Samuel Garber
Game Designer
Dungeons & Dragons Content
A lot of my time while otherwise working has been to create homebrew content for Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition. Below is a list of my homebrew, which is all free to download and play. There is also a short design blurb for each piece, detailing my design goals and intentions for that particular project.
D&D5e Mechanical Homebrew
D&D5e Subclasses
Inspired by a friend of mine's homebrew which was inspired by the language system I created for Umbrus, I decided to take the idea of a slightly more detailed language proficiency training system and expand it to encompass any proficiency in D&D5e. This creates a lot more avenues for interesting character growth during downtime, while still respecting the boundaries of the game.
I'm particularly happy with the paragraph before optional rules concerning expertise and armor proficiencies, as I think it is very important to have a rapport with players. While I personally wouldn't use those rules for the reasons I detailed, I think a lot of people still would. It felt wrong to simply not have them exist. As a compromise of sorts, I wanted to still make the point that these rules could possibly create problems and to make sure that players and dungeon masters had informed consent on what they were adding to their game.
I often volunteer to make custom content for my friends during our games. In one such campaign, our party had ascended to godhood. So, I made rules for such. This is my biggest, most ambitious project I've done for 5th edition D&D, and even with some things to work off of from a handful of sources, took a lot of energy and focus to ensure it was consistent, fair, and useful.
Apotheosis is designed to enable heavy amounts of customization for both players and dungeon masters alike, to allow them to create any kind of deity they can imagine. It offers up to 12 new tiers of power, called divine ranks, which grant a plethora of statistical bonuses. Apotheosis also adds 14 new channel divinity and domain spell arrays as domain choices for a deity (bringing the total options up to 39), as well as 64 divine feats to further customize and emphasize a deity's powers.
One of the major aspects of the project that I particularly focused on was more intentional formatting choices. Relevant sections are not squished next to each other, with a general intent of keeping connected information on the same page, if possible. At 41 pages, Apotheosis was a great way to begin refining my sense of formatting larger tabletop books, and taught me a great deal for future endeavors.
This project was something I had been meaning to do for a while, in part because of its uniqueness. There are very few supplements for 5th edition which categorically price magic items, and not to the degree that this project has: This project uses formula-driven means to price every single magic item in 5th edition that is available to be used on the DM's Guild, providing stable consistency, methodological transparency, and the means for which Dungeon Masters can price their own magic items. This was a massive undertaking to put it lightly. While this does somewhat go against the general desire of 5e to minimize crunch in its systems, the majority of the benefit is player-facing, with the handful who wish to use this system for their own purposes - or even re-balance the work I did - being given the means to do so with as little headache as is possible.
Path of the Blood-Spiller Barbarian
This archetype was intended as an experiment into designing a barbarian that would benefit more from two-weapon fighting than using a two-handed weapon. The Blood Frenzy feature provides a majority of the basis for this effectiveness, granting an early improvement to two-weapon fighting via allowing the bonus action attack to use the barbarian's strength modifier for increased damage. This then continues primarily with Exsanguination, allowing the player to more quickly stack up the bleed effect, as well as provide more chances for critical hits per turn. Improved Blood Frenzy caps this off with a more reliable damage increase, should slashing damage be somewhat hard to find.
The college of coordination was a design challenge: Make something based off of a prompt on Twitter in about 2 to 3 hours. Overall, I feel like this archetype achieved that goal very well. It has a heavy emphasis on teamwork and helping other players, with a once-a-day feature allowing them to take the spotlight and turn to their team to make that limelight shine even brighter. There was a very heavy challenge of making this feel balanced, as something like this has not really been done mechanically in 5th edition. However, playtesting has shown that it seems to be fairly solid.
While the concept of the presence bard was very fun and quick to flesh out, the major challenge of this piece was taking my intent as a designer and conveying it through a small paragraph of text. The archetype revolves around the eponymous feature, their Bardic Presence. Effectively, it is a 30 foot radius where the bard could do weird stuff that normal bards couldn't. After many rewrites, I'm very happy with the current wording.
This archetype was inspired by the oathbreaker paladin, a paladin archetype that is primarily intended for villains or for players who have intentionally broken the core roleplaying promise of their archetype. I intended the forsaken cleric to be of a similar vein. Because of this theme, this archetype necessitated the redesign of several core cleric features, namely Channel Divinity and Divine Intervention. These were themed to be more in-line with the archetype. This proved to be the biggest challenge of the project, as Channel Divinity in some ways acts like a wish spell, in that it has nigh unlimited uses, depending on how creative the player is. I decided to substitute that out for a strong, single way of using the feature, to reinforce the strength of the feature but limit its potential maximum strength, as the player would not be able to fully connect with their deity.
One of my earlier works, the secrets domain was an attempt at making a pseudo-psionic cleric that would fit extremely well as a cultist or an antagonist. It has a heavier focus on roleplaying mechanics than other archetypes, with its situationally powerful bonus to intelligence skill checks and stronger ability to bluff your way through social situations. Overall, it is a solid archetype with solid themes.
The circle of the aberrant druid was an interesting experiment into playing around with the core druid feature of Wild Shape. I wanted to create something that was somewhat in between the circle of the moon druid, which is heavily focused into this feature, and other druids, who are more inclined to spellcasting in their normal form. At the same time, my intent was to create a unique spin on the feature in of itself, which drew me almost instantly to aberrations.
One of my favorite things to do with class archetypes in 5th edition is to play around with already existing class features. The way of the perfect form monk is a paragon example of this, doubling down into the flavor and design intent of the various core monk features in lieu of expanding their toolkit. While this adds more choice to a class that has a solid number of options in combat, these do not add much to the player's decision-making process, as it doubles down into focusing on the monk's class resource rather than adding additional actions to consider.
Thematically, the way of the purifier is intended to evoke thoughts of the paladin class, but with more thoughtfulness and strategy. Both the paladin and the purifier have the ability to increase their damage dealt using radiant damage, which deals additional damage to fiends and undead, but for the monk, this comes in the choice of sacrificing defense or movement utility for damage, then spending more of their class resource to deal this damage. In addition, the majority of their features are either roleplaying or utility focused, rather than providing numerical combat advantages.
Oath of the Dragon Rider Paladin
Made at the request of a friend, the oath of the dragon rider was a challenge to balance. Naturally, the ability to ride a dragon, a creature that is intended to be a rough equivalent of four level 6 to 10 players, causes some problems to consider. The solution I had for this was to have overall fairly weak or utility-focused features for the majority of the class' lifespan, with only their Breath Weapon Channel Divinity being a strong feature, then granting them their full dragon-riding capabilities at 15th level. In addition, to curb the naturally aggressive player behavior one would have with an easily-reacquired dragon mount, I added a cooldown to the feature where if your mount died, you had to wait a number of days equal to its Challenge Rating for it to be usable again. This also allows for a rough balance across dragon types, as their CR ranges from 6 to 10, depending on their color. Dragons with a higher CR - and therefore a higher health - suffer a greater penalty if you engage in dangerous behavior or the dragon gets targeted by enemies.
The oath of protection was an archetype designed around the Lay on Hands feature, a largely grandfathered mechanic from previous editions of D&D. I generally felt like that the feature, while useful, wasn't as interesting as it could have been, and wished to create a paladin that focused more on healing than outright damage.
Another archetype that was requested by a friend, the mage's bane ranger is designed to evoke the flavor and feeling of a ranger - a class that should be very comfortable with outmaneuvering their foes while striking with deadly accuracy - and tying in the ability to be an utter pain in the butt for any spellcasters they find. Arcane Insight in particular is useful as a means of limiting the potential metagaming you may have with an archetype that is intended to counter a spellcaster. Being able to learn the spells of their enemy, as well as how strong their enemy is, provides valuable tactical information, so giving a way for a player to do that without looking up the enemy stat block beforehand is a clean way to limit that sort of behavior.
This archetype has been explored a lot in fiction, which was great for getting inspiration on the themes of its design. The big trouble with it is that there is a feat in 5th edition called Dungeon Delver, which already fulfills a lot of the gameplay expectations an archetype like this might provide. That created a very fun challenge of trying to design something that did not step on the toes of this feat. Ultimately, I feel like this does a good job of doing so, while also providing more use to the party beyond situational scenarios, which is a common criticism of the feat in question. The capstone feature is also very fun, providing a great way for players to feel clever, feeding back into the fantasy of being someone like Indiana Jones or Lara Croft.
Designed as a replacement option for a fellow player, the sanguine sorcerer is a tribute to the themes of vampirism, without granting the exceptionally powerful bonuses (and the pretty significant maluses) of vampirism as noted in the Monster Manual. The design focused into the more survivability-focused mechanics of the vampire, with healthy hit point regeneration (both active and passive), the ability to teleport a short distance if you are knocked unconscious, and a bit of utility with a more powerful charm person effect. The archetype nails the themes of a vampire without overstepping its bounds into becoming excessively powerful.
The wishborn sorcerer was explicitly designed as an excuse to see if I could make a class feature that modified the wish spell into something still fairly balanced. In this case, that was done by allowing the player to cast wish again, but not for a very long amount of in-game time. At the point in a campaign where one is able to cast wish using this feature, the remaining time in that game is likely going to be weeks, if not a handful of months of in-game time, making the loss of wish still effectively the same for most campaigns, only really being different in the post-game. It is harder to lose wish in the first place using this archetype, but it comes at a hefty cost of their class resource, and does not mitigate any other negative part of casting wish to do anything other than duplicate an 8th level or lower spell. The wishborn's other features tie into the clever, shapeshifting nature of genies and tie into the elemental nature of such beings in general. It is an interesting, versatile archetype, with a strong sense of replayability from mechanics alone, even ignoring character personalities, backgrounds, and other roleplaying elements.
This was another interesting balance problem to solve. The broker warlock is themed around money and in particular uses it to enhance their spellcasting. Giving them a strong ability to cast spells using their Thaumatic Tithe feature, while making it cost-prohibitive for a party to just use every day was a fun challenge. This proved to be the hardest part of designing the archetype, as determining the worth of spells is very difficult. I used another homebrew titled Sane Magical Prices as a rough guideline for my own balance, changing the scaling somewhat to preserve usability.
The overall balance of the archetype means that to be able to generate enough funds for their spellcasting on their own (via Arcane Greed) and not dip into their party fund, it would take a 20th level broker warlock about 12.2 days on average to achieve the amount of money to cast a single 9th level warlock spell via Thaumatic Tithe, doubled to 24.4 days if it is a non-warlock spell. If you take advantage of this feature frequently for high power effects, especially those that cross your class boundaries, you'll find you're going to quickly be unable to use it.
The mechanus lord warlock was one of my more recent projects. The design intent was to create something that played with the fundamental rules of D&D 5th edition. It has the potential to be extremely strong, but also has built-in mechanics that regulate narrative flow. In particular, the Law of Averages feature is great for this: It allows the warlock to take any roll anyone around them makes and changes it to a specific value on the die, including making it a natural 20 or a natural 1. However, the DM can then force any die roll the target creature makes with the opposite roll. Your fighter is knocked down with 2 death saving throw fails and they rolled a 3? Make it a natural 20. They're back up at 1 hp. But now if they attack, they might be forced to roll a natural 1 and automatically fail to hit later in the fight. This creates an excellent narrative dynamic while providing them situational, balanced power. Overall the mechanus lord warlock is one of my favorite archetypes I've ever designed.
An internal joke with a friend made into an actual class archetype, the culinaromancer wizard doubles down into the class' support spellcaster roll by providing enhanced healing during short rests and at later levels the ability to help people regenerate spell slots and even casting the heroes' feast spell without requiring material components (with a sufficiently long cooldown to maintain balance). It's a simple, fun archetype that provides a real quick way to make a flavorful, interesting character for a game.