Design Notes: Death Guard Fighter (Patreon)

Turns out we haven't done a subclass-design notes in all of 2026! (There've been two on damage math, but not on specific subs). So let's fix that! I asked in Discord and the first request I got was for the Death Guard.

The Death Guard is actually intended as an MB&B exclusive, but very few supporters haven't backed the book, so I'm fine letting you all get a look at it. This one wasn't particularly top-of-mind; I figured the Bone Knight would fill the "spooky necro fighter" slot for the book. But then the Death Guard won a backer poll, and I'm glad it did, because it was a really fun one to whip up. Where the Bone Knight is a 1/3 necromancer and follows the contours of a 1/3-caster pretty closely, the Death Guard is more of a "changed by necromancy" type. (If you're a Game of Thrones fan, this is a great way to build Gregor Clegane.)

The only thing I'd written in advance was the tagline - "A fighter who's been magically enhanced to be able to battle beyond death". So I knew it was going to be tanky, but I hadn't considered exactly how. The flavor feature, Eternal Unrest, was pretty easy to come up with. Often I do a proficiency or a minor utility feature here (advantage on a rare check or something), but none of those fit the brief; maybe Medicine prof, at a stretch. But my thinking at this point was leaning towards a "half-zombie" concept, and so ignoring food, water, air, and sleep made a lot of sense. The one thing I don't love about this is that it's got a lot of overlap with various species features; you might feel a little shortchanged if you make a warforged Death Guard.

Mortality Bound is our major feature and the interesting one. Obviously for a sub that's hard to kill, features that interact with death saves make sense. But a simple bonus to them would be boring, and wouldn't give me a hook to hang an offensive feature on. So instead I got the idea to boost their number, and it was a short step from there to using them as a resource. Eventually, a Death Guard gets up to 7 death saves. But extra death saves within a fight isn't that interesting, nor is it likely to be that useful; it's just extra pop-ups. So instead they recharge on short rest, you crit on a 15-20 (going from 5% to 25% chance), and you "crit" when someone stabilizes you.

The next feature, Fueled by Death, is the actual payoff here. Because once you've got all those death saves, it's fun to use them for more than just "not dying". Once per turn, you can burn a death save to deal 2d8 bonus damage. That's hit-confirmed too, so you can crit on it. Now we've got a unique dynamic and one with a lot of risk-reward balance to it: you can burn through all your extra death saves to do bonus damage (you've basically got divine smite). But if you do, the fact that those death saves aren't recharging every time you pop up from 0 might start to get really scary. Fueled by Death is the real thing people had questions about — it's a novel mechanic, after all. I wish I had a clearer story about how it came to me, but the design process here started from "more death saves" and then just tugged at the thread of "what can I do with those death saves?"

Mathwise, I modeled this with a pretty conservative approach: you're only spending your "extra" death saves, and keeping 3 in reserve in case you go down. You can burn hotter and play riskier, though; theoretical output is a good bit higher, but limiting Fueled by Death to 1/turn keeps you from doing crazy nova damage.

Grave Wind is the 7th-level feature. Fighter 7th's are generally defense or utility (generally; fighter designs aren't terribly consistent). Not a ton to say here; it was nice to slot in a teamwork feature. I was a little concerned that it steps on the Purple Dragon Knight's toes (its main feature is essentially the same thing, but a big stronger) — but, who cares? That sub is terrible and almost nobody plays it.

Death's Summons is at 10; usually you'd slot in a smaller offensive feature to help the fighter scale into tier 3. (You don't want to do much, because upgraded Extra Attack handles most of that for you). I particularly didn't want to put much damage in here because Mortality Bound is already giving us a little scaling. An execution threshold is a nice way to cheat, though! It feels cool and powerful, but is rarely that mathematically impactful.

Specter Knight comes in at 15th, and ngl, mostly I wanted to slip the Shovel Knight pun in here. It's basically opportunity attacks against enemies that hit downed allies. Some people had questions about this, because not every DM will attack downed PCs. But the way I DM, my NPCs ignore downed heroes until the yo-yo healing starts, and then cold-blooded murder becomes fair game. This feature should feel pretty cool when it comes into play, but is also fairly situational, so isn't a huge power addition.

Mortal Blows is the pseudocapstone at level 18. At this point, we haven't touched Fueled by Death since it got introduced, so it's hard to justify not giving it a boost. More damage and splash damage, then? Sounds good. The main reason I've been leaving Fueled by Death alone is that it's frankly pretty powerful, and with its own built-in scaling, it has been upgrading, just quietly. Mortal Blows is a hefty damage boost then; the Death Guard comes in at the high end on the damage charts. (Though not top; I still need to do a Houndmaster revision, it's too strong).

That's the story! I feel like when a designer comes up with a novel feature, like death-saves-as-resource, there's a temptation to say "They are a geeeenius, nobody else could think of this." But most of the time, the process is more of a thread-pulling. How do I represent supernatural resistance to death? How do I turn that into an offensive feature? Where does this go if I tug on it?