Good evening! This post marks our shift away from discussing blog and internet presence minutia (though I would still greatly appreciate if you would respond to the surveys found on the Open Polls page, as this project could still benefit greatly from additional feedback in those areas!), and we get to move into more of the really fun stuff: Dungeons and Dragons homebrew and design!
For those of you who have missed this information in my admittedly disastrously inconsistent Tumblr blogging in the last six months, I have been working on a full-length supplement in the style of the official books Xanathar’s Guide to Everything and Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, meaning that the book will, in its final form, be over a hundred pages long and feature a bevy of content, including but also pushing well beyond my usual additional subclass options. The current draft includes:
- Over sixty new subclasses for every official class in the game, as well as Matt Mercer’s Blood Hunter class, with additional new options for certain classes (such as new Fighting Styles for martial classes)
- A new class called the Psion, a simplified Mystic for 5th Edition
- A handful of new feats, including new racial feats for races that weren’t included in Xanathar’s Guide
- A fistful of additional character options intended for use by Dungeon Masters in the creation of evil adventurers, in a similar vein to the Cleric Divine Domain of Death and the Oathbreaker Paladin character options presented in the Dungeon Master’s Guide
- A broad selection of new spells to expand any class’s spell list, including new Chronomancy spells to add to those presented officially in the Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount
- A selection of new loot and magical items, including a flexible system for designing and implementing an array of technological items and a titanic mecha-style construct designed for taking on larger than life monsters
- Several optional rules to expand on underdeveloped 5E design concepts, bring additional realism to your table, or otherwise spice up your tabletop experience
- A one-session adventure module, set aboard a science-fantasy train in the style of Eberron’s Lightning Rail
- A selection of monster and NPC stat blocks with which to run the included adventure
As you can see, this project is ambitious.
That might be an understatement.
Much of the content in the current draft has benefitted substantially from my incredibly patient friends, who have spent hours discussing or playing through the homebrew with me, but that can only carry me so far. As a result, I have decided to invite you, dear reader, to help me test this content.
While it may be a bit out of order, allow me to present the set of rules that I am presenting as playtest material: the Bardic Colleges that have survived cuts and refinement to make the list that will be published in The Huntsman’s Codex.
(I just discovered that there is a widget through which I can implant PDF documents directly into blog posts. This is a game changing upgrade from Tumblr!)
I am still in the process of determining how I will be accepting playtesting feedback on this and future playtest released; however, I do not want to delay beginning the release of playtest material any longer. As I have the opportunity to finish reviewing other subsections of The Huntsman’s Codex with my initial reviewers, I will post the playtesting incarnations of each subsection to this blog.
I look forward to hearing what you do with this and future releases, both in playtest and official release capacities!
– Michael Leonard A.K.A. The Huntsman
The Huntsman's Homebrews 