Downsides to serving a coven of powerful hags:
1. Three shrill whispering voices in your mind, all disagreeing with each other.
2. Dream sequence visions from your Patrons play out like jump scares.
Upsides to serving a coven of powerful hags:
1. Free grandma candy!
Click through to find out more about the Horrid Coven warlock! Its not as bad as it sounds, I swear!
Warlock-HorridCoven-v2
Or check out the PDF directly!
Additional downsides to serving a coven of powerful hags:
3. Evil grandma candy that polymorphs you into a newt*.
Anyway… the Horrid Coven! You’ll never find a more unpleasant book club of old ladies. They complain. They bicker. They tease and mock and demand. But, at the end of the day… what is it that you’ll do for power, eh? Sell your soul? Or just end up wishing you had?
Features:
- Get some minions of your own! Let the others do the heavy lifting, your specialty is “constructive criticism.”
- And what good are minions if they won’t take a hit for you? They’re big and dull, they can take a hammer to the head. You have enough of a headache already… dealing with them!
- Remember, granny’s got her eye on you… literally, you have her eye. Its gross, and creepy. Lets you see in the dark though, that’s neat.
- Double, double, toil and trouble, minions whine and burst your bubble! Give them some resistance to damage so they don’t always moan and groan about how helping “hurts” or how they can’t because they’re “dead.” Buncha babies.
- And finally, become as beautiful on the outside as you are on the inside, and by that we mean become hideous and terrifying! All who see you tremble, even as those swayed by your charms find themselves struggling to break free all the same.
Design Notes:
- *“A newt?”
- Well I got better.
- Now, welcome back to the coven warlock! This is an old homebrew that has seen quite a lot of change… mainly because I took the mechanics of the original version and switched them over to being a sorcerer subclass (more on that later).
- This new coven warlock is focused around minions, but with a twist. This time around, your party are the minions! At base, you fill a similar role to the mastermind rogue, save that you almost completely lack combat ability. This is made up for by your spellcasting capabilities and the utility that brings.
- Later features mostly play into this, giving you a bit more survivability through your minions and then giving them stronger defenses so that protecting you doesn’t get them too messed up. And finally you get to shed your more pleasant skin to become a hideous creature of hatred and spite, as you do.
- Control is the big goal here. Between helping your allies excel in combat and being rewarded for charming creatures any time you can, we should end up with a warlock that can effectively dictate what the battlefield should look like, and thus tilt the odds in their favor.
- Now, there’s one important thing that needs to be said here. It’s about the charmed condition. Charmed is not mind control. A lot of people, new players especially, get confused on this. When the Crone’s Minions feature allows you to help a charmed creature as one of your minions, it does so to reward players who think critically and can charm certain combatants who will then be more open to attacking their former companions. The In Harm’s Way feature then solidifies the benefit of charming creatures, as each charmed creature is another body-shield for you which simultaneously isn’t as dangerous when nearby because you have it charmed.
- My only real worry is people misunderstanding the above, but I’m unsure how I can address that given its just a general issue where people don’t fully understand how the charmed condition is supposed to work. Regardless, I’m otherwise very happy with this and look forward to what others have to say about it.
Let me know what you think!