This website and homebrew content began as a way to enable my players and I to play 5th edition D&D games in my own homebrew setting without compromising what I thought it was that PCs and NPCs should be able to do in that particular setting. But as the body of work grew and grew over the years of running games, it started becoming clear that these new spells, subclasses, feats, prestige classes, etc. could appeal to other players, DMs, and groups as well! After some time spent looking over the content and organizing it to share with the world, I’ve decided to create this website as a central location for this little project that has grown and become known as D&D Unleashed.
I’m organizing this into three major compendiums. One has already been released; the other two are planned for release in 2022 and 2023. I’ve never done anything quite like this before, so I can’t give a better estimate than that yet. I’ll keep you updated as I get closer to release, but I’ll be posting constant previews and excerpts on this website for you to enjoy, so be sure to bookmark this site for future reference! The compendiums planned are:
Legends of Prestige and Prowess: A focus on those who exceed mortal restrictions in their abilities. It will contain rules for epic level play, new spells, new subclasses, new feats, and four new prestige classes including a pet class and a support class.
The Impermissicon: A focus on forbidden magic and dark forces. It will contain blood magic, lycanthropy, twisted curses, vampires, soul magic, dark gods, fallen heroes, a large array of new forbidden spells, and new forbidden prestige classes.
The Elements and Beyond (Out Now!): A focus on not just the classic four elements, but the powers of the natural world and the planes surrounding it. It contains well over a hundred new elemental and sundry spells, along with spellcaster specialization feats, new elemental subclasses, and new races, such as the Pixie.
To understand D&D Unleashed, it helps to understand my viewpoint on the game design of 5th Edition D&D itself, and why I like it so much. I believe that 5th Edition’s strongest aspects are its strong character theming and its flexible multiclass system combined with its relative simplicity. Why? Well, there are a lot of tabletop game systems out there and most of them have some great ideas and mechanics to offer. Some systems sacrifice flexibility in character building to better define the theming of their character — class-based systems tend to do this. Other systems enable broader flexibility but do so at the cost of forcing players to build their own theme all on their own. 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons manages to define its character archetypes very well with its classes and subclasses, but it also enables PCs to be built with a great deal of flexibility and granularity because of the multiclassing system allowing you to simply allocate levels to different classes in a fluid way. Compare it to 3.5’s multiclassing or 4th edition. Compare it to other class-based systems. It’s remarkably powerful, resilient, and useful. I think that the best homebrew content is content designed to accentuate these strongest aspects of 5th Edition, by providing players with modular pieces of content like subclasses and prestige classes which strengthen that multiclassing system without diluting the archetypes that are so well-defined by the base published classes.
With that in mind, my goal with all of the new homebrew content is to enable character concepts and archetypes for PCs and NPCs that currently can’t be done using published material, or at least can’t be done in a satisfying way. This means never adding new content that attempts to fill the same thematic niche as existing published content, among other things. There is a lot of homebrew out there that attempts to redesign classes, subclasses, or spells, and a lot of homebrew that does something published content already does just in a different way or attempts to obsolete it, such as a new fighter subclass that casts spells in melee (Eldritch Knight) or a new paladin subclass that focuses on nature (Oath of the Ancients). That isn’t to diss such homebrew — some of it is excellent! But it isn’t the goal for D&D Unleashed. When it comes to redesigning or “fixing” published content, at most, we’ll offer some optional revisions to some spells and a few capstone class features which tweak numbers for the purposes of balance and little else.
The name “Unleashed” might imply to some that balance isn’t a concern here. But rest assured, we’re unleashing your capabilities, but we’re not trying to unleash the balance of the game! All the content in D&D Unleashed has been playtested, iterated upon, altered, and refined until it reached what we believe to be the most balanced and interesting design. We try to follow the design principles that Wizards of the Coast has advised upon, such as those in this document they released on class design long ago. If previewed content needs to be changed, you’ll see those changes on this site and you’ll be informed of those changes when the final compendiums are released.
Of course, all new content is volatile when introduced to your game. This is still true whether it is homebrew or official published content, and even if the content is well balanced. There isn’t any way to add many more options to a game like D&D without creating new opportunities for power-gaming. If that’s a concern for you, be advised that D&D Unleashed in its entirety will give power-gamers more room to break the game, just as Xanathar’s Guide did in-part, and as all new infusions of content will threaten to do. If your players are hardcore power-gamers, your DM is fundamentally unwilling to veto any character builds, and you don’t want to test the game’s limits or have to play with hyper-optimized teammates, adding this content to your game will make things worse. But if you fit that description I imagine your game already has problems, and I wish you good luck.
In the end, you don’t have to use all of D&D Unleashed to make use of it, or even an entire compendium. If you only like one post or preview on this website, I’d rather that you add at least that content to your game that you’re comfortable with adding rather than adding none at all for fear of what it will do. Use however much of the content fits your game and your group. There’s so much that this expansion will let you do that I’m confident there’s at least one thing in it for everyone who plays 5th Edition.
If you’re interested, talk to your group and your DM about incorporating some or all of D&D Unleashed into your Dungeons and Dragons game!
There are two kinds of new spells in D&D Unleashed: (1) completely new spells designed to stand on their own and (2) spell variants that duplicate other spells but with minor variations in damage types, schools, saving throws, available classes, or other mechanics. Spell variants do not reproduce the text of the spells that they copy. There are spell variants for both existing published spells and for many of the completely new spells as well, but D&D Unleashed will not reproduce the full text of any officially published spells for obvious copyright reasons. Instead, the spell variants have a name, school, class list, and a short bit of text detailing the changes. These spell variants are incredibly useful for helping to fill out a spell list for characters who want to specialize in a particular theme, school, or damage type, but they aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. If you don’t like them, feel free to exclude them when you add D&D Unleashed content to your game.
As for the completely new spells, we have a few design principles that we like to adhere to. One is that spells are better when they involve meaningful gameplay differences for more than just the caster player. A spell that does a great deal of damage is interesting, but a spell that changes the battlefield for every player at the table is usually more interesting. The new buff spells are a great example of this philosophy in action, as they are some of the more powerful of the new spells, with the intent being that a powerful buff spell feels fun and rewarding for both the caster and the Fighter, Rogue, or whoever it is that’s being buffed by it.
D&D Unleashed also attempts to add more spells that affect the lesser-used saving throws of Strength, Intelligence, and Charisma while still adding even more Dexterity, Constitution, and Wisdom-based spells to match them. This should change the ratio of saving throws for spells overall, but only slightly. It does similar things to the ratio of damage types, and it intends to offer enough spells of the lesser-used schools like divination and illusion that a mage who wishes to specialize in those schools can do so at less of a cost to their combat power. Finally, we sought to fill out the spell lists with magical effects that are familiar to classic fantasy but are conspicuously missing from 5th Edition, such as mass invisibility, turning a foe tiny, or creating a wall of lava.
5th Edition already has specialization feats for martial characters: Great Weapon Master, Defensive Duelist, Two Weapon Fighter, Sharpshooter, etc. But other than War Caster (and to a lesser extent Elemental Adept), there are few published feats for a spellcasting PC to take that specialize them into a particular theme or mechanic in the same way. D&D Unleashed aims to improve that by giving players options in the form of new spellcasting specialization feats. Some of these, like Blood Mage, work with other new mechanics from the expansion. Others, like Ward Mage synergize with existing mechanics to achieve their goal of specializing the spellcaster.
Most of them, however, are special spellcasting feats that come with their own spell list of thematic spells from all classes. When the PC with the feat casts one of the spells on the feat’s spell list, the feat’s special abilities activate. This enables players to specialize under thematic concepts that don’t normally stick to one damage type or school of magic, like water magic, earth magic, or sword magic. In this way, spellcasters can take feats to distinguish themselves from each other in addition to class and subclass decisions.
Prestige classes are designed to follow the general guidelines set out by Wizards of the Coast in this Unearthed Arcana document. They each have only 5 levels, and they all have some strict prerequisites before levels can be taken. All but one require more than 3 levels of normal classes beforehand in addition to other qualifications. Prestige Classes are each a dedicated multiclass — they cannot be a character’s base class. For that reason, if a DM or group dislikes or disallows multiclassing, they probably shouldn’t play with prestige classes. The new combinations allowed by these prestige classes can be very powerful, but they are no more powerful than the combinations already allowed by multiclassing.
So why make Prestige Classes instead of new normal 1-20 classes? As I stated above in the About section, I find 5th Edition’s flexible multiclassing system to be one of its strongest attributes. I feel that the officially published classes already do a great job of filling the basic fantasy niches for characters, and that’s what a 1-20 class should do. A Prestige Class, on the other hand, is less of a noun and more of an adjective for a character. Each Prestige Class was designed to cover a thematic concept that is broader than something that can be covered in a single feat, more generalized than something like a subclass that applies to only one base class, and more of a modifying concept than a full 1-20 class should be. D&D Unleashed also uses Prestige Classes to enable styles of play reminiscent of 4th Edition D&D, such as those around the Defender and Leader roles, and to enable character themes that should require great investment (such as levels) to achieve, like gaining a powerful pet/companion or gaining permanent regeneration like a vampire.
For example, the Leader can be combined with any other class to accentuate their PC’s theme, enabling far more character concepts than even a dozen subclasses could enable.
Plus, a prestige class is much easier to integrate with an existing game than a new class or subclass, as a player doesn’t always need to create a new character to make good use of it!
Blood magic is a popular concept for fantasy casters but lacks much support within the official published 5th Edition. In light of that, I've produced a small ecosystem of blood magic, spells, subclasses, and even a feat to enable players to choose the amount of blood magic that's right for them -- a small sip, or a deeper drink? Blood spells are a new school of magic, but each Blood spell also has a conventional school of magic as well, so that the Blood affix is more of an additional tag added to spells, which enables them to work with the various blood magic class features and feat abilities that will come with them.
The goal of this blood magic is to enable players to not only build dedicated blood mages of various sorts, but also to enable other mages who are tempted by the pull of forbidden power to slowly immerse themselves in the dark magicks. An evocation wizard who finds an ancient tome of forbidden blood magic may start by simply copying a few blood spells, and casting one or two sometimes, but then eventually take the Blood Mage feat as they pick up more and more blood spells, and can keep their original subclass the entire time if they wish to be an evocation wizard learning blood magic, rather than a full blood wizard. If they do wish to be a full blood wizard, there’s a new subclass for that!
There are myriad ways to do blood magic, and there’s no one right answer. Because of this, the blood magic in D&D Unleashed comes in many forms, whether its the self-sacrificial paladin subclass, the sorcerer subclass that is empowered by shedding blood, or the wizard subclass that turns enemies into blood puppets. But it is also designed to work with other homebrew blood magic content, since there is other good content out there that hits slightly different thematic notes. Simply add the Blood tag to any homebrew blood magic spells that you add to your game from another source and it will work with D&D Unleashed!
