D&D 5E Unearthed Arcana: Travelers of the Multiverse

New free content from WotC - the latest 4-page Unearthed Arcana introduces six new races: astral elf, autognome, giff, hadozee, plasmoid, and thri-kreen.

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dnd.wizards.com

Looks like Spelljammer and/or Planescape is back on the menu!

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

A further though in favor of an Armor Arificer Plasmoid. One of the features of Arcane Armor is, "The armor replaces any missing limbs, functionally identically to a limb it replaces." And with Shape Shift, a Plasmoid can control how many if any limbs it manifests.

So it seems to me you can totally do a Krang where you're a blob with a head piloting a magic robot body. How's that for cool?

Wait! I have an idea!

You're a Plasmoid Armorer with Winged Boots (reflavored to be a levitation pad on the bottom of your armor) that is completely covered by your armor. You're an Infiltrator Armorer, so you shoot blasts of energy that kill anything that gets in your path with deadly electricity. You are also a supremacist for your race, and your whole culture of people is more or less identical to you, just having differently colored armor. All of you sound exactly the same, and are obsessed with eradicating all other forms of life that you come across.

You're a Dalek. This is how you play a Dalek in 5e.

 

[Von Ether]

I suspect this will lean into the Spellscape/Planejammer they've been teasing all along. i.e. that SJ ships fly around in the Astral Sea and the planes vs the stars and pholgiston.

 

[Charlaquin]

Random thoughts about the future of character race design, prompted by this:

• Pointing folks to the PHB tables for height/weight/age will either require them to keep defaults for the core races as reference (thus erasing whatever benefit they think this genericizing provides), or signals that everything will be distilled down to a more generic set of height/weight builds in the anniversary edition. As noted before, I at least hope they provide different ranges for Small and Medium races, because an eight-foot-tall Small-sized PC would be silly.

I don’t think that erases the benefit of genericising sizes at all. There’s no harm in different races having different average heights and weights written in the book, but by keeping them in those tables instead of in the PC race entries, it helps emphasize the fact (which has always been true) that your PC doesn’t have to conform to the average for their race. Your individual character can be exceptional among their people. It’s exactly the same philosophy behind changing monster stat blocks to say “typically [alignment].” It’s always been the case that you can make individual monsters exceptions to the typical alignment for that type of monster, but this simple change in presentation helps make that fact clearer.

RE: Small characters being able to be as tall as Medium ones, I think this is really a non-issue. I can’t imagine anyone who actually wants to play a Small character choosing to be more than like 4’, maybe 4’6” tops, unless they’re just being deliberately contrarian. This is a problem that only exists in the heads of people who are actively trying to poke holes.

• I really hope the anniversary versions give us more nuanced information on possible cultures than we're seeing in these writeups. Each one only basically provides one or two traits, which will likely result in some players (and DMs) leaning into those few traits, rather than filling in the blanks themselves - more stereotyping, not less.

I’d be surprised if the anniversary PHB doesn’t have about as much information on each race in it as the current PHB does. But, I do expect that information will either focus primarily on non-cultural information (because race is not culture), heavily emphasize that it’s talking in generalities and your character isn’t beholden to them, or some combination of both.

• PCs in general are going to have fewer proficiencies than they did in 5.0, unless we're getting an additional "culture" layer to add.

Probably true. I could maybe see Backgrounds getting a bit of a boost to compensate, but more likely I expect to see more designs like the new elf trance proficiencies.

• How the heck are they going to make humans viable, if ASIs and proficiencies are off the table? Giving humans traits like we're seeing here is a non-starter...

Standard human gets +1 to all ability scores, so there’s no problem because it doesn’t shoehorn them into any particular subset of classes. Variant human I imagine will lose the bonus proficiency and language and get the same floating +2/+1 or +1/+1/+1 as everyone else plus a Feat.

• There doesn't seem to be as much trait parity between the character races as there was back when proficiencies were mixed in. Giffs and hadozee have notably fewer abilities than the other new races (and the usefulness of the traits they do have, in comparison to the others, is debatable). Going to make homebrewing tougher and more arbitrary (unless guidelines are provided in the anniversary books).

Yeah, I mean this will be very much a matter of doing whatever “feels about right.” However, as with big races not having enough to make them stand out, this isn’t actually new, it’s just more obvious now.

That all said, I don't hate the new format; I just see issues and room for improvement. (To include space for convenient defaults on ASIs and languages.)

You know, I would not be the least bit surprised if those defaults are in the anniversary edition monster manual. Doesn’t the current monster manual have a table for applying race features to NPCs? That seems like the best place for “default” racial ASIs to me.

 

[dave2008]

It does, by not defining it. That is something people are going to have to come to grips with being a 'feature' going forward, but the removal of definition to some is a flaw.

No, if you had seen some of my other posts, my point is that what is presented in this UA does not need to be everything in a race's description. This is just a 4-page UA that has 6 races. The elf section of the PHB is 4 pages by itself. There could be a lot more information in the descriptive text that could cover all the issues raised by the poster I quoted. There may not be, but I image the 2024 core books will contain a lot more information of the races then just a couple short paragraphs. I could be wrong of course.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

We have 4 Spelljammer-specific races, 1 race that is fairly widespread but still a major player in Spelljammer, and 1 mystery race. Why, whatever its name may be, would that mystery race be any different than the other 5? And if they are mixing the settings, why didn't they include the more common Planescape races like bariaur and rogue modron, but only include this mystery one?

(Granted, they might allow certain ships, like those of the githyanki and illithids, as well as maybe these Astral Elves, to also visit the Astral, but I'm guessing they'll be more the exception than the rule, and they'll keep the crystal spheres and phlogiston system for your bog-standard Spelljamming ships).

(I'm also beginning to think they used the name "Astral Elf" just to troll us lol. They're probably sitting back laughing their butts off watching us argue over the inclusion of the single word "astral"...)

I'm not saying that it is Planejammer, I'm just saying that it could be, and if it its, the Astral Elves are a sign of that. The Astral Plane/Sea was really only "Divine" in D&D 4e, where it was where Spelljammer took place, and the flavor text for the Astral Elf describes the Astral Plane as being divine. It might mean nothing, it might mean a minor revision to the Astral Plane, or it might mean that this is Planejammer.

 

[Demetrios1453]

Wait! I have an idea!

You're a Plasmoid Armorer with Winged Boots (reflavored to be a levitation pad on the bottom of your armor) that is completely covered by your armor. You're an Infiltrator Armorer, so you shoot blasts of energy that kill anything that gets in your path. You are also a supremacist for your race, and your whole culture of people is more or less identical to you, just having differently colored armor. All of you sound exactly the same, and are obsessed with eradicating all other forms of life that you come across.

You're a Dalek. This is how you play a Dalek in 5e.

Spelljammer already has its Dalek equivalents in its Clockwork Horrors. Even though they're more spider-shaped than Dalek-shaped (probably to keep cease-and-desist orders away), their origin story is almost exactly the same, their attitude is exactly the same, and the various types have two appendages, one as a manipulator arm and one as a tube-like weapon mimicking those of the Daleks through the decades (jets of steam, lightning bolts, and disintegration rays). Jeff Grubb has stated that he based them on the Daleks.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

I wonder why there aren't any Scro in this UA. They're one of the main Spelljammer races, definitely larger players in the setting than Thri-Kreen, and Astral Elves are an entirely new concept. It's kinda interesting how they're ignoring one of the main races of Spelljammer and making another entirely new race for the setting.

But that does bring up the question: do Scro have a place in D&D 5e? In previous editions they were basically just "Orcs, but backwards!" (literally and lorewise), that had a Lawful alignment, were more civilized and militaristic than the Orcs (were basically Hobgoblins culturally), and were intelligent.

Maybe Scro could just use the Hobgoblin racial features, or a revised version for whatever book these races are being published in. Or, they might be ignored entirely and just retconned out of the setting.

Anyone have any thoughts/opinions on this? Do Scro have a place in the new 5e design philosophy for races?

 

[Charlaquin]

I wonder why there aren't any Scro in this UA. They're one of the main Spelljammer races, definitely larger players in the setting than Thri-Kreen, and Astral Elves are an entirely new concept. It's kinda interesting how they're ignoring one of the main races of Spelljammer and making another entirely new race for the setting.

But that does bring up the question: do Scro have a place in D&D 5e? In previous editions they were basically just "Orcs, but backwards!" (literally and lorewise), that had a Lawful alignment, were more civilized and militaristic than the Orcs (were basically Hobgoblins culturally), and were intelligent.

Maybe Scro could just use the Hobgoblin racial features, or a revised version for whatever book these races are being published in. Or, they might be ignored entirely and just retconned out of the setting.

Anyone have any thoughts/opinions on this? Do Scro have a place in the new 5e design philosophy for races?

I don’t think this is really for a Spelljammer book. I mean, the Giff could be, but they could also be for something else - for instance, the Minsc and Boo book. Thri-Kreen I’m pretty convinced are for Dark Sun (despite also existing in Spelljammer), and Astral elves I’m pretty sure are testing the waters for changes to high elves in 50AE. Remember, they tend to try to obscure what product UAs are testing for.

 

[Demetrios1453]

I wonder why there aren't any Scro in this UA. They're one of the main Spelljammer races, definitely larger players in the setting than Thri-Kreen, and Astral Elves are an entirely new concept. It's kinda interesting how they're ignoring one of the main races of Spelljammer and making another entirely new race for the setting.

But that does bring up the question: do Scro have a place in D&D 5e? In previous editions they were basically just "Orcs, but backwards!" (literally and lorewise), that had a Lawful alignment, were more civilized and militaristic than the Orcs (were basically Hobgoblins culturally), and were intelligent.

Maybe Scro could just use the Hobgoblin racial features, or a revised version for whatever book these races are being published in. Or, they might be ignored entirely and just retconned out of the setting.

Anyone have any thoughts/opinions on this? Do Scro have a place in the new 5e design philosophy for races?

I think they will be there and just be regular ol' orcs, now that orcs aren't pigeonholed as CE any more. They might keep the name as what the "space orcs" call themselves.

 

[Demetrios1453]

I don’t think this is really for a Spelljammer book. I mean, the Giff could be, but they could also be for something else - for instance, the Minsc and Boo book. Thri-Kreen I’m pretty convinced are for Dark Sun (despite also existing in Spelljammer), and Astral elves I’m pretty sure are testing the waters for changes to high elves in 50AE. Remember, they tend to try to obscure what product UAs are testing for.

Again, 4 of the 6 races are definitively Spelljammer-specific, a fifth is more general, but still a big Spelljammer power, and the last is a mystery race, but one that can easily be interpreted as another Spelljammer faction. If 5/6 of the races presented would be in a Spelljammer book, and the other one could quite possibly be, why think it's for anything but that? Ockham's Razor here, folks...

And the Minsc and Boo book could be that Spelljammer book, as a hybrid adventure/setting guide.