And to think that, a week ago, all Tasha (alias Iggwilv) was known for in Fifth Edition was one first-level spell. A perfectly good spell, mind you, and a fantastic concentration-breaker against certain enemies (once DMed a fight that was entirely swung against me by that spell, it was glorious), but just that one spell. This is all to change, however, with the latest announcement of a new book, coming November. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that we were getting a new content book in the vein of 2017’s fantastic Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, what with the recent deluge of UA in the theme of new subclasses (so many subclasses), new spells, and new magic items. However, from what we’ve heard, Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything is going to deliver beyond our expectations. 

So, below, here at Artificial Twenty, we’re going to break down the things that we, and the community as a whole, are the most hyped about in regards to the upcoming book. These are in no particular order, because a particular order would require the logical, ranking part of our brains to stop going “Squeeeee! New book!”. 

Brand New Subclasses

Subclasses are the life and soul of Fifth Edition’s character creation. Unlike in Third Edition and 3.5, when you had an individual class for everything, including some that were slight (often better) variations of existing classes, Fifth Edition has slowed the dial on new classes right down. We’ve had one new class in six years, the fabulous Artificer (also coming in a more setting-neutral form in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, get hyped). Instead, 5e uses subclasses to achieve the same effect. Fifth Edition has slowed down new content in general, with only a trickle of subclasses since 2017’s Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, and so to get a great load of them at once is fantastic.

We’re getting 27 in total, according to leaks, with 22 of those being new, and 5 of them being reprints from older books – the Circle of Spores Druid and the Order Domain Cleric from Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica, the College of Eloquence Bard and the Oath of Glory Paladin from Mythic Odysseys of Theros, and, in a dark horse contender, the Bladesinger Wizard from The Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide. The last one was definitely a surprise announcement, seeing as the Bladesinger was released before Xanathar’s Guide, and yet was not selected for inclusion in that book. Why the change has happened now, we might never know.

But that’s twenty-seven in total, equalling just over two new subclasses for each class. And from the UA we’ve seen, these are going to be subclasses that fundamentally change how the base subclass works, and set themselves apart from existing options. We’ve written previously about subclasses in the latest batch of Unearthed Arcana releases in Four UA Subclasses That Look Good to Go, and everything mentioned there we’re still hoping gets included.

However, chances are, I’d bet, that classes getting a reprinted subclass will only get one new one, and so I may need to let my dreams of having both the Circle of Wildfire Druid and Circle of Stars Druid in the same book die (although twenty-seven subclasses for thirteen classes means one class will be getting a third, so I can still hope). But even the other releases, with some tidying up from Unearthed Arcana feedback, look like they’ll be welcome additions to the game. So the new (and returning) subclasses are one thing we are absolutely here for in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. 

Magic Items Galore

Show me a player who doesn’t like magic items, and I will show you a liar. And probably a Chaotic Evil one at that. Let’s face it, magic items are great. Aside from being powerful, they’re just cool. They grant new options to characters (particularly martials, who are sometimes in dire need of them), they can be used to change the very ways in which battles are fought – just a couple of weeks ago my Fighter used a Ring of Jumping to attack a Hags’ hut from above and save himself a couple of turns of being pelted with spells), and they can make serious changes to your character. Plus, there’s usually a fantastic dopamine rush accompanied with getting new things, and with magic items you get that dopamine rush for free (in real-life terms, not including books you purchase to get magic items).

So the promise that Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything would come with fresh magic items (and why wouldn’t it? She’s a witch) is a welcome one. And it looks like a good haul, from what we’ve seen. New items will range from Uncommon to Artifacts (unlike the still-fantastic Common Magical Items seen in Xanathar’s Guide), and seeing as the DMG has covered a lot of the +1/+2/+3 ilk of weapons, these promise to be flavourful and really mechanically interesting, with new effects not seen before in 5e. While my first love will always be magic weapons, due to being a Fighter player at heart, I’m sure there’ll be more than that. In particular, the Magic Tattoos Unearthed Arcana content seems bound to return, with magical ink giving abilities like unarmoured AC, powerful unarmed attacks, resistance to damage types, and the ability to write using your finger as a pen. 

So whether your character carries around an armoury of magical armour, weapons, and artifacts that could level a country, or are coated in ink like somebody’s intimidating-yet-lovely biker parent, there will be some way to up their magic items game following the release of Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything.

A Host of New Spells

Like I said, I primarily play Fighters. Even when I play spellcasters, I like to play fight-y ones. But that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate new spells. The ones in Xanathar’s Guide were some of the most fun parts of the book to read through (even the ones nobody uses – forever in our hearts, Bones of the Earth), and it’s always great to give casters new options (although the vaguely quadratic element of spellcasters as a whole getting more powerful with every release can be slightly worrying). As such, we’re here for the new spells coming in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything.

In particular, the new spells promise to fix one real issue spellcasting has had since the dawn of 5e – summon spells. Despite numerous subclasses dedicated to it (School of Conjuration Wizard and Circle of the Shepherd Druid, to name a couple), summoning spells in Fifth Edition have suffered from problems. These range from broken exploits (summoning pixies to polymorph your entire party into T-Rexes, for instance), to unbalancing the action economy, to requiring the player to own their own Monster Manual to know what they might be studying, to the uncertain element of whether the player or DM chooses which is summoned and the inherent unreliability of that. So, with all of those issues, it’s nice to see them addressed in a series of spells which, if they’re like their Unearthed Arcana incarnations, are reliable, summon a single creature (which is buffed by upcasting), and have the statblock contained within the spell. To give some flexibility and suit a range of aesthetics, each of the summon spells gives a few options, each of which gives some new abilities, and changes the aesthetic.

Incidentally, one of these spells, the third-level Summon Undead Spirit, gives traditional, dead-raising necromancy a much-needed boost, freeing it somewhat from the shackles of having to summon twenty-four skeletons at a time with Animate Dead. Instead, thanks to this spell, you can summon a horde to deal with small-fry enemies, and then summon one big, powerful Undead creature to deal with the boss. Or, alternatively, summon both and make your DM plan to kill you off at the next possible moment. Ideally when you’re not surrounded by twenty-five Undead.

So, in general, new spells are good, and it’s great to see Wizards of the Coast taking steps to remedy issues with two of the most-struggling spellcasting archetypes in Fifth Edition, which are just a few reasons why the new spells in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything are getting us hyped.

Race Variant Rules

Now this one’s going to be controversial. Wizards of the Coast aren’t just looking to fix things with the game mechanically, they’re looking at the thematic side of things, and gauging if there are problems there. In the light of certain injustices committed recently, Wizards have revisited the issue of race in Dungeons and Dragons, and have decided to go with variant optional rules to address some of the issues people might have.

Now, this has garnered positivity from several sources, but it has been divisive within the Dungeons and Dragons community itself. From concerns of min-maxing, to worries about build diversity, to the typical mutterings that “SJWs” are infiltrating the hobby to sabotage it from within. However, an important thing to note is that this rule is, even within a book that you have to go out of your way to acquire, is listed as an optional variant, and not an ‘overwrite’ of the rules given in the Player’s Handbook. The old races still exist in their forms, these optional rules will just allow for more flexibility in character-building, while assuaging the not-unjustified worries of some that Fifth Edition holds onto some unfortunate tropes from less-enlightened times. It’s hardly a white supremacist manifesto (for an RPG that is, I’d recommend a cursory google of ‘Racial Holy War’, but trust me, that thing goes beyond entertainingly bad, it’s just repellant), but there’s no harm in assessing how the media we enjoy can improve.

The key thing about these racial variants, however, despite the thousands of miles of internet paper written about them, and the debates raging in forums across the world, is that we have no real idea how they will work. Unlike nearly everything else in this book, they haven’t had a pass through Unearthed Arcana, they’re almost entirely an unknown. So it’ll be great to get the book and actually see how these rules work. And for people to stop arguing over what is almost entirely speculation. 

Also, we’re apparently likely to get the Orc rules from Eberron, without the uncomfortable Intelligence malus (Orc Wizards of the world rejoice), and an updated version of the Kobold that might lack the Strength malus, thank god. I try hard to love the Kobold, but it’s got some issues.

So, to finally see these much-discussed racial variant rules in their full, and to get a much better version of the Orc and Kobold, the section on race in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything has us cautiously, but optimistically, hyped. 

As Well As Class Variants

Oh, now we’re talking. Much less controversial than the race variants, the Class Variant Rules UA was apparently the single-most responded to Unearthed Arcana ever, and it was typically positive. Somewhat similar to Pathfinder’s archetype system (where, instead of a subclass like you pick in Fifth Edition, you pick modifications of your base abilities to better tailor your character to what you want), the Class Variants UA gave some classes some additional features, and gave all of them the ability to trade out features they may not want, for some features they may.

And these features were typically great. Some limiting features were made more open (for the Cleric, for instance, instead of being limited by subclass to slinging spells or bashing with weapons, they could take an all-purpose damage buff that wasn’t quite as powerful at either). Some classes were given the option for more utility, such as the Fighter and the Barbarian getting the option to take features that interact with the exploration and social features of the game beyond just skills, at the expense of some of their more marginal combat buffs. Paladins and Rangers got the option to trade a small bit of martial prowess for the ability to cast Cleric and Druid cantrips respectively (Shillelagh Ranger should be a good combo, and Paladins with Guidance should be feared). In general, character-building got a bit more open than the fairly rigid subclass-system, while still retaining a structure, and not being quite as cats-mating-with-dogs as other games, including previous editions of Dungeons and Dragons.  Limitations breed creativity, but a bit more openness never hurt anybody.

Another function of the Class Feature Variants, and not even a hidden one, was a buff to the Ranger. While able to keep up in DPR with most builds, the Ranger has been widely-acknowledged to have issues in capturing the class fantasy of a ranging woodsman, a nature expert, and a lethal tracker, and especially so in the case of the Beastmaster, which has been long-acknowledged as a joke subclass outside of hyper-specific builds that require you to refer to your animal companion as ‘Giant Venomous Snake #47’.

As such, a major focus of the Class Feature Variants was to buff the Ranger without going to the extent of the Revised Ranger of Unearthed Arcana past. While this is done largely through a lot of spells, it still does much better at capturing the fantasy than the ‘you auto-win in highly specific situations’ of the base Player’s Handbook Ranger. The new Beastmaster beasts, of Earth and Air (and, added in the book, most likely Water) follow on the heels of infinitely more successful pet subclasses from other books, notably the Battle Smith Artificer from Eberron: Rising from the Last War.

This seems to be how Fifth Edition will handle pet subclasses from now on, and we’re not complaining. Aside from being better, and resurrectable with some magic (so you don’t need to callously lead it to slaughter for its one attack per turn), it can be commanded with a bonus action, and, like the summoning spells, you no longer need a Monster Manual to use it.

As such, due to both making character creation more flexible, making classes a bit more versatile, and making the best attempt at fixing the Ranger we’ve seen, you can count us here at ArtificialTwenty, along with seemingly the rest of the world, hyped for the upcoming Class Feature Variants in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this post, and thank you for reading. If you enjoyed it, please feel free to leave us a like, or a comment, or subscribe to this blog. Even tell your friends, if you really loved it.