Hints of abandoned sub-classes in the 5e Player's Handbook?

Reading through the players handbook a bit lately (my Princes of the Apocalypse character was trapped in the plane of Air by Yan-C-Bin so I think I'm making a new character, at least temporarily), I remembered something I thought was strange. There's a pretty clear hint at the storm sorcerer in the flavor introduction to the sorcerer. I know that, by and large, the classes are introduced by flavor text for 3 of the iconic builds, but it struck me that storm sorcerer was seemingly included in the flavor but the subclass was left out.

It immediately made me look at the druid and bard options because they were also only two-subclass classes and I was wondering what else I'd find. Indeed, one of the bard options could be read as a College of Guile/Subterfuge/Chicanery and there's a possibility that a third druid circle would be some sort of druidic avenger/warden. I'm not sure of a good name for this druid, I'd tentatively call it Circle of the Storm to indicate nature's fury but that's likely to give people the impression that its all about lightning and thunder when its about being a warrior druid.

Looking at the others, we see a dwarf battlerager described in the barbarian intro. Cleric lists three iconic domains. Fighter is a laundry list. Monk lists the three monastic traditions. Paladin lists the three oaths. Ranger, oddly, seems to list two types of hunter and the beastmaster, possibly harkening to a time when there were more subclasses that got condensed. Rogue, warlock, and wizard also follow suit by listing three examples from their subclasses.

Intriguing, but I'm not sure if that means a College of Guile bard or drudic Avenger/Warden were planned but not released yet or abandoned as they didn't make the cut. I'm guessing they were half-baked but due to space some things needed to be cut. The storm sorcerer saw a release in Unearthed Arcana and was later toned down slightly (such a waste, they could have just given the storm sorcerer 5-ish thematic utility spells and it would have been perfect, or perhaps just feather fall (1), gust of wind (2), and wind wall (3) to solidify the storm theme with spells that are thematic but you just don't have room for in your build).

So the druidic avenger (let's stick with Circle of the Storm) is pretty easy to mock up. Take the Valor bard's features as a base: extra weapons/armor plus bardic inspiration uses at 3, extra attack at 6, and cantrip/attack mix at 14. You have to modify it a bit, so the main circle feature is probably a couple ranger hunter-type spells and a melee damage boost at level 2 and/or a bit of extra land speed, extra attack at 6, land's stride at 10, and the bonus action spellcasting at 14. Spells might include: ensnaring strike (1), hunter's mark (1), find steed (2), silence (2), elemental weapon (3), nondetection (3), fire shield (4), locate creature (4),  contagion (5), geas (5). I tried to pick only things that worked on melee and missile attacks and mostly spells from off the druid's normal list. So you end up with a caster using the druid list, who's about as good as a valor bard at melee attacks but with more weapon-enhancing spells and a mount. They're probably about on-par with some clerics, and will be using spell slots to cast spells augmenting their melee attacks. This does make for an interesting variant of the 4e Warden class though without the war-forms. It could be a nice alternative to the ancients paladin, totem barbarian, or ranger for a wilderness character.

A guile bard isn't as straitforward. They're superficially similar to the lore bard, you'd assume they'd get expertise in deception and slight of hand maybe plus something like mage hand. But that's really similar to the Lore bard's training just more specific. And its not really clear how to modify their bardic inspiration here. Lore bard uses inspiration to hinder foes and valor uses it to boost allies. This makes me think that they just said the lore bard basically covers what a guile bard would need, and the guile bard was aborted because the lore bard killed it and took its stuff. One could potentially poach some Arcane Trickster features, but that actually also covers much of the same ground as a guile bard would. The college of satire bard from unearthed arcana (and college of blades bard too mabye) also suggests that if they did consider a guile bard concept initially they abandoned it.

What's odd here is that the battlerager was clearly forseen and released in the SCAG where it maybe belongs (really wish they had just renamed the class berserker still). The storm sorcerer looks like it wasn't done in time for the main book, which also makes sense why it would be left out. They only had so much time to test it and so much space in the book: they just happened to leave the flavor text in. These are obviously things the designers considered and found worked well or otherwise filled a niche. The druidic avenger could just have been a nod towards a land-druid who liked flame blade (following their rule of threes for the class intros) but it is a reasonably obvious concept that would add a bit more diversity to the druid and wouldn't take up that much space in the book. And the druid is the only class other than the ranger that is left with only two subclasses after the SCAG came out, though the circle of the land does have many sub-options within it. There's easily space for another druid build, especially a smaller one like what I sketched out above. So I'm not sure why it wasn't fleshed out unless I'm totally misinterpreting the signs here. Finally, the guild bard seems like a viable option, but maybe less so once the lore bard was finished  and they moved on to some other directions that seemed more viable.

A failure of 5e: Cleric and Druid spell lists

I was (perhaps foolishly) reading some forum posts about the new Elemental Evil materials for D&D. Besides the usual gripes which amount to wanting more material, I've been thinking about how the new spells affect clerics (not at all) and druids (uncertain).

See, what they did was provide about 40 new mostly-elemental spells. They provided lists saying which spells can be taken by which classes, and one of those is the druid (cleric and paladin were left out). But there's an interesting caveat:

"Your DM might add only a few of these spells to your druid’s spell list. For example, if your druid is from a coastal region, the druid might have access only to the new water-themed spells." (Elemental Evil, p12).

Now, what has historically happened is every new spell in the game is available to the proper class. But everyone other than Clerics and Druids has a mechanic for how they "know" that spell. Wizards have to get a copy in their book (now you get a couple free when you gain a level, otherwise you have to seek it out) and other classes simply gain a new spell at each level (or thereabouts). Clerics and druids know every spell on their list, so when their list is expanded the classes just get that much more versatile.

This, I think, is a problem. But is there a solution?

Obviously for Elemental Evil they say: its the DM's choice if your druid can use all or only some of these. A reasonable thing to do at this point. As a DM, I think I'd simply ask the player to suggest which of those spells she would want access to and remove a few from the druid list that seemed less appropriate (i.e. a coastal druid might gain more water spells and lose fire ones).

But this is ultimately a little unsatisfying big-picture-wise. What you want is a good mechanism to allow all clerics/druids to have a universal set of core spells, and then provide additional ones based on their domain/circle/what-have-you. They did this, to an extent, with the bonus domain/circle spells. So its easy to instead customise those bonus spells instead of the list as a whole. But then we've still kinda got two different lists of bonus spells.

I'm not sure what the solution is here. With at most 40 or so spells, a little customization isn't bad. If they add another 20-40 spells in 6 months though... and another 50-100 spells a year after that... the problem balloons into an outrageous bloated system.

It sounds like the Cleric/Druid need a slight redesign that they don't want to do. A cleric might "know" a number of spells at each level equal to his wisdom score, or perhaps 10 + wisdom modifier. You pick them from the Cleric list and you or the DM can select a few which are thematic but don't fit the general Cleric list. Fairly elegant, but shitty for new players (i.e. time-consuming and difficult).

My beloved 2nd edition wasn't necessarily better in this respect. Cleric spells were divided into spheres of influence, but still the more spells published the bigger your list got, though it was at least thematically coherent still (by and large).

A different, but not quite as elegant solution, would be to similarly divide the spells up into paths of power, a la the old Dragon Magazine article (#216). That divided up wizard spells into a number of paths, and wizards could only pursue a few thematic paths until they mastered them. I think, in theory, it meant high-level wizards were still crazy-potent, but it forced wizards to be thematic in their spells. I can see this being useful for both clerics/druids and sorcerers in particular, who ought to have maybe one or two thematic spells at each level but you don't want people to be making constant choices (i.e. choose once to get the Flame path and you've got a set spells with one flame spell at each level, rather than choosing from a large group of spells at each level to add or wholly customizing your spell list).

The problem with this "paths" approach is it doesn't jive with the current domains/circles, because both are mechanics to add new spells to the spell list. The classes still need a rewrite to prevent bloat in the long term.

Wizards are a bit of a concern as well, but the DM can (and should) limit which spells are available to some extent. So you don't have to let all the extra spells in as scrolls or through NPC spellbooks found as treasure. Sorcerers and Bards and Warlocks pick from the list, so even a bloated list isn't really increasing their power/utility unless bad spells are created for the game. But clerics and druids... I wonder if they'll actually do anything about this.

Rule of Law: A Chinese Rome

One of my beefs with a lot of the fantasy worlds floating around these days is that they're pretty euro-centric. That's not necessarily bad, but it leaves out a lot of concepts and archetypes that I'm interested in exploring.

Could this represent a Druid too?

One of may favorite aspects of Fading Suns is that you can use the setting to tell so many stories. Sure, at heart its a sci-fantasy space opera game, but you can tell stories of zombie plagues, dirt-farmers who barely leave their hometowns, or spaceship odysseys. The setting is so broad that its hard to find a concept that can't fit with a little modification. From intergalactic hobos to alien freedom fighters, its got just about everything.

So that's where I'd like to take the Rule of Law setting that I originally developed with some friends a few years back. The term that I'm using is Chinese Rome. And the idea behind that is things are familiar, but also new. Crucially, grounding things in the familiar is important for me.