The Keeper (Prestige Class)
After years of designing, refining, playtesting, and editing, we are extremely excited to finally be able to preview one of our most important and impactful pieces of 5th edition D&D content: the Keeper prestige class, which allows player characters of any base class to gain a dedicated pet or companion that matches their themes and aesthetics. The Keeper was one of the first prestige classes we ever designed, but it has gone through myriad reworks and redesigns to get it to its current state. Using this prestige class, you can gain a unicorn companion for your paladin, a hell hound pet for your warlock, a fungal friend for your druid, a ghostly servant for your necromancer, or whatever else you can come up with!
The Keeper, like all our homebrew prestige classes, has only 5 levels available and can only be gained through multiclassing. Unlike the other prestige classes, this one has a minimum required level not just for the first level you take in the prestige class, but for every level that you take. Essentially, even though you can take your first Keeper level as early as level 4, you can't ever have more Keeper levels than you have levels in other classes.
The Keeper is a prestige class dedicated to granting the player character a pet or companion of their own (which the prestige class calls their "ally"). These Keeper Allies function very similarly to the Beast Companion and Steel Defender of some Ranger and Artificer subclasses. Each level up as a Keeper increases the hit points, armor class, attack bonus, and damage dealt by your Keeper Ally, and also grants you new features that upgrade your Ally and give you new ways to interact with the game world. You also gain additional talent points for your Ally with each additional Keeper level. These talent points are used to buy special traits and features for your Ally (such as Amphibious, Damage Resistance, Charge, Pack Tactics, and more) that help you build a companion tailor-made for your character. You can use these talents to recreate existing Dungeons and Dragons creatures (such as a dragon whelp, a unicorn, a zombie, an elemental, or a pixie). The Keeper also gets to choose between a companion that can fly or one that can take a few more hits.
Each Keeper specializes into one of four types of companion when they gain their first level in the prestige class, which determines the possible creature types for their Keeper Ally and grants that ally specialized traits to help it fit with other similar creatures. For example, the companions of a Spirit Medium (one of the four Keeper Specialties) always have resistance to nonmagical physical damage and the Incorporeal Movement trait. Each Keeper specialty also grants you some flavorful ribbons for the interaction and exploration pillars of the game, such as the Wild Tamer's ability to speak with animals and plants. Keepers also choose a style at 2nd-level that helps define how they work with their companion. They may fight side-by-side, or the Keeper may rely on their companion to keep enemies at bay. The Keeper might use their spells to reliably heal and buff their companion, or perhaps the companion is an overgrown familiar who delivers the Keeper's spells to their enemies.
Though all the D&D Unleashed prestige classes are designed to be flexible and modular, the Keeper is probably the most versatile of any of them. Nearly any character concept can be augmented by the addition of the right kind of pet or companion, and this prestige class gives you everything you need to build exactly the companion you are looking for. It can be the perfect way to introduce new plot threads for your character or spice up their options in combat. Perhaps your group found a loveable critter or monster that you decided to adopt, and your DM is wondering how to handle the situation. Or perhaps you are building a summoner and want a constant companion to stand out from the temporary ones. Regardless of your needs, the Keeper prestige class can provide you with the ally you are looking for.
As part of this preview, we have updated the Foundry modules for D&D Unleashed. These updates fix a variety of formatting issues that arose after recent updates to the D&D System on Foundry, as well as including some minor compendium revisions that were missed in the Foundry module. We also added the racial features for the races and subraces from The Elements & Beyond. When using the Keeper features from the module, you can create the ally statistics by copying the base statistics from the D&D Unleashed Monsters module and adding the appropriate traits from the Keeper folder in the Features module. If you have any issues using the modules in Foundry, please contact us and we will do our best to assist you.
On a final note, we usually release our previews as "version 1.0," but in this case, there are so many factors at play in the balance of this prestige class that we are intentionally releasing it as "version 0.9.9" to represent that we are seeking feedback and playtesting even more than normal. We are confident in the state of the Keeper (or we wouldn't be finally previewing it), but we don't want to be overconfident. Please playtest this content, and if you have any feedback at all (positive or negative), we hope that you'll share it with us.
Thank you and have fun!
