Dungeons & Dragons recently released a new Unearthed Arcana. This one offers a new subclass for Bards called the College of Spirits and a new patron for Warlocks, The Undead. The College of Spirits is really intriguing to me. The premise is that the Bard can communicate with spirits which then tell their stories and bestow abilities to the Bard based on said story. The catch is that the Bard has no control over what kind of spirit they deal with and so the results end up being more random. However, another bonus comes with the fact that at level 6, the Bard can spend an hour to conduct a ritual to learn any spell from any class with the restriction being that the spell’s level cannot be higher than the number of creatures that conducted the ritual.
The Undead is a new patron for Warlocks that could be a variety of undead beings including the infamous Strahd. That in and of itself is pretty cool. On top of that, Warlocks can transform into a Form of Dread that has some aspect of your patron and gives you bonuses like causing foes to be frightened of you and eventually increased damage. The Mortal Husk feature is also really interesting. When you drop to 0 HP, you explode, deal damage to everything within 30 feet, and then revive with 1 HP and 1 level of exhaustion. That’s pretty cool in my opinion.
I think these are two very interesting new subclasses and am interested to see if either will end up in an official capacity. Remember, Unearthed Arcana items are merely designed for playtesting and may never end up being official. What do you think of these new options?