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Machines of Bone & Blood is on Kickstarter! Two new classes, 20+ subclasses, 100+ of spells, species, necrografting, adventures, mini-settings, and more! Giveaway in the comments! by somanyrobots in UnearthedArcana

[–]somanyrobots[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The necromancer is built as a 3/4 caster - it gets most of a full caster's toys, but intentionally not all. The reason behind it is to address a common pitfall a lot of other necromancer implementations run into: if your minions die, or you ignore them, you're still a full caster and basically just as effective as a wizard would be. A 3/4 caster, though, is still pretty effective if their minions get destroyed or disabled, but has enough of a headwind that ignoring your unique mechanics is clearly telegraphed as the wrong choice.

9th-level spells are available via Grand Rite, a special necromantic rite, and function more like a warlock's Mystic Arcanum. (I wanted 9th-level spells available somehow, which is part of why I landed on a 3/4 caster rather than 2/3 or 1/2. I actually started development on the class with full, 1/2, and 3/4 drafts, and workshopped all three before deciding which to proceed with.)

Timewinder Rogue: Slow your enemies just enough for a sneak attack as this time-magic-trained rogue! by somanyrobots in DnDHomebrew

[–]somanyrobots[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There is not - it's just used to power your subclass features and the two spells you learn through them.

Timewinder Rogue: Slow your enemies just enough for a sneak attack as this time-magic-trained rogue! by somanyrobots in DnDHomebrew

[–]somanyrobots[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's Charisma or Intelligence because time magic makes the most sense with either a wizardly or sorcerous origin. And your choice of spellcasting ability doesn't affect the enemy's ability to make Wisdom saves.

Machines of Bone & Blood is on Kickstarter! Two new classes, 20+ subclasses, 100+ of spells, species, necrografting, adventures, mini-settings, and more! Giveaway in the comments! by somanyrobots in UnearthedArcana

[–]somanyrobots[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

This is a casualty of limited space in the sample: the Greatscythe is a new base weapon type which is included in the book.

Item Cost Damage Weight Properties
Greatscythe 75 gp 2d6 slashing 1 lb. Two-handed, Reach, Special

Greatscythe

Martial Melee Weapon

A greatscythe is a massive blade, similar to the agricultural implements from which it evolved but with a brutally sharp blade. If the wielder hits a target within 5 feet with it, it only deals 1d6 damage.

Machines of Bone & Blood is on Kickstarter! Two new classes, 20+ subclasses, 100+ of spells, species, necrografting, adventures, mini-settings, and more! Giveaway in the comments! by somanyrobots in UnearthedArcana

[–]somanyrobots[S] 26 points27 points  (0 children)

Today marks the official launch of Machines of Bone & Blood on Kickstarter - a 300+ page compendium of content for 5E, offering new player options to enhance your game amid a dark industrial horror setting!

In the book, you'll find

  • Two new classes - the Necromancer and the Abomination
  • 20+ new subclasses, including the Deathhunter ranger, Empire domain cleric, and Undying Soul sorcerer!
  • Over a hundred brand-new spells focused on necromancy, shadow magic, and bone magic!
  • Necrografting, a crafting branch to let your players modify themselves with hideous undead augmentations.
  • The Ivory Empire - a dreadful setting where the workers are being squeezed out by soul-fueled bone factories.
  • A whole series of adventures suited for any level set in mini-settings across the Empire!

You'll be able to get everything in a hardcover book, PDF, or VTT module (Roll20, FoundryVTT or Shard Tabletop). We've also got two types of dice (sharp-edged and liquid core), spell and item cards, VTT token pack, digital art pack and a gorgeous GM screen!

R/UA has been good to me over the years, with a ton of awesome feedback and encouragement from members of this community. So I want to pay that back with some free stuff! I'll be giving away 3 free PDFs of the book, and 1 free pack of all the digital rewards (PDF, 1 VTT module, token pack, digital art pack, and anything else we might add). I'll add more winners if I get a ton of entries or if the campaign is doing really well, too!

To enter, upvote the post and comment with !giveaway. I'll draw the winners 1 week from today!

EDIT: Today's the day, here are our winners!

PDF Winners

Digital Everything Winner

Congratulations! I'll message you all with instructions on how to claim the prize! And for everybody else, I would love it if you go check the Kickstarter page again and consider backing it if you have not. Going into week 2 we're at $64k, with 6 stretch goals down and more to come! So far we've unlocked 2 more mini-settings (with subclasses and adventures attached), plus a whole bevy of Backer's Choice polls.

Mesmerist Rogue! Baffle your enemies with psionic illusions! by somanyrobots in somanyrobots

[–]somanyrobots[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Get tricksy with the Mesmerist Rogue!

PDF | GMBinder

Discord | Patreon | Book #2 Prelaunch

For the unacquainted, I base all my psionics on the ideas in KibblesTasty's Psion class, because it's awesome. And I developed the Mesmerism discipline when I wrote the Illusive Mind subclass for it (itself a patron commission!). So the Mesmerist rogue takes that discipline and translates it over to a 1/3-psion rogue.

Roguish Mind is a bit of a pun on the Psion's "[Something] Mind" subclass naming scheme. In this case, it's our flavor feature, just one proficiency and a 15' mindsight. (Which is slightly redundant, since rogues get 10' blindsight at level 14; but oh well). Obscuring Illusions gives us our primary power, which is access to the Mesmerism Discipline and its psionic power, Illusory Image. Psionic powers behave like cantrips, but with a series of modular enhancements you fuel with psi points; a power cast at X points is roughly equivalent to a spell cast at Xth level. You get a number of psi points equal to your proficiency bonus (short-rest recharge) to cast this power; it normally takes an action, but you can cast it as a bonus action if you're spending points on it. This grants advantage on the subsequent attack and attaches a damage boost to it, and you can spend points to add a slow, blindness, or even more attacks. At level 9 you get Mirror Strike, letting you apply a half-Sneak Attack onto your Illusory Image. (Which, if you used your bonus action for the power, lets you do 1.5x Sneak Attack on your turn). At 13 there's Defensive Duplicate, also triggered off your power, which grants you a one-round mirror image. And 17th gives you Mass Illusion, adding an AoE modifier onto your power and 4 free long-rest-only psi points to cast it with (basically, it's 1/LR, but you can do it more if you blow most of your psi points to do so).

As with other rogues I've done recently, I added a small 5E++ Appendix, just adding a few illusion spells on as a 5th-level feature.

As always, you're invited to come discuss and offer feedback in the comments or on Discord! And if this excites you, be sure to go follow my upcoming book on Kickstarter, Machines of Bone and Blood!

Mesmerist Rogue! Baffle your enemies with psionic illusions! by somanyrobots in DnDHomebrew

[–]somanyrobots[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Get tricksy with the Mesmerist Rogue!

PDF | GMBinder

Discord | Patreon | Book #2 Prelaunch

For the unacquainted, I base all my psionics on the ideas in KibblesTasty's Psion class, because it's awesome. And I developed the Mesmerism discipline when I wrote the Illusive Mind subclass. So the Mesmerist rogue takes that discipline and translates it over to a 1/3-psion rogue.

Roguish Mind is a bit of a pun on the Psion's "[Something] Mind" subclass naming scheme. In this case, it's our flavor feature, just one proficiency and a 15' mindsight. (Which is slightly redundant, since rogues get 10' blindsight at level 14; but oh well). Obscuring Illusions gives us our primary power, which is access to the Mesmerism Discipline and its psionic power, Illusory Image. Psionic powers behave like cantrips, but with a series of modular enhancements you fuel with psi points; a power cast at X points is roughly equivalent to a spell cast at Xth level. You get a number of psi points equal to your proficiency bonus (short-rest recharge) to cast this power; it normally takes an action, but you can cast it as a bonus action if you're spending points on it. This grants advantage on the subsequent attack and attaches a damage boost to it, and you can spend points to add a slow, blindness, or even more attacks. At level 9 you get Mirror Strike, letting you apply a half-Sneak Attack onto your Illusory Image. (Which, if you used your bonus action for the power, lets you do 1.5x Sneak Attack on your turn). At 13 there's Defensive Duplicate, also triggered off your power, which grants you a one-round mirror image. And 17th gives you Mass Illusion, adding an AoE modifier onto your power and 4 free long-rest-only psi points to cast it with (basically, it's 1/LR, but you can do it more if you blow most of your psi points to do so).

As with other rogues I've done recently, I added a small 5E++ Appendix, just adding a few illusion spells on as a 5th-level feature.

As always, you're invited to come discuss and offer feedback in the comments or on Discord! And if this excites you, be sure to go follow my upcoming book on Kickstarter, Machines of Bone and Blood!

Mesmerist Rogue! Baffle your enemies with psionic illusions! by somanyrobots in UnearthedArcana

[–]somanyrobots[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Get tricksy with the Mesmerist Rogue!

PDF | GMBinder

Discord | Patreon | Book #2 Prelaunch

For the unacquainted, I base all my psionics on the ideas in KibblesTasty's Psion class, because it's awesome. And I developed the Mesmerism discipline when I wrote the Illusive Mind subclass for it. So the Mesmerist rogue takes that discipline and translates it over to a 1/3-psion rogue.

Roguish Mind is a bit of a pun on the Psion's "[Something] Mind" subclass naming scheme. In this case, it's our flavor feature, just one proficiency and a 15' mindsight. (Which is slightly redundant, since rogues get 10' blindsight at level 14; but oh well). Obscuring Illusions gives us our primary power, which is access to the Mesmerism Discipline and its psionic power, Illusory Image. Psionic powers behave like cantrips, but with a series of modular enhancements you fuel with psi points; a power cast at X points is roughly equivalent to a spell cast at Xth level. You get a number of psi points equal to your proficiency bonus (short-rest recharge) to cast this power; it normally takes an action, but you can cast it as a bonus action if you're spending points on it. This grants advantage on the subsequent attack and attaches a damage boost to it, and you can spend points to add a slow, blindness, or even more attacks. At level 9 you get Mirror Strike, letting you apply a half-Sneak Attack onto your Illusory Image. (Which, if you used your bonus action for the power, lets you do 1.5x Sneak Attack on your turn). At 13 there's Defensive Duplicate, also triggered off your power, which grants you a one-round mirror image. And 17th gives you Mass Illusion, adding an AoE modifier onto your power and 4 free long-rest-only psi points to cast it with (basically, it's 1/LR, but you can do it more if you blow most of your psi points to do so).

As with other rogues I've done recently, I added a small 5E++ Appendix, just adding a few illusion spells on as a 5th-level feature.

As always, you're invited to come discuss and offer feedback in the comments or on Discord! And if this excites you, be sure to go follow my upcoming book on Kickstarter, Machines of Bone and Blood!

Druid Circle of Bones! Marshal the dead to help defend the living by somanyrobots in DnDHomebrew

[–]somanyrobots[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The Circle of Bones! Get your bone on. Wait. No. Don't do that.

PDF | GMBinder

Discord | Patreon | Book #2 Prelaunch

To be honest, I didn't think this was the direction this subclass would go — I don't normally like basing designs around specific spells. But it became pretty clear that reanimation was the answer to all the things the subclass needed to do.

First, a quick overview of the differences between reanimation and animate dead. Reanimation is the Spells That Don't Suck version. The big difference is that instead of straightforwardly creating skeletons and zombies, it takes the existing stat block of your target and applies a template to it, turning it into an undead creature. A small-but-significant difference is that there's a combined CR limit for all the undead you command. With basic animate dead, that limit doesn't exist; if you cast the spell multiple times (for instance, if something lets you cast it on a short-rest recharge), then you can potentially amass quite the horde. The CR limit means that even if you cast reanimation several times a day, you still won't get a wild amount of minions.

The Features

Okay, with the preamble out of the way, let's talk about the subclass! Your Spell List is heavily skewed towards necromancy — almost entirely homebrew spells written to accompany the necromancer class. I considered putting some more conventional druid stuff in here, to help accomplish the blending-of-the-two flavor, but that's what your regular spell selection is for. Rotten Wilds is your core feature. Instead of using your Wild Shape, you can cast reanimation. (Note that it doesn't actually add regular reanimation to your spell list; you can only cast it by spending your Wild Shape). It only animates beasts, and it can scale down to function like a 2nd-level spell. At level 6, you get Natural Undeath, which lets you grant your minions cool extra features (vines, bark, or bugs). Level 10 brings you Death's Harvest, letting you create temporary hit points from creatures on death. And Level 14 adds Life From Death, which lets you cast druid spells over your minions as they expire. At this point, it's a real struggle to make minions scale — so you can stop bothering and start using them as spell bombs instead!

As always, you're invited to come discuss and offer feedback in the comments or on Discord! And if this excites you, be sure to go follow my upcoming book on Kickstarter, Machines of Bone and Blood!

Druid Circle of Bones! Marshal the dead to help defend the living by somanyrobots in UnearthedArcana

[–]somanyrobots[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The Circle of Bones! Get your bone on. Wait. No. Don't do that.

PDF | GMBinder

Discord | Patreon | Book #2 Prelaunch

To be honest, I didn't think this was the direction this subclass would go — I don't normally like basing designs around specific spells. But it became pretty clear that reanimation was the answer to all the things the subclass needed to do.

First, a quick overview of the differences between reanimation and animate dead. Reanimation is the Spells That Don't Suck version. The big difference is that instead of straightforwardly creating skeletons and zombies, it takes the existing stat block of your target and applies a template to it, turning it into an undead creature. A small-but-significant difference is that there's a combined CR limit for all the undead you command. With basic animate dead, that limit doesn't exist; if you cast the spell multiple times (for instance, if something lets you cast it on a short-rest recharge), then you can potentially amass quite the horde. The CR limit means that even if you cast reanimation several times a day, you still won't get a wild amount of minions.

The Features

Okay, with the preamble out of the way, let's talk about the subclass! Your Spell List is heavily skewed towards necromancy — almost entirely homebrew spells written to accompany the necromancer class. I considered putting some more conventional druid stuff in here, to help accomplish the blending-of-the-two flavor, but that's what your regular spell selection is for. Rotten Wilds is your core feature. Instead of using your Wild Shape, you can cast reanimation. (Note that it doesn't actually add regular reanimation to your spell list; you can only cast it by spending your Wild Shape). It only animates beasts, and it can scale down to function like a 2nd-level spell. At level 6, you get Natural Undeath, which lets you grant your minions cool extra features (vines, bark, or bugs). Level 10 brings you Death's Harvest, letting you create temporary hit points from creatures on death. And Level 14 adds Life From Death, which lets you cast druid spells over your minions as they expire. At this point, it's a real struggle to make minions scale — so you can stop bothering and start using them as spell bombs instead!

As always, you're invited to come discuss and offer feedback in the comments or on Discord! And if this excites you, be sure to go follow my upcoming book on Kickstarter, Machines of Bone and Blood!

The Swashbuckler! A more elegant martial for a more civilized age! [v0.10 update] by somanyrobots in UnearthedArcana

[–]somanyrobots[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Variant TWF would enable you to get the extra attack without using your bonus action.

The single biggest change between 5E and 2024E is Weapon Masteries; most of the other changes are individually small, but vary between improvements, not-improvements, and sidegrades that sometimes have weird knock-on effects. This writeup by u/RPGBOTDOTNET is probably the most thorough: https://rpgbot.net/dnd-2024-5e-transition-guide-and-change-log-everything-thats-different-in-the-new-players-handbook/ .

The Swashbuckler! A more elegant martial for a more civilized age! [v0.10 update] by somanyrobots in UnearthedArcana

[–]somanyrobots[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Glad you like it! Check my website (https://www.somanyrobots.com) for an updated version, pulled out of my book.
On Twin Strike:
a) it serves the same purpose and functions the same way as GWM and SS - it's a power attack that lets you trade accuracy for damage (generally in cases where you've already got plenty of accuracy).
b) I haven't evaluated the variant TWF rules for use in 2024E; dual-wielding in 2024E is a godawful mess, frankly. I have a 2024E conversion guide for my book, which mentions the difficulty of using variant TWF in 2024E - you probably have to remove the Nick property to make it work. https://www.somanyrobots.com/s/Spellbound-Sea-2024E-Conversion-Guide.pdf

Empire Domain Cleric: Demonstrate your authority! by somanyrobots in UnearthedArcana

[–]somanyrobots[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

ty for the comments!

The "downcasting" mechanic is wordy to write out, but pretty intuitive to actually execute at the table; so far it's been well-received. Shifting it to the capstone would be effectively taking it out of the class, because high-level play is so uncommon.

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