Clerics, Deities, & Domains
Today we have a special bonus for you: not just a preview, but brand-new stand-alone homebrew content that won't be in any of the D&D Unleashed compendiums. This document outlines each of the cleric domains available from official D&D sources and from D&D Unleashed and their capabilities. It also lists the deities of various official D&D settings and other unofficial fantasy settings and suggests a set of cleric domains that correspond with that deity. A similar list already exists in the Player's Handbook, but it only covers the cleric domains available when the Player's Handbook released. This document draws from that list and expands on it, including additional gods, pantheons, and cleric domains. Finally, the document also contains bonus cleric features for a variety of cleric domains.
The main purpose of the document is to connect clerics and deities to subclasses and domains. Players can use the lists in this document to plan out the religious ideals of their cleric character, or even to decide on the religions of paladins or other non-cleric characters. The lists of domains also allow both players and dungeon masters to intuit a better understanding of the gods in their setting's pantheon. Dungeon masters can use these lists to plan conflicts or storylines between the deities or as templates to create or modify their own pantheons.
In addition to the official Dungeons and Dragons settings such as Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Eberron, and Dragonlance, the document includes pantheons from other settings that have received less official support in fifth edition, such as Dark Sun, Ravnica, and Theros. It also includes pantheons from other Wizards of the Coast settings, such as Amonkhet and Kaldheim, and a list of generic deities associated with different species and races. There are even pantheons from completely unrelated fantasy settings such as Warhammer Fantasy and Tolkien's Middle-Earth, and there are pantheons inspired by real-life mythologies, such as Norse, Greek, and Egyptian practices.
The last page of the document provides players and dungeon masters with optional cleric features to add to the Arcana, Knowledge, Nature, and Trickery domains. These features are intended to help strengthen these subclasses, which are often considered weak. The Arcana and Knowledge domains both have very weak features at level 1, creating the need for some kind of boost to aid them with combat. The Trickery domain, by contrast, needed slightly more versatility and overall power, which accounts for their two optional features (both of which appeared in The Impermissicon as well). Finally, the Nature domain has a strong but extremely situational Channel Divinity. It becomes even more situational by 17th level, and the 6th-level feature doesn't quite make up for it (and is also somewhat situational). To remedy this, we added two minor 6th-level and 17th-level features to make the subclass slightly less situational and allow it to use its features more easily.
