The Elements and Beyond (v1.0)
The first D&D Unleashed compendium has finally arrived! A magical exploration of the four elements and the various energies of creation — minus those dark forces that belong in forbidden tomes — powers such as light, thunder, lightning, acid, frost, and the magic of nature! The great news is that just like all of D&D Unleashed, it’s entirely free and you can download it right here!
This 246 page compendium contains 23 subclasses, 8 spellcasting feats, 134 spells, 213 spell variants, 85 monsters, 30 magic items, 4 races plus 12 new subraces each with racial feats, and even more goodies for both players and DMs!
If you’d like to view the whole compendium without downloading it or previewing it through Google Drive, you can find an album of all the pages right here on the website.
Download Links: Normal PDF, Tiny PDF (Optimized for Small File Size), Full-Size PDF, Spells Sorted By Level PDF, Full-Size Cover Art Image, Dust Jacket Image
Assorted Sample Pages:
D&D Beyond Links for D&D Unleashed:
Races, Backgrounds, Subclasses, Feats, Spells, Monsters, Magic Items
D&D Beyond Links for The Elements & Beyond Subraces:
Dwarves: Ember Dwarf, Stone Dwarf, Tundra Dwarf; Elves: Bright Elf, Green Elf, Thimble Elf; Halflings: Jungle Halfling, River Halfling; Genasi: Ash Genasi, Ice Genasi, Slime Genasi, Storm Genasi; New Races: Shardmind, Glassheart, Pixie, Sprite, Scamp
After an arduous process of refinement, our first compendium is finally ready for public consumption! You can finally make full use of the spellcasting specializations, the expansions to damage types through new spells, and of course the subclasses, races, monsters, and so much more that has yet to be previewed! If you’ve been waiting to be able to build your ideal plant mage, geomancer, or aerialist rogue, your wait is over. If you’ve been looking for dozens of new elementals and hordes of other monsters dealing and resisting a variety of damage types, you’ve not only found it — you’ve also got tools to customize your monsters for more resistance or weakness to various damage types and environmental effects to help tailor your game to your players! And if you just wanted to flesh out the underused damage types or elemental themes in your spellcasting lists, we have over a hundred new spells from cantrips to 9th-level spells to fill those empty areas!
If you’ve been following D&D Unleashed for very long, you may have noticed already that this compendium took much longer to edit, revise, and complete than we initially planned. We said at the beginning that any estimates could be very wrong since this has been the first compendium and we didn’t know how long it would take. Of course, 2020 has been full of surprises for most of the world, and that slowed things down considerably as well. This project is entirely free and I still have to work professionally to survive, which has become more taxing in the conditions of quarantine, among a number of other personal things that came up and complicated the time. Despite all that, the compendium is still releasing at a larger size than we initially planned, and that’s even with a handful of older material not quite making the cut. For example, a warlock subclass that was planned from the beginning for this compendium was made obsolete and extraneous by the release of the Fathomless official warlock subclass. Some new material was still produced during this time, while other older material was refined in unexpected ways, making it into a public release when it was originally planned to remain private.
Some of the material that’s been previewed from the compendium has received changes since it was previewed. For minor examples, the Woods Warden has been renamed to the Verdant Warden, and the corona spell has been renamed to holy glare. Most content received at least some minor tweaks, but some received significant boosts or reductions in power, such as the storm spear spell, which had its damage increased, or the cold snap spell, which had the potency of its debuff reduced. As part of the general goal of adhering to the style and design principles of 5th edition where possible, we try to keep changes and revisions to an overall minimum where possible, so as to maintain more consistency in people’s games, but further iterations have come with time, thought, discussion, feedback, and playtesting. The intent with the release of the compendium is that the content is now finalized. That means I’m not currently planning significant overhauls to any of this content in the future, but some errata here and there are bound to be needed just as they have been for the official game, which is why the compendium has a version number. As with all tabletop content, though, more playtest feedback will always be the guide, so make sure to keep sharing your impressions as you play with this compendium!
There’s simply too much content in the compendium to go through the design thoughts and decisions of all of it in the same way that we normally do for the previews. Instead, we’ll continue to preview content for the other two compendiums as we approach their release, but we’re also planning to post excerpts from this compendium from time to time along with a set of those thoughts. Sometimes that will be a discussion about the design principles in the content, but other times it will be suggestions of ways that it can be used together or with other parts of the official D&D game. Whether you peruse the compendium slowly over time or devour it all in one rush, you’ll have plenty to think about as times goes on. And of course, you’ll have more and more chances to use it in your games! You can even print the entire compendium as a physical book of your own, either in a binder, rings, or actually bound (some businesses can do so for a cost). If you know someone in your life who loves D&D homebrew, a cheaply-printed copy could even make a budget holiday gift!
After nearly a year of concerted effort on putting together this collection of homebrew content, I’m so, so beyond excited to get to share it all with you. Thank you for all your support — just knowing that you’re out there enjoying the content in your games gives me motivation. As you play (or just daydream about it), I hope you all enjoy The Elements & Beyond!
