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View Full Version : D&D 5e/Next Warlock Necromancy: The Undead Lord Patron (Rough/WIP)



Giegue
2017-05-20, 06:56 PM
As the title says. I've seen a lot of attempts at Warlock necromancy options, and rightfully so. As the class all about dark magic, it just *feels* right for the warlock to be able to play with undead minions. Wizards, sadly, has yet to deliver on that front in UA, and while there are a *ton* of homebrew attempts at Warlock necromancy options, none of them really "got it right" balance wise. This is largely because the Warlock is a hard class to balance in terms of Necromancy; just giving it animate dead as a known spell would be too strong, while giving it animate dead as a 1/day invocation is not strong/effective enough to really be *good* at necromancy. (Heck, a cleric who prepares animate dead would still be better to you.) So rather than try to work off Animate Dead, I've decided to go a totally different route with my homebrew, taking the radical approach of making their "undead army" powers come from a combination of archetype exclusive spells which create uncontrolled berserk undead and class features that allow you to control them as you create them and gain increasingly finer control over them. This gives you the ability to use undead pets *from 1st level* but with several hefty drawbacks, including greater action economy concerns than animate dead and, most importantly, the sacrifice of HP (and lowering of your HP maximum) to gain control over your minions. You have the ability to field a fair-sized chunk of bodies, but at the cost of making yourself *extremely squishy.*

Now, while I have the concept down in a doc, I have no clue how balanced it is. That's why I am posting it here. I want advice on how to make it better/more balanced if that's even possible. If you have any advice on how balanced/unbalanced this is, and how to fix it, I would be grateful!

The parton, as well as a slew of new themeatic invocations to go along with it, can be found here (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kSitq9QIII2Fo-BjemQ4Sh_Tehvs1dNdR5MhYDhHNqM/edit?usp=sharing).