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View Full Version : D&D 5e/Next Sorcerer Origin: Dread Necromancy



Giegue
2018-04-14, 08:20 PM
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"The Blackest Night falls from the skies, The darkness grows as all light dies, We crave your hearts and your demise, By my black hand — The dead shall rise!" — Black Hand

Necromancy. Few other magics inspire as much revulsion, dread...and fascination, as this black art. The ability to command the forces of death and animate shambling armies of the dead is a temptation that lures a many depraved individuals, and of them the Dread Necromancer is perhaps the most foul. While Necromancy specialist wizards spend years devoted to the study of undeath, the Dread Necromancer is an individual who seeks a quick and easy route to necromantic power. Lacking the patience and skill to take up wizardry, they gain mastery over the undead comparable to the most learned wizard in one, terrible act of depravity. To be a Dread Necromancer is to become undeath, willingly tainting yourself with necrotic energies so you may bend them to your will. How you assumed this taint is something intimate and personal to you; many aspiring Dread Necromancers actively seek out undead, locking themselves in desecrated tombs for days on end in the hope that the foul necrotic energies within forever corrupt them. Others may take a more gruesome road, such as pledging themselves to Orcus in a depraved act of evil, or consuming the flesh of a particularly powerful or tainted undead.

While most Dread Necromancers are twisted individuals seeking an easy route to necromantic power, there are an unlucky few who are instead cursed with the powers of Dread Necromancy. Such an individual could be the child of adventurers, born on one of their many quests into a desecrated or undead infested location. Or perhaps they could be somebody cursed by Orcus, Velsheroon or another deity of Undeath. However, regardless of whether you sought out your powers or where cursed with them, they are fundamentally twisted and corrupting. While you may not be a villain, you constantly struggle against depraved, morbid urges that fester within your psyche. Whether you end up a tortured anti-hero or force of evil depends largely on whether or not you let the taint of your magic consume your mind completely....whether you gain control of your dark magics or let them control you. However, no matter your origin or outlook, you are a master reanimator, able to raise stronger and larger undead hoards than any other spellcaster.

Fundamentals of Necromancy

Due to the twisted origins of your magic, you learn how to wield necromantic spells beyond the scope of traditional sorcery. Starting at 1st level, when your spellcasting feature lets you select a Sorcerer cantrip or Sorcerer spell known of 1st level or higher, you can choose that spell from all Necromancy spells on the Wizard spell list, or the Sorcerer spell list. Any spell you select this way not on the Sorcerer list becomes a Sorcerer spell for you, and you cannot select a spell of a level to which you do not have access.

Additionally, you gain Cause Fear as a bonus spell known. At 5th level, you may exchange this Cause Fear spell for either the Fear or Animate Dead spell. Any spell you gain from this feature becomes a Sorcerer spell when you gain it, and does not count against your total spells known (as-per the spells known column of the Sorcerer table).

Charnel Touch

Also at 1st level, you learn how to channel necrotic energies to heal the undead and give false vitality to the living. You have a pool of necrotic energy points equal to your Sorcerer level x 5 that replenishes when you finish a long rest. As an action, you can touch a creature and spend any number of points from this pool (up to the total number of points left in the pool.); If the touched creature is living, it gains temporary hit points equal to the amount of necrotic energy points spent. Unlike normal temporary hit points, these hit points stack with themselves, but not with temporary hit points from any other source. (Meaning if you used this feature twice on the same creature, the temporary hit points granted would stack with those granted by the first use. However, if you also cast a spell that gave that creature temporary hit points on that creature, those temporary hit points would not stack with any of those granted by this feature.) If the touched creature is undead, it instead heals hit points equal to the amount of necrotic energy points spent.

Alternatively, you can expend 5 necrotic energy points to cure the touched creature of one disease or neutralize one poison affecting it. You can cure multiple diseases and neutralize multiple poisons with a single use of Charnel Touch, spending points desperately for each one. This feature has no effect on constructs.

Undead Mastery

At 6th level, you learn the most iconic power of the Dread Necromancer: the ability to bolster your undead beyond their normal limits. You gain Desecrate as a bonus spell known. For you, Desecrate is a Sorcerer spell, and does not count against your total spells known (as-per the spells known column of the Sorcerer table). Additionally, when you cast a Sorcerer spell that creates undead (such as Animate Dead or Create Undead.), you can spend 4 sorcery points to have the undead that spell creates gain the additional benefits:

They gain proficiency with all armor, shields, simple weapons and martial weapons.
They use your proficiency bonus in place of their own for all purposes.
Their weapon attacks count as magical.
Reanimating Touch

Starting at 14th level, you learn how to channel necrotic energy to animate a skeleton or zombie under your command as an action. To do this, you must touch the corpse to be animated and expend 20 points from your necrotic energy pool (see the Charnel Touch feature for details). Skeletons and zombies you create this way use the statistics they had in life altered by the Skeleton or Zombie NPC features (DMG pg. 282), with their their Intelligence being reduced to 3 if would be higher normally. You cannot raise a creature with a CR above 1 this way, and you can only control a maximum of 2 creatures raised with this feature. At 17th level, this CR limit raises to 2, and you can have a maximum of 4 creatures created by this feature controlled. At 20th level, this CR limit increases again to 3, and you can have a maximum of 8 creatures created by this feature controlled.

Enslave Undead

Starting at 18th level you learn how to bring undead under your control indefinitely, even those created by other spellcasters. As an action, you can choose one undead that you can see within 60 feet of you. When you do this, you can also expend a spell slot of at least 8th level to cast Feeblemind on that undead as a Sorcerer spell, even if you do not know it. The effects of this Feeblemind spell are applied before any other effects of this feature. Regardless of whether or not you cast Feeblemind on that creature, it must make a Charisma saving throw against your Sorcerer spell save save DC.

On a successful save, you can’t use this feature on it again. On a failed save, it becomes friendly to you and obeys your commands until you use this feature again. Intelligent undead are harder to control in this way. If the target has an Intelligence of 8 or higher, it has advantage on the saving throw. If it fails the saving throw and has an Intelligence of 12 or higher, it can repeat the saving throw at the end of every hour until it succeeds and breaks free.

This is my attempt at doing what Wizards did for the Favored Soul for the Dread Necromancer. It is likely unbalanced in some places, hence why I am posting it up. I am looking for all the balance help I can get with it, though I have a clear goal in mind. The clear goal is that it should be BETTER than a school of Necromancy wizard at undead pets, without being brokenly so. The thing is, wizard is straight up a better caster and better class than Sorcerer. As a result, and to stay true to the flavor of the Dread Necromancer, my philosophy behind this subclass was to create a pet-based necromancer that can create stronger and more undead than the wizard, but at the cost of being specialized/having significantly less casting power than the wizard. Thus, its pet commanding abilities should be better than that of the wizard, since a Sorcerer will never have the wizard's versatility and metamagic doesn't really give a necromancer any reason to not go wizard over sorcerer. That being said, I'd like some balance help to make this better than the wizard at pets, but not so broken it could never see play at a table (allowing you to attempt to permanently control a different undead creature.)

Hell, for all I know, it may be fine as-is, so any and all comments/suggestions are appreciated!

VictoriousLoL
2018-04-15, 06:25 PM
Always nice to see more Necromancy-based classes. I like the Charnel class feature a lot!

Giegue
2018-04-15, 10:29 PM
Thanks! I have zero clue how balanced this is though, word of warning. I am a far better judge of balance when it comes to 3.X; my 5e balancing is pretty bad by comparison...so if you have any balance advice for this I'd appreciate it!

Elistan
2018-04-20, 01:59 AM
Charnel Touch

Also at 1st level, you learn how to channel necrotic energies to harm the living and heal the undead. You have a pool of necrotic energy points equal to your Sorcerer level x 5 that replenishes when you finish a long rest. As an action, you can touch a creature and spend any number of points from this pool (up to the total number of points left in the pool.); touching an unwilling creature requires making a melee spell attack using your Sorcerer spell attack bonus against them. If the touched creature is living, it is dealt 1d8 necrotic damage for each point spent. If it is undead, it is instead healed for an amount equal to the number of points spent.

Starting at 4th level, if you expend at least 20 points from this pool to damage a living creature, you can also cause that creature to suffer one level of exhaustion. When you do this, the target makes a Constitution saving throw against your Sorcerer spell save DC. On a failed save, they suffer one level of exhaustion. On a successful save they suffer no level of exhaustion and become immune to this exhaustion effect for 24 hours, but still take the damage for your Charnel Touch as normal. For every additional 20 points above 20 you spend, you can have the target suffer an additional level of exhaustion when they fail their Constitution save.

20d8 damage at 4th level is incredibly broken, by my estimation. Was that the intended way for that feature to work? I suggest only being able to spend a single point per offensive touch at level 1, 2 points/touch at level 5, etc. Like a normal cantrip damage progression. No cap on points spent to heal undead.

JNAProductions
2018-04-20, 02:09 AM
Seconding what Elistan said. That's bonkers.

You might think players would dole that out sparingly, which WOULD make it balanced... But why would they do that? They have cantrips for that. No, that is used for Novas, and holy hell is that a crazy strong nova.

If you mistyped (which happens to all of us) just fix it and let us know what it's meant to be.

Giegue
2018-04-20, 07:21 AM
it was meant to be a reverse paladin lay on hands, so a direct 1 point for 1 damage trade. That’s why it has the exhaustion effect, the damage is on the low side, so the exhaustion makes it worthwhile at the levels the damage becomes too low to matter. Thanks for the heads up.

Hykeru
2018-04-20, 07:33 PM
At first glance I like the archetype. The flavor is really strong, which a lot of people skip entirely.

The only thing I take issue with, (and a lot of people do this, and every time it makes no sense) is that you've tacked on a weapon and armor proficiency to a caster class for no reason. None of the rest of the class is meleecentric, so why does it need weapons and armor? More importantly, why would a practitioner of this class practice weapons and armor? Why do they get that extra skill? You need to use that flavor to explain and justify the decision. Otherwise it just feels like you're trying to have the class do everything. Borderline Mary-Sue. Borderline.

If a player wants to go super melee sorcerer, they can always multiclass.

Anyway, other than that, the class is pretty goddamn sweet, so kudos on that!

Giegue
2018-04-21, 01:00 PM
The proficiencies are entirely for theme; in 3.5e Dread Necromancers where a light armor class that got a free martial weapon prof. This was made to basicly be a direct approximation of the DN without making it its own class rather than an “inspired by” and as a result I wanted it to be as close to the “source material” as possible. Mechanically, wizards has shown that expanding the spell list a sorc can choose from is “not enough” to stand on its own as an Archetype Feature due to divine soul getting both a spell list expansion and a bonus Spell Known. However, since this archetype already gets a bonus Spell Known at 6th (and a pseudo-bonus Spell Known at 18th) level having it get TWO bonus spells Known (and the pseudo-spell know) would be a bit much, in my eyes. Thus, the armor prof was added to replace the bonus Spell Known, with the weapon or skill added to make up for the fact that, at least as the game stands now, getting the entire cleric list is stronger than getting all necromancy spells. Likewise, the armor helps them use their Charnel Touch feature at less of a personal risk, so it does serve a mechanical purpose.

If it still bothers you that much, just swap the armor and weapon/skill for their AC always equaling 13 + their Dex mod when unarmored and not carrying a shield. Fluff this as that their innate Necrotic taint not only lets them cast Necromancy spells other sorc’s can’t, but also corrupts them physically, making their skin tough like bone, but also causing them to become pale, corpse-like in apperence or otherwise obviously physically warped. If you feel this is too strong, also give them disadvantage on persuasion and deception checks due to their warped apperence.