Base Class: Cleric
As a Domain of Decay cleric, you serve a darker purpose, using your abilities to weaken and destroy your foes with rot, disease, and pestilence. Your magic revolves around dealing necrotic and poison damage, weakening enemies with afflictions like poisoned and controlling the battlefield with summoned vermin and blight. You are particularly effective against large groups, wearing down foes over time with debilitating effects.
Though you still have access to healing and support magic like other clerics, your focus lies more on destruction, decay, and imposing an aura of death around you. You create chaos in urban areas, turning once-thriving cities into diseased, crumbling ruins. Your connection to Scurris Malum ensures that you thrive in filth and darkness, finding strength where others would falter.
Ideal Campaign Role:
You fit perfectly in dark, grim campaigns or in areas stricken by disease or famine. You bring pestilence to your enemies, turning their own strength against them. Whether serving as a plaguebringer in a corrupt city or as a secret cultist within a larger organization, you are a master of decay and destruction.
Characteristics of the Domain of Decay Cleric:
- Manipulation of Disease: Your spells focus on spreading disease and rot, poisoning your enemies, and summoning swarms of vermin to do your bidding.
- Weakening Foes: Many of your abilities are designed to debilitate enemies, reducing their ability to fight back while you thrive in their suffering.
- Aura of Destruction: As you progress, your very presence emanates rot, decay, and disease, dealing constant damage to enemies within your vicinity.
- Corruption and Chaos: You aren’t just a destroyer; you symbolize the slow, inevitable corruption of all things. Cities crumble, nature withers, and your enemies succumb to diseases they cannot cure.
Plaguebringer
Starting at 3rd level, you can use your Channel Divinity to unleash a swarm of vermin and disease in Scurris Malum’s name.
As an action, you can present your holy symbol and summon a cloud of diseased insects or swarming rats that appears in a 15-foot radius centered on you. The area is filled with diseased filth for 1 minute. Each creature of your choice within the area must make a Constitution saving throw your spell save DC. On a failed save, a creature takes poison damage equal to 2d6 + your cleric level and becomes poisoned for 1 minute. On a successful save, the creature takes half damage and is not poisoned.
Creatures poisoned by this effect can make a new saving throw at the end of each of their turns, ending the poisoned condition on a success.
You can use this feature a number of times equal to your Wisdom modifier (a minimum of once). You regain all expended uses when you finish a long rest.
Corrupted Resilience
At 3rd level, you gain the ability to twist and degrade a creature's natural defenses against poison, turning their strength into weakness through the foul influence of Scurris Malum.
Corruption of Resilience:
When you deal poison damage to a creature, you can use this feature to force the creature to make a Constitution saving throw against your spell save DC. On a failed save, the creature's resistance or immunity to poison is corrupted for 1 minute as follows:
- A creature immune to poison damage or the poisoned condition becomes resistant to poison damage and can still be poisoned.
- A creature resistant to poison damage loses its resistance and takes normal poison damage.
- A creature with no resistance to poison damage becomes vulnerable to poison damage.
You can use this feature a number of times equal to your Wisdom modifier (minimum of 1), and you regain all expended uses when you finish a long rest.
Decay Domain Spells
Your connection to this Decay domain ensures you always have certain spells ready. When you reach a Cleric level specified in the Decay Domain Spells table, you thereafter always have the listed spells prepared.
| Cleric Level | Prepared Spells |
|---|---|
| 3 | Inflict Wounds, Ray of Sickness, Blindness/Deafness, Melf's Acid Arrow |
| 5 | Stinking Cloud, Animate Dead |
| 7 | Blight, Phantasmal Killer |
| 9 | Cloudkill, Contagion |
Aura of Decay
At 6th level, your mere presence begins to spread the influence of Scurris Malum.
You emanate an aura of corruption and decay that extends 10 feet from you in every direction, but not through total cover. When a creature enters the aura for the first time on a turn or starts its turn there, you can choose to deal necrotic damage equal to your Wisdom modifier (minimum of 1).
In addition, plants wither and die in your presence, and nonmagical food and water spoil if they are within your aura for more than 1 minute. This aura also causes mundane insects or vermin to swarm within it, though these are not strong enough to affect combat unless you choose to use your Channel Divinity: Plaguebringer.
Harbinger of Pestilence
At 17th level, your connection to Scurris Malum empowers your very presence to spread ruin and decay on a massive scale.
You gain immunity to poison and the poisoned condition. Additionally, you can use your action to unleash the Harbinger of Pestilence form once per long rest. For 1 minute, you gain the following benefits:
- You exude an aura in a 30-foot radius. Each creature of your choice that starts its turn in the aura must succeed on a Constitution saving throw (DC = your spell save DC) or take 3d8 necrotic damage and become poisoned for 1 minute.
- While in this form, when you deal necrotic damage, you heal for half of the necrotic damage dealt.
- You can move through creatures and objects as if they were difficult terrain. If you end your turn inside an object, you are shunted to the nearest unoccupied space and take 1d10 force damage for every 5 feet moved.
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Posted Jun 15, 2026yo i tried to change it but D&Dbeyond has decided that my Subclass does not have the necessary class features with the correct required levels. even tough i just added the changes and fixed the scaling here's a link to the updated variant if it works
https://www.dndbeyond.com/subclasses/2829467-domain-of-decay
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Posted Jun 13, 2026This subclass in my eyes is pretty good, but i do wanna say that the level 3 features and the rest dont really line up, unless you are playing with something like a poison monk, or a sorcerer with transmute spell to poison damage, corrupted resilience is extremely useless, and then shifting from poison to necrotic damage is an odd choice
there is one of 2 changes i would make:
1. change corrupted resilience to necrotic instead of poison, this is really strong but niche, limited use on enemies + needing saving throw + single target, makes is ballanced
on top of that necrotic is much more common than poison by magnitudes, and now this is more of a boss killer feat than a feat that might effect combat
2. make the 6th and 17th level feat both poison damage and poison damage related, and make the lvl 6 one deal more damage, like by making it a 1d6 + cleric level, but only lasting for t he channel divinity duration
But overall i think its a solid idea