Unearthed Arcana Unearthed Arcana: That Old Black Magic

Random racial spells.... not my cup of tea but could be fun.

Summoning demons seem like fun spells. Reminds me of the instinctive actions of some 4e summons.

 

[TerraDave]

An edgy if brief Unearthed Arcana this month. Abyssal tieflings with random magic and demon summoning spells where humanoid blood can be handy. "As the Rage of Demons storyline season continues to boil over in the Underdark, this month’s Unearthed Arcana offers new demonic options for your campaign. Taking a new look at the tiefling race, this article breaks down the Player’s Handbook tiefling into a modular variant, allowing players to create tiefling characters tied to either a diabolic or a demonic ancestry. Additionally, a new suite of conjuration spells allows casters to call forth demons to do their bidding."

​

This month's UA is a short, 3-page PDF. It details two tiefling variants - the Infernal and Abyssal Tieflings - along with five new spells.

SaveSave​

 

[GreenTengu]

Huh... I like that they put thought into a demon-blooded Tiefling and how to make it different from a devil-blooded one, but... random spells?... I get that demons are about chaos, but generally speaking do demons just randomly change into other demons once a day?
Plus, having random spells is never going to be equal to having the same spell because if you know what spell you are getting, then you can build your strategy around it and the DM can present you with opportunities to use it. With a random spell, even if it is the same level the problem is that you are stuck in the situation of looking for a time when you might possibly make any use of it.
Also, I'm not sure about putting +1 Con and bonus hit points onto the same subrace.... But, then again, Dwarf has a subrace that grants twice as many bonus hit points and it defaults as a +2 Con race.

The spells are a nice and flavorful... Not sure I would want PCs using them, but I could easily imagine a villain who might sacrifice innocents (or even her own minions!) to summon demons which could be uses as an interest point for an encounter. If you are already fighting the cultists, you got the choice of either trying to cut through the cultists or trying to get through them, likely incurring opportunity attacks, in order to try to stop the warlock from killing the hostage (and even then you got to choose between doing damage, hoping that it will be enough, or forgo damage in favor of a grapple attack unless you have a maneuver to push or knock her down!) and if you fail, not only will the hostage die, but a big baddie who you will need to fight will pop in.

And if you do save the hostage, perhaps the priestess can still choose to cut herself which will summon the demon that might well eat her before turning its attention on the party.

You can play around with that scenario a bit, but it leads to an interesting template for demon cultist scenarios.

 

[Minigiant]

What's the spellcasting ability score for Abyssal tieflings?

Sorcerer buff.
Step one: Extended Summon Barlgura.
Step two: Run Away
Step three: Come back in 20 minutes and collect loot.

 

[mellored]

Plus, having random spells is never going to be equal to having the same spell because if you know what spell you are getting, then you can build your strategy around it and the DM can present you with opportunities to use it. With a random spell, even if it is the same level the problem is that you are stuck in the situation of looking for a time when you might possibly make any use of it.
Also, I'm not sure about putting +1 Con and bonus hit points onto the same subrace.... But, then again, Dwarf has a subrace that grants twice as many bonus hit points and it defaults as a +2 Con race.

Because random spells are less useful, it's fine to give more HP.

 

[mellored]

What's the spellcasting ability score for Abyssal tieflings?

I presume Charisma.

 

[Kobold Avenger]

Random spells after every long rest is not suitable, but the same random spells rolled once and only once at character creation is fine, just like how Tieflings could have random traits from a table that they only rolled once for back in 2e.

 

[Kobold Avenger]

In fact I want to know why can't they just try to reproduce the random Tiefling traits table from the 2e Planewalker's Handbook. Just have them generally balanced.

 

[Larrin]

Nothing like summoning 32 demons to gum up game for a while (Conjure lesser demon, at 8-9th level). That just seems like reckless spell design (which I assume is what they want feed back on). It is certainly possible to have clever ways for a good DM to handle it, but for many games it seems like handing people more then enough rope to hang themselves with. It's the sort of thing that could be really funny once, but once the humor wears off (and it may rather quickly depending on the group) I feel this creates a mess that will be more trouble than it could possibly be worth.

[obviously this isn't the main point of the spell, etc, but it's on the sheet, so it exist to tempt people to do this...]

 

[Neyd]

I like the risk/reward nature of the spells a lot and some more summoning options were needed imo. I also dig the "somewhat more complicated to get components" part of the spells.

Dunno about the Tiefling variant though. Random spells COULD be fun for some... not my cup of tea though