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Welcome to the Ninth World, where civilization has ended eight times, nobody understands how anything works, and sufficiently advanced technology is mostly an excuse to point at a laser pistol and yell, "Magic!" In this first part of our How to Play Numenera series, Randall attempts to explain a billion years of lost civilizations, Ash discovers that physics are apparently optional, and Tyler starts asking the dangerous questions about Edge. Before long, we have ancient nanotechnology, mysterious artifacts, cyphers that might explode if you hoard them, stat pools that double as hit points, and a GM who can literally bribe you with XP to make your life more interesting. Also, we say "moist" far too many times while explaining a d20 mechanic. We regret nothing. Well, some of us regret quite a lot. Show Notes We're kicking off our How to Play Numenera series with a tour of the Ninth World and the Cypher System mechanics that make this wonderfully strange science fantasy RPG work. Randall walks Ash and Tyler through the Numenera setting, a version of Earth roughly a billion years in the future after eight unimaginably advanced civilizations have risen and disappeared. Their technology is everywhere, but the people of the Ninth World understand so little of it that ancient machinery might as well be magic. That gives Numenera its central science fantasy theme: sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. We dig into the Steadfast, the Beyond, and the increasingly strange places beyond civilization, along with the remnants left behind by previous worlds. Those remnants include reusable artifacts, one-use cyphers, mysterious oddities, and massive ancient structures that the characters may have absolutely no idea how to operate. Sometimes the players know they have discovered an elevator. Their characters definitely do not. From there, we get into how to play Numenera and the Cypher System core mechanics. Tasks have difficulty levels from 0 to 10, with the target number determined by multiplying the difficulty by three. Instead of piling bonuses onto a d20 roll, characters make challenges easier through training, specialization, assets, and Effort. Effort introduces one of Numenera's most interesting resource-management decisions. Might, Speed, and Intellect are not simply ability scores. They are pools that power abilities, fuel Effort, and absorb damage. Spend too aggressively and you may discover that the resource you just used to succeed is also the thing keeping your character alive. Then there's Edge, which reduces the cost of spending points from those pools. Naturally, Tyler immediately begins investigating whether enough Edge will allow him to achieve his ultimate character build: the Edge Lord. We also explore one of the signature Cypher System RPG mechanics, GM intrusions. The GM can offer XP to introduce an unexpected complication, while players can spend XP to reject intrusions, reroll critical checks, create temporary skills, trigger player intrusions, or advance their characters. The goal is not simply to punish players. A good GM intrusion makes the story more interesting, creates new opportunities, and occasionally puts something cool behind the wall that just collapsed on you. By the end, we've covered the Numenera setting, cyphers and artifacts, task difficulty, Effort, Edge, stat pools, XP, GM intrusions, player intrusions, and the basics of character advancement. It's a surprisingly streamlined system hiding underneath one of the strangest tabletop RPG settings we've explored. Key Takeaways Numenera takes place on Earth roughly one billion years in the future, after eight previous civilizations have risen and disappeared. The Ninth World mixes science fiction and fantasy by treating incomprehensibly advanced technology like magic. Numenera includes artifacts, one-use cyphers, oddities, and enormous remnants of ancient civilizations. The Cypher System uses a d20, but characters generally reduce task difficulty instead of adding large numerical bonuses to rolls. Task difficulty ranges from 0 to 10, with the target number equal to the difficulty multiplied by three. Training, specialization, assets, and Effort can ease difficult tasks and bring otherwise impossible rolls within reach. Might, Speed, and Intellect are resource pools used for abilities and Effort, but they also function as your character's health. Damage normally reduces Might first, followed by Speed and then Intellect. If all three pools reach zero, things have gone very badly. Edge reduces the cost of spending points from a stat pool and becomes increasingly powerful as characters advance. In the Cypher System, the GM generally does not roll dice. Players make both offensive and defensive rolls. GM intrusions let the GM introduce complications in exchange for XP, turning unexpected problems into part of the game's advancement economy. XP can be spent on rerolls, player intrusions, temporary skills, and permanent character advancement, creating a constant choice between helping yourself now or saving for later. Numenera encourages creativity over strict simulation. Sometimes the explanation really is, "Ancient technology did it." Most importantly, never tell the RPGBOT Discord you are trying to keep the math "moist." They cannot be trusted with that information. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Welcome back to the Underdark, where the mushrooms are telepathic, the fish can invent gods, and magical radiation apparently has the terrifying power to give you a headache and ruin your wine. This week, Unearthed Arcana Underdark Options 2 gives us a Freedom Cleric that desperately wants you to move around, a Spores Druid that has discovered the tactical value of exploding zombies, and a Faerzress Sorcerer built around creating a 40-foot cube of mild inconvenience. We also get playable Driders, almost-Mind-Flayers, god-making fish people, communal mushroom skills, and several moments where Ash seriously considers personally redesigning the Sorcerer. So grab your darkvision, protect the cheese from magical radiation, and try not to stand too close to the zombies. We're going back underground. UA Underdark Options Accompanying Blog Post RPGBOT.Podcast Episodes UA Underdark Options 1 Show Notes Unearthed Arcana Underdark Options 2 takes us back below the surface for another batch of D&D 5e playtest subclasses and playable Underdark species. This time we're looking at the Freedom Domain Cleric, Circle of Spores Druid, Faerzress Sorcery Sorcerer, Deep Imaskari, Drider, Illithidkin, Kuo-toa, and Myconid. The Freedom Domain Cleric starts with a promising idea: a high-Dexterity cleric built around mobility, escaping restraints, breaking debilitating conditions, and helping allies get out of trouble. Invoke Liberty can remove conditions and reposition the party without provoking opportunity attacks, while Unencumbered Grace turns the Cleric into something resembling a shield-carrying monk. Unfortunately, the later features lean heavily on difficult terrain, movement bonuses, and Dexterity checks, leaving us wondering when the subclass is supposed to get its next interesting button to push. Then we get the revised Circle of Spores Druid, and things get significantly better. Wizards addresses several long-standing complaints about the D&D Circle of Spores by improving its action economy and making Symbiotic Entity a bonus action. Halo of Spores now provides value whether the enemy succeeds or fails its save, and Fungal Body remains delightfully creepy. But Explosive Burst is where things get wonderfully ridiculous. As written, an undead creature you created explodes when it dies. That wording potentially includes creatures created with Animate Dead, which immediately inspires the completely reasonable strategy of surrounding an enemy with injured zombies and starting a fungal chain reaction. Is that probably getting rewritten before publication? Yes. Is exploding an army of disposable zombies extremely funny? Also yes. Unfortunately, the Faerzress Sorcery Sorcerer brings the mood crashing back down. The subclass revolves around creating areas of Faerzress that interfere with divination, long-distance teleportation, and a handful of other magical effects. The problem is that most enemies simply do not care. Instead of dangerous magical radiation, the subclass frequently feels like it has created a large zone where somebody might have trouble scrying on you. There are pieces worth saving. The concept of an Underdark radiation Sorcerer has potential, and the discussion quickly turns toward mutations, crystal growths, radiant damage, exhaustion, and other mechanics that could make Faerzress actually feel hazardous. As presented, though, the subclass spends a lot of time solving problems that rarely appear in combat. The playable species in Unearthed Arcana Underdark Options 2 fare considerably better. Deep Imaskari blend human traits with Faerzress mutations and radiant abilities. Driders finally offer the opportunity to crawl across ceilings as a giant spider person. Illithidkin provide telepathy, psychic resistance, and a collection of appropriately Mind-Flayer-adjacent abilities. Kuo-toa may be the standout simply because Deific Manifestation is wonderfully strange. Their familiar can borrow actions, reactions, or traits from other familiar options, opening the door to creations like weapon-wielding weasels and other tiny violations of common sense. It feels exactly like the sort of bizarre mechanical playground Kuo-toa deserve. Finally, the Myconid gives D&D players a playable mushroom creature with telepathy and Skill Meld, allowing a group to share a skill or tool proficiency after a long rest. Sharing Stealth, Perception, or another useful proficiency with the whole party is mechanically interesting and perfectly fits the communal Myconid fantasy, even if letting Myconids speak normally raises some questions. By the end, our feelings on this D&D Unearthed Arcana are all over the Underdark. Circle of Spores feels close to ready, especially once Explosive Burst gets clarified. The Freedom Domain Cleric has a worthwhile theme but needs more interesting features. Faerzress Sorcery needs considerably more work, but magical radiation, mutations, crystals, and Underdark corruption could still become a fantastic Sorcerer concept. The ideas are here. Some of them just need to be dug up, dusted off, and exposed to slightly more dangerous radiation. Key Takeaways The Freedom Domain Cleric has a strong concept built around mobility, condition removal, and escaping restraints, but several later abilities feel too passive or situational. Invoke Liberty is the highlight of the Freedom Cleric and could provide useful party repositioning in addition to condition removal. Circle of Spores Druid gets meaningful D&D 2024 improvements, particularly the bonus-action Symbiotic Entity and revised Halo of Spores. Explosive Burst could potentially create hilarious zombie chain reactions unless its wording is narrowed to Fungal Infestation zombies. The revised Circle of Spores is the subclass the hosts felt was closest to being ready for publication. Faerzress Sorcery struggles because its central zone interferes with abilities that many D&D monsters and encounters never use. The Faerzress Sorcerer concept could be much stronger if it leaned into magical radiation, mutation, radiant damage, crystals, poisoning, or exhaustion. Deep Imaskari, Drider, Illithidkin, Kuo-toa, and Myconid add some genuinely unusual playable Underdark species options. Kuo-toa Deific Manifestation offers particularly entertaining familiar customization and plenty of room for player creativity. Myconid Skill Meld lets characters temporarily share skill or tool proficiencies, reinforcing the species' communal identity. Underdark Options 2 has several strong themes, but the episode's recurring message is simple: keep the concepts, improve the execution, and please make magical radiation more threatening than spoiled wine. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Last time, we built Wizards who could survive long enough to become dangerous. That was apparently a mistake. Treantmonk is back as we take our 2014 D&D 5e Wizard builds from level 8 all the way to 20, where spell selection stops being a question of how to win a fight and becomes a question of how creatively we would like to ruin reality. Tyler is operating his floating spellbook like a magical Predator drone. Ash has discovered Bigby's Hand and immediately found exactly the wrong way to describe it. Randall continues turning Magic Missile into a personal philosophy. And Chris is here trying to explain responsible Wizard optimization while the rest of us draft spells specifically to hurt each other's feelings. By the time we reach ninth-level spells, Wish almost goes undrafted. That sentence alone should tell you how this episode goes. Welcome back to the RPGBOT.Podcast. We made it to level 20, nobody died, and reality is now more of a suggestion than a rule. Treantmonk on YouTube Content from RPGBOT DnD 5e Wizard Handbook DnD e Wizard Spells Guice Show Notes Treantmonk returns for Part 2 and the conclusion of our 2014 D&D 5e Wizard optimization builds, picking up at level 8 and taking our Wizards all the way to level 20. At this point, the training wheels are gone. Fifth-level spells bring Wall of Force, Bigby's Hand, Wall of Stone, and increasingly aggressive spell drafting. By sixth level, the choices get even nastier, and picking the right spell becomes almost as important as making sure someone else doesn't get it first. Contingency gets selected partly because it is useful and partly because denying Tyler something he wants is apparently a valid optimization strategy. That pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the episode. As our D&D 5e Wizard builds move into the high levels, each character leans harder into their particular brand of nonsense. Ash embraces illusions, confusion, and magical hands. Randall continues finding ways to make Magic Missile everybody else's problem. Treantmonk builds around control, restraint, and smart high-level Wizard spell selection. Tyler keeps sending his Manifest Mind into places he absolutely does not intend to visit personally. Then we reach seventh, eighth, and ninth-level Wizard spells, where things get properly ridiculous. Maze, Sunburst, Demiplane, Foresight, Shapechange, Power Word Kill, Meteor Swarm, and Wish all enter the conversation as the builds start moving from battlefield control into reality control. And somehow Wish almost doesn't get picked. We also get into one of the most interesting parts of high-level 5e Wizard optimization: Spell Mastery. Unlimited access to carefully chosen first and second-level spells opens up some disgusting combinations, especially when Shield, Web, Tasha's Mind Whip, Vortex Warp, Phantasmal Force, and other low-level favorites no longer need spell slots. Finally, we hit level 20 and Signature Spells, where everyone chooses their third-level favorites and collectively realizes that the Wizard's actual capstone might not feel nearly as exciting as what they received two levels earlier. After two episodes of ability scores, feats, subclasses, Wizard spell selection, optimization, and increasingly questionable tactical decisions, our Treantmonk Wizard builds are complete. The Wizards have reached level 20. The spellbooks are full.The laws of physics have filed a formal complaint. Key Takeaways High-level Wizard optimization is less about dealing more damage and more about having exactly the right tool when everything goes wrong. Spell selection gets increasingly competitive as the builds advance. There are plenty of good Wizard spells, but everyone starts wanting the same exceptional ones. Wall of Force remains exactly the kind of spell an optimized Wizard hates leaving on the table. If nobody else takes it, somebody eventually has to. Sixth-level spells show just how different optimized Wizards can become. Mental Prison, Contingency, Mass Suggestion, Disintegrate, and other options push each build further into its own playstyle. High-level D&D 5e Wizards stop merely controlling encounters and start controlling circumstances. Maze, Demiplane, Shapechange, Foresight, Wish, and similar spells fundamentally change what the party can accomplish. Wish is incredibly powerful, but the discussion with Treantmonk highlights the practical problem with having nearly every lower-level spell available on demand: you still need to remember those spells exist when you actually need them. Spell Mastery may be one of the strongest pieces of the entire Wizard class. Turning excellent first and second-level Wizard spells into effectively unlimited resources creates some absurd possibilities. Shield becomes even more ridiculous when you can cast it without spending spell slots, especially if Randall is nearby with Magic Missile and bad intentions. At level 20, Signature Spells are useful, but after getting Spell Mastery at level 18 they do not exactly feel like the grand finale of becoming one of the most powerful spellcasters in Dungeons & Dragons. The biggest lesson from the complete Treantmonk Wizard build is that there is no single correct way to optimize a 2014 D&D 5e Wizard. Control, illusions, damage, summons, utility, mobility, and general magical nonsense can all work if the spell choices support the character you actually want to play. And if all else fails, become a Wizard with a remote-controlled spellbook, hide around a corner, and make the dungeon somebody else's problem. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Welcome to Thay, where the dress code is red, the government is run by homicidal wizards, and your spy agency's severance package is either magical memory loss or death. Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall takes D&D 5e from cloak-and-dagger espionage to rebel wizards, pirates, demon-powered skeletons, legendary magic items, and eventually a full-scale assault on Szass Tam's evil wizard lair. Along the way, we discover that the real secret to saving Faerûn is apparently making friends with pirates, hoarding magic items, and knowing when not to punch the lich who can cast Finger of Death whenever he feels like it. Also, there's a dragon turtle named Bitey. Obviously, this is serious espionage. Arcana Unleashed (affiliate link) Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall (affiliate link) Forgotten Realms Wiki Szass Tam Show Notes We're wrapping up our Arcana Unleashed review with Deadfall, a high-level D&D 5e adventure that drops characters into Thay for an espionage campaign involving Red Wizards, political scheming, undead armies, absurd amounts of magic, and the small problem of Szass Tam attempting to take control of everything again. Before the spying begins, we dig into Thay itself, including the Zulkirs, Red Wizard society, Szass Tam's long history of being spectacularly evil, and why living in Thay mostly involves keeping your head down and desperately pretending you didn't see anything. Deadfall also offers advice for running a D&D espionage adventure, complete with secret identities, codenames, magical disguises, compromised covers, hidden bases, and consequences when the party inevitably decides subtlety is for NPCs. Once the campaign gets moving, Deadfall becomes a rapid-fire series of covert missions. The party hunts spies, blackmails messengers, recruits dissident Red Wizards, collects increasingly ridiculous magic items, befriends pirates, meets a dragon turtle named Bitey, and watches their earlier choices come back in meaningful ways. The adventure even accounts for the traditional player solution of murdering someone important to the plot, which earns it considerable respect from the group. The campaign moves quickly from level 11 to level 20, giving characters access to legendary equipment and some genuinely dangerous high-level D&D encounters. The final stretch turns the spy thriller into a full assault on Szass Tam's stronghold, culminating in a brutal boss fight involving powerful undead, demons, environmental effects, necrotic damage, and consequences tied directly to allies the characters helped or ignored earlier in the campaign. We also talk about why Deadfall works surprisingly well as more than a single adventure. Its missions can be pulled apart and used as D&D one-shots, adapted into an anthology-style campaign, or mined by Dungeon Masters looking for a useful Thay campaign setting reference. There are a few missed opportunities, particularly with some disappointing monster design, but the amount of usable material, meaningful player choice, high-level treasure, and contingency planning left us pleasantly surprised. If you're looking for an Arcana Unleashed Deadfall review, a D&D 5e high-level adventure, ideas for running an espionage campaign in Dungeons and Dragons, or an excuse to send level 20 characters after Szass Tam and the Red Wizards of Thay, there's a lot here worth stealing. Preferably before the players steal it first. Key Takeaways Deadfall is a level 11 to 20 D&D 5e espionage adventure set in Thay, centered on stopping Szass Tam and his latest extremely reasonable plan for world domination. Thay gets enough background material that the book can double as a useful Red Wizards of Thay campaign reference for Dungeon Masters. The espionage mechanics include disguises, codenames, secrecy, compromised identities, hidden bases, and ways to recover after blowing your cover. Player choices matter. Allies, side missions, failures, and earlier decisions can significantly change later encounters and even the difficulty of the final battle. The adventure anticipates players going off-script surprisingly well, including what happens when important NPCs die or the party chooses violence over diplomacy. Deadfall hands out a huge amount of high-level D&D magic items, including very rare, legendary, and even artifact-level equipment. The adventure's monster design occasionally disappoints, especially when flavorful concepts turn out to use fairly ordinary existing stat blocks. The campaign moves extremely quickly through high-level play, making the proposed session count ambitious for groups that like exploring every corner. The final Szass Tam encounter actually feels dangerous, with multiple enemies, nasty environmental effects, and consequences based on what the characters accomplished earlier. Deadfall can work as a complete campaign, a collection of connected D&D one-shots, or a source of missions and ideas for a homebrew espionage adventure. Most importantly, make friends with the pirates. Seriously. Make friends with the pirates. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

We survived the subclasses. We survived the wizard subclasses. Now Arcana Unleashed Part 3 asks the truly dangerous questions: What if every wizard got a Pokémon? What if every magical faction agreed that the Ninth Quill sucks? And what if an invisible imp could carry your entire adventuring party through a wall while you relax inside a genie lamp like the world's most heavily armed first-class passengers? This week, we're digging into the rest of Arcana Unleashed, including new backgrounds, feats, spells, magical factions, evolving magic items, monsters, and a dungeon puzzle whose greatest challenge is apparently identifying which end of a snake has the head. Welcome aboard Infernal Air. Please keep your arms, legs, and extraplanar vessels inside the familiar at all times. Arcana Unleashed (affiliate link) Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall (affiliate link) Fizban's Treasure of Dragons (affiliate link) AmateurJack.com - Recovery Long Rest - Cozy D&D Business Sim Show Notes We've covered the Arcana Unleashed subclasses. We've given Tyler an entire episode of wizard content. Now it's time to dig through everything else Wizards of the Coast packed into the book, and there is a lot more here than we expected. We start with the new Arcana Unleashed backgrounds and origin feats, where the results range from flavorful-but-forgettable to options that could seriously change how characters are built. Familiar Friend immediately gets our attention, especially once the rest of the familiar feats enter the picture. Arcane Warrior opens wizard cantrips to characters with Fighting Styles, while the new school-specific Adept feats offer spellcasters ways to steal spells and tricks from outside their usual class options. Then things get weird. Battle Familiar might be one of the strongest new D&D 2024 spells in Arcana Unleashed. It looks suspiciously like Summon Beast, except it does not require concentration, which means there is very little reason not to have one running whenever possible. Add familiar feats, Conjurer interactions, Necromancer options, and Pact of the Chain nonsense, and suddenly your adorable magical pet is an active participant in breaking the action economy. We also discover that Otherworldly Familiar lets a familiar move through walls, which naturally leads to an invisible imp carrying a Genie Warlock's vessel, and potentially the entire party, directly through the dungeon. Congratulations. You have invented Infernal Air and apparently solved dungeon crawling. The new Arcana Unleashed spells keep the chaos going. Detonation inspires the return of bag-of-rats logic, Mordenkainen's Lucubration provides an expensive way to trade higher-level spell slots for lower-level ones, and Summon Dinosaur requires very little explanation because sometimes the spell name is already doing all the work. Beyond character options, Arcana Unleashed includes advice for building magic-heavy campaign settings, creating magical traditions, defining society's relationship with magic, and using group patrons. The magical faction system expands that idea with organizations tied to each school of magic, complete with goals, renown rewards, relationships, player options, and Bastion facilities. Some are noble. Some are creepy. The Crucible Keepers apparently treat magical disasters like sporting events. The Bringers of the Cosmic Dawn have decided transmutation needed more body horror. The Covenant of the Grave gives necromancy a surprisingly thoughtful treatment. And nearly everybody hates the Ninth Quill because, as it turns out, being an organized magical crime syndicate is not a great way to make friends. We also dig into the new D&D evolving magic item rules. There are several premade examples, a simple system for upgrading items into higher-rarity versions, and a more flexible framework for adding new powers as an item grows. The concept is useful, particularly for DMs building long-term rewards, even if we wish the book gave us a lot more material to work with. Arcana Unleashed also brings back creatures like the baelnorn, introduces archmages themed around the schools of magic, and includes the level 1 adventure Tomb of the Shadow Serpents. Venger has apparently created a multiversal dungeon-based recruitment program where surviving a few traps and assembling three pieces of a snake qualifies you for employment in an evil organization. Which explains a lot about Venger's career. By the end of our Arcana Unleashed Part 3 review, the mechanics remain the strongest part of the book. The feats offer some genuinely interesting character-building options, the familiar material could have a major impact on D&D 5e character optimization, and the spells contain several standouts. The magical factions and worldbuilding material provide useful starting points for DMs, while the evolving magic item system feels like a good idea that we wish had been given more room to grow. And Battle Familiar probably needs concentration. Seriously. Key Takeaways Arcana Unleashed adds ten backgrounds and origin feats, with Familiar Friend standing out because it dramatically improves familiar survivability and unlocks the book's additional familiar feats. Arcane Warrior gives Fighters, Paladins, Rangers, and other characters with Fighting Styles access to wizard cantrips, opening up plenty of new D&D 2024 character build options. The school-specific Adept feats provide new spells and magical abilities, effectively offering lightweight versions of the eight schools of magic to characters outside the Wizard class. Battle Familiar is one of the biggest mechanical standouts in the book. Its lack of concentration creates extremely powerful interactions with familiars, summoners, Conjurer Wizards, Necromancer Wizards, and Pact of the Chain Warlocks. The Arcana Unleashed magical factions give DMs ready-made organizations for Abjuration, Conjuration, Divination, Enchantment, Evocation, Illusion, Necromancy, and Transmutation, complete with renown rewards and faction-specific Bastion facilities. The new evolving magic item rules provide a solid framework for D&D campaigns where weapons, armor, wands, and other magical equipment grow alongside their owners, although the system could use more examples and options. Tomb of the Shadow Serpents is a simple level 1 dungeon crawl built around Venger recruiting adventurers for future schemes. The loot is surprisingly generous, the encounters are straightforward, and the snake puzzle may be the greatest threat ever posed to player overthinking. Overall, Arcana Unleashed Part 3 reinforces the book's biggest strength: mechanics. The feats, spells, familiar options, and character customization tools are much stronger than the lighter worldbuilding material, and several options look likely to become significant parts of the D&D 5e 2024 optimization landscape. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Treantmonk joins us to talk about Wizards, which means we're about to spend an unreasonable amount of time discussing concentration saves, initiative bonuses, spell selection, and why standing anywhere near the enemy is a terrible lifestyle choice. We're taking the 2014 Wizard from levels 1 through 7, starting with a fragile academic who can be killed by an aggressively thrown sandwich and ending with a battlefield-control monster who can Web half the room, Fireball the other half, and still have enough magic left over to argue about which subclass is best. Along the way, we discover the Muscle Wizard, question why Medicine is still a skill, turn a spellbook into an arcane Predator drone, and once again prove that the strongest Wizard strategy is simple: Go first. Stay far away. Don't lose concentration. Easy. Show Notes Treantmonk joins Tyler, Ash, and Randall as we start building the 2014 D&D 5e Wizard from levels 1 through 7. We kick things off with ability scores, skills, defenses, and the eternal Wizard question: how much effort should you put into not immediately dying? That leads naturally into armor dips, Constitution saves, initiative, and why keeping concentration is often more important than squeezing out a little more damage. Then we get into subclasses. War Magic gets plenty of attention for its defensive tools and initiative bonus, Divination continues being Divination, Illusion gives Ash plenty to work with, and Order of Scribes eventually lets Tyler use his spellbook like a magical surveillance drone. Transmutation is also discussed. We'll leave it at that. Then comes the real Wizard experience: picking spells. Shield, Mage Armor, Find Familiar, Absorb Elements, and Magic Missile get us started before the gloves come off and everyone starts fighting over Web. From there we hit Fireball, Hypnotic Pattern, Slow, Fear, Counterspell, Tiny Hut, Summon Undead, Arcane Eye, Sickening Radiance, Greater Invisibility, Banishment, Polymorph, and enough other spells to remind everyone why building a Wizard takes three hours and a spreadsheet. By the end, one thing is very clear: Wizards don't need to solve every problem with damage. But they absolutely can. Key Takeaways The Wizard's biggest class feature is still its spell list. Your subclass matters, but your spell choices matter more. Protect your concentration. Positioning, Constitution saves, Shield, Absorb Elements, and simply refusing to stand next to angry monsters will keep your best spells running. Going first is incredibly powerful. War Magic gets a lot of love because dropping battlefield control before the enemy gets moving can completely change a fight. The classic Wizard staples are classics for a reason. Shield, Find Familiar, Mage Armor, Absorb Elements, Magic Missile, and rituals give you a ridiculous amount of mileage at low levels. Web is excellent. Everyone knows Web is excellent. This becomes a problem when multiple people are drafting spells and everybody wants Web. Third-level spells are where the Wizard really starts showing off. Fireball is Fireball, but Slow, Hypnotic Pattern, Fear, Counterspell, and other control options can be even more important depending on the fight. Don't build around a single saving throw or status effect. Having multiple ways to attack a problem keeps you useful when monsters inevitably refuse to cooperate with your favorite spell. Utility spells are a huge part of what makes Wizards so good. Scouting, teleportation, rituals, summons, battlefield control, and information gathering often solve problems before initiative is even rolled. Order of Scribes gets wonderfully weird once Manifest Mind enters the picture. Your floating spellbook can scout and act as the point of origin for your spells, turning your Wizard into a magical drone operator. And remember: dealing damage is technically a form of support if the thing threatening your party is no longer alive. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Four Wizards walk into Arcana Unleashed. One teleports around insisting that swapping places is exciting. One looks like somebody's tiefling dad going through a stage-magic phase. One brings an army of disposable skeletons specifically so he can blow them up. And the last one turns into a T-Rex and starts casting Disintegrate. Somehow, this is still a more functional party than most adventuring groups we've played in. Welcome back to Arcana Unleashed, where today's lesson is simple: Wizards apparently needed more things to do. Show Notes Part Two of our Arcana Unleashed review is all Wizards, all the time, and Tyler finally gets his moment. We start with the Conjurer, which continues its identity crisis between "master summoner" and "person who is really, really enthusiastic about Misty Step." Benign Transposition and its upgrades make teleportation useful, especially once Randall figures out how to combine swapping places with summoned monsters. But the real excitement comes later, when Durable Summons, Focused Conjuration, and Splintered Summons finally let the subclass lean into what everyone actually came here for: putting more creatures on the battlefield. Then we meet the Enchanter, whose artwork immediately gets described as a middle-aged tiefling dad who took up stage magic during a midlife crisis. The subclass gets better social skills, a much more playable version of Hypnotic Gaze, and some frustratingly limited spell-twinning. Things improve considerably at higher levels, especially when Alter Memories turns magical manipulation into full-on fantasy Men in Black nonsense. Necromancer is where things get wonderfully irresponsible. Undead familiars can finally contribute, Animate Dead gets stronger, summoned undead become tougher and hit harder, and eventually your disposable corpse army becomes a collection of walking necrotic grenades. Tyler tries repeatedly to explain the mathematical shortcomings of undead attack bonuses while Ash tries repeatedly to enjoy himself despite Tyler's best efforts. Finally, the Transmuter arrives with the traditional Transmuter's Stone, some questionable attempts to make Alter Self exciting, and a substantially improved Empowered Transmutation. Things really come alive with Shapeshifter, which lets the Wizard Polymorph themselves while keeping their mental abilities and continuing to cast qualifying Transmutation spells. Which leads to the discovery nobody knew they needed: T-Rex. Casting. Disintegrate. Arcana Unleashed (affiliate link) Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall (affiliate link) Fizban's Treasure of Dragons (affiliate link) AmateurJack.com - Recovery Long Rest - Cozy D&D Business Sim Key Takeaways Conjurer is much better when it remembers that people choosing Conjurer probably want to summon things, not just teleport slightly differently. Enchanter has some weak spots, but Instinctive Charm and Alter Memories offer genuinely fun tools for manipulation, infiltration, and absolutely horrifying roleplay possibilities. Necromancer may be the standout of the bunch. Stronger undead, useful familiars, better Animate Dead support, and exploding minions finally deliver the "commander of the dead" fantasy. Transmuter still has an unhealthy emotional attachment to its rock, but Empowered Transmutation and Shapeshifter give the subclass some genuinely exciting options. The most important rules discovery of the episode is that turning into a T-Rex apparently does not prevent you from solving problems with high-level Wizard magic. Tyler likes Wizards. Ash would like Tyler to stop explaining why the things Ash likes aren't as good as Ash thinks they are. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Arcana Unleashed is here, bringing new subclasses, spells, feats, magic items, and—most importantly—fresh opportunities for Tyler to find loopholes Wizards of the Coast absolutely did not intend. In Part 1, we discover that Clerics can apparently wizard better than Wizards, the Arcane Archer has finally been upgraded from "why?" to "okay, I guess," Monks can punch people and cast spells at the same time, and Warlocks can carry around the fading remains of a dead god like a supernatural emotional-support animal. Also, somewhere at Wizards of the Coast, an editor just felt a disturbance in the Force because Tyler realized you can shoot a magical darkness arrow into someone's shield. Show Notes We kick off our review of Arcana Unleashed, the new setting-agnostic collection of character options, rules, spells, magic items, factions, monsters, and other magical nonsense for D&D. The book isn't quite Tasha's-sized, but there's plenty here to keep us busy—which is why this review is absolutely becoming a series. Part 1 is all about subclasses, starting with the Arcana Domain Cleric. The old "what if my Cleric wanted to be a Wizard?" concept finally feels like it knows what it wants to be. Great Wizard spells, a nasty saving-throw penalty through Channel Divinity, and eventually access to high-level Wizard spells make this an extremely strong hybrid. Tyler immediately starts planning for Contingency and Wish, because of course he does. Then we revisit everyone's favorite subclass to forget exists: the Arcane Archer. It is unquestionably better than the 2014 version, which unfortunately clears a bar located somewhere beneath the basement. More Arcane Shot uses, better utility ammunition, and some genuinely cool later-level abilities help, but the subclass still struggles to generate much excitement. We also spend far too long discovering that Darkening Ammunition can apparently stick to any "solid surface," which means shields, possibly whales, and whatever other nonsense your table is willing to litigate. The Warrior of Mystic Arts Monk fares much better. Mechanically, it's essentially the Monk answer to the Eldritch Knight: punch things, cast Sorcerer spells, and eventually do both with increasingly ridiculous efficiency. The old Tattooed Warrior concept may have been more flavorful, but the finished version is clean, effective, and potentially terrifying once its spellcasting and Monk abilities start feeding into each other. Finally, we meet the Vestige Patron Warlock, where your patron is also your pet because apparently the traditional Warlock power dynamic wasn't complicated enough. Your Vestige can shift between Celestial, Fiend, and Undead forms, bringing different abilities along with it, and eventually gets some impressive summoning upgrades. Ash begins thoroughly uninterested and ends up won over almost entirely by the possibility of worshipping the forgotten god of toads. Which, frankly, is the strongest possible argument for the subclass. We wrap things up before reaching the Wizard subclasses, mostly because making Tyler wait another episode to talk about Wizards is funny. Stuff for the Show Notes Arcana Unleashed (affiliate link) Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall (affiliate link) Fizban's Treasure of Dragons (affiliate link) AmateurJack.com - Recovery Long Rest - Cozy D&D Business Sim Key Takeaways Arcana Domain Cleric is excellent. It finally delivers the Cleric/Wizard hybrid fantasy without feeling like somebody stapled a spellbook onto a holy symbol. Arcane Archer is substantially improved, but "best Arcane Archer ever" still isn't the ringing endorsement Wizards probably hoped for. Darkening Ammunition should never have included the phrase "solid surface" anywhere Tyler Kamstra could see it. Warrior of Mystic Arts trades some of the Tattooed Warrior's flavor for straightforward mechanics, but those mechanics are very, very good. Spellcasting plus Monk action economy gets increasingly ridiculous at higher levels, and everybody seems fine with that. Vestige Patron is mechanically solid, narratively weird, and significantly better once you realize your patron can be the forgotten god of toads. The subclasses covered so far are generally simple, approachable, and effective without introducing a pile of unnecessary new systems. Wizards are next, assuming Ash eventually stops tormenting Tyler and allows him to talk about them. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

At level 5, the Barbarian unlocks a revolutionary new combat technique: hitting the problem twice. From there, things escalate exactly as responsible game design intended. Randall gambles his way through Wild Magic, Tyler perfects the ancient martial art of being an unbearable pain in the ass, and Ash becomes a house-sized fairy with tiny butterfly wings, a returning elemental pike, and enough reach to poke somebody from the next county. Then Brutal Critical shows up and somehow the math becomes angrier than the Barbarian. Grab your greataxe, start screaming, and remember: if smashing something once didn't work, the rules now officially support smashing it again. Show Notes We're back with the second half of our 2014 D&D 5e Barbarian builds, taking Randall's Path of Wild Magic, Ash's Path of the Giant, and Tyler's Path of the Ancestral Guardian from level 5 all the way to 20. Extra Attack immediately delivers exactly what everyone came for: more smash. From there, the builds start developing very different personalities. Randall embraces the chaos of Wild Magic and Great Weapon Master, Tyler becomes increasingly obnoxious to anything trying to hurt his friends, and Ash discovers that being a flying, increasingly enormous fairy with a throwable elemental pike is every bit as ridiculous as it sounds. We dig into Instinctive Pounce, subclass features, feat choices, Relentless Rage, Persistent Rage, and the glorious absurdity of Primal Champion. We also spend a healthy amount of time asking why Brutal Critical is supposed to be exciting when critical hits refuse to happen on command. By the end, we have battlefield control, flying giants, magical gambling, angry ancestors, Polearm Master shenanigans, and Barbarians who are extremely difficult to kill. Basically, the class gets tougher, weirder, and significantly better at solving problems with repeated applications of a large weapon. Key Takeaways Level 5 is huge. Extra Attack effectively doubles the Barbarian's basic offense, while Fast Movement helps get the angry person into smashing distance faster. Instinctive Pounce is an excellent quality-of-life feature, letting you Rage and immediately move toward whatever has made the poor decision to exist nearby. Ash's Giant Barbarian becomes increasingly ridiculous. Elemental Cleaver turns his pike into a returning elemental weapon, and later features let his flying fairy become enormous, extend his reach, and attack enemies from extremely inconvenient places. Randall's Wild Magic Barbarian is built around controlled chaos. Bolstering Magic helps attacks and ability checks, while later features let him reroll Wild Magic effects and improve his odds of getting something useful. Tyler's Ancestral Guardian becomes an excellent defender. Spirit Shield reduces damage to allies, and Vengeful Ancestors eventually makes enemies regret hurting anyone except Tyler. Brutal Critical is the problem child. The crew likes the fantasy of gigantic Barbarian crits but argues that the feature arrives too rarely and scales too poorly to carry high-level damage. Polearm Master, Great Weapon Master, and eventually Sentinel turn the builds into increasingly nasty melee threats, particularly when combined with Reckless Attack and extended reach. Relentless Rage keeps Barbarians standing after hitting zero hit points, Persistent Rage finally makes Rage easier to maintain, and Primal Champion delivers a genuinely satisfying capstone with massive Strength and Constitution boosts. The overall verdict: Barbarians remain wonderfully straightforward at their core, but the subclasses are doing a lot of the heavy lifting at higher levels. Fortunately, sometimes all you really need is Rage, Reckless Attack, and another opportunity to smash something. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall Jamesd BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Most RPG rules questions start with something reasonable, like Can I jump over this pit? or Does fireball set the curtains on fire? This one starts with a much more dangerous question: How many adventurers can we cram into one five-foot square before the rules collapse? Tyler digs into decades of D&D and Pathfinder rules looking for an answer, while Ash does increasingly questionable celebrity impressions, Randall weaponizes every edge case he can find, and Tyler's cats provide live demonstrations of why personal space is apparently optional. Show Notes This week, we're getting uncomfortably close as we dig into the surprisingly complicated rules for creatures sharing spaces. Can you walk through an ally? What about an enemy? Can a tiny creature just hang out in your square? What happens if somebody gets shoved into someone else? And, most importantly, can another player give you a piggyback ride and technically become your mount? We trace the rules from D&D 3.5 through 2014 and 2024 D&D 5e before arriving at Pathfinder 2e, comparing how each system handles movement, size differences, prone creatures, incapacitated creatures, forced movement, swarms, and all the weird situations where two creatures wind up occupying the same chunk of battlefield. Along the way, Tyler discovers that some rules are clearer than expected and others become significantly worse the longer you stare at them. Pathfinder 2e earns some praise for actually explaining what happens when creatures accidentally collide, while 2024 5e raises uncomfortable questions about exactly who falls prone and when. Meanwhile, Ash turns rules text into an excuse for a parade of impressions, Randall threatens the Grand Canyon with rules exploits, and the cats continue proving that tiny creatures respect neither game mechanics nor boundaries. DnD 3.5: Moving Through a Square DnD 5.x Shifting Combatant 5e: Moving Around Other Creatures 5.5: Moving Around Other Creatures PF2: Tactical Movement https://dicegoblin.com/  RPGBOT.Podcast Episodes Combat Maneuvers Jumping Key Takeaways D&D 3.5 was surprisingly explicit about moving through allies, enemies, helpless creatures, and creatures of dramatically different sizes. 2014 5e simplifies those rules considerably, but that simplicity creates some strange gaps when creatures accidentally or forcibly end up sharing a space. 2024 5e improves several things, especially interactions with Tiny and incapacitated creatures, but its rule about creatures falling prone when a turn ends while sharing a space creates a whole new argument about what exactly end a turn means. Pathfinder 2e gives the GM a clear answer when creatures accidentally occupy the same square: somebody gets moved, somebody may fall prone, and the GM decides how the mess gets resolved. Pathfinder 2e also handles willing creatures, unwilling creatures, prone creatures, Tiny creatures, objects, and forced movement with much more specific rules. Tumble Through exists for a reason. Forced movement in Pathfinder cannot simply put a creature somewhere it cannot normally occupy, which immediately kills several wonderfully stupid launching-people-into-the-air strategies. Swarms are the exception everyone should remember. They want to share your space because getting directly on top of you is how they ruin your day. The ultimate lesson is that creatures sharing spaces is one of those rules nobody thinks about until it happens. Then everyone stops the game, opens three rulebooks, and discovers they've been doing it differently for years. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelygm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Welcome to the Underdark, where the sun doesn't shine, everyone wants to murder you, and Wizards of the Coast has apparently decided what this place really needed was more light. Sorry, Unlight. Totally different. We've got a glowing Barbarian who can't turn off the high beams, a Rogue whose subclass starts working sometime around retirement age, a Wizard with healing powers and questionable workplace safety practices, and finally a perfectly reasonable solution to all of these problems: put a tadpole in your skull and become a Mind Flayer. Somehow, that's the part we liked. Show Notes This week, we head underground to dig through the latest Unearthed Arcana: Underdark Options, featuring three new subclasses, a Ceremorphosis feat path, and the Mind Blast spell. First up is the Path of Unlight Barbarian, a character who rages so hard they become a walking lantern. There are some genuinely useful ideas here, including radiant retaliation, blindsight, and the ability to make enemies glow, but the damage numbers struggle to keep up and several abilities feel strangely dependent on fighting invisible creatures. Worse, your Barbarian apparently has no dimmer switch, so raging in the Underdark turns you into a thirty-foot beacon advertising free adventurers to every monster nearby. Then we meet the House Agent Rogue, built around charm, betrayal, and stabbing people who thought you were their friend. The fantasy is great. The mechanics are considerably less cooperative. Several of the subclass's signature abilities depend on creatures being friendly or charmed, but the tools needed to make that happen reliably either arrive far too late or don't interact with the rules the way the subclass seems to expect. By level 17, the House Agent can finally do much of what we wanted it to do at level 3. That is one hell of an onboarding process. The Imaskari wizard fares better mechanically. It can convert elemental damage to radiant damage, spend Hit Dice to hand out temporary hit points, heal allies, remove conditions, and eventually curse enemies with Unlight until they explode. There are some strong ideas here, particularly the bonus-action healing and restoration options, but the subclass feels like several different concepts sharing an apartment because none of them could afford rent alone. And then somebody finally releases the tadpoles. The Path of Ceremorphosis is easily the most interesting material in the UA. It lets characters gradually embrace Illithid abilities through a feat tree, picking up Psionic Energy Dice, telepathy, defensive abilities, tentacles, and eventually full Ceremorphosis. At the end of the path, you can become an aberration, gain Mind Flayer abilities, and choose between eating brains or spellcasting. Choose spellcasting. Mind Blast alone makes the decision pretty easy. A massive cone, an Intelligence save, psychic damage, and the stunned condition is an incredibly nasty combination. With Psionic Energy Dice potentially letting a high-level character use it repeatedly without spending normal spell slots, this is also the part most likely to receive a visit from the balance hammer before publication. Overall, Underdark Options is a mixed bag. The Barbarian looks salvageable with better scaling and stronger flavor. The Rogue probably needs to go back to the drawing board. The Wizard works, but doesn't inspire much excitement. Ceremorphosis, however, feels like exactly the kind of weird, dangerous character option the Underdark should be giving us. The Underdark is full of Drow assassins, Illithids, Umber Hulks, ancient civilizations, horrific monsters, political intrigue, poisons, spiders, and things with entirely too many tentacles. There is plenty of material here. We're just still trying to figure out why everyone is so excited about Unlight. Key Takeaways Path of Unlight Barbarian has some solid ideas, but weak damage scaling and mandatory glowing hold it back. The subclass's reliance on blindsight and revealing invisible enemies can become very campaign-dependent. House Agent Rogue has a fantastic betrayal fantasy, but its mechanics don't reliably support that fantasy. Several important House Agent abilities arrive far too late, with some of the subclass finally functioning properly around level 17. The Imaskari wizard is probably the strongest of the three subclasses mechanically, especially as a secondary healer. Spending Hit Dice for bonus-action healing and condition removal gives the Wizard some excellent action economy. Unlight still feels underdeveloped as a concept. The hosts wanted something stranger and more distinctly Underdark. Ceremorphosis is the highlight of the UA and continues the promising idea of character paths built through feat trees. Some Ceremorphosis options are niche, especially the tentacle and brain-eating mechanics. Mind Blast is extremely powerful thanks to its large area, Intelligence save, and ability to stun. Repeated Mind Blasts fueled by Psionic Energy Dice look strong enough that they may need adjustment. The hosts generally liked the villainous path concept and want to see more options built around it. Final verdict: mixed bag. The subclasses need work, but becoming a Mind Flayer is apparently a perfectly reasonable career move. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Today we're building Barbarians, the D&D class for anyone who looked at tactical combat and thought, This needs fewer tactics and significantly more upper body strength. We've got Rage, Reckless Attack, enormous hit points, questionable wardrobe choices, and an ongoing debate over whether a shield is sensible equipment or an admission that you lack confidence in your own face. By level four, Ash has become a flying fairy giant with a pike, Tyler is weaponizing irritation, and Randall has embraced the ancient Barbarian tradition of solving probability with violence. Grab your protein shake, yell something incomprehensible, and roll initiative. SHOW NOTES In this episode of the RPGBOT.Podcast, we finally tackle the 2014 D&D 5e Barbarian from levels 1 through 4, and things immediately become louder, sweatier, and considerably less concerned with personal safety. We start with the fundamentals: Strength, Constitution, that glorious d12 Hit Die, armor choices, and why Unarmored Defense looks much better on paper than it usually works in practice. Then we get into Rage, the feature that turns getting punched in the face from a problem into something approaching a class strategy. We also talk about managing those limited early Rage uses and why running into every fight screaming may be thematically correct but mechanically questionable. At level 2, Reckless Attack gives Barbarians one of their defining tactical choices: advantage for you, advantage for everyone trying to murder you. Fortunately, Barbarians have a lot of hit points and remarkably little respect for consequences. Danger Sense adds some much-needed protection against Dexterity saves, because apparently surviving fireballs through sheer gym-bro intuition is a legitimate class feature. Level 3 brings Primal Knowledge and, more importantly, subclasses. We run through the Barbarian options, separating the powerful from the interesting and occasionally discovering that those are not the same thing. Ancestral Guardian is an effective defender but can feel repetitive, Wild Magic brings some desperately needed unpredictability, and Path of the Giant lets Ash fulfill the perfectly reasonable fantasy of playing a tiny fairy who gets angry, becomes enormous, and starts stabbing things from fifteen feet away. By level 4, the builds are taking shape. Tyler leans into Ancestral Guardian with a whip, shield, and Slasher to become an incredibly annoying battlefield defender. Randall grabs Great Weapon Master and combines it with Reckless Attack because accuracy penalties matter considerably less when you've already decided to roll everything with advantage. Ash takes Strike of the Giants, picks up a pike, and continues transforming his fairy into a flying problem with an increasingly ridiculous reach. It's everything you need to get a 2014 Barbarian through tier one: Rage management, big weapons, bigger hit points, questionable decisions, and enough tactical depth to prove that smash actually has several different settings. KEY TAKEAWAYS Strength and Constitution are the Barbarian's priorities. Dexterity helps, but investing heavily in it just to improve Unarmored Defense is usually difficult to justify. Medium armor is often better than it feels. The shirtless Barbarian fantasy is great, but half plate can save you a lot of ability-score investment. Rage is your core resource, especially at low levels when you only have a few uses. Don't waste it on fights that don't need it. Rage doesn't have to mean screaming fury. It can be cold focus, a physical transformation, magical power, or whatever fits the character. Reckless Attack is the Barbarian bargain: you get advantage on Strength-based attacks, but enemies get advantage against you. Fortunately, getting hit is already part of the job description. Danger Sense helps compensate for one of the Barbarian's defensive weaknesses by giving advantage on many Dexterity saves. Barbarians have limited utility outside combat, so backgrounds, racial abilities, and creative roleplaying can do a lot to make the character feel more rounded. Subclass power and subclass fun are not necessarily the same thing. Ancestral Guardian is strong but mechanically repetitive, while options like Wild Magic and Giant bring more toys to the table. Great Weapon Master pairs beautifully with Reckless Attack because advantage helps offset the feat's attack penalty. By level 4, the Barbarian already knows exactly what it wants to be: difficult to kill, extremely dangerous, and preferably standing much too close to whoever made the mistake of starting this fight. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

We're back with Pathfinder Wizards, and somehow giving Tyler ten more levels of spellcasting has not improved the situation. Ash has evolved from sneaky magical assassin into a nearly undetectable menace who can freeze time and ruin your life before you know he was there. Randall has discovered that there is apparently no such thing as enough bonded-item spell slots. And Tyler's angry robot can now scream at you until you die, drop meteors on your friends, and disintegrate whatever is left. At this point, these aren't adventurers. They're reasons cities have evacuation plans. SHOW NOTES We're finishing our Pathfinder 2e Wizard builds, taking Ash, Randall, and Tyler from level 11 all the way to level 20. At these levels, the Wizard starts showing exactly where its power lives. New class features are few and far between, defenses remain deeply Wizard-shaped, and some of the high-level feat choices are surprisingly thin. But the spells? The spells get ridiculous. Ash continues turning his Red Mantis Sprite into the world's most irritating magical assassin. Phantasmal Calamity wrecks minds, Redirect Teleportation makes escaping him considerably harder, Duplicate Foe lets him turn your own face against you, and his growing collection of invisibility and stealth abilities eventually makes finding him a campaign objective all by itself. By the time he picks up Disappearance and Legendary Sneak, the plan has basically become: you don't see Ash unless Ash has made a tactical error. Tyler's Rune Lord continues leaning into wrath, explosions, and increasingly hostile interpretations of spellcasting. Blinding Fury makes enemies literally too angry to perceive things properly, Falling Stars brings the expected amount of meteor-related destruction, and Scare to Death gives his angry robot the possibility of simply yelling at someone until they fall over dead. Naturally, Tyler immediately starts figuring out how to combine that with Sure Strike and Disintegrate because apparently death by terror wasn't conclusive enough. Randall keeps feeding the Universalist Wizard's bonded-item engine. Superior Bond and Reprepare Spell give him even more ways to keep spells flowing, because the answer to "When do you have enough spellcasting?" is apparently "What kind of quitter asks that question?" Along the way, we hit some of the Wizard's best high-level toys. Contingency lets you prepare for problems before they happen. Time Beacon lets you rewind a terrible turn and try again. Metallic Meteorite Glyph introduces the exciting tactical concept of repeatedly hitting someone with space rocks. Effortless Concentration frees up actions for sustained spells. Infinite Possibilities gives prepared casters a valuable wildcard when the perfect spell wasn't prepared that morning. Then we reach 10th-rank spells and restraint leaves the building. Ash stops time with Freeze Time and starts planning elaborate traps while everyone else stands around unknowingly waiting for reality to resume. Randall grabs Cataclysm because sometimes the correct number of damage types is all of them. Tyler considers Manifestation, giving him access to nearly any spell he could suddenly decide he needs. There is also an extended disagreement about line of effect after Ash discovers that Phantasmagoria cannot simply murder everyone inside a building without worrying about pesky things like walls. Apparently Pathfinder has rules specifically designed to keep Wizard war crimes within reasonable geographic boundaries. Ash takes the news well. By level 20, everyone somehow lands on Spell Shape Mastery, turning many of their favorite spell-shaping tricks into free actions. Ash becomes harder to identify, read, locate, or meaningfully interact with. Randall takes Lore specifically about Ash's Sprite, immediately putting himself on Ash's hit list. Tyler takes Too Angry to Die, because there was really no other possible ending for the angry robot. Twenty levels later, the Wizard remains exactly what it promised to be: fragile, complicated, occasionally frustrating, and capable of solving problems with a spell list large enough to qualify as infrastructure. Player Core 1 (affiliate link) Player Core 2 (affiliate link) Impossible Magic (affiliate link) Archives of Nethys Pathbuilder RPGBOT.Content Wizard Guide Wizard Ancestries and Heritages Guide Wizard Arcane Schools Guide Wizard Arcane Thesis Guide Wizard Feats Guide Remastered Arcane Spell List Guide KEY TAKEAWAYS High-level Wizards are still defined more by their spells than their class features. The Wizard's defensive and weapon progression remains painfully slow, so positioning and magical defenses continue to matter. High-level spellcasting is where the class really comes alive, with options like Contingency, Time Beacon, Phantasmal Calamity, Falling Stars, Disappearance, and a frankly unreasonable number of meteor-related solutions. Ash's Red Mantis build becomes an extremely capable infiltrator and assassin built around stealth, deception, illusions, invisibility, and making other people look responsible. Tyler's Rune Lord doubles down on damage, persistent effects, intimidation, and the general philosophy that being angry enough should eventually become a damage type. Randall's Universalist shows how powerful Drain Bonded Item can become when you keep investing in ways to recover and recycle spells. Reprepare Spell trades downtime for reusable low-rank utility, while Infinite Possibilities sacrifices some raw spell-slot power for tremendous flexibility. Effortless Concentration is an easy standout for Wizards who rely on sustained spells. Scare to Death on an angry Rune Lord is exactly as stupid and wonderful as it sounds. 10th-rank spells are deliberately limited, but Freeze Time, Cataclysm, Manifestation, and the other options make that single slot feel appropriately enormous. Spell Shape Mastery is a fantastic capstone if your build has invested heavily in spell-shaping feats. Free Archetype opens even more directions, including Rogue or Captivator for Ash's assassin, additional spellcasting options for Randall, and apparently more explosions for Tyler. Pathfinder's line-of-effect rules are all that stand between civilization and unrestricted Wizard war crimes. Most importantly, Tyler got twenty full levels of Wizard and still wanted more. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Tyler loves wizards. We know this because he told us. Repeatedly. For ninety minutes. So naturally, we gave him an entire episode to explain why the best solution to every problem is a spellbook, an alarming number of prepared spells, and occasionally sucking magical energy out of your left shoe. Meanwhile, Ash builds a tiny invisible assassin, Randall discovers that wizardry can apparently involve throwing a greatsword at someone from several hundred feet away, and everyone learns the most important rule of Pathfinder spellcasting: Fireball is a tool, not a personality. Tyler disagrees. SHOW NOTES It is finally time for Tyler's Roman Empire: Wizards. In Part 1 of our Pathfinder 2e Wizard build, we take the class from levels 1 through 10 and dig into what makes the PF2e Wizard different from its D&D 5e counterpart. Wizards are still the spellbook-carrying nerds we know and love, but their real power comes from choosing, preparing, and using the right spells rather than simply solving every encounter with Fireball. We break down Arcane Bond, including the extremely important revelation that your bonded item can technically be your left shoe, then walk through the Arcane Theses and the different ways they reshape how a Wizard manages spells. Spell Blending offers big high-rank spell slots, Spell Substitution gives prepared casters some much-needed flexibility, Experimental Spell Shaping opens up spell modification options, and Improved Familiar Attunement lets you drain magical power from your adorable animal companion without technically hurting it. Probably. Then we build three very different Wizards. Ash creates a sneaky Red Mantis spellcaster built around stealth, spying, invisibility, and framing innocent people for magical crimes. Randall embraces the School of Unified Magical Theory and somehow turns his scholarly Wizard into a man who hurls increasingly large weapons at enemies. Tyler goes full Rune Lord of Wrath because apparently simply playing a Wizard was not Wizard enough. As the builds advance, the differences become even clearer. Ash gains tools like Split Slot and Shroud of the Mantis to become an increasingly slippery magical infiltrator. Randall discovers the ridiculous potential of Bond Conservation and starts chaining recovered spells together while continuing to throw weapons at people. Tyler adds persistent fire, bleeding, spell shaping, extra spell slots earned by waking up angry, and increasingly elaborate ways to make one enemy have the worst day imaginable. By level 10, we have three Wizards who share a spell list and almost nothing else. We also discover that Ash is apparently building according to the defensive philosophy of being somewhere else when the damage happens, which leads to perhaps the purest Wizard philosophy of the episode: here for a good time, not a long time. Player Core 1 (affiliate link) Player Core 2 (affiliate link) Impossible Magic (affiliate link) Archives of Nethys Pathbuilder RPGBOT.Content Wizard Guide Wizard Ancestries and Heritages Guide Wizard Arcane Schools Guide Wizard Arcane Thesis Guide Wizard Feats Guide Remastered Arcane Spell List Guide KEY TAKEAWAYS A Pathfinder 2e Wizard is defined primarily by their spells. What you learn, prepare, and cast matters far more than simply collecting class feats. PF2e Wizards are powerful, but they do not have the enormous caster-versus-martial power gap familiar to many D&D 5e players. Fireball is good. Fireball is not the answer to every question. Tyler remains emotionally unconvinced. Arcane Bond effectively gives you another use of a prepared spell, and your bonded item can be almost anything you own, including, unfortunately, a shoe. Arcane Thesis dramatically changes how your Wizard handles spellcasting. Spell Substitution is especially forgiving if you are new to prepared spellcasting, while Spell Blending can be extremely powerful but more complicated. Arcane Schools provide curriculum spells, additional curriculum spell slots, and focus spells, while the School of Unified Magical Theory trades the curriculum for much greater flexibility with Drain Bonded Item. Wizard class feats can sometimes feel underwhelming because so much of the class's power budget lives in its spells, making Wizard an appealing class for archetype options. Ash proves that Wizards can make surprisingly effective stealth and infiltration characters. Randall proves that being a Wizard does not technically prevent you from solving problems by throwing a greatsword at them. Tyler proves that Rune Lord Wrath can turn waking up angry into an actual character resource. By level 10, the three builds demonstrate just how differently Wizards can play despite all starting from the same enormous Arcane spell list. Most importantly, Tyler loves Wizards. We know, buddy. We know. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati

Nature is healing. Unfortunately, nature has chosen violence. We're taking the Druid from level 5 all the way to 20, which means summoning packs of velociraptors, turning into dinosaurs, raising fungal zombies, weaponizing potted plants, becoming an angry celestial nature wizard, and eventually gaining the power to erase armies with natural disasters. But none of that matters because we discovered the true pinnacle of Druid magic: summoning cows sixty feet above our enemies and letting gravity finish the spell. Welcome to high-level Druid optimization, where Mother Nature loves you, but she has absolutely had enough of your crap. Show Notes We return to our 2014 D&D 5e Druid builds and take Tyler's Circle of Spores, Randall's Circle of the Moon, and Ash's Circle of Stars from level 5 all the way to 20. Third-level spells immediately send us down the Conjure Animals rabbit hole, where velociraptors look terrifying until someone suggests cows. From there, the entirely reasonable discussion of battlefield control becomes the Twister Gambit: summon livestock above your enemy and allow physics to contribute to the encounter. As the levels climb, the Druids only become more ridiculous. Randall gets increasingly dangerous Wild Shape options and eventually Elemental Wild Shape. Tyler builds an expanding fungal entourage while becoming increasingly difficult to kill. Meanwhile, Rain Shadow graduates from peaceful celestial hippie to terrifying flying star mage with an alarming willingness to unleash the wrath of nature. We dig through the Druid spell list, separating great options from traps, discussing Polymorph, Wall of Fire, summoning, battlefield control, Draconic Transformation, Foresight, Shapechange, and the point where spells like Earthquake and Tsunami stop feeling like combat abilities and start feeling like natural-disaster plot devices. By level 18, Beast Spells lets Druids cast while Wild Shaped, and level 20's Archdruid removes the practical limit on Wild Shape altogether. The result is a class that starts by talking to squirrels and ends as a nearly unkillable force of nature capable of turning into monsters, casting world-altering magic, and presumably still dropping cows on people whenever the situation demands it. Key Takeaways Conjure Animals remains enormously powerful, especially when quantity, Pack Tactics, battlefield control, and questionable applications of gravity get involved. The Twister Gambit proves that cows are not merely livestock. They are ammunition. Druids excel at battlefield control, with spells like Plant Growth capable of making movement extremely difficult under the right circumstances. Circle of the Moon keeps improving its Wild Shape options, eventually gaining Elemental Wild Shape and much stronger beast forms. Circle of Spores develops into a durable melee caster surrounded by fungal undead and eventually gains excellent defensive abilities. Circle of Stars becomes increasingly flexible as its Starry Forms improve, allowing Ash's Rain Shadow to become the terrifying celestial nature prophet she was always destined to be. Higher-level Druid magic increasingly shifts from winning encounters to reshaping entire situations with spells like Earthquake and Tsunami. Beast Spells dramatically changes Wild Shape by allowing Druids to cast while transformed. Foresight and Shapechange provide outstanding ninth-level options and make already-powerful Druids even harder to deal with. Archdruid's unlimited Wild Shape makes the level 20 Druid extraordinarily difficult to kill, especially for Circle of the Moon. The Druid's greatest strength is versatility. It can summon, heal, control the battlefield, transform, deal damage, support allies, infiltrate, and eventually become a walking ecological catastrophe. Welcome to the RPGBOT Podcast. If you love Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and tabletop RPGs, this is the podcast for you. Support the show for free: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any podcast app. It helps new listeners find the best RPG podcast for D&D and Pathfinder players. Level up your experience: Join us on Patreon to unlock ad-free access to RPGBOT.net and the RPGBOT Podcast, chat with us and the community on the RPGBOT Discord, and jump into live-streamed RPG podcast recordings. Support while you shop: Use our Amazon affiliate link at https://amzn.to/3NwElxQ and help us keep building tools and guides for the RPG community. Meet the Hosts Tyler Kamstra – Master of mechanics, seeing the Pathfinder action economy like Neo in the Matrix. Randall James – Lore buff and technologist, always ready to debate which Lord of the Rings edition reigns supreme. Ash Ely – Resident cynic, chaos agent, and AI's worst nightmare, bringing pure table-flipping RPG podcast energy. Join the RPGBOT team where fantasy roleplaying meets real strategy, sarcasm, and community chaos. How to Find Us: In-depth articles, guides, handbooks, reviews, news on Tabletop Role Playing at RPGBOT.net Tyler Kamstra BlueSky: @rpgbot.net TikTok: @RPGBOTDOTNET Ash Ely Professional Game Master on StartPlaying.Games BlueSky: @GravenAshes YouTube: @ashravenmedia https://ashelydm.com/ https://ashelydm.com/ Randall James BlueSky: @GrimoireRPG Amateurjack.com Read Melancon: A Grimoire Tale (affiliate link) Producer Dan @Lzr_illuminati