Circle of the Swarm (Druid)
Art Credit: https://www.peterpaulrubens.net/the-head-of-medusa.jsp
Art Credit: https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Moat+Piranhas
Sometimes it isn’t enough to transform into a wild animal: you want to become legion, to have your body dissolve into a writhing horde of swarming critters and overwhelm your enemies as a single contiguous mass. Perhaps you’ve been wanting to build a dark elf druid that poisons enemies using swarms of spiders, a kenku shaman that explores the sky as flocks of ravens, or a desert wanderer that combines earth magic with hordes of venomous scarabs and scorpions. Maybe you miss the flavor and gameplay of the Swarm Druid subclass from 4th edition, or maybe you just want an alternate option to the Moon Druid that still focuses on the power of wild shape. This preview of the Circle of the Swarm, a new homebrew druid subclass for 5th edition D&D that will appear in The Impermissicon, serves all those needs and more!
In gameplay terms, the swarm druid acts more like the Circle of the Moon than the other druid subclasses. Most of the subclass’s power is invested into the Wild Shape feature, allowing it to be used as the subclass’s primary combat tool, just as with the moon druid. Like that subclass, the swarm druid even has a way to spend spell slots while in wild shape, so that the resources of a full caster don’t go to waste. The moon druid can expend spell slots to focus on toughness and survival, whereas the swarm druid expends them to damage groups of enemies, another classic strength of the druid class. In terms of statistics, the alternate form granted to druids of the Circle of the Swarm tends to offer less direct damage than the beasts available to the Circle of the Moon, but it also features swarm-themed resistances that make it generally tougher than those beasts, which balances out the difference in spell slot usage between the two subclasses. The swarm druid also avoids the classic moon druid problem of starting off too powerful and eventually becoming slightly weaker than other subclasses by scaling the power of the Wild Swarm stat block directly with the druid’s class level.
When we first designed this subclass six years ago, the 2nd-level feature simply allowed Wild Shape to transform the druid into the monster stat block for any given swam of beasts that the druid had encountered, just as it does for a regular beast. That design had numerous issues, and it created a requirement that new swarm stat blocks be made for all kinds of possible tiny beasts. After that, we tried allowing the druid to select any tiny beast’s stat block (within the right CR) and gave it specific buffs to make it into a suitable “swarm” stat block, but that was nearly impossible to balance (and resulted in a swarm of cats or a swarm of spiders always being the optimal choice). Finally, we seized upon the current implementation, where the druid player can choose a particular set of traits every time they transform, flavoring the beasts in the swarm however they like, whether that means choosing different kinds of spiders to fill your spider swarm, or choosing an entirely different swarm of beasts every time you need a new set of traits. This allows for the best balance while also granting the most freedom to the players in how they build and flavor their characters. That kind of freedom — the ability to build any character you can imagine in your mind without wrecking the game — is exactly what D&D Unleashed homebrew content is designed to bring!
