The School of Hemomancy (Wizard)
“Hahaha! Behold! You are betrayed by the vital energy in your very own blood!”
PDF Link | D&D Beyond: School of Hemomancy
Art Credit: https://www.deviantart.com/sbraithwaite/art/Master-of-magic-347393548
For a wizard, there are many paths to great power, yet few that are not darkened by forbidden practices. Perhaps the most forbidden of all schools of magic, even beyond that of regular Necromancy in many worlds, is Hemomancy — the school of blood magic. There is great power in the blood of living things, but it is not meant to be pulled from the body and woven into spells. Repeated use of someone’s blood for blood magic can cause health issues or worse (the Blood Magic Afflictions table coming in The Impermissicon will enable DMs to enact these consequences in a gritty campaign). While sorcerers are so infused with magic that some can magically tap their blood regularly with no long-term afflictions, everyone else must be wary of such recklessness. Hemomancy wizards, like the practical book-learners that most wizards are, prefer a less hands-on approach. Why risk long-term ailments by using your own blood when you could more safely use someone else’s blood instead? You even get the benefit of much wider sample sizes for your blood magic experiments!
When comparing the hemomancy wizard with the blood magic sorcerer, we can see some clear differences in themes even within the realm of arcane blood magic. After all, it’s important to get the feel right when designing similar subclasses for different classes — you probably want the blood wizard to have abilities that feel like the wizardly take on blood magic as opposed to simply neat features, so that the blood sorcerer, blood cleric, blood barbarian, and others still feel distinct. With that in mind, let’s note some things. Hematurgy is a feature that many of D&D Unleashed’s blood subclasses gain some version of, usually with their own interactions, similar to other class-spanning features like fighting styles or channel divinity, so both these subclasses gain it in different ways. The blood sorcerer focuses on wielding the power in their own blood more than that of their enemies. They gain Hematurgy at 1st level instead of 6th, they gain extra hit dice for blood magic, and their other features encourage them to and reward them for taking damage and spilling their own blood. By contrast, the Hemomancy wizard must wait until level 6 to gain Hematurgy, and their version is slightly weaker even when they get it — but with their easy temporary hit points, they have the ability to pay some of the damage cost using the blood of their enemies. And the blood wizard’s other features, Spell Clot and Red Harvest, also revolve around wielding the magic energy in the blood of their enemies in different ways.
Hemomancy Savant is also worth commenting on. While the basic eight wizard subclasses each have Savant features, those features only include the copy time and cost for that school of magic, not the ability to add schools. But the Hemomancy wizard does, which is important because there aren’t as many Blood spells as there are spells of the other schools, even when using D&D Unleashed, and we still haven’t previewed all of them yet! The relative paucity of blood magic spells makes a normal Savant feature mostly useless by itself for the Hemomancy wizard, and the requirement to use blood spells for its features would become incredibly burdensome without it. And it would no longer be modular enough to be playable in a game with no other homebrew content. Thus, its intended as more of a bandaid and much less of a power-boost. Even with the ability to create your own blood spells, though, you’ll probably want to get some of these blood cantrips, combat blood spells, and utility blood spells in your spellbook if nothing else. Note that blood spells being cheap and easy to copy might not mean anything if you can’t find any spellbooks with these forbidden spells in them! For you DMs, note that because they’re so hard to find through conventional means, forbidden spellbooks containing blood spells make excellent treasure for any aspiring blood wizard.
A portion of the blood spells appearing alongside this subclass in The Impermissicon are spell variants of other spells, either existing spells or new ones. Most of the time these feature new drawbacks that require targets to have blood, but there are exceptions, such as the spells that bleed targets over time. We’ve talked some about spell variants before, but they’re basically optional spells with similar but slightly altered effects from other spells, often to change a damage type, school, and/or saving throw. If you don’t want to use any spell variants, don’t worry! The intent of this wizard subclass’s design is that you shouldn’t need to use any nor should you need to invent your own. It was one of our first blood magic homebrews from years ago back when we had no dedicated blood spells to play with, and from the beginning has been built to work in that environment, which is part of why the Hemomancy Savant feature is designed the way that it is. Of course we still recommend trying out the spell variants if you’re not sure yet. If we didn’t think spell variants were worth playing with, we wouldn’t be releasing them!
And this subclass, like all the blood magic in D&D Unleashed, is intended to play nice with other blood magic homebrew that you might like and already use. If you’ve got a blood spell or two from another homebrew source and you want to use it for these class features, that’s entirely intended, and we love it! Combine this blood wizard with as much homebrew blood magic as you need! Fill your spellbook to whatever concentration of blood happens to call to you! With D&D Unleashed, we hope to usher in a glorious new era of blood magic within Dungeons and Dragons.
PDF Link | D&D Beyond: School of Hemomancy
