Grimdark Mode

[kaiju3]

Hey all!

I'm wanting to give one of my players the chance to get a dark power up at a cost. Context: One of my players has been playing a character that's been leaning between being good and being evil. They recently acquired a staff from an evil tree, and soon they'll find the evil tree itself. Plot twist, the evil tree was born from the stake that killed a vampire, so that vampire's spirit is still in there.

Soon enough, that player will have to choose between getting a dark power-up from that tree or not. My question is, how do you guys think that should work mechanically?

The character himself is a Genasi (plant-person) druid and I'd like to play around with themes of corruption. What do you guys think?

[Ninjadeadbeard]

New Wild Shape: Evil Ent!

Or a Warlock-style Spell Slot that's always set to his highest level (up to 5th).

Or just make a Vampire template and remove Sunlight damage. Or keep it.

[Phantos_Argent]

I'd replace at least one spell per level, cantrips included, with more evil versions. When they use the new "evil" spells, treat them as being cast as two levels higher and with at least one higher spell slot applied. You could even make it so they can't use the standard weaker version, to show a loss of control. However, when they do cast those spells, have the area around die as by a very small Blight spell and the land turn against them temporarily.

For example, replace the 3rd level Plant Growth or Speak With Plants with Vampiric Touch. Using the automatic higher spell level, it deals 4d6 damage right off the bat.

Alternatively or in addition to the above, you can add some kind of corrupted template to all the creatures they wildshape into. Sort of a half-undead, they could ignore effects that require Constitution saves, a natural poison effect on critical attacks, heal with damage inflicted, and deal necrotic damage when their blood is spilled, but slowly loses hit points at the same time. This has the story advantage of encouraging the druid to be more aggressive and feral in combat. Or to make it easy you could just apply the Zombie or skeleton template.