Quote from EldritchSeacrit >>This is really cool, and I'm honestly excited for this book; But I have to admit it feels weird to put Cthulhu in the same category as these other beings.
I think it's just an avatar or aspect? The actual Cthulhu is still out there in the F.R.
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Noted, though it doesn't change my answer 🙂 maybe it'll be helpful to someone else.
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It saves you a minute of downtime if the vestige would otherwise die. How valuable that is depends on the time pressure and combat density of your campaign, but in general I would view it as a nice to have feature rather than a material power increase.
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I love it. The only thing I was really looking forward to were the subclasses, but the backgrounds and feats exceeded my expectations, especially the X Adept and all the Familiar stuff.
Speaking of which, the standout spell for me was Battle Familiar, but there's a number of other goodies in that space too, especially the new druid summons.
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You can create a table from those rules if you really want one. Something like this:
Exhaustion Level
D20 Tests Penalty
Speed Penalty
1
-2
-5
2
-4
-10
3
-6
-15
4
-8
-20
5
-10
-25
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N/A - Dead
N/A - Dead
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Do your players not wear armor? Also, are all your battlefields featureless white rooms?
ETA:
Your poll is lacking clarity. Yes, Arcane Burst is a good feature for the DM, as it allows caster monsters to more consistently/precisely hit their listed CR/difficulty. It's also good for players, because being a spell attack, it comes with built in counterplay via features like armor class, resistance, temp HP, cover, obscurement, and other reactive defenses like Shield. So yes, as a DM I would use it, but no, as a player I wouldn't (because I can't.)
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I love the idea of an unarmored cleric. Everything else though...
There've been great UA before this one though. The final draft UA for Arcana Unleashed ended up pretty close to what we got in the book and with only a couple of exceptions (looking at you, Enchanter capstone, and thank Mystra that "Magic Stealer Rogue" never saw print) was a home run of a book. I'm hopeful that this Underdark one will do far better in v2 than this initial pass would indicate.
Of course - but like, I'm still grateful? Most of the v1 UA have been way worse than the finished product, and we have ourselves to thank for that. Just think how horrible it would have been if we didn't review bomb their first draft of the 2024 Monk.
Sure the community doesn't always get it right (*sighs towards Moon Druid templates getting scrapped*) but overall I think the process does more good than not. And clearly they think so too or they wouldn't keep doing it, it's not like they're contractually obligated to keep running the program.
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Other than the species, which look genuinely interesting, whatever book this Underdark stuff is going to end up in so far looks pretty mid, the SCAG of 5.5e.
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I suppose LARPing the devs as doing the bidding of a spiteful witch is as fine a gimmick as any.
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I thought the OP meant xenomorphs (the Geiger kind) and was coming to say that those exist in D&D too - in prior editions they were called Kythons.
Grays are a bit of a taller order - D&D has a few species that come close to their design, like Asherati and Dromites. (If there's a closer one I can't recall it off the top of my head.) Pathfinder just skipped the middle man and put Grays into their Bestiary.
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Without reawakening the entire debate, I just wanted to hone in on this bit and point out a noteworthy fact - it's Lolthite / Menzoberranzan Drow that are matriarchal. And they aren't even the only Drow society in the Forgotten Realms, much less the multiverse at large. That kind of nuance is important when extrapolating from a single society to an entire species, or when making conclusions about what changes have and haven't been made to the lore as a whole.
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And plenty of us - me included - are fans of both. And yes, while bringing newcomers to D&D is an admirable goal for any product, there are in fact others. For example, maybe working in these IP will provide creative juice/energy to the devs that the standard D&D settings haven't in a while, or just new perspective. Maybe they have a sizeable contingent of current customers who don't purchase everything they put out, but for whom UB will prove to be more enticing than yet another FR book. Maybe the added marketing reach (Blizzcon is this weekend) makes it easier to justify the dev time they'll spend on things like revisiting 5.0 subclasses such as Swashbuckler via this book. The point is that these sorts of arrangements are never just about one singular benefit.
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The only one that is outright broken currently (as in, does not function in 5.5e as written) is Shepherd Druid, because the spells it's designed to work with have been drastically changed in the update.
All the rest will work fine; their performance will vary as all subclasses do, so you'll have to be specific about which ones you're considering to get more specific guidance.
"Satisfying to play" depends heavily on what you find satisfying, but if you want to share which ones you're looking at and maybe a bit about what you typically like we can help you get a meaningful answer.
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I agree with you on this, but it actually supports the point that there's nothing to be concerned about here. Setting-agnostic/multiversal books are clearly still a priority for them, with them continuing to make those right up until the tail end of 5.0 with BoMT.
That's still consistent with the overall trend though:
And even if the WoW book is the only time we ever even see the word "Swashbuckler" for the rest of 5.5 - if you want to play one so badly, is it that hard for your group to pick up that book and file off the serial numbers? It's not like a Swashbuckler is some inalienable concept to Azeroth that you need a ton of guidance to envision anywhere else; it's a pirate rogue, a fantasy concept right up there with "woodsman ranger" in terms of its ubiquity.
In short, I'll believe the sky is falling when it actually... falls.
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Don't forget Harrison Jones and Johnny Awesome 😁
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The term I'd use for those other settings is "narrower." FR actually has plenty of definition - it's just linked to regions, much like Golarion (another kitchen sink). You want vanilla heroic fantasy, Sword Coast or Cormyr. You want political intrigue, Waterdeep or Amn. You want wilderness exploration and survival, head to Chult or the Anauroch or Icewind Dale. You want dark fantasy / horror, go to Thay or the Moonshaes. And so on.