Unearthed Arcana Unearthed Arcana: Spirits Bard and Undeath Warlock

We have a new UA release with two subclasses. The College of Spirits Bard is a fortune teller or spirit medium type character with a big random effect table. Meanwhile the Undeath Pact Warlock is a a do-over of the Undying Pact Warlock.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

This bard is my favorite bard archetype since the playtest. It makes me want to play one, which is a rare thing.
I definitely will flavor mine as a PoE chanter, summoning the actual actors of the tales as spirit form to generate an effect.

Beast-> ''The Fox from the Farmer Did Run and Leap''
Warrior -> ''And Hel-Hyraf Crashed upon the Shield''
Friend -> ''At the Sight of their Comrades, their Hearts Grew Bold''
Runaway-> ''Shatter their Shackles, Cast off their Chains!''
Avenger -> ''Thrice Was She Wronged, and Thrice Justly Avenged''
Hero->''Blessed Was Wengridh, Quickest of His Tribe''
Fey -> 'The Bride Caught their Ruse and Set to Make them Pay'''
Dark spirit -> 'But Reny Daret's Ghost, He would not Rest'''
Giant -> ''Oh, But Knock Not on the Door of Urdel and Gurdel''
Dragon -> ''Gernisc's Beast Lit the Night with his Breath''
Celestial -> ''Rise Again, Rise Again, Scions of Adon!''
Unknown -> ''Thick Grew Their Tongues, Stumbling O'er Words''

so cool!

 

[Jeff Albertson]

The Class Variants UA is my greatest (maybe only) hope for this edition.

I do like my classes/subclasses action, but that seems a tad uninspired; so many cool ways to go with alternate rules/variants and as they talked about in the misty days of 2012: modules.
To limit it to yet another subclass rider effect thingy seems a bummer.

 

[Olrox17]

Oh yeah, I remember as well. So many great ideas back then, only a few survived. Modularity became an afterthought, just a smattering of variants buried in the DMG. What a waste.

 

[Jeff Albertson]

Oh yeah, I remember as well. So many great ideas back then, only a few survived. Modularity became an afterthought, just a smattering of variants buried in the DMG. What a waste.

Bingo.

Also, I dig your style, dude.

My thing with 5th Ed is, after my personal what-have-you with decades of all previous, is they hit it out of the ballpark (2012-2014), and since, have petered...

 

[Undrave]

Agreed.

The Warlock is neat, but barely screams undead to me. The fact that they don't get animate dead on their expanded spell list is also perplexing. Still, it seems like it'd be a fun subclass.

The Ouija Bard is cute, I think it does well what it sets out to do. While I see a very strong spiriualist/new age occultist vibe, I can also see the perspective of it as a Roma foutune teller stereotype—which, if paired with Vistani lore (which they look to be doing with the tarroka deck) my need a second look.

We need healing crystals as implement! And homeopathic potions!

You know, an exploding Undead Alligator Warlock sounds like an epic attack or just epic in general. And the Undeath Warlock does explode.

Or the Diablo Necromancer Corpse Explosion comes to mind. Now I want that for the Undeath Warlock.

Lizardfolk Warlock?

 

[Parmandur]

Sophistry. The first power listed for The Undying warlock is called "Among the Dead". It should either be presented as a fix for The Undying, or find a new idea.

Maybe so, but he isn't wrong that the Undying Warlock does have non-Undead patrons and flavor.

 

[Remathilis]

You know, if they really did realize that, I think they should've just revamped the undying warlock. Those of us that bought SCAG will now officially own a crappy subclass that is completely made obsolete, both mechanically and conceptually, by something that came out in a new book.

It's blatant power creep, littering the game with trap options that will never be directly fixed. Also, we're supposed to buy this "fix", since it'll take up pages in a future book.

Hey WotC, how about fixing the Undying warlock (and the banneret, and most monk subclasses, etcetera) and releasing it as a free errata? You used to do that back in 4e, it was a sensible and respectful consumer practice.

I'm suspecting for the same reason they abandoned the revised rangers; fear of two very different versions of the same material sowing confusion. Anyone who bought and uses the Scag undying pact was not invalidated by some web document they may not know about or a reprint in a new book. The new version, while thematically overlapping, doesn't invalidate the old one.

There is only one undying warlock. There is only one undead warlock. You can choose which one is better, but nobody's choice is changed retro-active to the new version being printed.

I mean, WotC changed healing spirit a few months ago and fans wanted to go to war about how their Xanathar's books are invalidated. WotC is not going to use errata to re-write classes or subs.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

There is only one undying warlock. There is only one undead warlock. You can choose which one is better, but nobody's choice is changed retro-active to the new version being printed.

Doesn't wash. They are too similar in name, too similar in theme, and too similar in mechanics (about 50% of the granted spells are the same) to jusify them being seperate subclasses. And one is underpowered, the other is overpowered, put them together and you might get something that works.

And there is plenty of design space unused. They could, for example, design A Vampire Lord patron, strongly themed around being a vampire's minion. Or how about an Ancestral Ghost patron? It doesn't have much power itself, but it can still instruct one of it's decedents.

And we still haven't got a (n official) Ancient Dragon patron. Or Modron - more sensible for warlock than sorcerer. And there is room for more Pact Boons, more Invocations, more plain old spells.

 

[TwoSix]

There's nothing wrong with having multiple mechanical expressions of the same concept. Hell, in my games I have 2 different versions of druid, 3 versions of ranger, and 3 different kinds of psion. Different mechanics appeal to different players.

 

[Undrave]

Doesn't wash. They are too similar in name, too similar in theme, and too similar in mechanics (about 50% of the granted spells are the same) to jusify them being seperate subclasses. And one is underpowered, the other is overpowered, put them together and you might get something that works.

And there is plenty of design space unused. They could, for example, design A Vampire Lord patron, strongly themed around being a vampire's minion. Or how about an Ancestral Ghost patron? It doesn't have much power itself, but it can still instruct one of it's decedents.

And we still haven't got a (n official) Ancient Dragon patron. Or Modron - more sensible for warlock than sorcerer. And there is room for more Pact Boons, more Invocations, more plain old spells.

This one is still in play test, they usually skew more powerful in the first round. I bet we'll see these two at least one more time in a UA article before publication, and 'the Undead' might even be renamed so it's not as similar to Undying.

And yeah there's TONS of room left unexplored, but that's true of every class out there (except maybe Wizard) because they've barely published anything for players.

There's nothing wrong with having multiple mechanical expressions of the same concept. Hell, in my games I have 2 different versions of druid, 3 versions of ranger, and 3 different kinds of psion. Different mechanics appeal to different players.

What he said! Heck, I wouldn't mind a different type of Feywild inspired pact... it's not like all patrons give out the exact same gift even if they have thematic overlap. I still want my undersea abyss themed Warlock patron and a Star Warlock (the Star Pact flavour in 4e was WILD!), despite the overlap with the GOO Warlock.