Hey folks, first time really posting here but hoping to get some advice as a longstanding DM! tldr version: I need help from all of you Elder Evils figuring out a homebrew race/Warlock subclass for a Star Spawn crossbreed that isn't exactly Great Old One or Seeker Warlock.
I'm coming up on DMing the fifth year of my main 5E campaign as our party prepares to bring in new faces to new places, and one of my most trusted players who's been here since the start has a very interesting idea that they want to pursue a bunch of homebrew for: a Warlock inspired fully by Star Spawn. I'm really excited to make it happen since I've set the groundwork for elements of Star Spawn to come up in my world and I've wanted an excuse to use them more for a long time, but I'm having some challenges homebrewing things for them. For context, we're starting the party off at 5th level with an Artificer, Barbarian, and Paladin in the mix as well.
The idea we're working off of is something along the lines of having a crossbreed descendant of a humanoid with Star Spawn over many generations, with their family line's main goal being to release an Elder Evil into the Material Plane. Currently, we're using this homebrew race as our base, which I think is good but could potentially be tweaked around. But I really wanted to ask for some second opinions on this as well as class stuff as well so that we can try to achieve that level of cosmic horror we're looking for.
We've taken a look at Great Old One and Seeker Warlock alike, but we've felt like neither exactly hits on the precise things we're looking for. On the one hand, they've touched GOOlock before and, as much as they enjoy it, they're not sure they want to replay one again and they worry that too much of its features feel more like "mind magic" rather than "cosmic magic." But on the other hand, the Seeker Warlock appears to them more like an astronaut of sorts rather than some sort of cosmic horror. There are some elements we like from both or feel we could improve upon between.
Would anybody happen to have any feedback or ideas on how to hybridize or homebrew something out of these currently mentioned concepts and subclasses- not just in terms of the spell list, but also in terms of subclass features?
Update: Thanks for all of the feedback you guys- it's helped me think this out a ton! Here is my current iteration of this subclass in the spoiler below:
Starting at 1st level, you possess the ability to summon extraplanar pockets that can store various contents upon your persons. As a bonus action, you open an extraplanar rift that appears upon your body and stow an item in hand or retrieve an item that is currently stored.
You can hold as many items within these rifts in this fashion as equal to your proficiency bonus. Attempting to stow more items than what you can hold causes one item to be released from the rifts and drop at your feet at random. A tiny object counts as a single object, a small object counts as two, and a medium object counts as four.
Collapse Distance
Starting at 6th level, you can teleport yourself with a burst of cosmic power, warping space and causing an implosion of psychic energy in the rift left in space. As an action, you can cast thunder step at 3rd level, dealing psychic damage rather than thunder damage.
Once you use this feature, you can’t use it again until you finish a short or long rest.
Psychic Mirror
Starting at 10th level, you not only negate psychic forces but deflect them to nearby targets. Whenever you take psychic damage, you instead take none and each creature within 10ft of you takes that damage instead.
In addition, your thoughts and location can't be discerned by magic, and the spell level of thunder step from your Collapse Distance feature increases to 5th level.
Gate to the Cosmos
Starting at 14th level, you have become a conduit through which the Elder Evils of the Far Realm can draw entities into with vicious force and bombard with the horrors of beyond. As an action, you can use this feature to summon a miniature wormhole centered on you. Unsecured creatures within 30ft must make a STR saving throw or take 5d10 force damage and be pulled to an unoccupied space as close to the center as possible, and unsecured objects are automatically pulled towards the wormhole. On a successful save, a creature takes half of the damage and is not pulled towards the wormhole.
Regardless of whether a creature was pulled towards the wormhole or not, any creature or object that is pulled within 5ft of you is then transported through the rift and into the farthest realms of the planes. The targets disappear and hurtle through the cosmos. At the end of your next turn, if the targets are not aberrations, they take 5d10 psychic damage and reel from the horrific experience. If they are reduced to 0 hit points while they are within this void, they are permanently consumed by it and lost to the cosmos. Otherwise, a target returns to an unoccupied space within 5ft of you which you choose for them.
Once you use this feature, you can’t use it again until you finish a long rest.
Additionally, the spell level of thunder step from your Collapse Distance feature increases to 7th level.
In terms of subclass features, you could take something like the Fathomless warlock has, where they get a “signature spell” that has some special effects. Just make sure it’s at 6th level for a level 3 spell instead of 10th, because 10th is pretty late to be getting a subclass-defining feature.
Level 14 for warlocks is often some sort of nuke, or a one-a-day power that turns the tides in some way. You could consider some 1-day action that causes all creatures of your choice within 60 feet to make an int save or be under the effects of the confusion and slow spells for 1 minute, making a save at the end of their turn to end it, or something like that, as a glimpse of your full aberrant power leaks through into the world. Just thought of that, not sure about the balance, but it’s a starting point.
You could borrow from the aberrant sorcerer and include some area effect that warps local geometry, including via difficult terrain, teleportation, etc.
Hurl through Hell seems relevant too. To me, the psychic damage seems even more appropriate with this concept than it does with Fiend honestly (I would have made HtH multi-elemental damage myself).
Starting at 1st level, you possess the ability to summon extraplanar pockets that can store various contents upon your persons. As a bonus action, you open an extraplanar rift that appears upon your body and stow an item in hand or retrieve an item that is currently stored.
You can hold as many items within these rifts in this fashion as equal to your proficiency bonus. Attempting to stow more items than what you can hold causes one item to be released from the rifts and drop at your feet at random. A tiny object counts as a single object, a small object counts as two, and a medium object counts as four.
Collapse Distance
Starting at 6th level, you can teleport yourself with a burst of cosmic power, warping space and causing an implosion of psychic energy in the rift left in space. As an action, you can cast thunder step at 3rd level, dealing psychic damage rather than thunder damage.
Once you use this feature, you can’t use it again until you finish a short or long rest.
Psychic Mirror
Starting at 10th level, you not only negate psychic forces but deflect them to nearby targets. Whenever you take psychic damage, you instead take none and each creature within 10ft of you takes that damage instead.
In addition, your thoughts and location can't be discerned by magic, and the spell level of thunder step from your Collapse Distance feature increases to 4th level.
Gate to the Cosmos
Starting at 14th level, you have become a conduit through which the Elder Evils of the Far Realm can draw entities into with vicious force and bombard with the horrors of beyond. As an action, you can use this feature to summon a miniature wormhole centered on you. Unsecured creatures within 30ft must make a STR saving throw or take 5d10 force damage and be pulled to an unoccupied space as close to the center as possible, and unsecured objects are automatically pulled towards the wormhole. On a successful save, a creature takes half of the damage and is not pulled towards the wormhole.
Regardless of whether a creature was pulled towards the wormhole or not, any creature or object that is pulled within 5ft of you is then transported through the rift and into the farthest realms of the planes. The targets disappear and hurtle through the cosmos. At the end of your next turn, if the targets are not aberrations, they take 5d10 psychic damage and reel from the horrific experience. If they are reduced to 0 hit points while they are within this void, they are permanently consumed by it and lost to the cosmos. Otherwise, a target returns to an unoccupied space within 5ft of you which you choose for them.
Once you use this feature, you can’t use it again until you finish a long rest.
Additionally, the spell level of thunder step from your Collapse Distance feature increases to 5th level.
This looks really good! I’d even consider increasing the scaling on thunder step by a little (maybe making it skip 5th level and go to 6th at level 14) to make sure it stays relevant damage-wise. Great job!
This looks really good! I’d even consider increasing the scaling on thunder step by a little (maybe making it skip 5th level and go to 6th at level 14) to make sure it stays relevant damage-wise. Great job!
Ahh that's true- thank you so much! Some of these features are actually based on some Star Spawn abilities from MTF, and looking back at it now a Seer can use that Collapse Distance feature up to 6d12 psychic, so it's not too unreasonable for me to even up the spell slot levels by two per patron feature increase to reflect the actual levels. Level 5 Thunder Step at 10th, level 7 at 14th?
As a side note, the one feature I've had some discussion on is the 1st level Aberrant Gates feature. The idea was to grant an interesting utility that could prove useful in the right hands but wasn't too game-breaking or threatening (I know the power of extradimensional storage spaces far too well in the hands of crafty players haha), but I'm wondering if it seems too weak or too potent from an outside view? I'm not sure if I'm missing any glaringly obvious issues with such a feature or if it could be fun to figure out.
I'd recommend dropping the reference to thunder step and just writing out the power explicitly. That way you can define the progression as you'd like without making a bunch of awkward amendments to that spell.
A few other comments: you may want to add much more to the 1st-level ability, as that ability is meant to define the play-style of the subclass.
Also, the psychic mirror ability is probably not going to come up often, as a) very few monsters deal psychic damage, and b) even if they do, they'd have to target the warlock. Further, that ability is very likely to backfire if the squishy warlock is surrounded by allies. You may want to change the ability to reflect the damage to nearby creatures of your choice.
I'd recommend dropping the reference to thunder step and just writing out the power explicitly. That way you can define the progression as you'd like without making a bunch of awkward amendments to that spell.
A few other comments: you may want to add much more to the 1st-level ability, as that ability is meant to define the play-style of the subclass.
Also, the psychic mirror ability is probably not going to come up often, as a) very few monsters deal psychic damage, and b) even if they do, they'd have to target the warlock. Further, that ability is very likely to backfire if the squishy warlock is surrounded by allies. You may want to change the ability to reflect the damage to nearby creatures of your choice.
Gosh that's really good input actually- I'll rewrite the Thunder Step portion and I definitely agree with you about the Psychic Mirror part; it might even just be better to say "the psychic damage gets deflected to one creature of your choice" rather than just indiscriminately blasting everybody around.
But you have a really solid point about how the features don't really work too well or defining together, hmmm... If I think about the other features of this subclass idea, I think all of the features lean into a sort of a "defensive dodger, deflector, and disruptor" sort of build- a mixture of AoE effects that screw over people that risk getting too close and a slew of things that help them to shut down single targets that decide to hang back.
Just as context as well, my player has art of their character! Art credit goes to them at lad.luck
Seeing that the Aberrant Gates are supposed to reflect extraplanar rifts, a potential idea might be to lean further into that defensive feel by making it possible for attacks to get absorbed or vanish into the rifts, similar to Hexblade's Armor of Hexes but not as potent. An example that could be added on:
"There's a chance that an attack aimed at you might vanish and dissolve into one of the aberrant rifts instead. The critical failure range of attack rolls made against you is increased equal to the amount of empty and unused rifts you possess."
So as an example: if a 5th level warlock of this subclass was stowing a single tiny item in this fashion using these rifts, they'd have two unused ones to add extra potential to send an attack phasing straight through them, effectively extending their critical failure range from 1-3. Maybe doing it like this might allow them the flexibility to say "you hang onto things discretely that might help you be sneaky or avoidant, but you'll be just as squishy as any normal warlock" or "you leave yourself more emptyhanded and open as any ordinary person, but you have more of a chance for trouble to go right through you."
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Hey folks, first time really posting here but hoping to get some advice as a longstanding DM! tldr version: I need help from all of you Elder Evils figuring out a homebrew race/Warlock subclass for a Star Spawn crossbreed that isn't exactly Great Old One or Seeker Warlock.
I'm coming up on DMing the fifth year of my main 5E campaign as our party prepares to bring in new faces to new places, and one of my most trusted players who's been here since the start has a very interesting idea that they want to pursue a bunch of homebrew for: a Warlock inspired fully by Star Spawn. I'm really excited to make it happen since I've set the groundwork for elements of Star Spawn to come up in my world and I've wanted an excuse to use them more for a long time, but I'm having some challenges homebrewing things for them. For context, we're starting the party off at 5th level with an Artificer, Barbarian, and Paladin in the mix as well.
The idea we're working off of is something along the lines of having a crossbreed descendant of a humanoid with Star Spawn over many generations, with their family line's main goal being to release an Elder Evil into the Material Plane. Currently, we're using this homebrew race as our base, which I think is good but could potentially be tweaked around. But I really wanted to ask for some second opinions on this as well as class stuff as well so that we can try to achieve that level of cosmic horror we're looking for.
We've taken a look at Great Old One and Seeker Warlock alike, but we've felt like neither exactly hits on the precise things we're looking for. On the one hand, they've touched GOOlock before and, as much as they enjoy it, they're not sure they want to replay one again and they worry that too much of its features feel more like "mind magic" rather than "cosmic magic." But on the other hand, the Seeker Warlock appears to them more like an astronaut of sorts rather than some sort of cosmic horror. There are some elements we like from both or feel we could improve upon between.
Would anybody happen to have any feedback or ideas on how to hybridize or homebrew something out of these currently mentioned concepts and subclasses- not just in terms of the spell list, but also in terms of subclass features?
Update: Thanks for all of the feedback you guys- it's helped me think this out a ton! Here is my current iteration of this subclass in the spoiler below:
Warlock of the Beyond
Beyond Expanded Spells
1st
dissonant whispers, guiding bolt
2nd
blindness/deafness, levitate
3rd
blink, clairvoyance
4th
summon aberration (Star Spawn only), dimension door
5th
contact other plane, passwall
Aberrant Gates
Starting at 1st level, you possess the ability to summon extraplanar pockets that can store various contents upon your persons. As a bonus action, you open an extraplanar rift that appears upon your body and stow an item in hand or retrieve an item that is currently stored.
You can hold as many items within these rifts in this fashion as equal to your proficiency bonus. Attempting to stow more items than what you can hold causes one item to be released from the rifts and drop at your feet at random. A tiny object counts as a single object, a small object counts as two, and a medium object counts as four.
Collapse Distance
Starting at 6th level, you can teleport yourself with a burst of cosmic power, warping space and causing an implosion of psychic energy in the rift left in space. As an action, you can cast thunder step at 3rd level, dealing psychic damage rather than thunder damage.
Once you use this feature, you can’t use it again until you finish a short or long rest.
Psychic Mirror
Starting at 10th level, you not only negate psychic forces but deflect them to nearby targets. Whenever you take psychic damage, you instead take none and each creature within 10ft of you takes that damage instead.
In addition, your thoughts and location can't be discerned by magic, and the spell level of thunder step from your Collapse Distance feature increases to 5th level.
Gate to the Cosmos
Starting at 14th level, you have become a conduit through which the Elder Evils of the Far Realm can draw entities into with vicious force and bombard with the horrors of beyond. As an action, you can use this feature to summon a miniature wormhole centered on you. Unsecured creatures within 30ft must make a STR saving throw or take 5d10 force damage and be pulled to an unoccupied space as close to the center as possible, and unsecured objects are automatically pulled towards the wormhole. On a successful save, a creature takes half of the damage and is not pulled towards the wormhole.
Regardless of whether a creature was pulled towards the wormhole or not, any creature or object that is pulled within 5ft of you is then transported through the rift and into the farthest realms of the planes. The targets disappear and hurtle through the cosmos. At the end of your next turn, if the targets are not aberrations, they take 5d10 psychic damage and reel from the horrific experience. If they are reduced to 0 hit points while they are within this void, they are permanently consumed by it and lost to the cosmos. Otherwise, a target returns to an unoccupied space within 5ft of you which you choose for them.
Once you use this feature, you can’t use it again until you finish a long rest.
Additionally, the spell level of thunder step from your Collapse Distance feature increases to 7th level.
In terms of subclass features, you could take something like the Fathomless warlock has, where they get a “signature spell” that has some special effects. Just make sure it’s at 6th level for a level 3 spell instead of 10th, because 10th is pretty late to be getting a subclass-defining feature.
Level 14 for warlocks is often some sort of nuke, or a one-a-day power that turns the tides in some way. You could consider some 1-day action that causes all creatures of your choice within 60 feet to make an int save or be under the effects of the confusion and slow spells for 1 minute, making a save at the end of their turn to end it, or something like that, as a glimpse of your full aberrant power leaks through into the world. Just thought of that, not sure about the balance, but it’s a starting point.
You could borrow from the aberrant sorcerer and include some area effect that warps local geometry, including via difficult terrain, teleportation, etc.
Hurl through Hell seems relevant too. To me, the psychic damage seems even more appropriate with this concept than it does with Fiend honestly (I would have made HtH multi-elemental damage myself).
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
Thanks for all of the feedback you guys- it's helped me think this out a ton! Here is my current iteration of this subclass:
Warlock of the Beyond
Beyond Expanded Spells
1st
dissonant whispers, guiding bolt
2nd
blindness/deafness, levitate
3rd
blink, clairvoyance
4th
summon aberration (Star Spawn only), dimension door
5th
contact other plane, passwall
Aberrant Gates
Starting at 1st level, you possess the ability to summon extraplanar pockets that can store various contents upon your persons. As a bonus action, you open an extraplanar rift that appears upon your body and stow an item in hand or retrieve an item that is currently stored.
You can hold as many items within these rifts in this fashion as equal to your proficiency bonus. Attempting to stow more items than what you can hold causes one item to be released from the rifts and drop at your feet at random. A tiny object counts as a single object, a small object counts as two, and a medium object counts as four.
Collapse Distance
Starting at 6th level, you can teleport yourself with a burst of cosmic power, warping space and causing an implosion of psychic energy in the rift left in space. As an action, you can cast thunder step at 3rd level, dealing psychic damage rather than thunder damage.
Once you use this feature, you can’t use it again until you finish a short or long rest.
Psychic Mirror
Starting at 10th level, you not only negate psychic forces but deflect them to nearby targets. Whenever you take psychic damage, you instead take none and each creature within 10ft of you takes that damage instead.
In addition, your thoughts and location can't be discerned by magic, and the spell level of thunder step from your Collapse Distance feature increases to 4th level.
Gate to the Cosmos
Starting at 14th level, you have become a conduit through which the Elder Evils of the Far Realm can draw entities into with vicious force and bombard with the horrors of beyond. As an action, you can use this feature to summon a miniature wormhole centered on you. Unsecured creatures within 30ft must make a STR saving throw or take 5d10 force damage and be pulled to an unoccupied space as close to the center as possible, and unsecured objects are automatically pulled towards the wormhole. On a successful save, a creature takes half of the damage and is not pulled towards the wormhole.
Regardless of whether a creature was pulled towards the wormhole or not, any creature or object that is pulled within 5ft of you is then transported through the rift and into the farthest realms of the planes. The targets disappear and hurtle through the cosmos. At the end of your next turn, if the targets are not aberrations, they take 5d10 psychic damage and reel from the horrific experience. If they are reduced to 0 hit points while they are within this void, they are permanently consumed by it and lost to the cosmos. Otherwise, a target returns to an unoccupied space within 5ft of you which you choose for them.
Once you use this feature, you can’t use it again until you finish a long rest.
Additionally, the spell level of thunder step from your Collapse Distance feature increases to 5th level.
This looks really good! I’d even consider increasing the scaling on thunder step by a little (maybe making it skip 5th level and go to 6th at level 14) to make sure it stays relevant damage-wise. Great job!
Ahh that's true- thank you so much! Some of these features are actually based on some Star Spawn abilities from MTF, and looking back at it now a Seer can use that Collapse Distance feature up to 6d12 psychic, so it's not too unreasonable for me to even up the spell slot levels by two per patron feature increase to reflect the actual levels. Level 5 Thunder Step at 10th, level 7 at 14th?
As a side note, the one feature I've had some discussion on is the 1st level Aberrant Gates feature. The idea was to grant an interesting utility that could prove useful in the right hands but wasn't too game-breaking or threatening (I know the power of extradimensional storage spaces far too well in the hands of crafty players haha), but I'm wondering if it seems too weak or too potent from an outside view? I'm not sure if I'm missing any glaringly obvious issues with such a feature or if it could be fun to figure out.
I'd recommend dropping the reference to thunder step and just writing out the power explicitly. That way you can define the progression as you'd like without making a bunch of awkward amendments to that spell.
A few other comments: you may want to add much more to the 1st-level ability, as that ability is meant to define the play-style of the subclass.
Also, the psychic mirror ability is probably not going to come up often, as a) very few monsters deal psychic damage, and b) even if they do, they'd have to target the warlock. Further, that ability is very likely to backfire if the squishy warlock is surrounded by allies. You may want to change the ability to reflect the damage to nearby creatures of your choice.
Gosh that's really good input actually- I'll rewrite the Thunder Step portion and I definitely agree with you about the Psychic Mirror part; it might even just be better to say "the psychic damage gets deflected to one creature of your choice" rather than just indiscriminately blasting everybody around.
But you have a really solid point about how the features don't really work too well or defining together, hmmm... If I think about the other features of this subclass idea, I think all of the features lean into a sort of a "defensive dodger, deflector, and disruptor" sort of build- a mixture of AoE effects that screw over people that risk getting too close and a slew of things that help them to shut down single targets that decide to hang back.
Just as context as well, my player has art of their character! Art credit goes to them at lad.luck
Seeing that the Aberrant Gates are supposed to reflect extraplanar rifts, a potential idea might be to lean further into that defensive feel by making it possible for attacks to get absorbed or vanish into the rifts, similar to Hexblade's Armor of Hexes but not as potent. An example that could be added on:
"There's a chance that an attack aimed at you might vanish and dissolve into one of the aberrant rifts instead. The critical failure range of attack rolls made against you is increased equal to the amount of empty and unused rifts you possess."
So as an example: if a 5th level warlock of this subclass was stowing a single tiny item in this fashion using these rifts, they'd have two unused ones to add extra potential to send an attack phasing straight through them, effectively extending their critical failure range from 1-3. Maybe doing it like this might allow them the flexibility to say "you hang onto things discretely that might help you be sneaky or avoidant, but you'll be just as squishy as any normal warlock" or "you leave yourself more emptyhanded and open as any ordinary person, but you have more of a chance for trouble to go right through you."