Design Notes - Empire Domain (Patreon)

This month I figure we can cover the free subclass, the Empire Domain Cleric, because it's actually got a little bit interesting in it.

I forget if this sub's been sitting on my ideas list for awhile or if it's new, but either way, it hit top-of-mind because I've started prep for the next book. The book's going to be very British, so a cleric of Empire would fit quite well. But maybe not this one? We'll get there.

The idea is a cleric whose worship is wrapped up in nationalism, someone for whom faith and patriotism are basically two sides of the same coin. But not just any patriotism — patriotism for Empire, for a powerful, wide-ranging, and dominating sort of state. The subclass isn't explicitly British (otherwise we'd have features related to football hooligans and gin, maybe?). But the concept I had in my head was to express the two-faced nature of imperial power; the way it often presents itself as benevolent (as condescending and destructive as that can be), but can be quick to resort to authority and violence when its overtures are unwelcome. In my mind, the quintessential face of empire is always about to say, "You ungrateful little shits!".

So that's our target - a cleric who's charming and presents "benevolent persuasion", but is unafraid (and indeed quick) to resort to violence. The spell list is a bit of a grab bag, but that's because the theme's abstract enough that there's nothing directly applicable. In general I opted for a fair amount of coercive charm spells like command and suggestion, and a few utility spells that fit with the "exploring far-flung corners and expanding the empire's influence" idea (tongues and sending). Wall of stone might feel like an outlier, but again, I was thinking about the "explorer" side of empire and how you could use it to build outposts in foreign lands. The spell list isn't perfect; in particular, I'm a little unhappy about putting two utility spells together at 3rd, because my general goal for spell lists is "one consistently-great spell and one niche spell" at each level. But it came out pretty well, overall.

Emissary of the Crown is our flavor feature. Nothing terribly fancy here; a social skill and heavy armor. The rider about using Wisdom in place of Charisma is fairly niche; it shouldn't be for anytime you make a social check, but only when you're serving the crown. The note block is designed to help narrow it, but as with most ribbons, it's the sort of thing that should come up once or twice a session, maybe.

A note on heavy armor: that's actually the meat of the proficiency, and the thing that merits the most scrutiny. Anytime you have a full caster with heavy armor access, you've got something that's very attractive for multiclassing; another class can dip in and get a level of full spell progression while picking up heavy armor. So we'll have to be very careful with our other level 1 feature that we don't make the sub too attractive for multiclassing.

Imperial Influence is that feature: when an enemy successfully saves against your enchantment, you can still inflict 1d6 psychic damage. Small but impactful: it gives you a consolation prize when your save-or-suck spell fails, which would ordinarily accomplish nothing. Useful for our cleric's playstyle, but narrow enough that I don't think (outside of enchanter wizards) other characters would prize the dip super highly. Still situationally good, and the sub's still worth dipping at all, but not overly attractive. One commenter suggested adding some scaling onto this ability, and I did consider it, but I don't think it's the right way to go here. Frankly, I think the feature just doesn't need it; I'd have to steal budget from elsewhere in the subclass, and depending on how it was implemented, it'd potentially raise the multiclassing problem again.

Our Channel Divinity comes online just a level later, because the cleric skeleton's a little finicky. And here's a feature that, if it were at 1st level, would definitely be a multiclassing problem. You can use your bonus action to add a target to an enchantment spell, which for most of them, is effectively upcasting it by a level. You'll start off using this for dual command, but later dual suggestion and eventually dual dominate person will be super strong. And it's another chance to get value out of Imperial Influence, which is great (and another reason that ability probably shouldn't scale).

Soldier of the State is at 6th, and both serves our theme while significantly changing the flavor of the subclass. Heavy armor already hinted at it, but now the Empire cleric wants to be up close and personal — make an attack and you can cast a spell as a bonus action. You get to use it prof/LR times, and after that, you have to essentially "downcast" — you spend a slot as if you were upcasting but don't get the benefit. In the first draft, it only allowed the downcasting version. Some folks thought that was too limiting (reasonably), so it got the limited number of free uses. There was also a suggestion to just clone the Eldritch Knight's War Magic feature, which allows casting cantrips (and only cantrips) in this way, but I don't think that'd be a great fit for a cleric. For one, you've got all these great spell slots and leveled spells that you'd really like to use. And for two, I think a cleric that's just doing a thwack-cantrip one-two every turn is a very different feel (and more aggressive) than one that's just holding the front line down while also tossing out enchantments and other key spells.

Divine Strike is standard Divine Strike, 'nuff said. I like to put an interesting spin on it; this time there wasn't a simple way to do that.

Awesome Might is your pseudocapstone at 17th. Anytime you inflict charmed or frightened, you can try to inflict the other one too, and you get attack boosts against any creature affected by either. This is quietly quite strong. If you charm a creature, you can additionally frighten it; now it can't attack you and it has disadvantage attacking your friends. If you frighten a creature, you can charm it; now it can't attack you to try and break your concentration on the fear effect. A creature suffering both conditions probably wants to stick close to you, but is too afraid of you to approach, so its movement is doubly hampered.

On the Order Domain

It became clear pretty quickly that Empire is a soft rework of the Order Domain. It wasn't really intentional; most people think Order is ~fine, it's not screaming out for a redesign. But the thematic distance between these two is just very small. In fact, it's so small that you could almost think Order is a slightly-sanitized version of the same concept. Order does have a more supportive flavor — granting allies attacks, increasing allies' damage. But the focus on enchantment is similar and for similar reasons. All I can really say is a big :shrug-emoji:. Sometimes things turn out the way they do!