All in The Elements and Beyond
This bard subclass began with a vision of teleporting bards, and evolved from there until the aspect of travel became the main aesthetic. What's more bardic than serenading your friends to march (or sneak) through the forest more effectively? Bards of this college believe that the best stories are found upon the open road, and thus they specialize in travel-based magic, even in planar travel, and especially in teleportation.
Today's spells are intended to be useful to a wide variety of characters but are also explicitly designed to be especially useful for Eldritch Knights and other warrior-mages/gishes.
These three spells are focused on movement and mobility, a common theme for Aeromancers, and share a thematic unity with the fly spell that makes it easy to reconcile retraining. For example, a low-level storm sorcerer may make use of the swoop spell until he is high enough level to cast fly, and then retrain swoop to fly, flavored as the character becoming more skilled at aerial magic.
Sinking Maw resembles the also-5th-level spell maelstrom in some ways, and differs in others. The swirling liquefied ground doesn't deal damage over time, but can be much more confining and harder to escape from than swirling water. If you really want to completely smother your foes beneath the earth and you don't mind hitting only one target, Living Burial at 7th-level is what you're looking for.
Today's spells are Hydromancy spells, which means that they appear on the spell list for the new Hydromancer feat in the compendium, and they thus activate the feat's special abilities. These feats are designed, among other things, to unify thematic concepts that can stretch across multiple damage types, making other forms of conventional specialization (such as damage type synergies) less resonant for these things. Steam spells are a great example, as they deal fire damage but they appear on the Hydromancy spell list (which also contains spells that deal bludgeoning damage, cold damage, and more) and not on the Pyromancy spell list (also new in the compendium), which doesn't necessarily contain every spell that deals the fire damage type.
Stockade Sprouts is an environmental spell that creates temporary trees out of nothing to trap your foes in. Since it lasts up to an hour and only deals damage to targets who struggle, you can use it as the name implies -- a prison. The trees can also be used for cover to hide behind or higher vantages to climb to. Meanwhile, Sun Flower offers a stationary but long-lasting and versatile magical cannon in the form of a spectral flower blasting sunlight.
This particular spell is inspired very directly by the anime Dragon Ball Z, and specifically by the abilities used by our small friend here and our very evil boy, called the Destructo-Disk in the English Dub. This spell will chase your foes down until it hits something, but it won't chase only your foes down. Watch out that your disk doesn't accidentally hit someone you care about... like yourself!
Fist of Flame is intended to be a simple-to-understand single-target damage spell, fitting into the lineage of blight, harm, disintegrate, and finger of death. As an eighth-level spell, fist of flame gets to pack some debuffing power with its damage punch. Blood to Flame is both a new Pyromancy spell and a new Blood spell (what a fun venn-diagram!) you can use to torture your enemies as they die a gruesome death.
These spells do explicitly nonmagical physical damage, which leaves almost as many creatures resistant or immune to them as for fire damage, with fewer vulnerabilities. And that doesn't count temporary spells and effects such as stoneskin or gaseous form. This, combined with their other limitations in terms of needing suitable earth, affords them a bit of extra potential power in other situations.
Drown does exactly what it says, and is designed to be especially dangerous for enemy mages since it targets Strength and prevents most spellcasting by locking off verbal components and sight. Dive is one of many new travel-themed spells in the compendium, along with others such as glide, swoop, burrow, and soar.
This barbarian subclass transforms the normal barbarian into a warrior of the forest, whose rage represents a primal infusion of arboreal power. Each time you rage, you can choose between three different options for battlefield control, meaning that not only is the subclass geared toward defense over offense more than the average barbarian, it provides dynamic and flexible gameplay that players shouldn't tire of as easily as other barbarians.
