapon fighting or archery?

What if I want more martial consistency that what the rogue allows (less spike damage, more attacks) but not to the point of the fighter because (a) the amount of skills and features I need to fulfill the character wouldn't fit into a fighter subclass and (b) I recognise that the fighter is meant to be *the* martial character and I'm okay with playing something not quite that focused on martial?

Well, the wilderness aspect should really be a module for fighter and rogue alike. I was merely mentioning the most COMMON interpretation of the melee ranger, which is as a two-weapon fighting specialist. So putting the two-weapon fighting module out at the same time as the wilderness survivor module would make a lot of sense playing into the lore of D&D.

Unfortunately, WotC ended up not really going particularly modular in character design, when they could have easily made the most freeform and modular version of the game to date, opening up so much more variety in character builds with a lot less actual crunch required. It's a crying shame, really. At some point, I might have a go at making a truly modular version of the d20 system, since that is sorely lacking. I, personally, don't like the way every version of D&D has so severely limited character options along such distinct paths. Even something as simple as limiting what skills you have access to is head-against-wall frustrating in its utter lack of need, its acquiescence to sacred cows instead of good game design and balance (there is nothing unbalancing or even outside of the realms of fictional precedent to have anyone be skilled in anything that is tailored to their own background as a character; yes, yes, it can be homebrewed to allow everyone to choose whatever skills they want be proficient in with their selections, but relying on homebrew shouldn't be so ubiquitous in so needless a manner).

Anyhow, I think having a wilderness survivor with whatever bloody combat choices you want should be perfectly a-ok, and should be a legitimate character choice from the get-go.